Many of the most annoying and pervasive problems with the furry fandom–from the cyclical nature of Twitter discourse to the increasingly frustrating issue of furry convention main hotel registrations selling out immediately after opening–are entirely predictable if you know even a little bit of mathematics.
And it’s going to get worse. If you don’t believe me, read on.
“But Soatok, my whole thing is being a dumb animal online. Why would I know any mathematics?”
This video from Colorado professor Albert Bartlett is a must-watch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZA9Hnp3aV4
Gimme the Numbers
WikiFur has historical data on furry convention attendance. Let’s start with the list of furry conventions with the highest attendance in their most recent year.
| Convention | Year | Location | Attendance |
|---|---|---|---|
| Midwest FurFest | 2023 | Rosemont, Illinois | 15,547 |
| Furry Weekend Atlanta | 2024 | Atlanta, Georgia | 15,021 |
| Anthrocon | 2023 | Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania | 13,644 |
| Furry Fiesta | 2024 | Dallas, Texas | 8,001 |
| Further Confusion | 2024 | San Jose, California | 5,826 |
| Megaplex | 2023 | Orlando, Florida | 5,189 |
| Anthro New England | 2024 | Boston, Massachusetts | 4,482 |
A sample of the top attended furry conventions.
Note: We can make a similar analysis for most furry conventions that have historical data available.
For ease, I’m going to focus on the more popular events.
Additionally, I’m going to take the average of percentages just to smooth out the variability Year-over-Year and make simpler statements.
Using averages like this is normally a risky move, especially if a statistician might one day read your work and get cross with you. I’ve provided more granular data in a Google Sheet.
- Anthrocon saw an average of 14.2% growth year-over-year since 2000. If you only focus on the past decade (which includes a dip during the pandemic), their growth rate was 12.6%.
- Midwest FurFest grew by an average of 17.9% since 2000 and 17.8% since 2014 (omitting the cancelled year).
- Furry Weekend Atlanta grew by an average of 26.3%, or 25.9% if you only look at 2015-2024.
- Texas Furry Fiesta saw an overall growth rate of 31.8% since its first year (2009), and a growth rate of 17.4% over the past decade.
- Megaplex was grew 24.6% each convention, with a 25.2% growth since 2014.
Okay, if you haven’t watched the video and aren’t good a math, that maybe sounds like sustainable, healthy growth for a community, right?
Well, let’s use the past 10 year average growth rate to make some predictions.
- AnthroCon attendance grows by 12.6%, which corresponds to an attendance doubling in 5.5 years.
- Midwest FurFest? Doubles in 3.9 years.
- Furry Weekend Atlanta? 2.7 years!
- Texas Furry Fiesta? 4 years.
- Megaplex? 2.7 years!
If the growth rate keeps up, for example, we can expect Furry Weekend Atlanta to have approximately 60,000 attendees by 2035 (11 conventions in the future).
If you think the FWA elevator wait times were long this year, just let the current growth rate keep up. Especially if their staff are short-sighted enough to sign a multi-year contract with the current convention hotel.
What About Furries That Don’t Go to Conventions?
We see exponential growth in the furry fandom outside of convention attendance, too.
https://twitter.com/Dragoneer/status/1766121415156146610
I’m sure there are many other data sources we can consider, but the conclusion is likely to be the same elsewhere.
What Do The Numbers Mean?
Simply put: The furry community is growing at a break-neck exponential speed.
We are seeing year-over-year growth rates exceeding 10% (a benchmark which represents a doubling time of 7 years, as that video up above was fond of pointing out).
Given that the world population is growing at 0.8%, it may be tempting to assume that, in a few short decades, the entire world will be furry. That is not the case.
Exponential growth cannot continue forever. You will always run headfirst into some sort of carrying capacity or limiting factor that impedes growth. Every exponential curve eventually becomes an S-curve.
Where Are We Headed?
Based on the numbers presented above, let’s think about what risks the furry community could be aimlessly blundering into right now.
I must stress that this is not a realistic threat model of the future, but an examination at what could go wrong.
Awareness of the risks could be sufficient to actually mitigate them before they manifest.
Or perhaps these words will fall upon deaf ears, and things could go more-or-less exactly as I will describe in this section.
Or maybe I’m entirely too optimistic and things will get much, much worse than I can imagine.
This is all to say: The future isn’t written yet, so who the fuck knows?
But we can make a somewhat educated guess on the trajectory we’re on. So let’s do that.
Know Your Limits
What limiting factors could the furry fandom’s explosive growth encounter in the near future?
That’s a broad question to ponder, but one possibility that comes to mind is that while there is an exponential growth in furry participation (i.e., convention attendance), there is not an accompanying exponential growth in the quantity of conventions themselves.
(Nor of convention staff, for that matter!)
