So today I'd like to give a little more background on myself and my relation to the furry fandom and kind of give an impression of where I'm coming from. This the first time I've tried to become an active participant in the furry fandom, and yet I've known and been a fan of furrydom for a long time. As such I sort of feel like getting people up to speed on what I was up to while not actually being part of the community, for those that might be interested.
Firstly, I wasn't even aware the fandom existed until I entered young adulthood, either late teens or early twenties. This was about in the early 2000s so the furry fandom was not something new. As I understand it, its been around since the 80s, correct me if I'm wrong.
Being that I was a kid of the late 80s and early 90s I got to see a lot cartoons and movies that featured anthropomorphic animals. Nowadays you dont really see this as much with only a few exceptions, but back in my days the vast majority of shows primarily featured animals. I was drawn to it and found myself crushing on various male and female characters on such shows, drawn to their idealized boyishness and girlishness. I would get these strong romantic/warm feelings towards such characters. At the time I only interpetted my attraction towards the females as romantic in nature. I was a very sheltered kid and the internet as such didn't exist yet, or at least I had limited to no access to it in its infancy, so I had no awareness of the gay community or that same-sex attraction was a thing. But I do distinctly remember having a feeling of wanting an extremely close "friend thats a boy" and clearly being picky about whether they were attractive enough to be such a friend. Again I had no understanding of this as anything other than a normal desire to make friends with the same sex. It would never have even occurred to me growing up that marrying a girl was not the only option. Anyway, I felt my same sex attractions most acutely through cartoons which may explain why I was particularly drawn to them. This isnt to say I wasnt interested in girls, and perhaps more so. I was intensely fascinated by the strange otherness of girls. I was obsessed with the idea of one day marrying a beautiful girl even from a very young age.
Staying on topic, the point is before I even knew furrydom existed I already was experiencing what I do think is a hallmark of the experiences of most furries, which is an intense (not necessarily sexual) attraction to anthro characters whether it be romantic in nature or affectionate feelings towards characters or cuteness in general.
Even though I loved many of the early disney shows, personal favorites being Rescue Rangers, Tailspin, and Darkwing Duck, I wouldnt say I grew up making a lot of furry characters, not even spin off characters from the shows I liked. I had lots of things I liked to create growing up, but I'd say my earliest experiences were being fascinated by stuff like math and science. To give a few examples, I once made a giant map of the "universe" by taping a bunch of pieces of paper together and drawing all the galaxies I knew of on it. Another time I had a notebook that would be a future timeline and explain what the future would be like 100s or even 1000s of years in the future. I created another notebook where I tried to reach infinity by inventing my own mathematical notation. Lastly I remember attempting to program my first games on an atari 800. So I had lots of things I was interested in and that early I dont remember making characters so much.
Then at some point I got interested in wanting to make my own stories. My earliest attempt at this was actually a shameless rip off of megaman called powerman, complete with tona of really off the wall robot masters (juiceman) and lots and lots of sequels. Mostly it was just drawings for the design of the robot masters. I think I also created a computer animation based on the "first game". As a kid I spent a lot of time trying to draw the actual megaman robot masters as well.
Other things I was a fan of growing up was star wars and sonic the hedgehog. Star Wars and especially sonic the hedgehog definitely had an influence on things I was to create later. Star Wars, in particular dark forces (early star wars themed first person shooter), lead to the creation of a character I called Ultraman who had a suit of armor made of a nigh invincible metal alloy a battery of weapons and the ability to learn more (like megaman). It was set in a far future where intergalactic travel is considered normal. At the time it was of the most original creations of mine, despite clearly still stealing quite heavily from megaman. Other than involving interplantary travel on a regular basis it didnt actually have that much in common with star wars. I did however steal dark troopers and they were a regular enemy Ultraman could defeat with ease. But it was unique in other ways. It featured a mixed cast of humans and anthro characters. Specifically Ultraman had a sidekick which was originally based on an ewok asset in dark forces. This character became the diminutative companion "skinny" who was hyper intelligent and generally sarcastic and dismissive of Ultraman who was kind of like a big kid with too much power. Then there was an anthropomorphic rat that was one of Ultramans foes, as well as a mouse bounty hunter (actual mouse size) that was out to kill him. Due to his small size and extremely explosive arsenel he was basically impossible to see so difficult to hit. But I wouldnt neccessarily call this a furry series. In this universe it just turns out that whenever i needed an alien race, most of the time it was an anthropomorphic animal rather than the types of aliens you might see in star wars or star trek.
