Furry

This article contains PROMOTIONS! Don't say we didn't warn you.

Fig. a: This furry is not making any friends here.

"I have run with the tigers and I know wild beasts better than the priests. Animals are neither gods nor fiends, but men in their way without the lust and greed of man."

– Kull, Exile of Atlantis

If you're looking for actual /tg/ races that are based on the principle of "humanoid animal", see Beastfolk.

Alternatively, if you’re looking for the Chaos God from which furries emanate, see Slaanesh.

A Furry (not to be confused with fury, which they tend to create) are people who are (often obsessive) fans of anthropomorphic animals. Some furries are merely keen on Disney, the Rats of NIMH, My Little Pony, or Usagi Yojimbo (these are the tolerable ones); at the other end of the spectrum lie the Otherkin, people who genuinely believe that they are animals or dragons trapped inside human bodies. Some furries make and wear fursuits in an attempt to resemble their avatars in real life, which tends to make the participants look ridiculous most of the time unless the costume is well made (which, credit where credit is due, happens extraordinarily often) or they're at a con full of them (and even then...).

The Furry community is ostensibly based mostly in meritocratic elitism, with good drawfags in the upper levels of their social pyramid and the average Disney/Warner Brothers' animation fanboy in the lowest. Drama, misanthropy and other emo behaviors are very common in the hierarchy, often representing humankind as sociopathic or genocidal in their literary works or comics. Many furry comics have a homosexual or bisexual theme, not unlike anime; while there are many LGBTQ+ individuals and supporters in the furry community, there are also many "safe havens" that are host to furries often overlap with those accepting of gay communities. For what it's worth, the non-furry parts of those communities only consider them a problem when they go bashit fucking crazy.

The diverse constituencies of the furry community in a nutshell.

Furries get a lot of hate in a lot of places on the internet, which stems form several sources; a big one is the really insecure subtype of furry who posts their "fursona" on deviantART and proceeds to spew bile at anyone who doesn't kiss their ass about it. Another big part of it is the type of furry most commonly referred to by /tg/ and 4chan, which is the erotic furry, also known as the "furvert", which is a specific sexual fetish for anthropomorphic animals. Erotic furries are fond of cybersex, which they refer to as "yiffing", supposedly for the sound a fox makes while copulating. There are fewer erotic furries in the furry community than the average fa/tg/uy believes, but also more of them than the average furry will admit to. While sexual attraction to anthropomorphic animals *by itself* isn't too deviant or disturbing, the problem is that like many fetishes it has an odd tendency to occur in conjunction with other, more extreme ones (more on that in a bit). Because of these various factors, this type of furry is considered by 4chan, out of all possible factions, as the vilest and most nauseating form of heresy in all of existence, with only the ultimate Banhammer as the solution. Even to the point where *all* forms of furry porn are banned on /d/, a board that accepts pretty much everything else, even outright felonies like rape.

Antipathy toward furries on /tg/ and 4chan runs high principally due to a profound weariness with thin-skinned furries complaining of persecution (but the irony that this has partially legitimized their claims has not gone wholly unnoticed). If you are a furry and feel the need to talk about it, the best way to survive on /tg/ is to admit from the outset that you are a sick bastard and that you don't expect anyone to praise you for it. (Addendum: Since 40k has very little to do with the fandom, it's generally safe to just not refer to yourself as one, lest ye call down the collective nerd rage of the fa/tg/uys on you, as shown in fig. a.) Furry threads make for very effective trolling experience, especially if erotic furry art is involved.

In a somewhat ironic twist, /tg/'s burning hatred for furries is what allowed /tg/ to come into being; Warhammer Wednesday was created as a direct response to furries attempting to spam /b/ every day of the week. The popularity of this day caught Moot's attention, leading to the creation of the /tg/ board.

Furries have their own RPGs, most notably Ironclaw, and its Asian themed companion book Jadeclaw, as well as Furry Pirates and Albedo.

/tg/, /v/, /x/ and other boards (not really /b/, because half of them are furfags anyways) have a profound hatred for all things furry and will rage, sage, kill, maim and ultimately burn the thread into the desolate wastelands of 404. (Any thread you may happen to see featuring monstergirls, centaurs, gnolls, or other sexualized sapient creatures is merely a figment of your imagination.)

