I’m not a furry.
I’ve never wanted to be a furry; the thought of spending hundreds of dollars on a giant costume just to sweat inside of it doesn’t really appeal to me.
But I am also tired of the lazy jokes made but people who lack understanding of the community or any community adjacent.
Oftentimes, I have been around peers who have made jokes at the expense of the fandom. Someone mentions furries and suddenly it’s “get the leash,” “where’s your collar?” or some joke about the fandom being sexual. They’re predictable, overused and were never really funny in the first place.
If you’re going to be a hater, upgrade your insults.
The more I looked into the furry community, the more I realized that a lot of the jokes come from people who have never actually talked to a furry. They see a person in a giant animal costume online or on the street and immediately make assumptions about the character of the individual beneath the mask.
That’s not really how it works.
A resident furry on Slippery Rock University’s campus, who I chose not to identify because of the stereotypes and misconceptions surrounding the fandom, compared being a furry to cosplay.
“I think they would understand that it’s more of the same as cosplay,” they said. “People cosplay at home, people cosplay at events, people cosplay at conventions.”
Someone will spend hundreds of dollars putting together a lore accurate Thor costume because they love the god of thunder. Someone else can spend hundreds of dollars designing a character that represents them and turn that character into a costume. The difference is that most people already understand cosplay.
Furries don’t get the same benefit of the doubt.
My interviewee said one of the biggest misconceptions is that being a furry is inherently sexual or that furries actually believe they are animals.
“Probably either it’s an inherently sexual thing or people believe they’re animals,” they said. “I feel like they kind of overlap a lot of the time in people’s perceptions.”
Sexual content does exist within the furry fandom. Pretending otherwise would be dishonest. But a subsection of a fandom existing does not define everyone who participates in it.
Pretty much any large fandom has its weird or dark corners. There are people who make their favorite TV shows, video games, musicians or fictional characters into something more than just an interest. That doesn’t mean everyone who shares those interests is participating in that part of the fandom.
The problem is that the strangest examples tend to be the ones people see and the ones that are trending on social media sites.
For my interviewee, being a furry is much more about creativity and self-expression.
“It’s kind of no different than having a favorite show or having a favorite character,” they said. “I find it just influences everything I do, not in a bad way, but in a way that inspires me and I feel like I’m expressing myself.”
They also gave an example of how designing their own character and projecting parts of themselves onto it isn’t necessarily unheard of nor not as seemingly strange.
“I’m not actually a cat, I just have this cute character that is a cat,” they said.
The furry community also gives individuals something that is important to pretty much every university student: a way to meet peers and create friendships.
My interviewee said they have a small group of furry friends on campus and that the community can be especially helpful for new students trying to find their place.
“I have a whole small friend group here on campus of people who are students here and furries,” they said.
That’s a part of the fandom that doesn’t make it into someone’s overplayed lunchtime comedy routine very often.
College is already an environment where students are constantly trying to find friends and figure out where they belong. If a shared interest in anthropomorphic animals helps someone find their people, I don’t really get why that needs to be treated as a punchline.
The stereotypes can have an effect too.
My interviewee said they are careful about who they tell because they don’t know how people will react. They remembered hearing a childhood friend talk negatively about furries before the friend knew they were one.
They decided not to tell her.
“If I tell random people, there’s definitely that perception that you get,” they said.
They also spoke of instances where they found themselves awkwardly going along with furry jokes around people they don’t know out of worry of judgment.
“If I’m hanging out with friends and there’s people I don’t know and they’ll make passing jokes or something, I’ll be like, ‘oh, um, yeah, ha ha,’” they said.
Nobody had to directly insult them. Nobody had to tell them they weren’t welcome. They just heard enough jokes to know that revealing something they enjoyed might change how their peers saw them.
I still don’t want to be a furry.
But I also don’t need to be interested or a part of something to understand that someone else enjoys it.
At the end of the day, being a furry can be a hobby, a creative outlet, a form of self-expression or simply a way to make friends. For some people, it’s all of those things.
My interviewee’s advice for people who don’t understand the fandom was simple: ask questions.
“It’s mainly just for fun, it’s a form of expression and that you don’t have to be afraid to ask people questions,” they said.
Maybe before making the same furry joke for the 500th time, just ask a question. If you’re still gonna make fun of them afterward, at least come up with something more original than “haha furry.”
