This is an essay on the furry fandom I wrote in 2012, but never posted here.. It was my contribution to inQueery, a zine I made as part of a small collective with the same name, that unfortunately disbanded shortly afterwards. It's meant to precede the first essay I posted to my account here: http://www.furaffinity.net/view/9442668/

---

Fursonas
by PupRoger

I'll start by saying this won’t be some ‘look at our wacky Internet’ magazine-style primer on the furry fandom. It is an essay presenting my understanding of furry identity after two years in the fandom. By a furry, I mean fans of anthropomorphic characters who collect together on the Internet and at conventions to share anthropomorphic porn, stories, and conversation. However, not all users of furaffinity.net, for example, identify as furries. Not all furries have fursonas. Many simply enjoy the comics, the community, the porn, or the money they can make drawing porn.

The supposed function of a fursona is to serve as a visual representation of a furry’s personality within the fandom, but in practice a fursona ends up being a character a furry invents for themselves around the point they choose to identify themselves as furries. They serve as a personal representation within furry artwork, and as something that can be used during roleplaying, or to make a fursuit of. It’s easy to become attached to a fursona, because it’s generally a well thought-out representation of who a furry is, or of a person they want to be. My favourites from what I’ve encountered are a winged otter, a wolf with a moustache who has drugged-out philosophical conversations, and a tree.

There are plenty of reasons a person would choose an animal as their persona, whether the decision was made instantly and with little thought or was carefully ruled down from a range of possibilities. The furry fandom is an amalgam of fan groups of endless comics, books, movies etc., and these all provide different associations with each animal species that would impact a fan's decision to represent themselves with. For example, there is a certain set of stock characters in furry porn, including a handful of handsome canines, tigers, bears and otters, that a furry might choose if they want a fursona that's hawt. Fan's of sprawling sci-fi webcomics might have fursonas that begin as animals, but also have elaborate titles, carefully specified uniform, and weaponry.

An important thing to notice is that furry characters always or almost always represent human personalities through an animal lens, so it’s more than the strange, animal-headed biological creature that is being thought of. For instance, our instinctual understanding of Arthur from the kids cartoon would be broken if we saw him let out his long, sticky tongue and begin eating ants . . . we’d start expecting a sci-fi explanation about how he came into being, or wonder how he can have a pet dog.

I recently changed my fursona from a kangaroo to a deer. Little change to my personality is represented by this. I chose a kangaroo as my fursona initially because I identified with a kangaroo character from a surprise gay love story arc in The Suburban Jungle, which was the first furry comic I read. But recently I re-watched Bambi and swapped my fursona for a stag, because I'm drawing totem strength from its ability to be masculine, beautiful, and majestic at the same time. Since stags sit lower on the food chain than other species with masculine symbology, (wolves, eagles, etc) their masculinity/beauty is one of survival.

When furries are inventing a fursona, most are only selecting a representation for themselves on the Internet, rather than pretending to be animals or pokemon in real life. Though some furries mention spiritual connections they have with animals, the idea behind pretending to be an animal on the internet is ironic. Anywhere on the Internet, the anonymity of account creation, combined with the endless potential for the misrepresentation, omission, distortion, or fictionalization of reality makes a fursona as accurate an online representation as any other. The difference between the username/ avatar combo used in other Internet voids and a furry’s fursona is that while another Internet user tries to create an Internet projection of their real life self, a fursona is an animal representation of a furry’s personality on the Internet.

A common criticism of Internet involvement is that people are developing idealized, fictional attachments to other people, and even escapist understandings of themselves, which is something fursonas could represent. But I wonder whether the detachment of an internet personality from the self makes it more or less true. In reality, social and personal obstacles prevent the expression of who we’d like to be. It’s worth asking whether the person we happen to be in reality, or the person we could be if there were less barriers, is more valid. For example, many furries who are not given the opportunity to explore their sexual orientation in real life are able to do so within the fandom. People who suffer from social anxiety are also able to find a personality that is more social and more awesome, such as a werewolf that harnesses the powers of darkness and light with an eight pack.

The subtle or blatant distortion of real-life personalities occurs under the premise of a character that is a fictional creation. But if in real life there is an expectation that we access, determine, or obey some conception of our ‘true selves’, I have three questions in response: I can be anyone I want to be. Why restrict myself to ‘being myself ’? What is ‘myself ’ . . . wouldn’t I just be creating that anyways? How can you be anything but yourself?

What it means to identify as a furry

I’ve only dealt with half of this topic, because while the furry fandom offers occupants a space to consider their identity, furriness is itself an identity. Users of fursonas are more varied than the image I presented earlier, which has my own interpretation of their function and the intentions of others.

From outside the fandom, many Internet users aware of the indicators will be quick to identify a furry, but furriness remains an identity with a definition interpreted differently throughout the fandom. So far as identities go, to be a furry is not especially desirable in the eyes of the mainstream. Furries sit at the base of the nerd hierarchy, below trekkies, and only above sexual furries, or furries who draw versions of Star Trek with animal characters replacing the original cast. So many fur affinity users, drawn by particular elements of what is offered on the site, don’t believe this qualifies them as furries, and avoid adopting the identifier.

The fandom attracts users who are drawn to animal characters in art for whatever reason. This shared predilection doesn’t make them any kind of predetermined and separate species, with other personality traits that can be expected by association. In fact, since a major draw to the furry fandom is its extreme acceptance of difference, attempting to generalize the fandom in any way is precarious. As with any classifier that refers to a population sample based on a shared trait, where ‘furry’ means members of the furry fandom, it will be comprised of a multitude of individuals, each having their own concept of the fandom, draw to it, and association with it.