Note: some furfags like to take it to the extreme and have recently tried to take /tg/ for themselves, only to have to resort to copious amounts of samefagging after the majority of fa/tg/uys got bored of saging their threads into oblivion. It is also theorized that furfags that invade /tg/ usually come from the bottomless pit of horror called tgchan.

Scalies are anthropomorphic creatures of the reptile and amphibian variety. As furries are nicknamed such for their humanoid shape covered in fur, scalies tend to have a coating of scales much like the animals they represent. However, some scalies, including draconids, have very light or no true scales, but flesh more like a human's.

Scalies are also furry fans with a preference for lizard, reptile, dragon and dinosaur characters and themes. It is also a self-moniker for the users of alt.fan.dragons, a Usenet discussion group for all things drakōn. They are not to be confused with dragonborn (because they don't ask to be fucked and raped constantly).

The real question is are birds scalies or furries? ~~Maybe beakies?~~ *BLAM*

Yiffing

Yiffing refers to sex between furries, and is most commonly used outside the fandom in the form of "Yiff in Hell", indicating to publicly erotic furries that they or their sexual practices are not welcome in a given locale. As mentioned before, it frequently ventures into absolutely wild territory guaranteed to squick even the most hardened of internet users. For the most part, furries might have been tolerated had the fandom simply left it at "animal people fucking" and not become host to an array of utterly fucked up shit: watersports, adult babies, various forms of vore (most not even from natural orifices), actual bestiality, and scat are all just scratching the surface.

Of course /tg/, being /tg/, knows everyone gets off to something that would be considered fucked up by at least a significant amount of people - after all, we have to let loose somehow and not all of us are the same. Plus, there's no fetish amongst furries that isn't already expressed in plenty amongst non-furries - 8chan has an entire fucking board dedicated to non-furry vore, for example, and that's not counting the fetishes ranging from bondage to guro in the 'non-furry' world since the fucking Romans. Furries are simply the poster child for people who take it to completely unfathomable heights, due to the frequent overlap between furries and other /d/-tier fetishes, such that one may feel an insatiable urge to drink bleach afterward. It's not uncommon to see even other furries giving the worst parts of their fandom a wide berth, although many onlookers would make no distinction in that regard anyway.

Some people like to joke that the influx of furries into hell drove the immortal Prince of Darkness into attempting suicide (and succeeding), and he was replaced with the Prince of Pleasure, because it turns out Chaos accepts pretty much anyone.

You might be considered a furry (by some) if...

As the only attribute consistently required to be considered a furry is an interest in anthropomorphic animals (def: having human characteristics, such as human speech, clothes, etc) you might be a furry if you identify with and/or are a devoted fan of:

Beastmen
Skaven
Lizardmen
Minotaur
Centaur
Satyr
Some subspecies of Demon or some species of Daemon

(Clarification: Just because you are interested in any of these does NOT force you to become a furry. It's a fandom like anime is. You can like something without associating with the ravening horde of crazy fanboys/girls.)

Things That are Not Furry

Distaste for furries often backfires on /tg/ when overly zealous anons cannot find any furries to abuse and turn their attention to people involved in innocuous practices. In particular, you should check yourself if you find you are calling someone a furry for any of the following:

Playing Bunnies and Burrows (without masturbating).
Discussing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness (without masturbating).
Watching Disney movies and other movies with anthropomorphic characters (again, without masturbating). Disney movies may cause anthropomorphic animals to pique your interest, but does not, by default, MAKE you a furry.
Monstergirls. Suggesting they count as furry to any stray weeaboo on /tg/ will result in them broiling over with rage.
Playing gnolls, minotaurs, Orks, kobolds and in some extreme cases elves (without masturbating).
Discussing something such as Ruby Quest (without masturbating), which primarily has given the characters animal features in order to easily differentiate between them within its simple style.
Discussing Werewolves, playing Werewolf: The Apocalypse or Werewolf: The Forsaken (without masturbating) as, despite the frequent overlap, they are not furry by themselves.
Playing Space Wolves (without masturbating).
Playing Tyranids (without masturbating).
Playing Beastfolk in general (without masturbating).
Sexual attraction to actual, real-world animals (as in not the cute catgirl you just drew up, but your actual neighbor's cat). This is known as Bestiality, and unlike everything else on this list is worse than being a furry^[1], although it is also one of the aforementioned deviances that "Furry" tends to overlap with.

