As the voice-over to an intro presentation for FurFest sonorously boomed over a dubstep beat, “You know you are more than a human.… Now you are the beast that slept inside your mind.” If you fall into any of these categories, then furries are your kind of people, and FurFest the place to unleash the human-size sergal (a fictional rabbit/shark/wolf amalgam) within. Maybe you’ve long thought it would be rad to buy a $10,000 curvy hippo costume and enter a breakdancing competition. Maybe you’ve always felt an inexplicable affinity with Tony the Tiger.
Maybe you really liked drawing wolves during eighth-grade homeroom. While there is a contingent of furries who do derive sexual pleasure from the subculture, the fanbase is much more broad than that. Like most subcultures, the furry fandom is a largely internet-driven phenomenon, providing a label for a pre-existing feeling that has always lived, dormant and unnamed, inside a select number of people. The mainstream media has historically painted furries as sex-crazed, socially maladjusted freaks who enjoy rubbing up against each other in giant bunny costumes.
