Like any predominately-online community, the furry fandom truly is a talent meat grinder. Seemingly almost every month someone will create a work that propels them into some degree of “stardom” and nine times out of ten it happens completely unintentionally. Sure, everyone wants their artwork or stories to be appreciated, but most people are ill-prepared for what fame and notoriety actually entail.
Take me for example; when I was a few months shy of being legally old enough to drink alcohol something I wrote (that to this day I will assert in hindsight wasn’t even very good) “put me on the map”. I was convention-bound and prepped for the “flavor of the month” pump-and-dump grooming fields. When you’re young and stupid I think everyone wants to be “a star” in the field of whatever it is they enjoy doing; if you play the guitar you want to be the next Pearl Jam, if you write stories you want to be the next Stephen King. That’s a completely normal thing to want, “fame” is this nebulous thing that “just happens” to the “right people” and if you try hard enough then you too could be a star.
Really, it’s just random. Catch the attention and interest of someone who is already famous (relatively speaking) or knows how to “make” people famous and they’ll do the legwork because in actuality there’s something in it for them. “No free lunches”, and all. All you have to do is smile and put the fries in the bag. That was me; I wrote a story about people banging dinosaurs that a lot of furries read, someone in charge of signing talent for a massive convention spotted an up-and-comer, and I got to wear a special con badge and have my name printed in the guidebook and sit at a table that had a little paper placard with my name on it. If I would’ve played my cards a little differently that would not have been a one and done affair and my life likely would’ve taken a drastically different route. Whether that was for better or worse is anyone’s guess.
But I didn’t handle it well. When I was 20 years old of course I wanted to be famous. There was a level of humility folded into those feelings somewhere but by and large I wanted to own one of the accounts that broke FurAffinity when its follower count got too high. That spike in popularity led to an assortment of opportunities in my personal and “professional” life, many of which I’ve documented on this blog already. I’d like to say I made the best decision I could with the information I had at any given point in time but I know that’s probably not true; this is why actors and performers have agents who handle things on their behalf, none of us can be trusted to make sound decisions when every choice we’d make would inevitably be saturated in confirmation bias.
So I flopped, and fell out of the spotlight fairly quickly. But this journal isn’t really about me, it’s about someone else who found themselves in the same position as I did but wound up taking a different course. To reiterate, because I don’t want to assume you (the reader) have read every single long-winded journal on this website, I’m really not the type to name names because I’m not trying to stir up any beef with anyone. I don’t hold grudges, I got past that, and even so this isn’t a person that I had an aggressive conflict with in the first place. It’s just a story that I sometimes dwell on a little more than I probably should and I figured it was worth sharing.
I was a writer, and so was this other person. They and I both appeared in the furry fandom around the same time, though I had a couple of years’ head start and was unknowingly already on my way out when our paths crossed. We both also served the same sort of niche with what we made, which is to say we wrote stories that featured non-anthro characters. (Not going to argue if this is or isn’t acceptable, it’s not a topic I want to get into and it’s not worth the headache. I’m just providing the information for context.) What we did not have in common however was our trajectory; I plugged away at a few projects that gradually crept up the Yiffstar story charts whereas this other person somehow managed to knock out a grand slam on the first try and was almost literally popular overnight.
We wound up attracting the same circle of people and got to know each other for this very reason. I guess you could call it a “friendship of circumstance”. What I remember the most about this person was that they’d cultivated a level of self-hatred that tread far beyond the usual kind of obnoxious “man aren’t I such a failure writing furry porn haha” act that’s all too common. This was something that was alarming to me from the very beginning. They seemed to constantly be at odds with how talented they were as a writer and hated the fact that they had managed to “score” with something that was, I assume, rooted in a facet of their identity they found to be very shameful. I don’t know this for fact but in hindsight perhaps we really were cut from the same exact cloth; my first stories were adaptations of things I’d written in a dream journal at the recommendation of a therapist that only became furry smut because someone else convinced me to do that as well (further reading: Konned, An Origin Story). We became noteworthy for “venting” our insecurities and the things about us we recognized as being impure (or however you want to phrase it) anonymously only to be hailed as creative powerhouses because of it.
I mentioned that as I crossed paths with this person I was unknowingly in the process of exiting the fandom, by the end of 2011 my creative output tapered off to less than one finished work per year; this person’s output was a little more consistent than that to say the least and as I sat on the sidelines I’d see them get fully polished fanart – not sketches – of characters from their stories from some very notable names in the fandom, the kinds of artists you’d have to pay $200 or more to get something from all the way back in the 2010’s. Or not at all because they never took commissions! I can’t remember if I ever felt any sort of jealousy toward them at the time, because I sure as hell wasn’t getting big ticket artwork of my characters on the house for the stories I wrote. I probably did feel some level of inadequacy over it and if so then it’s something I’ve long since worked out of my system, but I do have vague memories of the writer speaking to me and being sort of blasé about it. I cannot recall any specific quotes or conversations but I do have some recollections of them not really understanding what all the attention was for.
I don’t know if they were invited to any conventions the way I was, but I guess this was some kind of surrogate grooming or whatever too. “Lovebombing”, whatever you want to call it. I’m not trying to say the artists who were making fanart for this person were doing it with explicitly malicious intent, it’s more that they’re all just cogs in the same system making fanart of things they like that are sexual in nature and these individual components as a whole make a hard to ignore feedback loop of perversion that can very easy ensnare someone who isn’t aware of its effect. Do you think the guy who designed the bolts on the first atomic bomb knew what he was doing? No, he was just some guy hired to do one thing without paying attention to the bigger picture.
