Being a furry is a lot different now
I used to be a furry a few years ago. Funnily enough, I didn't even know of the fandom's existence when I first got hate for it.
I played Minecraft and needed a skin of my own, I had used existing skins but never had one tailored to me. Having already made a horrible attempt in the past at making one from scratch, I took a bit of a different approach and turned to Roblox for references. I went into one of those games where you can put on any wearable item, made something I was happy with and copied it as best as I could into Minecraft. Now, I'm leaving the important bit out: I had decided to put a rainbow cat tail on that roblox avatar. That made me decide to make the whole skin a (mostly human) anthropomorphic cat. Cat ears, yellow eyes, and rainbow tail made it into the first version of that skin. After setting it, I decided to log into hypixel - a popular Minecraft minigame server, for those not familiar with the game - and play the character a little bit. I don't want to say exactly what I was doing as I'm still pretty embarrassed by it, but it may just be worthy of those cringe compilations that used to be popular. But at this point I had only heard the term "furry" thrown around a couple times and I hadn't looked into it before. After being weird in a guild in hypixel (like a group of players you can chat and play with), I got kicked out for the reason "furry". I decided to look into what that word I kept hearing meant. I searched "what is a furry" on YouTube, and watched a video explaining exactly what this whole thing was. I realized I was basically what the video was describing, and then decided to look further into it. The moments after this are a bit of a blur. I think I kept looking at YouTube and getting recommendations on furry content after that, cause I eventually found a furry discord server and remember putting a favorite furry youtuber in the application. I hung out for quite a while in that server. My english was questionable and I think I misinterpreted like 30% of what was happening, but I made some great friends and had a lot of fun talking there. At one point I even got a profile picture drawn for free by an artist trying to practice there. Outside of that server, however, it wasn't all great. I remember getting straight up kicked out of a few groups before they could even get to know me as soon as they saw my furry profile picture. Eventually - and this is not because of the hate - I lost interest in the discord server and in furry as a whole, making some changes to my skin to turn it into just a human. And that was it for while.
Recently - and I don't know what sparked it - the interest came back. I started thinking about what my fursona would be, and after a pretty long process of deciding how to bring what I had in mind to reality, I eventually got a good enough profile picture and set it. From my past experience I had expected some reaction to this, but to my surprise, there was absolutely no change in how people interacted with me. I'm still incredibly impressed with the change in how the fandom is seen by outsiders in just like, 4 years? It's been months since I got back into the fandom, and all I've gotten this entire time is maybe one person mentioning the fact that I'm in it in a Minecraft minigame.
I wrote this post because I'm really impressed with how fast the public opinion on something can flip. I'm sure there's still some people out there who haven't changed their minds about us and never will - hell, most people I know in real life probably have negative opinions about the fandom (hi you know who you are) - but still, four years is nothing to make a big change in how people view one community, yet the change was so big I barely even noticed a difference between being and not being in it.
PS: All that was written is based on my own personal experiences and may not represent what others are experiencing.
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