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Rest In Peace Dragoneer - Sharing A Story
a year ago
Dancing Through Life...
Rest in Peace Dragoneer
Thank you for everything you did during your ownership of Furaffinity over the years. For many, including myself, FurAffinity is part of every day life. A place created by furries, run by furries and for furries. It's a furry safe haven where we can be ourselves. Furaffinity is a pillar of the Furry Fandom and I cannot fathom it not existing.
While I had the pleasure of chatting with Dragoneer a few times over the years, I never told him a story I had really wanted to. I always said "I want to tell him this story over a beer at a con" but I never had that chance. I will regret not trying harder forever so I'm going to share it here now.
In 2007, I made a Deviant Art account to share my art. It was mostly poor quality photos of pencil sketches and my digital art which was really just tracing still from Disney movies haha. But I had tons of sketchbooks at this time filled with artwork of monsters, demons and anthropomorphic animal people. I had no idea what furries were and in 2007 and I was 15/16 years old. When I made a DA account I was asked to create a username, so I decided to use a name of one of my anthropomorphic animal characters, a demonic wolf man named Dragoneer. Yep. YEP. You can go look up my DeviantArt account and you'll find it's a young me there with the username Dragoneer.
Well later in 2007 I got a note from someone aside from my two friends on the site. They asked me if I did commissions to which I said no, and told them I was just a kid. They apologized and said "Oh gosh i'm sorry, I just read the name, I thought you were The Dragoneer." I said no worries and told them I liked their digimon character and hoped they could find whoever they were looking for. But I wondered what they meant, did someone else on the Internet use this name? Welp, I googled 'Dragoneer Digimon Art' since that's what I had been asked about and when I clicked on the first link I was brought to what I assume was Dragoneer's personal website, hey maybe it was here on FA. All I know was I was staring at Guilmon cock and balls and I panicked, X'd out of the Internet and was just flabbergasted lol. I hadn't ever seen porn before, IRL or drawn so I was like omg what! I told my two friends on DA what happened and they were both like "Yeah, a lot of spaces on the Internet are for adults, especially those furry sites. Just stick to here and Neopets for now!"
Those two friends I'd later learn were both furries themselves and much older than me but had taken on a parental role in my young online art spaces days. That word, 'furry' went to the back of my mind for years and it wouldn't be till January 2011 that it'd get stirred up again when 19 year old me would find and join the furry fandom.
Looking back I find this story hilarious, that furry was there in my life four years before I'd officially find and join it. And that Dragoneer was really a catalyst for all that, and the importance Furaffinity would have in my life from 2011 onward. I check FA every single day, I love FA.
Rest In Peace Dragoneer, I hope your spirit read this now and got a good laugh out of it. Goodbye.
I only got to meet him twice, at FA:United. He was always so friendly no matter what was happening.
I wouldn't be here without FA. I mean that very literally, and I know I'm not alone.
This fandom has saved countless LIVES and many of them never would have found it without this website.
Dragoneer... an absolute LEGEND.
I had an account here, but still preferred DA until it started having hacker issues, and switched to FA. Yeah, I still have some of that purist background, but I'm a lot more open minded now.