The common thread we shared was how our works featured “non-anthro” characters, usually with humans as the other partner. That was a genre of writing that I exited relatively quickly once I became privy to the fact that perhaps this was not something I should hitch my trailer to; not counting stories that I was paid to write I only penned three of them, the third being the “break out” work that landed me at Further Confusion. From 2009 onward I segued into writing stories with standard anthro characters (or with casts exclusively comprised of dragons, which seemed to be an acceptable theme). I admittedly didn’t really keep up with this person’s stories beyond a certain point but I don’t think they ever deviated from the foundation that made them popular which is to say they were writing stories with sentient non-anthros the entire time.
The acquaintanceship I had with them was sporadic but lasted several years, ending somewhat ironically with the launch of Discord (despite what that platform is known for today). Like a lot of furs I abandoned my Skype account, which was forced upon me when MSN Messenger ended its online services in 2013, and used the opportunity as a way to quietly remove myself from a handful of social circles I was vestigial in out of feelings of obligation (and because at one point someone hired some Russian hacker to break into my Skype account, not a joke, and despite gaining back control of it I was paranoid constantly so any reason to ditch Skype was good enough for me). One of the last interactions that I can recall having with this person was when they tried to send me a massive archive of content that I really did not want but felt cornered into accepting just to end the inexplicably awkward situation that had begun to unfold.
When you write stories that involve non-anthropormorphic characters and one of the focal points of the stories is their anatomical accuracy you’re really walking a fine line between “collecting a paycheck” and just writing something that caters to your no longer private perversions, and there was no paycheck involved here. It gets to a point where describing the minutia of something enters the “why do you know this” territory and I think this person had been on this perpetual downward slope of chasing ever higher highs. They were very peculiar about pornographic content. At the time I was personally interested in dating men and a lot of the work I did reflected a very noticeable gay slant. This person claimed to not be gay and even found it “gross” that two men would want to engage in sex with one another. I didn’t care, I wasn’t the type to take offense to the “yiff in hell furfag” routine regardless of whether it came from a Something Awful goon or a closeted/self-hating furry (but I repeat myself…), but what I did find strange was how they’d just randomly send me porn of female people or characters completely unprompted. They made a game out of it, kind of like how when you were a kid you’d trick your friends into looking at your hand making an “OK” symbol so you could punch them on the shoulder.
Again, it didn’t offend me in the slightest but I did very much see it as a strange prank to play on someone who’d previously stated they were interested in male partners. I later came to find that this was one facet of a larger issue with pornography. To double back and touch on that “massive archive” I mentioned a couple paragraphs ago one day out of the blue they messaged me and said they had something to send to me. It was a ZIP folder multiple gigabytes in size comprised entirely of real life zoo material literally named “For Dracokon.zip”. They’d collected a half dozen gigs of potentially illegal material, named the file after me, and then insisted I accept it via a Skype file transfer.
Trust me, I said “no”. But I did fall just short of telling this person to pound sand before permanently blocking them because I also knew in that moment that I was not dealing with someone of sound mind. I’ve always had this predisposition toward being paranoid and on edge about all kinds of things that probably don’t matter. I read between the lines in places where doing so is impractical or impossible. It’s habit. But for as bad of a habit as that is I do feel in this one specific moment it made me hyper-aware that the correct option was to end this confrontation by whatever means would not result in an outburst. I felt threatened. So I accepted the file transfer. Multiple times too, because you might be shocked to hear that Skype was a terrible P2P service so the slightest interruption in your connection caused the entire transfer to be lost. Every time it happened they’d insist on starting again. “Leave your PC on overnight if you have to”, “leave it on overnight and if you need to go to work I’ll leave mine on too”, etc.
Eventually the file did transfer successfully. I never unzipped it; I checked the file structure of the archive with an extraction tool, read the names of the folders and files, determined that I was probably in possession of something I definitely should not have, and deleted it. We never spoke again, and I made my quiet exit to a new messaging platform (which, itself, has since been deleted).
It’s been over a decade since that incident and in that time they eventually succumbed to burnout and vanished for a period, but in a very unhealthy way. As my presence in the fandom waned I stayed in touch with less and less people and around 2018 or so I went to a theme park with a group of people from the furry fandom and this person’s name was mentioned. Apparently, they all used to play Cards Against Humanity and the like together online, but one of the guests on this trip brought up how this person had just randomly vanished from their online messenger handles but would still sometimes show up to their game nights and just never say anything. They’d play the game, just in dead silence. And then one day… nothing.
They’re not dead or anything like that as far as I can tell because similar to how I “came back” into the public eye so did this person and they’re still working on the same lineage of stories that began 15 years ago.
I haven’t reached out to them, and I don’t want to. It’s not an interaction that I feel I’d get anything out of. Like I said, I don’t hold grudges but I do hope that they’ve settled their problems with whatever it is that was haunting them, and if that hasn’t happened yet then I pray someday they find the strength to deal with their vices in a way that benefits their quality of life. My own withdrawal from the furry community has been such a major step for me that I’m not even in touch anymore with the group of people I went to the park with that’d tangentially brought this person up.
It’s an era of my life that, as these journals have demonstrated, was as complicated as it was unsettling and I’m fine with my only closure on certain things simply being “I’ll never know”.
Until next time.