Moving onto sonic which is perhaps more relevant, one thing i remember growing up was being intensely fond of tails, maybe even liking him.mkre than sonic. Sonic was cool but tails was cute. I also liked Sally from the saturday morning cartoon. I used to find it annoying how little of tails there was, but the weekday show featured him heavily so thats how i got my tails fix.
Tails might be one of the earliest furry characters I tried to start drawing. Naturally I ended up with a spin off character of tails, maybe the first true furry character of mine. He was a grey squirrel named AC that travelled around using blue and white rocket boots and had power gloves to enhance his physical strength and looked like a grey tails oc. I made a few drawings and animations with his character. The story for this character was never very well defined but it focused on standard themes of saving the environment and saving a teal colored girl squirrel princess of some sort.
So up to this point only AC was truly a fully furry series as there were no humans, but everything up to that borrowed so heavily from things I liked that they were in my opinion, not original enough to actually become published works.
A while after Ultraman, during my middle teen years my output started to become increasingly original and furry themed. It began with a weird spin off series of Ultraman that involved a completely different dimension. In that dimension was a bounty hunter named Rodezard hamstar which was half lizard half hamster. His father was an experimental lizard creature with unnaturally enhanced strength that had escaped and lived in the woods like tarzan. He kidnaps a hamster princess and they eventually have a child. Even here we have the beginning of the intertwinning of sex and furryness, which would only increase with subsequent works.
Leading up to 2000 is when I started to create some of my most original and frankly bizarre series. One involved a species of furry-like creatures smaller than subatomic particles that multiply and evolve rapidly. The effect from a human scale just looks like a nuclear chain reaction destroying all matter below even the subatomic level in its wake as all matter is consumed and converted into these little guys. They are rather strange chibi creatures of indescript species with weird ears and tails and mechanical parts. I'd say they are closest to mice most of the time. Each generation is completely different than the other in appearance however. Some are more like cats, like generations 3,7,9, and 11. Some are more like insects like 10. Some are like shrimp as in 6, and so on. They are highly stylized and abstract. There werent any characters perse but a large focus was on creating cute designs and then figuring out all sorts of weird ways these creatures reproduce. For example 9s reproduce by rubbing their forheads together. Female 11s have a socket on their heads like male 11s have a plug on theirs, etc. Just off the wall shit like that.
During the latter part of the year 2000 we get to what i consider to be my first recognizably furry work, and at the time the most original and elaborate thing I had created up to that point. This was also around the time that I starting masturbating for the first time in my life, having full fledged sexual fantasies and experimenting with queerness. Up to this point I had no queer characters, and in fact a few years prior I had vowed to myself to never create a gay character. My next creation was the first to involve gay characters, specifically too furry boys named Shaw and Felix who wind up in the same orphanage. It was a weird scifi oliver twist like series. Shaw is the most like a cat though with some bizarree deformities including having 3 ears, and Felix was most like a bunny but with a very long cat tail, a cabbit I guess. In this world gayness is completely forbidden and knowledge of its existence is supressed. Both are lonely and kind of stumble into their attraction for each other. There was also a cast of other furry males and females, each some weird alien heretofore unknown species of furry. Typically this manifested in increasingly weird tails and ears. One girl for example had floating metallic discs for ears. My explanation for this was that this was so far in the future that essentially all the animals had interbred and become integrated with technology to the point that it was part of them organically (they're born with their mechanical parts, they are not implants). Again, weird stuff. I only had a very rough idea of a storyline but basically shaw gets torn from his caretaker, a street urchin girl with an incurable disease only a few years older than himself. He then becomed incredibly lonely. Being a naturally effeminate boy he is unable to make friends with either the boys or the girls at the orphanage. He becomes the strange boy people avoid. Felix shows up and Shaw is immediately drawn to him for some reason. Felix is even more effeminate than shaw and soon is actively harassed and hated, especially by the other boys that like to bully him. Over time shaw and felix strike up and friendship and presumably escape the orphanage to go on a series of adventures together involving discovering their past parentage.