Dispute rages over what exactly constitutes furry. As a general guideline "If it has a snout, it's out" works well-enough; however (and especially on /tg/) fantasy races complicate that particular equation a bit. Gnolls, Minotaurs, Beastmen and their ilk are a well-established part of many a RPG/Wargame setting and have been there long before the furry craze. It's important to note the difference however: Beastmen, Wulfen and the like are clearly set out in the lore as monsters-they aren't sexualised and aren't really tolerated. There's no Beastman-Human relationships in Warhammer, because the lore is quite clear on them being hated and reviled, with every interaction starting and ending at the tip of a sword.

There are two major schools of thought on the subject. One holds that catgirls and other essentially near-hairless human characters with only one or two animal features (such as ears, minute resemblance of claws/fur on the body or a tail) are not furry, and the boundary of furry is only breached when you start sighting other obviously animal characteristics such as an altered skeletal structure, a face that resembles an actual animal and full-body-fur (this does not stop trolls from calling Horo furry, however). On the other hand, the second school of thought maintains that nobody fucking cares. There are hints of a still forming third school developing around the idea of exterminating all of them and let Gary Gygax sort it out.

Monstergirls vs. Furries

One will note that the above doesn't constitute a strong defense of Monstergirls as not being Furry (as, unlike the other non-furry fur-adjacent-fandoms^[2] mentioned above, the two do share a rather *ahem* one-handed approach to things). This is because, sadly, Monstergirls has some overlap with furrydom. There are a few distinctions that may be worth making between the two, though:

Monstergirls are usually an attempt to make monsters more human, usually due to a desire for something "exotic" and/or the fa/tg/uy or fa/tg/irl in question having poor luck with actual humans. Furries are frequently driven by a desire to make people less human, at least in appearance (with the target of dehumanization usually being the furry fan themselves), though the desire for the exotic still plays a similar role.
Monstergirl settings usually make a point of having humans be present. Furry works are frequently describable as "ordinary (if perhaps porny) life, but everybody is an animal".
Monstergirls are, well, monsters who happen to be conventionally attractive. Most Monstergirl works make a point of discussing and showing differences in thinking (whether cultural or biological) between the Monstergirls and normal humans. Again, Furry works are frequently describable as "ordinary (if perhaps porny) life, but everybody is an animal".
Furry erotica has an especially bad habit of going into too many weird (and/or sickening) fetishes; Monstergirl-related porn tends to be more "mass market" in their erotic goals, with a good chunk of written fiction being completely romance-oriented (although admittedly there are a few high-profile exceptions to this trend).
Monstergirl fans seem to be an 'ordinary' (if also porn-heavy) fandom, with all the perks and pitfalls of any other. Furrydom overlaps more with being a "lifestyle", with all the bullshit that the phrase "alternative lifestyles" usually involves.
Perhaps most importantly, sanity. Erotic Furries are well-known for their blurring of fantasy and reality in their minds and fan-conventions; Monstergirl fans seem to be more clear on the distinction between the two.

A close reading of some furry webcomics crying about "fursecution" can be highly enlightening on several of these points, if you're of strong enough stomach to do so.

Whether these distinctions actually differentiate the two is left up to the reader to decide.

Furries on /tg/

Besides the usual angst over furry porn getting spammed, if furries are brought up at all, this is mostly in the context of fantasy roleplaying games that feature anthropomorphic species like Gnolls and Kobolds, etc. As mentioned above, this is a gray area where playing one of these characters does not necessarily mean one is a furry; even so, accusations can still be made, since genuine furries can use playing a canon furry species as a smokescreen for creating their magical realm. The key is to figure out ahead of time whether the player in question cares about roleplaying an adventurer and not roleplaying a sexual fetish. Actually, that's a good general rule to go by, furry or not.

