There are a lot of stories I want to eventually tell on this website someday, but I feel the one I should start with is the one that explains where I came from.
I’d been a casual user of the internet since the late nineties but I didn’t make an effort to put my roots down anywhere until I joined FanFiction.net some time around 2001. Here I would submit stories (clean ones) I’d written about mundane things like Pokemon and Sonic the Hedgehog as they were my obsessions when I was much younger and I was deeply familiar with the characters and lore. Despite being quite young at the time my gift of being able to write well flourished as a small handful of the stories I’d written picked up a reasonable audience. One of them even got one of those gaudy little web awards from a Sonic fansite for something like “Fanfic of 2002” or whatever. Naturally, I also had to deal with things like people knocking off my work and uploading it wholesale as their own to try and mooch followers and likes.
During my time on FanFiction.net I eventually heard about communities on the web that centered around Pokemon and Sonic. I joined a couple of the more prominent sites and it was there where I made my first online friends. I downloaded MSN Messenger so we could keep in touch. To say this era of my life was uneventful would be an understatement. I was just some dumb kid writing even dumber fanfics. One of the friends that I made exclusively wrote content that had to be filtered under the “NC-17” label on FanFiction.net, however. I can’t really remember how I came to know this person exactly, I assume he was just “around” in the Sonic community (because that’s what he predominately wrote about) and because of this we sort of just got to talking since we were occupying the same space.
Things maintained themselves for a couple of years until the end of 2002 when this person, who wound up becoming something of a close friend to me, vanished. This was unusual because he was always online except for when he was at school. Days passed and he never signed in, no one heard anything from him. After a couple of weeks word spread that he’d shot himself. This was my first time dealing with something like this and I wasn’t sure how to handle the situation. It bothered me quite a bit and eventually I started losing interest in participating in the communities I had joined. Eventually I stopped posting to FanFiction.net entirely and at some point later on down the road I purged my account and its contents.
I bring up this story because I feel like it appropriately sets the stage for my mentality regarding online interactions. I was, apparently, very easily influenced by the people and happenings around me. Remember, I cannot recall how I exactly met this friend that I had. He just sort of showed up one day and I apparently saw no issue with adding him to my buddy list on Messenger. Obviously this person wasn’t well and he filled his free time by existing online virtually 24/7 writing Sonic fanfics that had to be tagged “NC-17”. From what I can recall, which isn’t much, I think he was born in 1982 making him probably 20 when he committed suicide because it happened in December. He was over 18 but I don’t think he was a predator or anything like that (I was under 18 in 2002), I just think he wasn’t right in the head and obviously didn’t get the help he needed.
Another five years would pass before I’d re-emerge on the creative scene. I spent this time coming and going from message boards centered around medieval role play and dragons. I met a lot of people who identified as “dragonkin” during this time and while it was an identity I flirted with it’s something that I could never truly pin down. There were a lot of people in these communities who took this matter of a deeply personal identity very seriously; I have never gone as far as to utter the line “I was a dragon in a previous life” but lots of other people around me did. Because of this I wasn’t exactly sure how to parse people who claimed they were dragonkin. I treated them with suspicion for a while but over the years found them to be largely harmless and many of them wound up becoming good friends. My dragon identity was one born from recurring dreams and while I cannot go as far as to commit to the idea that I am (or was) that dragon in a spiritual sense I do acknowledge that the being is important to me in some tangible way that I do not fully understand. (I plan to go into this facet of my personality deeper at a later time.)
The dragon community did have something of an effect on me though as during this time I was rounding out the end of going through puberty. Some wires got crossed somewhere along the line and I developed an “affinity” for dragons. While I’d like to say I ran a clean image during this time in reality I was a member of a few adult-oriented dragon forums where I’d lied about my age to gain access to their smut collections. Of note however was that I’d started occasionally having dreams about dragons that were sexual in nature. Despite my engagement with adult communities online, in the back of my head I knew this wasn’t right and this was something I probably should talk to a professional about.
It was now 2007 and I’d recently started higher education. One of the things my tuition paid for was an on-campus counseling service. They employed real therapists complete with PhD’s so it’s not like this was just a bunch of licensed professional counselors (LPC’s) who couldn’t cut it as social workers. These were actual doctors. In hindsight I realize now this staff of doctors were probably there to help students deal with minor things like homesickness so what I was about to do probably came out of left field for the poor soul who took me on as a client. I opened up to my new therapist that I was having strange dreams of a sexual nature that involved dragons, dinosaurs, and reptiles as partners. Specifically, my problem was that this all felt very unnatural. My therapist was supportive of course but after a few sessions we weren’t making much progress because I was having problems with dreams and it is the very nature of a dream for the memory of it to expire after a couple of hours of being awake. Because of this by the time I’d make it to my next appointment I could barely remember anything of what bothered me.
My therapist suggested that I keep a dream journal so that the next time we spoke I would be able to bring up specific things from those dreams and work on getting some kind of closure. This was a completely reasonable suggestion but it would turn out to be the catalyst that would lead to everything you see before you right now. Or rather, the remains of everything you see before you.
