(Penned 19.06.2025, published 14.06.2026 (yes, a whole-ass year later...))
Yee boi, back into the swing of things again, blogposting and shit. We are so back.
Today I'm gonna talk about the furry fandom. Animal people. I have a complicated relationship with that one. Furry has been a part of my life on and off for most of my life. And I don't usually like to talk about it, because of the, uh, icky associations. Well, it's time to discuss that topic.
So, um. I am, in fact, a cat. You can learn that in my "about" page. Not a nasty, filthy - may God forgive me for uttering the word - hooman. Shocking, I know, but it's true. White paws typed this post UwU.
Okay, all shitposting aside. I am not actually a cat, but a human, believe it or not. I have a fursona that I like to imagine myself as - but I am not an otherkin, and neither am I a therian (apparently some new flavour of otherkin out there).
How did I get there? What made me that way? That's what this post will be about. I guess you could say it started with female rabbits for me, as with so many others. And oh boy, did the rabbit hole go deep there.
First, let's set the context right: I've had exposure to lots and lots of anthro animal stuff in media growing up. My first significant exposure to funny animals was through animation, so, so long ago. I was watching Looney Toons on Cartoon Network when I was a kid. Then I watched The Lion King. At some point I also saw Space Jam. I've heard Lola Bunny was a lot of people's sexual awakening at the time - but not mine, because I was too young for that. Still, I think I must have at least felt something towards her. Then, I watched some movie about Goofy - the, uh, dog(?) character from the Mickey Mouse comic universe - and his son, I think he was called Max. I literally forgot everything about that movie, LOL - other than it had a road trip-centred plot and seemed to feature a teenage romance story that I did not care about in the slightest.
So, furry characters have had a presence in my conscious ever since I was young. And then they began to appear in more than just the shows and movies I watched. I've been a lifelong PC gamer who never really owned a home console, and my mother got a home computer when I was 7. That's when Jazz Jackrabbit arrived.
2.
The Secret Files.
Those words must surely evoke dread in those who know the game - they can surely see where this is all going.
Jazz Jackrabbit 2 was a Sonic the Hedgehog clone for the PC. It was developed by Epic MegaGames (yes, back when their games were both Mega and Epic, not just regular Epic). Jazz Jackrabbit 2: The Secret Files was an expansion pack only released on the European markets for some reason - until its re-release on GOG around 2020.
The Secret Files introduced a new playable character, Lori Jackrabbit. She, uh... she was my sexual awakening. I was, like, 11 at the time. It was over for me before it ever began.
The thing about Lori is, she is drawn in a completely different art style from the other two male playable characters and her cousins, Jazz and Spaz. I'm fairly sure she was drawn by a different artist than the one responsible for the base game. His name is Dean Dodrill, going by the nickname "Noogy" online.
Noogy is the man who later founded the company Humble Hearts, under which he developed his indie game, "Dust: An Elysian Tail", largely by himself. He made most of the art assets AND coding for his game, the absolute madlad. Dust: AET was a part of some universe of anthropomorphic animals that he was writing and developing a story for, I think it was just called "Elysian Tail" - and I believe the game was meant to serve as a way to raise money for a prospective Elysian Tail animated movie that he wanted to make. I don't think that movie has ever materialised, sadly. You know, it seems that in the recent years after the pandemic we have been enjoying something of an indie online animation renaissance. I wonder if now wouldn't be a great time for him to try to make something happen again, if he's still interested in making that movie... Well, so anyway, Noogy is a talented artist. And he got me into furry.
Lori exhibits the same design choices that are common in female anthropomorphic characters: whereas her male relatives are more cartoony-styled, she has more realistic proportions, and wears form-fitting sports clothes. In contrast, Jazz and Spaz were featureless and only wore some boots and maybe bracers and a bandana. She is sporty, sexy and athletic, and distinctly less of a cartoon animal than the rest. Noogy definitely drew her with male gaze in mind. What makes me say that? Because on his old home page, he had a hidden section where he showcased some saucy pictures he drew of his characters, including Lori of course. I don't have the link anymore, but it's true. The pics in question are available on the e621 image board now: just search for the "Dean Dodrill" artist tag to find them.
I spent months playing JJ2 as a kid. It was my favourite game for quite a while, and Lori was my favourite character in that game, unsurprisingly (even though she's considered the worst from the gameplay standpoint compared to both Jazz and Spaz).