With regards to WH40k, there's less ambiguity. The Imperium's stance on non-humans is quite clear. Yes, Wulfen do technically straddle the line into anthro territory, but the fluff makes it clear that they're barely tolerated as it is, and the Inquisition is too busy dealing with daemonic shit to get into another fight with the Space Wolves. Yet despite all this, you do have the occasional furry try to slip something in that, by all rights, should ordinarily result in Exterminatus right from the get-go. Because of this, furries have been classified as Extra Heresy. See the Fur Heresy for one such example.

Flare

Originally introduced to /tg/ by some creepy furfag that would spam her picture in drawfag threads constantly, Flare was since kidnapped from her creator to receive an extreme makeover in the hands of /tg/: Her backstory is that, hated by absolutely everyone, she had to endure constant abuse and fighting ever since childhood, turning her into a sociopathic fuckup. Posting an image of old Flare with or without text used to be the easiest form of trolling on all of /tg/ (Not even 4e D&D could have elicited as much blind rage from the board) but the new Flare has since cut the worst edge out of it. More importantly, what /tg/ did to her is bugging the shit out of the original Flarefag, which is awesome.

There is no art of her anywhere except the original image and the ones that drawfags have made. Trolls sometimes refer to Flare as a mascot of /tg/, but this is so unthinkably wrong and horrifying that you are advised to stop thinking about the possibility before we make you.

Chakat

Like Flare, this is an imported concept that /tg/ rapidly grew to hate. The short story is that Chakats are a race of hermaphroditic furry catfolk centaurs who are super amazing at everything and everyone wants to fuck them, and engage in metric fucktons of sexual fetishes including incest. And if you're not sexually attracted to them, then you're a horrible person and they'll make you love them. In short, they're everything stereotypically wrong with furries in one package. Originally a Star Trek fanfic race, they've since attempted to invade every other sci-fi franchise, despite being hated even by other furries. So if one of your players attempts to play a Chakat character, you'll know what to expect. On the other hand, with a few tweaks, they'd make for a great villain...

Also, their inventor is now a brony. Make of that what you will.

Sparkledogs

The original form of the Freakshit meme, "sparkledog" is a pejorative from the 90s/early 2000s against furries who try to make their furry characters more distinct and end up making them at best silly-looking and at worst uberspecial snowflakes. There are three distinct methods of making a sparkledog:

Give the character an unnatural and often lurid color scheme; edgelords favored black and red, whilst others favored brighter, more technicolor colors, often in combinations. This is the source of the term "sparkledog".
Make the character a halfbreed or even a multigenerational mixture of different races. This can be as innocuous as something technically in the same family, like a lion/tiger or a fox/wolf, to something completely defying biology, like a literal bull(cow)/shark or tiger/shark, a wolf/raven, or a scorpion/cobra. Some of these hybrids even caught on enough to make their own niche fandoms within the furry fandom, such as cabbits (half cat, half rabbit) and laquines (rabbit/horse, usually depicted as hyper-horny bunny dickgirls with big ol' horse weiners).
Make the character a mythical creature crossbreed, which ironically is often regarded as worse than just straight up being a mythical creature. The Half-Dragon was a popular choice, but Half-Fiends (especially succubus) and Dhampirs were also big.

Note that these methods can and often do overlap - method 2 is often an in-universe justification for giving a sparkledog character its unusual coat. A good example of this is ZigZag; an in-universe porn star and a major furry sex icon of the 90s who was half-skunk and half-Siberian tiger, basically resulting in a skunk with black-and-white tiger stripe pattern fur.

The Furry Test

If you are developing a character or race, or are looking at someone else’s, and are wondering if they are technically furry or not, take this simple test. Just go through the list of traits and add the indicated points for each one that applies. Note: a lot of these traits are also synonymous with Mary Sues and indeed the two have a tendency to occur together, so this test probably isn't that valid. The worst furries most worthy of purging (read: most of them), are almost without exception blatant and shameless Mary Sues in addition to their other depravities.