I worked on this for about a year, making lots of character art, with a few pieces involving both shaw and felix. I considered it my "forbidden series" as it involved gay stuff, lots of sexual encounters, various kinds of abuse, etc. I was somewhat self conscious and secretive about it. I never drew any related erotica but i certainly imagined it. I would have been afraid to draw anything too lewd lest it be discovered. I also hid the gay relationship at its core by claiming that shaw was a female, to make it seem straight. My sister eventually figured it out. In fact its alittle more complicated than that because one of the possible backstories for shaw, that would explain his anomalous mix of male and female features, namely he had slightly curvy hips for a boy, was that he was initially born a perfect hermaphrodite. However, since such an anomaly in this world would basically be a death sentence he was transformed through some kind of magic into a fully physically male. So this gave me just a little bit of wiggle room to be ambigious about Shaws sex.
At this point, while this was certainly the strangest and most original series I had created, I also did not know what the hell to make of it. What else was there out there that was even remotely like this? The closest thing I could think of was sonic the hedgehog, but this was different. It wasnt about powers and fighting but more slice of life grimdark kinda stuff. What was up with all the strange inscrutible animal characters, the taboo subject matter, the sex, and the gayness? Sure maybe i had created something original enough to publish but two obvious questions came to mind (1) how could you publish this given the taboo nature of the subject matter but more importantly (2) who would even be interested in this? What even is this, other than something that i created that personally gave me comfort? I did not know that there was a whole community that dabbled in this exact intersection between cartoons and adult themes.
Anyway, I tried to make a brief comic, and i started writing brief novelization, but i didnt get far on either, mostly sticking to daydreaming adventures and scenarios for my characters, never entirely coalescing into a coherent storyline. Eventually I just moved on to other stranger projects. Like a weird hitchhiker like scifi adventure video game featuring yet another furry like character that could take the form of a cat in certain sections (i never wrote any code for this, just planning ideas). Or another really strange one that would take place in another dimension that would be an rpg involving 4 cat like furries that wore almost no clothing and clearly had some queer coding. Or another series involving a bisexual male fox that would go around trying to sexually corrupt others.
Around this time I just stopped creating new series because I knew if I kept doing that I'd never actually finish anything. I chose on project in particular, and rpg, not furry themed this time, and began working on that for many years. It is easily my longest standing and most complex work. I also began to slide back into my math and scifi roots, creating a massive recreational math site and a scifi racing game. To date these three projects are my most elaborate comprising 100s of hours of work over years.
Anyway sometime around here I started to discover furry erotica online (finally caught up with the internet). My first furry crush was a fursona called "Micah Fennec", though I'm not sure anyone even remembers the character anymore. He was a nerdy effeminate fennec boy who exclusively had sex with other males and was usually the submissive. At lot of art was created of him on an old furry site called vcl, but it has since more or less vanished from the internet inexplicably. In any case I finally became aware that there were lots of people that were sexually attracted to these anthropomorphic animal cartoon characters and they were sharing their erotic art online.
At this point I contacted the creator of Micah, told her how much i liked her art, and that i wanted to make my own art gallery some day. She was very nice and understanding, and that is the first time I ever communicated with an actual furry.