So yeah. That's how it all started, with me simping for Lori. From the young age, I developed a kind of "fur affinity", if you will, though I don't think I was fully aware of that yet. It was sexual in nature for me almost from the very beginning, which is a big reason why I feel uneasy discussing my interest with people today. But I was isolated. I did not know anyone who liked specifically characters like these, and I did not talk about that to anyone I knew. All that happened before I really got on the internet. Certainly before I discovered any online communities devoted to furry.
As you might know, furries congregate on the internet. Let's talk about the next big chapter of my life, and how it contributed to my developing... whatever that interest was. I did not even have a name for it. I think the term the early-teens me learned first was "anthro".
There is this major underlying theme here that for all my life I've been interested by video games, and they have often dominated my interests. We're going to see more of that here. Eventually, my primary interest moved on from Jazz Jackrabbit 2 to Pokemon, as the growing Pokemania was approaching its peak here, and kids at school were discussing Nintendo GameBoy emulation to play Pokemon games on their PCs. This seems so painfully obvious now with the benefit of hindsight, but unbeknownst to me, Pokemon was going to be the next step of my furry journey.
I was playing Pokemon Silver at home on some GameBoy emulator. That was my first experience with emulators, and they were cool. For example, one interesting one was TGB Dual, designed to emulate two GameBoys simultaneously, and it could even simulate the cable link between them, which allowed for accessing 2-player multiplayer features on the real GameBoy, which Pokemon games did have. I was able to use it to trade Pokemons between games and fight my friends from school when they came to visit, and I think we were also able to simply play two games independently on the same PC. (We had to share a keyboard.) Very cool stuff.
Well, that was also around the time I started having broadband internet access. I learned about "anthro" around that time. I was finally connected.
As a side note, prior to that, I did have dial-up internet at home for some time, so it's not like I was offline for all my primary school years. My mother soon terminated the dial-up internet service however, when I was abusing it to play Jazz Jackrabbit 2 online, ignoring her telling me to stop because it was too expensive.
The cost of using dial-up internet was obscene back in the day. You were billed per "impulse", which I think was a contiguous time period of about 90 seconds of connection, and your household's landline phone was busy during that time, so nobody could call you, and you wouldn't even know anyone was trying to contact you! There were no notifications for missed calls, or anything! (Well, maybe some people had voice mail to help with that, which I have no idea how that worked. I never had that at home.) Yes, I'm so ancient that I remember times before cell phones became commonplace. Now get off my lawn, you darn whippersnappers! And yes, dial-up modems really did make those strange noises as they established the connection, and it would take, like, an entire minute. I was kind of a little piece of shit for not listening to my mum - but Jazz Jackrabbit 2 online multiplayer was just so fun, especially on custom levels others made in the bundled editor, as well as my own ones.
BY THE WAY (a tangent within a tangent, holy shit. I promise I'll get to the point soon lol), that was the first time I played a multiplayer game online, and it slapped. But you know what else was fun? Playing JJ2 in local multiplayer. My friends and I played together as 3 people, sometimes 4, all on the same computer, and using the same keyboard! It was crowded as hell, but we tolerated it.
Dial-up internet download times were truly miserable - 56 kilobits per second! Yes, I said "bits", so divide that by 8 to get the transfer speed in bytes. I would literally wait and just watch the images on websites slowly load, one row of pixels at a time. I think modern web browsers' developer tools' accessibility testing features let you reduce your download speeds to various outdated connections so you can still kinda-sorta experience that misery for yourself today. That connection was so bad that I did not really use it to communicate with anyone. Broadband, on the other hand, was a different story.
I would go to my mother's workplace to use the broadband there, since we didn't have internet at home for a couple more years following the whole dial-up abuse fiasco. There, online, I found communities related to Pokemon - and, soon afterward, personal websites with Pokemon anthro art.
It wasn't even saucy art, or anything. And yet, it activated my neurons tremendously. That was when my interest in furries truly exploded - especially since I had found anthro art of Lugia, who was my favourite pokemon at the time. I've heard that even today, like 8 generations of Pokemon later, Lugia is still one of the more popular 'mons. His/her design is just so aesthetically pleasing: all the curves and the contrasting sharp angles, the simple, somewhat awkward yet gracious, vaguely part-avian, part-dragon shape, the face mask-looking scales/"horns" surrounding his/her eyes... Lugia is just really cool. She's the best 'mon, don't @ or e-mail me. (Actually, do e-mail me, if you can. It's been years since I started running that website and not a single person has sent me anything. I'm so lonely. ;w; My e-mail is on the main page of my website.) And anthro Lugia was... wow... I mean... wow.
