i am very, very interested in furry history. this is all super cool to me
furry history is interesting as hell, imo, and part of the reason i get so deep into it is that it’s not well archived, at all. a whole fucking lot of nerd creative community stuff isn’t, though fanlore does a pretty great job of tracking and archiving shit up to and including ancient zine and usenet wars. for a lot of folk, i guess it never occurred to people to keep history down and organize it, because living in the moment, why would you? you’re just somebody doing watercolor paintings of gay lynxes hanging out in wooded glens.
the thing i’m really big into is also how much of furry ties into exploration of gender and sexuality, with people clumsily, but sincerely, working out this kind of shit for themselves in the worlds of MUCKs and MUDs, in handmade and scanned webcomics, in frcadia, and on and on. there’s a huge link there, and even people reporting on furry now tend to skip right over it and focus on hetero stuff, cis stuff, which… if you’re in deep in furry culture, you should know how fucking weird it is to focus on that aspect against all others. shit, even ancient posts in phpbb furry forums from 2003, you got straight furries complaining about “why’s there so much gay stuff?”
furry history is cool as hell, imo (i repeat myself). its got a distinctly different makeup and output from a lot of other nerd corners because it’s not all in service of or dedication to something from professional productions - over the years, there’s been dramatically less and less reliance on needing something from Disney, WB, or elsewhere to spark creativity. making fursonas, making your own worlds to house your fursonas and other characters, and all these other things, furry doesn’t have any sort of central hub other than “enjoys animal people in some respect”, so the output varies wildly, splintered, highly personal.
i went to my first furry con, finally, just this last year. very, very different experience than anime cons and other nerd kinda cons.
definitely add whatever you can to Fanlore. Furry Fandom needs more representation.