Unfortunately I never made any furry accounts. Part of the problem is I had no easy way to upload images. I didnt have a scanner/printer, would have to go to the library at best and find a way to digitize it, and then there would be the public embarasssment, and erotica would probably be straight out of the question. Nowadays I can just snap pictures on my phone, but im talking almost 20 years ago and also tending to be behind the times rather than ahead.
Then of course, I began to learn more about the furry community. I didnt even know fursuits and conventions were a thing. I though all furries do all day is make art. Micah's fursuit was probably the first one i ever saw and i thought that was unique to her. Then of course was all the negative press that started to happen and furrydom kinda semi hit the mainstream. Privately Ive always loved furry art/erotica but as for publicly acknowledging it I found it awkward. Maybe thats why I struggle somewhat with identifying as a furry. I never had any plans to create a fursona, fursuit, go to conventions, or become part of the community. I was just a fan or the art/erotica and thats it. Maybe I felt that didnt make me a true furry. I did want to share my own furry creations, but due to technical limitations, engagement in other massive projects, and maybe a little bit of apprehension joining the community and sharing my stuff, it just never happened ... until now.
I finally decided to take the plunge. I sort of wish I did this sooner but better late than never.
That brings us to "Petroshka" and company. This is not an old series I'm uploading, but rather a new one im in the process of developing.
Unfortunately due to complications I dont currently have access to any of the other works I just discussed. I dont want to draw my old characters off model so im waiting on that until i can get access to my original art. Whether i'll then upload my old art or just make new art i havent decided. In the meantime I'm hoping to expand on this new Petroshka series, perhaps the first new thing in a very long time, especially regarding furry characters.
Just a little background. Petroshka did not begin as an idea for a new furry series. Given the ridiculous amount of freetime Ive recently found myself with, I started role playing with a group on discord. This role play was just creating characters and putting them in the story describing their actions and dialogue. There is no rolling dice. There is no campaigns or overarching story. Just mostly goofing off and hanging out. Anyway I joined much later. Your basically allowed to add as many characters as you like, so i basically went wild creating tons and tons of characters (I think im currently at 27). Since this was not a super serious work and is just for fun not all the characters are original. For example there is a version of Rudolph I created for the role play, as well as his brothers rusty and ralph, and his cousin leroy. Anyway since I was adding christmas characters at some point I decided to add an easter bunny character, so naturally "Peter". Initially he was a guard at a high security prison that got kidnapped and interrogated by a band of criminals who were trying to figure out how to defeat the magically powered security guards. Then they went and killed him, but I was able to get him revived through some black magic he learned from a cult. Thus began Peters adventures and development as a character. He eventually became my most interesting and complex character in the role play. As part of his backstory I made it that all sorts of terrible things have happened to him all throughout his life, this unjust kidnapping and murder just being the lastest crappy thing to happen to him.
At that point I didnt know too much about his past except that he was a drifter, going from place to place, job to job, generally being poor, and winding up in all sorts of dangerous situations having to use his wits to escape and survive. But despite not knowing the details I had a feel for what type of character Peter was going to be. A kind of apathetic sassafrass. Anyway, I started to try and come up with a fleshed out backstory for this character and decided to make him a russian immigrant, hence Petroshka, a corrupted version of Peter in russian. The current set of characters are people Petroshka went to war with during his youth, long before his run in with the criminals. I'm hoping to develop a rough narrative of his time on the "USS Furtannia" a fictional furry exclusive aircraft carrier. Stay tuned.
Just to be clear, i might be quite busy in the coming weeks because im taking on a second job. Also i still have other personal projects (some of which i mentioned) outside of furrydom that i might want to devote time to. But I definitely want to see where this new project might take me. Peter is still being role played as well so im still developing his story on that front as well, although roleplay peter may have to end up being a separate continuity as it involves a lot more weird stuff, such as a cult of spacetime wizards run by christmas reindeer :/
Anyway, thats all for now. Any feedback appreciated. Im happy to finally officially be a part of the furry community.
--Zivrshka
2020.09.12.19:48GMT