It was so captivating. This idea, of taking a creature, a beast, a monster I knew, and... anthropomorphising it.
My first trace of using either of the terms "anthro" or "furry" was a a piece of paper on which I wrote down a link to that website where I found some (safe-for-work) Pokemon anthro art. It was hosted on Angelfire, that's all I can remember. It'd be fun if I could find the website again on the Wayback Machine someday... If I ever went diving through my old stuff in my mother's house, chances are I could still find that paper somewhere. I kept it hidden on purpose.
I was displaying some of the anthro Pokemon art that I had found in my profile picture and signature on some long-defunct, Polish-language Pokemon discussion forum hosted on PhpBB. In private, however, I felt more ashamed of my newfound interest. I remember outright lying to my parents about what I was spending my free time on, pretending it was a Counter-Strike discussion forum or something cool and age-appropriate like that, instead of kiddie stuff like them Pogeymans. I think even then I suspected something was up with my interest. Could it have been because of my attraction to Lori? Or, well, maybe it was because my father was playing grown-up video games like Quake II - and maybe I was looking to earn his approval by claiming to be interested in similar stuff.
As I continued surfing the World Wide Web, I kept finding more cool anthro stuff. There was this website, Creative Worlds. It looked like someone's home page. At the time, the person running it was raving about the release of Mother 3 on his blog - a game I knew nothing about. I remember finding the name "Mother 3" extremely weird, lol. I don't think I even realised it was a video game back then. I would only learn about Mother and Earthbound many years later, because it was Nintendo stuff, and I hardly knew anything Nintendo outside of Pokemon, but that's another story. Anyway, that site... It was stuff like that which inspired me to create my own website. Creative Worlds had some really neat animated .gifs, mostly featuring Mawile, a pretty cute and cool-looking Generation 3 steel-type pokemon (later I think they changed it to steel/fairy). Again, nothing lewd.
...HOLY SHIT, THAT WEBSITE STILL EXISTS TO THIS VERY DAY! Do check this guy's short animations, they're heccin' awesome, and he shall forever be my GOAT. Unfortunately, they now require a Macromedia Flash player to play, whereas originally I think they were just .gifs you could easily view in your web browser and save - but maybe those were always Flash animations and I simply did not notice back then, since Flash players were just built into internet browsers before their deprecation.
Main page: https://www.creativeworlds.net/index2.html
His animations: https://www.creativeworlds.net/oldanimation.html
...wait, hold on. I had to dig a little more, and actually I was indeed looking at his .gifs back in the day, but they're absent from his website now. They are now apparently only available on the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20060708045409/http://www.creativeworlds.net/Gif_Poke.htm
And regarding the .swfs, they contain some code that refuses to even let you view the animations unless you load the file directly from the website in the web browser - which you can't do anymore, since built-in Flash players have been removed from all mainstream web browsers a while ago, and now pretty much only standalone Flash players remain. The message in the .swf files says "Please leave things where you found them. If you want to share the animations, direct people to the Creative Worlds site instead." Yeah, and then your shitty website runs some JavaScript to open the .swf file, which only leads to the download option. Nice going, jackass. To be fair to that guy, though, it looks like he hasn't touched his website in a decade and a half. Still, now you have to edit the .swf to remove the stupid DRM thing he put on there. Annoying. Well, the .gifs are still very nice. Anyway...
I didn't really find any anthro art communities in my early teens. I don't remember using the term "furry" for quite a while, and the first instance that comes to mind was when I discovered the page about furries on Encyclopedia Dramatica, lol.
ED was kind of obscure. I think I must have somehow discovered that website through Uncyclopedia, a kind of comedy encyclopedia, which I browsed intensely for a short period of time. And I think I had found Uncyclopedia through Nonsensopedia, its Polish counterpart. I must have been told about Nonsensopedia by someone at school. (BTW BTW, Uncyclopedia had a really fun browser-based comedic spoof of a text-based adventure game "Zork". It was quite high effort for the time! Do check it out if you get the chance.) Alternatively, it's possible I was told about ED by someone from some small English-speaking Pokemon discussion forums I ended up at while looking for more cool Pokemon-related stuff. (I remember playing TPPC, a simple browser-based Pokemon RPG, as well as NetBattle, an online Pokemon battle simulator using the rules from the mainline games.)
