Midway Menagerie: July 2026

2026-08-01

Hello! This is the first post that I've written for this blog, so welcome and enjoy as I figure this out. :3

I'm writing this post as my submission for the inaugural July 2026 edition of Midway Menagerie, a furry blog carnival organized by my friend Lark. Here is the submission announcement post for this edition.¹

The theme for this month's edition of the Menagerie is "fandom and community". Since this is my first post on this blog, I'll take the opportunity to discuss my introduction to the furry fandom.

It was the summer of 2012 when I first learned about furries. I was on summer vacation before entering 8th grade and bouncing around YouTube one afternoon. I don't remember what led me to it, but eventually I stumbled across a few videos of the dance competition at Anthrocon 2012. I was amazed at the dancers' skill and especially at the fact that they pulled it off in full costume! I showed some of them to my little sister (which I imagine was the act that introduced her to furry, lol).

From there, I found other videos documenting Anthrocon 2012, including recordings of fursuiters walking around the Westin and the convention center. It was magical to me. A whole society of these creatures expressing so much creativity and friendship! I was immediately enamored with the way people created these representations of themselves as cute and cool animals and as unique individuals. You can imagine the appeal that this had to a middle schooler.²

I began googling "how to make a fursona" in search of guidance, and somehow ended up on a now-defunct website called "Become Your Fursona" (becomeyourfursona.com), which had—if I remember it correctly—a fursona personality quiz framed as a choose-your-own-adventure story where you were being interviewed in an underground lab by the author's bird sona. I don't remember my result, but the quiz led me to the rest of the website, which consisted of a large number of transformation-themed stories organized by species. I was obsessed for a few weeks, reading nearly every story on the website and fantasizing about turning into an animal and running away from home.

The author of that website, Tachyon Feathertail, wrote many of those stories as a way to process religious trauma. They had left the Mormon church after coming out as queer and apparently had a difficult relationship with their family. Within a few years of my discovering it, Become Your Fursona disappeared off the internet. I haven't been able to find mention of Tachyon after 2012 or so. I hope they're doing ok.

If by some chance Tachyon happens to find this post: thank you so much for serving as my introduction to this fandom. I felt deeply seen by your work and it brought me comfort during a difficult period in my life.

I continued exploring the furry side of the internet, creating a fursona—a gray cat named Sairen—and registering accounts on SoFurry and DeviantArt. Somehow my research led me to the older Web 1.0 and pre-Web roots of the fandom. I discovered FurryMUCK, a MUCK founded in 1990, years before the World Wide Web became publically available in 1993.³ I don't remember if I ever actually logged into FurryMUCK, but I was briefly obsessed with learning about this imaginary world where real people could socialize as their fursonas. Around this time I also discovered the "Furry Code", a system created years before I was born to concisely describe a person's fursona and personality via text.⁴ I definitely recommend checking the page out! It's a fascinating look at how similar the 1990s furry fandom is to the modern one. Do note that this code contains some endosexist language and generally assumes a more cishet-centric worldview.

Meanwhile, I'd become an avid Warrior Cats fan. I'd started the series in December 2011 and quickly became obsessed, plowing through the entire series up to that point. (This was while Omen of the Stars was the latest arc!) At the same time that I was discovering the furry fandom, I was also roleplaying on the Warrior Cats Roblox server and drawing a few Warriors OCs. Clearly I was doomed from the start to furrydom.

While I'd had a Facebook account, I didn't really use social media for fandom purposes. Mostly I followed the I Can Has Cheezburger website's sections for Pokémon, My Little Pony⁵, and such, which is a truly ridiculous way to follow a fandom but honestly may have been healthier than social media. One day on DeviantArt I discovered a Pokémon Nuzlocke comic called "Alterity"⁶ by Mewitti, who happened to have a blog on Tumblr. I signed up, found the Warrior Cats tag, and befriended Suu, who remains one of my best friends today.

Pokémon remained my primary fandom, and Tumblr re-introduced me to the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon series. My parents had given me and my sister Explorers of Time and Darkness on release day back in 2008 and I'd later finished Red Rescue Team, but I had still never beaten the Explorers games. I picked up Explorers of Sky used from GameStop (back when it was a reasonable price) and played obsessively during my April break from my freshman year of high school. I didn't understand it at the time but I'd entered my first depression episode that spring and Explorers of Sky managed to cut through the fog and make me feel emotions again. After that experience, I became a dedicated PMD fan.

Years passed and I'd still maintained my furryness in the meanwhile, though mostly I just lurked. After graduating college, in 2022, I made an impulse decision to attend Anthrocon on the Thursday of the con weekend. The story of this trip is a long one (which resulted in me being stranded in the middle of nowhere in central Pennsylvania) so I'll save the details for another time. But in short, it was a magical experience for me to attend the con I'd seen in YouTube videos ten years prior, and by the end I was genuinely overcome with emotion at finally feeling like I was in a community where I belonged.

Several years later, after attending a few more conventions, I invited one of my friends who I'd met through the Tumblr PMD fandom to come with me to Anthrocon 2025 for their first furcon. We planned to host a PMD room party and invite some of their friends who they'd met through their art online. One of the folks who they invited was DjMuffinTops, a PMD artist who I had been following for a few years by that point. DJ and I both happened to live in Boston, so we started talking about hosting a PMD panel at Anthro New England 2026. We spent some time over the next months planning the panel, which ended up being a much bigger success than we'd anticipated! (A recording of the panel is available on YouTube here!)

Furcationland was a few months after ANE and one of DJ's friends was hosting another PMD panel for it. We drove up to Portland to surprise him and spend the Sunday at the con, which ended up being one of my favorite con attendances. I'm planning to go for the full weekend in 2027! That evening, DJ introduced me to a few of his friends—Sonar, Serif, and Lima⁷—who he'd met at PAX East. Through them, I met Lark and it introduced me to Anville, which has become the nexus of my local furry friends.

So this ended up being a much more rambly post than I was expecting, but that's basically the story of how I found my local furry community!

"Fandom" vs. "Community"

As an aside, I've recently begun to feel that describing our scene as the "furry fandom" feels inaccurate. My understanding is that furries originated as a fandom of works featuring anthropomorphic animals, but since those early years, it's become an independent subculture celebrating the original works of furry artists and furry as a means of self-expression. While we're often fans of outside works featuring anthro characters, we're at least just as often "fans" of each other's art. As a result, I've become more comfortable describing us as the "furry community". Ultimately, what makes furry special to so many of us is not just sharing a media interest with other people, but being part of a culture that celebrates our creativity and weirdness and unique ways of engaging with our world. We like characters in movies and TV and comics indeed, but we love each other and the community we built to embrace us in our entirety.

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