Concurrently as I saw my therapist I was also still participating in online communities. I was trying to resist the urge to engage with the adult dragon community for obvious reasons but I did still talk to friends I’d made over Messenger. I told one of them about what I was going through with my therapist and this led to me bringing up the dream journal. My friend was interested in the journal and asked if he could read it. I initially declined but eventually relented and sent him the first entry in the journal, a scattered recollection of an erotic dream I had about a large snake-like creature. A few minutes later my friend replied that this would make a good story and asked if I ever thought about writing one and posting it online. Again, I declined.
That wasn’t the end of the conversation though as over the course of the next few days my friend would bring up the dream journal and insist that what I’d written in it would be a great adult story. I brushed it off until I couldn’t any longer. I gave in and I arranged the events of the dream into a loose chronological order and wrote a story in between the parts. It was the first story I’d written since my days of penning Pokemon fanfics at the turn of the millennium. I sent the text file to my friend and he was impressed with the results, but of course the pestering didn’t end there. Now I had to post it online. Once again I objected to this but eventually warmed up to the idea because I could just make up a random username, post the story, and move on. I opened FurAffinity in my web browser and went to its registration page. When it asked for a name I typed in the first nonsensical thing that popped into my head.
“Dracokon”
I posted the story on my new account and went about my business. After a while though I admittedly got curious about it and I returned to the site to see that I’d gained several followers, favorites, and comments on the story. I opened the comments. Unanimous praise; one user even asked if this had been uploaded to Yiffstar, a website dedicated to hosting furry fiction. I hadn’t posted it there but in the moment I was somehow invigorated by the positive feedback so I joined Yiffstar and posted the story there too where it would eventually go on to also be well received by that website’s userbase.
All of a sudden this “problem” of mine that was extremely personal to me and was something I was embarrassed about was being met with unconditional praise and encouragement by an online community that was new to me: the furry fandom. I did not know it at the time but this was the point of no return. I’d crossed the rubicon and although things seemed positive now they would not stay that way for long.
I continued meeting with my therapist while this double life of mine was starting to take off. Eventually I had another erotic dream, this time about a sentient alligator. I dutifully wrote about it in my dream journal while at the same time using the dream as the base of my second story which I posted on FurAffinity and Yiffstar. More positive acclaim and this time the story appeared on Yiffstar’s popularity chart, a section of the website that tracked and ranked the most popular submissions on the website by day, week, month, and year. Seeing myself on Yiffstar’s daily chart was like having a successful Billboard single. It compelled me to want to write something else and this time aim even higher on the chart. My therapist noticed my demeanor was improving so naturally he assumed our sessions were working. I never told him that I was turning my dream journal entries into erotic stories that I was sharing online and the success of these stories is what was fueling my positive attitude, not our counseling sessions.
My third story would prove to be the break I didn’t know I was waiting for. I’d had a dream that involved a Utahraptor and as I’m sure you’ve guessed I also turned this into a story. By now I’d begun ignoring FurAffinity and focusing solely on Yiffstar because while FurAffinity had the bigger audience Yiffstar had the popularity charts and it was also a website specifically for writers. The raptor story rose to #1 for the day. I’d made it, I’d topped the chart. I was over the moon. But things didn’t stop there. By hitting #1 for the day the story entered the weekly chart. Over the course of the next few days as more people saw it and the stories that had been on the chart for a week dropped off the raptor story also hit #1 for the week. Now that it had topped the weekly chart my submission appeared on the monthly one and like clockwork it worked its way up the list until it again reached the #1 position. This is where the madness would end though as the next jump would be to the annual list and I guess there wasn’t enough traction for the story to make it onto that one, but consecutively reaching the top of the first three charts had cemented me as a new force to be reckoned with in the furry fandom. Dracokon had arrived.
The success of the raptor story directly led to me being invited out to one of the country’s largest furry conventions as a special guest, but that’s a story for another entry. This is a reasonable place to wrap this one up.
This is how I entered the furry fandom and quickly rose to prominence after just three short stories. I betrayed the honest intentions of my therapist by allowing myself to be beaten down by a total stranger online, someone I allowed into my life in the same exact way as the adult Sonic fanfic author who ate a bullet. Out of some inexplicable and clearly faulty desire to not let down the people around me, even those as insignificant as a random person on the internet, I went along with sharing the contents of a highly private journal to a third party who in turn convinced me to turn the entries of that journal into pornographic stories for people to consume online. The feedback loop of positive encouragement I received from sharing these stories rendered everything I’d spoken about to my therapist useless and I eventually parted ways from his practice because the dopamine hits I was receiving from the furry fandom were enough to carry me onward. It was without a doubt the worst decision of my life.
Before I end this post I would like to also address the elephant in the room: yes, these were technically zoo stories regardless of the fact that the characters were sentient; they were still feral depictions of those kinds of reptiles so the label applies. I am more than aware of how inappropriate this subject matter is; this is why I objected to posting the initial story in the first place and why I sought the help of a therapist to help me sort things out because I knew this was wrong but I still got subverted by the fandom and reeled in. All because I listened to one person who absolutely did not have my best interests at heart. I glazed over the moral issues in this post because that’s an entire other can of worms to deal with – and I’ll address it someday – but an introductory journal entry is not the place to get into it.
Until next time.