Either way, Encyclopedia Dramatica was so weird to me. In case you don't know, it still kind of exists to this day, hopping between domains, and it is kind of a controversial website, documenting weird people online and making fun of them. I think it's the likes of these communities that spurred the subsequent communities like the infamous Kiwi Farms. I had almost no idea about any of the people and places they were ridiculing on ED, since much of that came from the Anglosphere part of the internet, which I was a stranger to. I learned about a lot of new stuff there - such as 4chan, which I had little interest in, the way it was presented as the Internet Hate Machine. Scary place, I thought, I wanted nothing to do with it. A lot of the stuff on ED felt incredibly mean-spirited. I just saw them as a bunch of meanies making fun of furries and other stuff, and wished their website would get taken down, haha.
Well, my memories from that time are hazy and I'm starting to forget the details. Maybe I learned more about furries at Uncyclopedia first. At any rate, it all seemed so weird and foreign to me. The fursuiters, and people who were into anthro characters... I now knew about their existence, but didn't really know anyone like that, even online, and I had little interest in finding new English-speaking communities where I could find somebody like that, so my exploration of furries stagnated there.
Eventually, I've found my "home" on the internet, and found a way to express myself and my interests there... That unlikely home would turn out to be a Polish discussion forum for a game you might not expect at all to be related to furries.
After a few years of being huge into Pokemon, it was time to move on. In the later years of primary school, I discovered the video game Gothic, a German Eurojank action-RPG and a huge sensation in Poland around the early 2000s. (Eurojank is a modern term created for this kind of ambitious games which ended up very buggy, but Gothic is absolutely excellent for its time, don't get me wrong.) I played it around 2006 and loved it to bits. Naturaly, I soon joined a Polish internet discussion board dedicated to the game. I would devote the next large chunk of my life to that community.
The board had a fantasy fan club loosely inspired by Gothic, but anybody could contribute to its lore, and everyone was more or less expected to have an OC, their fantasy avatar. Those OCs were drawing from all sorts of fantasy and even sci-fi settings, including Star Trek, various video games and animes, tabletop games like Warhammer 40000, and of course novels, most notably The Lord of the Rings - especially since Peter Jackson's cinematic LotR trilogy was coming out around that time and it was b u s s i n, as the zoomers (used to?) say. It absolutely slaps to this very day. You should watch it!
I knew what original character I wanted to make. While reading about furries in the past, I had discovered the concept of a "fursona", and I decided I wanted to make one. My original first OC and later fursona, Cadrin the cat, was crafted there, for that fantasy fan club.
He started off as a human shapeshifter, but during the first community role-playing adventure I joined, I decided to make him irreversibly stuck in an anthropomorphic cat form due to a freak accident involving having a spell interrupted partway.
Are fursonas the coolest things ever or what? Yes, they are. You can reimagine yourself as a badass anthropomorphic animal. It rocks. And better yet, you can then present as that animal on the internet, making it your avatar. So cool. Who wouldn't want to be an anthro?
Over the course of my over 30-years-long life, I have had various interests that waxed and waned, but furry remained more or less constant - I think in no small part due to the fursona aspect. I grew attached to my brainchild, Cadrin. I now wear his skin (ok, that sounds really creepy...). He became special to me.
I often pondered Cadrin, conceptualising who he was, and who I wanted him to be. Almost from the very beginning, I treated him as something more than a mere avatar, a sort of extension of myself. My sense of self has always been somewhat fluid and unstable, and so was he, but gradually, certain aspects of him emerged. He lives in my head and evolves. At some point I understood that he was an expression of my wishes: of who I wanted to be.
There are some parts of him that I find hard to explain. Like, from the start I conceptualised him as somewhat androgynous, and the name "Cadrin" was deliberately crafted to be possibly usable by both sexes. (The name "Cadrin" is derived from "cat" and "Katrin/Catherine", a bit mangled and with the aspiration dropped from the "t" consonant, to feel less on the nose about the cat aspect.) I did not know why, it just felt right, I guess? Which I suppose ties into all my gender and sexual orientation issues. Maybe he served as a way to explore those concepts before I eventually adopted them for myself.
I knew Cadrin was bi long before I realised that about myself. I imagined him doing stuff with dudes before I went and did it myself. There are some aspects of him I'm still adopting, like his innate athleticism and agility. To that end, in the recent years I have become rather physically active.
Cadrin as an avatar and an aspirational goal - a sort of representation of the superego, perhaps, to put it in Freudian terms - is a huge rabbit hole because of the topics I have explored through him, and I wish to write dedicated posts about some of those, such as gender identity and sexual orientation. But for now I'll stop talking about him. Suffice it to say that I consider myself not so good at role-playing. I guess I've always wanted to become him, rather than simply pretend to be him.
