1. literal answer/cause: as best as i can trace it back - my memory isn’t so great in a lot of places - weregarurumon’s abs seems the likely cause for me, specifically.

2. i’m not so connected to “the community!” this goes for a lot of my stuff i’m into. i carve out slices of groups of my own and prefer that, as it’s way less stress, and way more fulfilling, in a lot of ways.

furry, and i’ve talked about this on twitter, and there seems to be a lot of agreement, is where a lot of other gay and queer kids ended up checking out when mainstream gay stuff did… absolutely nothing for them? like, to this day, clone vat twinks and jocks and generically handsome hollywood men with generic facial scruff continue to generally do nothing for me, no matter how much gay mags and media push this as like cream of the crop stuff. furry was, and is, a place to explore sexuality and gender that was decidedly different. weirder, too, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, at all. like, remember those romanceable options of Coming Out On Top? those guys are the kinda generic i’m talking about, from gay art to gay live action stuff, and it’s just totally uninteresting to me. there wasn’t much of anything interesting for me to explore there. instead, i ended up working out my sexuality and all sorts of other stuff via like anime fan shrines, furcadia, and old solo furry websites and comics.

and i’m just sort of invested in the history of it! i find the community’s history really fascinating, even if i’m not connected to the modern community at large - i know way more about formerly popular artists like terrie smith than the currently highly popular crop like null ghost and such. i like tracing the history through old websites, usenet logs, VCL pages, etc, etc. there’s this personal level to it that’s hard to find elsewhere, and it’s especially interesting now as furry gets closer and closer to mainstreaming.

a lot of it is momentum. i’ve been following furry stuff forever and i have a buncha furry friends, so, that just sorta keeps it going. furry community isn’t so reliant on profesionally produced media anymore to maintain itself - no one’s waiting for the next minerva mink or fox robin hood to produce new content. they never have (furry zines with original material go back to the 80s), but as the community has grown and more original content has put out, the need for “source material”, so to speak, has weakened.

i say this, knowing full well that zootopia looks like it was made by the most greymuzzle of greymuzzles and if you were a fly on the wall in the disney offices you could probably hear about animators sticking in their friends fursonas, or their own.

a lot, a lot a lot, of kids who weren’t straight or didn’t feel at home in the gender they were assigned, but didn’t find a lot of comfort (or arousal) in mainstream stuff about them found their way to furry, and still do. kind of a defining feature of the community. for all people go on about the sub-sub-sub-fetishes, like, rubberization inflation or whatever the heck, a lot is just LGBT kids finding a place of their own that’s not recognized, per se, by mainstream gay narratives.