Add 3 if they resemble an anthropomorphic animal.
Add 4 if they are specifically an anthropomorphic animal (fox, wolf, etc.).
Add 4 if they are a Sonic fan character.
Add 5 if they are a My Little Pony fan character.
Add 2 if their sexual characteristics are gone into with any detail (E.g., things that Slaanesh would find amazing)
Add 1 if they have a vibrant and unnatural coloration (often a lazy attempt at Original character, do not steal).
- If the unnatural coloration is red-and-black and the artist is older than 12, just max out their score and skip to the next section.
Add 2 if they are the subject of fetish material.
Add 3 if they are are the subject of fetish material in universe.
Add 2 if they are always depicted on the side of good.
Add 3 if Humans are the real monsters.
Add 6 if they are overly perfect, physically and/or morally.
Add 5 if their nonhuman traits grants them any powers, although subtract 1-3 from that if they have the corresponding weakness (e.g., emphasizing a strong sense of smell sucks when you have to go into a sewer, or that spikes tend to get in the way of being intimate).

Now add up your final score.

Anything over 10 is definitely furry.
Anything over 20 is firmly in "you sick bastard" territory. Your synthetic abominations will be converted into a cybernetic slaves of the Auric Bara'ki empire, or else Age backwards into their infancy and mind-wiped. You, on the other hand, will be sent to the Ecclesiarchy and wired into a Penitent Engine. The Emperor Protects.
Anything over 30 is indescribably fucked up, and requires a counseling session with an Inquisitor, with cattle prod and leash.

"Fursecution"

If you've read this far then you've seen several references to "thin-skinned furries complaining of 'fursecution'". The problem is that, like with any largely hated group of people, such persecution does indeed exist (stop laughing), and the net is often widened to include 'sane' furries (e.g. simple fans of the "Funny Animal" style), who may be nonsexual and might potentially share that disdain for their more depraved "brethren". Furries who do have the pertinent fetish but lack any other fetishes will show where they draw the line; hell, even many of the sexual ones have their limits. In the cases where someone manages to check off most or (somehow) all of the more objectively despicable traits on the list, there's a point where the a constant stream of rage wouldn't do much good, since people tend to be less receptive of your opinions when you're a complete dick about them. But then, we don't come to 4chan to make healthy life choices, do we?

Another complication is that humans are like other animals in at least one notable way: we tend to act the way we're treated. Thus if you consistently act like an asshole to someone, they'll often eventually act like an asshole back. In this way, furries play into the common narrative where the insecure and/or arrogant vocal minorities within a larger group of people (e.g. the aformentioned LBTGQ+ community) get so annoying in their bitching about persecution (be it 'imaginary' or otherwise), that they "enable" actual persecution against the whole group. By that token, recognizing that furries are too easy a target - and usually scapegoated for other reasons - is not mutually exclusive of the fact that more than quite a few of them legitimately deserve the shit they get.

Some positive advice

So you have probably read this far and been wondering, "If you are a furry, how would the people on this site actually want you to act, besides dying?" Well, everyone is different, and other people have different levels of 'fur-tolerance' based on how far their Hive-World is to Holy-Terra. No strategy for avoiding getting hunted is perfect, but here is a survival-guide for how to be a furry in places like this:

Advice 1: Don't hurt animals, or kids. This should be self-explanatory - nobody who still has any semblance of moral compass would tolerate hurting those two categories. Do note that hurting is not limited to physical harm, if you have any fetishes relating to the two WE DO NOT want to hear about it and if you do mention it, do not be surprised if you are booted out of the site/board and possibly have the feds sicced onto you.

Advice 2: Be chill. Seriously, always be chill.

One of the most frequent positive things I hear from normal people with furry friends is how "chill" they are. That exact word keeps coming up. How do you do this? Don't get upset at anything. Ever. If your friend shows you something anti-furry as a joke, even if you don't like it, claim that you found it funny. People will slowly start to find you more tolerable, if you are tolerable of them!