So, the fantasy fan club on the Gothic site acted as an outlet for me to create and sometimes act as my sona, and stuff like the Creative Worlds website inspired me to make my own home page. For the longest time, I've also wanted to bring my fursona into reality, by drawing him myself. That's, um... still an ongoing effort. I was crushing on this girl in the fantasy fan club who seemed to have at least a passing interest in furry and art. She had a DeviantArt account, where she was publishing her deviations (artwork). I followed and made my own account there. I never made any art that I published here or really engaged with any artists on there, only keeping to blogposting and publishing some rants, as my interest in art rapidly waned. It's really embarrassing.
What DeviantArt did, though, was get me into more furry webcomics.
Back around 2007, I was into a handful of miscellaneous webcomics. They were fairly popular back then, so I passively picked some up along the way. I was reading Tim ~~B^Uckley's (iykyk)~~ Buckley's CTRL-ALT-DEL, for example, or a niche Polish webcomic Losux (which was about how high schools suck, hence the name: LO sux). Some Gothic site users that my crush and I chatted with had also told me about some furry webcomics, which I took interest in.
I remember them showing me Suicide For Hire, an extremely edgy webcomic with decent yet somehow repulsive artwork, about a pair of outcast teengae boys reminiscent of Columbine shooters Dylan and Klebold. They were advertising a service arranging to murder people wanting to die. (Somehow, this wouldn't get any authorities' attention... at least for a while.) They asked about their customers' reasons to die and their life stories, and then planned their killings in increasingly elaborate, gruesome and disturbing ways as the series progressed, attempting each time to exact an appropriate karmic payback in the act, and made their killings look like suicides. It sucked, I didn't like reading it, it was too grim, so after a few chapters I dropped it.
One furry webcomic I discovered through DeviantArt reading was Las Lindas, a very horny softcore porn furry webcomic made by a guy nicknamed Chalo or Chalosan. I found him one day randomly while browsing for artists on there. It tells a story of a woman keeping and managing a farm she inherited, with an ever-expanding cast of misfits and outcasts joining her as farmhands, including many scantily-clad girls and women and with MASSIVE boobs, and a couple handsome men. There was limited nudity and only one, very tame and tastefully depicted sex scene involving the main character and her love interest(?). The funny thing is, I don't remember really fantasising about any of the characters, even though that was kinda the point of the comic. I was embarrassed looking at the sexualised characters, and yet, I truly did read it for the plot. Needless to say, the plot sucked, and I fully checked out by the time space aliens got involved in saving the farm from the clutches of the evil corporate CEO female antagonist, in what was up until them a pretty grounded setting.
I was otherwise mostly disinterested in browsing other people's art on dA, but Chalo's became my fixation for a time. I became particularly fixated on one of the characters Chalo drew, which was not present in his webcomic. It was, uhh, I think she was named Kate, the cat. She was one of the few characters he drew without enormous knockers - at least sometimes. I especially liked one artwork of her where she was dressed in some fancy Japanese robe, like a "kimono" or something. It was like she must have been wearing a binder or something, because she appeared flat as a board in that one, and not particularly feminine.
I don't know if it was due to my previous exposure to softcore furry porn or what, but her design became a sort of blueprint for Cadrin's. It feels weird talking about it now. I kinda totally forgot about her influence until writing this memoir jogged my memory. I contacted Chalo for permission to use his artwork as profile graphics on a discussion forum (lol, imagine giving a shit about permission for something as harmless as this), and then used two artworks of Kate on the Gothic site forum for the longest time, like for literal years, viewing them as if they were depictions of Cadrin.
So, uh, a softcore porn comic led me to artwork by the artist featuring a somewhat de-sexualised character, and somehow adopting her as my own, and basing my male 'sona on her. In the sea of horny artwork by Chalo on DeviantArt, I did not see much art featuring Kate. Well, now that I think of it, there were at least a couple of thirsty pics of her I saw, but I focused on the non-sexual ones. I guess that's really weird and there's a lot to unpack here, so I'll save that for later posts about gender identity and sexual orientation.
So here you go. By that point, now that I had a fursona, I officially started considering myself a furry. By that point in time I barely knew anyone else who was one, and I still did not really interact with the fandom. You will notice sexual themes starting to seep in, even though they were always sort of present there since the start.
I want to revisit the topic of furries in the future, where I will talk more about me getting to know the fandom itself, learning about its seedy underside, and how others perceive it. There's going to be sex... so much furry sex. Stay tuned for the next post!
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