why am I a furry?

a holiday listicle

Dragons are cool!
I watched Digimon Frontier as an impressionable kid. If you’re not keeping track, that’s the one where the kids turn into the Digimon.
Watching Dragon Tales while even younger probably didn’t help.
I (the dragon) am what I (the human) imagine if I became an idealized version of myself, but overshot slightly. Way more confident, somewhat more laconic, actually capable of deadpanning a joke rather than breaking halfway. Giving a name and face to this bundle makes it easier to strive for, and to ask myself (human), what would I (dragon) do in this situation?
Along the same lines, I’m an alter ego that can be useful for taking the outside view — evaluating a situation as if it were happening to somebody else, and thus with more psychological distance and hopefully more clearly. As the Chinese say, 當局者迷，旁觀者清. If I dissociate really hard, I might glimpse the entirety of human civilization and society from the perspective of an ~~alien~~ draconic anthropologist, as if I were Voyager 1 looking back on Earth from six billion kilometers away, and see what really matters.
Along the same lines but different, there are some confidence visualization exercises where you imagine somebody giving you unconditional support, and myself the dragon is basically the idealized highest-octane version of that.
The art is good! Some art you can feel on your fingertips, some art can transport you to another world just like that. Furry artists are a talented bunch. I don’t know that there is a causal link or that this is more than post hoc rationalization, but I might argue something like, nonhuman characters have access to a wider range of visually distinguishable personality traits and methods of self-expression.
I’m a bit of a hoarder, both of physical objects (a Western dragon trait) and of information/wisdom (an Eastern dragon trait). Things I am hoarding right now include:
1. moving boxes, full of packing material, from when I moved into my current place… three years ago
2. a dozen (washed) used plastic boba straws, in case I need a piece of plastic in such a form factor. Once I used one as a makeshift vacuum attachment. That means the others might be useful one day, so I should keep them. Q.E.D.
3. digitized versions of my high school biology notes (a field I will probably never work in). Digitized as in, hand-written semantic HTML. What’s up with that?
4. stories I wrote when I was in first grade. I might’ve peaked as a fiction writer then, if only because I was willing to “publish” anything because I didn’t have any standards.
Speaking of which, have you ever wondered why we use the same word “dragon” for both types of creature? There are similarities, but also many differences; this was by no means a necessary convergence of language. In the same way, I’ve been caught between Western and Eastern culture the entire time I was growing up. We drilled this theme really hard in high school literature class.
The more meta point uniting the art and personality aspects is that I think it’s interesting and useful (and fun!) to externalize and reify these things. What aspects of myself are the most salient? What about of my aspirations? How would these things be metaphorically physically represented? Thinking through these things forces you to be specific and judicious, and can be an illuminating exercise.
My fursona came to me in a vision.
Seriously it would be so cool to fly and breathe fire and flash razor-sharp teeth at unsuspecting human passersby before reassuring them that I’m not going to eat them, ~~I’m not into vore~~^{(hashtag #notalldragons)} they are within my circle of moral concern.
It would be even cooler to do this after pretending to be a normal human being in front of them and then transforming in a pyrotechnic display, sprouting wings and searing flesh.
Remember the scene in Inside Out where the imaginary friend sacrifices himself by jumping out of the wagon rocket so Joy can achieve enough lift to get out of the Memory Dump? My imaginary friend can fucking fly!
I like bringing a bit more surrealism to people’s lives. Not everybody has to or should be a furry, but it would be awesome for more people to feel like they had permission to be unusual.
The community, of course. Some of the coolest, most inspiring people I’ve ever met are furries. I have no doubt this is true, but actually hesitated to list this item because I’m not sure the cause-and-effect is there, I’ve thought dragons are cool long before I knew anything about the furry fandom as a community. However, it is a reason I continue to go to furry events and such, so I think it qualifies.
Like any other subculture we have our in-jokes: the con pizza, the cheese grater, the food additive numbers, inflating people and thereby making them big and round. Of course, it’s hardly special that in-jokes exist, but these particular in-jokes are ones I’m clued into now. I didn’t say all the reasons in this list are good ones.
♪ Oh, why’s the world so cruel to me / When all, all I ever want to be is anything I’m not ♫
There’s a deeper question of identity somewhere. There was a moment in college when I was watching a recording of myself presenting for a public speaking class and realized, wow, I barely identify with the human in the camera at all. I don’t think I would quite label myself as therian or otherkin, and I never got involved in the community, but they seem cool and many bits of what I understand people to associate with the terms do resonate with me, so let’s just say I’m adjacent? shrug.
For real, dragons are cool. It doesn’t have to be more complicated than that.