Contemplating Therianthropy

This post was written for the September 2026 edition of Midway Menagerie, a furry blogging carnival.

Am I starting my submission for this month's Menagerie less than four hours before it's due? Yes. Isn't this the month that I'm hosting it myself? Yes. Shouldn't I be setting a better example as the host? Perhaps. However you must consider that in seventeen years of school I never once figured out how to space out my assignments. So here we are.

For its entry in the first edition of Midway Menagerie, my friend Lark wrote a touching post titled "It's not really about the animals" about its experience discovering the local furry scene and what this community means to it. I briefly had the idea of writing a response called "It's exclusively about the animals" as a joke, but this line of thinking brought me to a deeper idea. How important are "the animals" to my furry identity and my self-identity as a whole?

Like many furries, I've long held an interest in stories featuring animal characters. I was obsessed with Pokémon Mystery Dungeon (PMD) and Warrior Cats as a kid, which funneled me into the furry fandom. Animorphs was another book series that captivated me. While it didn't feature anthropomorphic animals, the main characters held the ability to transform into animals for short periods of time as a tool to resist an alien invasion. My favorite character, Tobias, becomes trapped as a red-tailed hawk in the first book and although he regains the ability to morph later, he chooses to remain a hawk. Much of his arc in the series concerns his relationship with his humanity and its dissonance with his body. Unsurprisingly, he is widely read as a transgender allegory.^[1]

I spent much of 6th grade pretending to be Tobias, morphed as a human in two-hour increments before sneaking to the bathroom to demorph. I have a distinct memory of standing in my family's backyard late one night watching the trees sway in the cold autumn wind and envisioning myself as a hawk, hunkering down in the branches. At some point, I snapped out of my daydream and realized that this fantasy could never be realized. I was stuck in my human body and no one was coming to rescue me from dreary reality.

I daydreamed extensively for most of my childhood and teenage years, imagining myself living in the worlds of the books I read and games I played. The PMD world was a favorite, one I inhabited most of high school. One day, it occurred to me that most people spend all of their time in the real world. The thought of living like that—that this was the way I was expected to be—filled me with dread.

Even in adulthood, people referring to me as a creature of some kind has brought me much satisfaction. Another member of a Discord server I joined in college, upon seeing my Shinx icon amongst the anime pfps of the other members, remarked that I looked like the pet of the group. More recently, a number of my friends occasionally refer to me as a dog or puppy, which always lights me up. Whether this appeals to me in a furry way, a kink way, or a potentially therian way is something I'm still trying to sort out.

So could I be therian? I'm not really sure. I attended an informational panel/howl (therian gathering) hosted by Hearth at ANE 2023 and found some of the experiences shared by them and other panel attendees to be relatable. A number of my fellow PMD fans identify as therians and I've shared some of their longing to live in that world. On the other paw, I can't claim to have the sufficient experience to call myself an animal-lover like other people can. Despite having a dog sona, I never had a pet dog myself and in fact was afraid of dogs for most of my childhood.^[2] I'm also too content with the amenities of living in human society—if not the nightmare that is living under capitalism—to say that I'd rather live in the wild like many therians do.

Ideally, I would end this post with some conclusive insights about my personal identity or the way furries in general integrate furriness into their self-conception. Unfortunately a month of contemplating this topic has brought me no hard answers, though it at least has been a valuable period of reflection. I'll continue to think and perhaps provide updates on this blog in the future. Regardless, I have a deeper appreciation for the role pretending to be an animal on the internet has played in understanding myself.

1. I agree with the reading but not with the usual "trapped in the wrong body" interpretation, but that's a discussion that warrants its own blog post. ↩

2. This began to change after I met my cousin's dog Lucy, a golden retriever, who was characteristically relaxed and friendly. It turns out that I was mostly afraid of poorly trained dogs, and it seems that many dog owners are poor trainers. ↩

Back