You could tell us now!
Dawnswalker, January 19, 2016, 06:32:09 pm
I started my freshman year of high school in the latter half of 1995. One of the kids who rode the bus with me was a big stocky guy who was always drawing in sketchpads. He never talked to anybody, and nobody ever talked to him. His size guaranteed him a seat by himself. After a few months, just before Christmas break, as I recall, I decided to break the ice and ask what he was drawing. At first, he did not know how to handle this request. He looked like a fish that had been caught but was past the flopping-around phase. After several moments he snapped out of it and showed me.
I looked through all the pages, and I got a feeling that something was Not Right. Nothing overtly horrific, just that eerie suspicion which forms in the back of your skull and puts you on guard. It's a feeling I've been well acquainted with since then, its precision honed to exceptional keenness from two decades of being exposed to weird things, knowingly or otherwise. The drawings were all of fox-people. The unerring and invariable subject of every drawing was one or two fox-people in various stiff poses, wearing generic medieval-looking clothing with oversized anime-style boots.
I was quiet as I looked through these fox-people. The Not-Right feeling was washing through my brain and tickling the tops of my shoulderblades. I was weirded out and I didn't even know why. At that time in my life I had a basic understanding of what a fixation was but couldn't explain it to myself mentally.
"It's from Shining Force," explained the kid. "It's a game."
I didn't know what Shining Force was at the time. Looking back, I'm astonished it wasn't Sonic, but we've discussed before how things like this seem to take the form of whatever an adolescent is doing at the time he or she experiences sexual awakening. Fourteen-year-old me was, even then, at once confused and intrigued by what I was looking at, and the narrative about the kid that was forming in my head. It wasn't fun, but it was
fascinating.
We'd had dial-up internet at home for about five months when I met Shining Force Kid. Nowadays we turn to Google first for any inquiry, but back then it took me a few days to have the notion that, huh, I wonder what the Internet knows about this. The connection was so slow that I had to plan out the sites I would visit, none of this multiple-tabs and alt-tabbing nonsense. You would literally have to map out your Internet itinerary for a session given the limited time you had.
Shining Force was bumped to the top of the list. You can imagine what I learned from there.
Come to find out that there were actually only a couple of fox-person characters in the game, and for the most part the game had human and humanoid characters. But there were
whole pages devoted to the fox character, or the rat character, or the whatever-else-wasn't-human characters. Shrines, they were called. My Not-Right sense was going haywire. What was the appeal? Why were people obsessing over a minor character in a Sega Genesis game?
One shrine site was a part of a webring (remember those?). The webring was called FurRing, and that was the hole down which I saw the white rabbit disappear.
It was like the ending to 2001. I didn't know people would—
could—use the Internet for such things. It was all so weird and unsettling, even before I discovered that people were making porn with these subjects (which, unsurprisingly, didn't take long, given what we're talking about). I of course learned retroactively that people didn't like the fox-people of Shining Force because the characters were good or interesting, they just liked the fact that it was a fox-person. Were these all awkward kids like the guy on the bus? No, I quickly learned, they weren't. They were, in fact, mostly guys much older than either me
or him. I don't know what became of that kid, because after seeing his sketchbook I joined the rest of the bus in staying away from him, but I can only assume he did as I had and discovered His People on the Internet. Furry is very, very inclusive, after all. They turn nobody away, ever. For any reason. They are not people who will ignore you on the bus. They will love your Shining Force drawings because it's fox-people. Hey, I like Shining Force too, why don't you draw those fox-people naked? You know, as a joke? Hahaha. Then post it here, please. People will like it! You like being liked, don't you? It's okay to like looking at naked fox-people, you know. Anyone who says that's weird is just being mean to you. We don't judge, so stick with us.
Anyway, furries—by way of the Shining Force Kid—were the start for me. They took my e-innocence. Over the years I would watch them grow coy and guileful even as they grew bolder and more vocal. The inevitable PR disasters surprised me not a whit, and as they gained more unwanted exposure* I watched duplicity emerge. A few bad apples don't spoil the bunch, after all! No, they don't, but with furry fans it was more like one or two good apples don't stand a chance of staying fresh in a bushel of rotten ones. I never bought that it was all innocent, because I was there, at the ground floor, while they built upwards. And
what they built was a horrible tower, an obsidian monument for all other groups of weirdos to aspire to. My experiences shaped my perspective, and I've since learned that furry predates the Internet by many many years, but for me it is Internet Subculture Zero. The Greek letter Alpha. The First Commandment of Being a True Pervert: Thou Shalt Be Furry. I don't believe all furries are perverts, but genuinely liking only the aesthetic of anthropomorphic characters has got to be like playing the triangle in a full symphony. It is both a subculture, a lifestyle, a fetish on its own, and an "adjective-fetish" which can be used to modify other fetishes. Into watersports? How about FURRY WATERSPORTS just turn all the dudes into lemurs or alpacas or whatever and boom in three months you'll be a Guest of Honor at Confurence! Fame and acceptance! You like the idea of that, right? Of course you do. You've never had fame
or acceptance before, but we can give it to you. Just keep giving us those lemurs and alpacas, mmm, yeah, just like that.
As the years passed I eventually discovered Portal of Evil through Old Man Murray, which itself had been discovered through Seanbaby's crossover articles with Chet and Erik. From there, I discovered that I wasn't the only one who was onto what furry was doing as a subculture. Watching other folks call out disgusting furry sites clicked with me, so I stuck around and acquainted myself with other exhibits. Like Shining Force Kid, I had found My People.
* "unwanted exposure" for furry is anything which doesn't paint them in the absolute most positive light as the perfect, happiest group of people to have ever put shorts over their SPHs