Advice 3: Don't have too many fucked-up fetishes. Having a furry fetish is a given regarding this, (asexual furries do exist, though) but if you like anything like scat, or gore, or anything gross like that, ALWAYS keep it to yourself. 99% of people here don't want to hear about that shit. You want to share that stuff with someone? Talk to a therapist or go to the dedicated Discord server.

Advice 4: If you are an artist, or writer, take criticism. Many Furries are artists, and nobody is gonna take your work seriously if you don't let them try and help you improve it. Unhelpful criticism does exist, but real critics are trying to help you. Even if you don't agree with their advice, you should take it respectfully and actually consider what they are saying, and how it can affect what you are making. A general writing bit of advice is this, don't make the Furry species in your story the Ubermensch. Practice what you preach, and don't make them better than everyone else.

Advice 5: Don't be obsessive over Furryism. This is technically a continuation of Advice 2, but this deserves clarification, do other stuff NOT related to furries, don't make it your entire life. You can have it be a part of your life, you can have it be a significant part of your life, but DO NOT let it become your entire life. Have other hobbies and make friends outside your own direct interests to gain some interesting new perspectives. Not all, but many furries think of the community as an entire lifestyle unto itself, THIS IS NOT HEALTHY. Don't think like this. Furries can be a lot of things, but it should not become your entire existence.

Advice 6: Respect the fandom and the lore. This is related to rules 2 & 5 and it basically means that you should not try to shoehorn your fetish/OC/fanfiction where it does not belong. If you play a game, work within the bounds of it's universe. If the 'verse has anthros or beastmen - fine, if it does not, either drop it or better have a damn good reason why they should be included. 40k has a good example with the Felinids - they are a poorly described feline-like species of abhumans that you can theoretically have as Your Dudes (Imperial Guard), but if you are going to have them as an IG army, make them grounded in the setting any not uber-sexualised Mary-Sue regiment.

This advice should help your overall acceptance/begrudging tolerance in websites like this. Your mileage may vary, terms and conditions apply, see store for details. There are many reasonable examples on why people here would/do hate furries, and although most would never admit it, a good half of this community would probably be interested in something that undeniably falls under the 'Furry Media' category, if the creator had a brain in his head, puts effort into writing, makes interesting artwork, and didn't take himself too seriously.

The Furry fandom and furries have seen a greater degree of acceptance by the larger internet and IRL community and YOU are in a position to improve upon this, watch-listen-respect-be better.

Nazi Furs

Ok,you can stop laughing. Nazifurs (aka Furzis) are furries who support Nazism. Yes, they do exist and yes, they are just as terrible as you imagine. The movement started much earlier but gained popularity in the late 2010s. They are still a minority within a minority thankfully.

There are also Soviet Furs but like the Nazifurs nobody gives a shit about what they have to say.

Gallery

Why any sane person should hate furries.
Furry LARPers.
Furcadia, an infamous furry graphical MUD.
This is what /tg/ actually believes.
/b/rothers do not like any more than fa/tg/uys do.
Flare before
Flare after
No mods on /tg/, you say?
Not sure if heresy...
HERESY IN THE EXTREME
Five years later - the war is still going strong.
/m/ supports /tg/ in its quest against the Fur-Tide.
Another awesome fantasy race is consumed by the fur-tide.
That's what happens when you ~~do drugs~~ draw furry porn for years. It screws up your mind.
Congrats, fuckwit, you just made Khornate Guardsmen look reasonable
Example of an erotic scalie fantasy.
A suspiciously furry D&D creature. ^[3]

Footnotes

↑ We're listing it here purely because the two tend to get confused
↑ Bestiality is not a fandom.
↑ For the record: That's a "Simurgh", actual real life mythological bird...only the artist has somehow made it 500,000 times more furry, LGBT-pridey, and just plain stupid looking for some reason.

[1] We're listing it here purely because the two tend to get confused

[2] Bestiality is not a fandom.

[3] For the record: That's a "Simurgh", actual real life mythological bird...only the artist has somehow made it 500,000 times more furry, LGBT-pridey, and just plain stupid looking for some reason.

[1]

[2]

[3]

Furry

Contents

Yiffing

You might be considered a furry (by some) if...