The demand for convention attendance is a bull market, but the supply is more-or-less static.
THIS IS NOT SUSTAINABLE.
If things continue at the same pace they’re currently marching, conventions will become increasingly overcrowded. But the problems will not stop with just that.
Rooms at the main convention hotel will become accessible only for the wealthier and/or more technically savvy, rather than for all furries.
Convention registration costs will rise, to little benefit for attendees. Some of that money will be spent on big, non-fandom performances from celebrity headliners, which will drive some non-furries to attend as well, further exacerbating the crowds.
All kinds of systemic, structural issues in society at large will become more pronounced within our community.
Registration, elevators, the dealers den and artist alley, and even the fucking stairwells will have unreasonable lines of people waiting to use them.
When confronted with this stress, people will take out their anger–which is caused by a complex mess of factors stemming from this relatively simple mathematical observation–on comparatively simpler targets. Slightly more literal than usual scape goats, if you will.
A lot of ageist, classist, ableist discourse will emerge from the fault lines of our ever-expanding community.
There will be calls for more gatekeeping, rooted in nostalgia for simpler times when there were fewer of us to try to accommodate.
Convention staff will eventually buckle under an exponentially rising amount of pressure. People will burn out. It won’t be pretty.
Meanwhile, Drama YouTubers (or whatever platform or vestige they adopt in the future) will be collectively increasing Orville Redenbacher’s quarterly sales with the content they can farm from this discontent.
“That sounds bad; surely other furries are aware of this explosive growth?”
Of course, but they mostly think it’s a good thing. For example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JumV2UQf43A
What Can We Do About It?
I don’t know.
I agonized for a long time about how to write this section, and I don’t have any good answers.
I mean, sure, I have some ideas that might help in some way. A couple of them are:
- Embrace Virtual Reality. It’s much easier to scale up VR servers on the fly than it is to just accommodate thousands more furries. No reg line to deal with, either.
- Focus On Smaller, Local Events. While it’s kind of cool that tens of thousands of furries will descend on the same city for a weekend to attend the same convention, it would also be cool if there were more local events. Not just weekly or monthly meet-ups, either. I’m thinking of picnics, barbecues, etc. “Think global, act local,” as it were.
However, neither idea does anything to alleviate the fear of missing out that can accompany large conventions.
Additionally, artists may depend on large conventions as a way to network and grow their audience, which is necessary to make their commission income sustainable. These ideas wouldn’t really help them at all.
Solving this problem is outside my wheelhouse. I’m not a social scientist, by any means, and this feels like the sort of problem they would be more successful at tackling than a computer security and math nerd.
Who knows? Maybe to an expert in another field, the solution is more obvious and known to be effective.
Or maybe nobody really knows, and we’ll have to make something up as we go.
Regardless, being aware of the problem is the first step towards solving it. So if I can do nothing else, I hope to ensure that the folks that enjoy my blog are made aware.
Beyond that. my plan is to let people more qualified think about what (if anything) to actually do about this potential mess.
Until next time.
More Coverage of This Topic
Woofles, cited above, wants to help solve some of these problems:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKW0qdJJbTA
Beta Eta Delota read the original version of this blog post and added his commentary:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tu2xQQBp_Lo
Finn the Panther has ideas (some specific to Midwest FurFest):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eI_2lDrGq4&t=476s
https://soatok.blog/2024/05/30/furries-are-losing-the-battle-against-scale/
#doublingTime #exponentialEquations #furry #FurryFandom #Mathematics #population #Society
While the furry fandom can be a wonderful place and a force for good in the world, the topics that tend to circulate on Furry Twitter are somewhat seasonal: They repeat every so often–usually sparked by someone saying or doing something shitty–and never actually lead to a productive result.Let’s look at a few of these reoccurring topics and suggest actual solutions, rather than reactionary hot takes that only add fuel to an already out-of-control fire.
Safe Spaces for Underage Furries
https://twitter.com/BoozyBadger/status/1275443221624057856Once upon a time, there was a movement called Burned Furs: A right-wing puritanical effort to rid the early furry fandom of its adult side. If you take the time to read about these clowns, you’ll hear a lot of the same arguments that alt-right trolls make today, except now they use the word “degenerate” to describe anything vaguely LGBTQ+.
As a result, most adult furries are generally wary of the creation of a “safe space” for strictly-SFW furry content, because it always gets co-opted by homophobes and the “sex is evil” variety of bigot. There’s also the concern that if you put all of the minors in one place, it will inevitably become a flytrap for creeps looking for their next victim.
There absolutely should be room for furries–of any age (asexual folks are valid too)–that only serves work-safe (i.e. non-sexualized) content. However, these spaces should be curated by people with a generally sex-positive mindset.
Why Should Sex-Positive Adults Moderate Non-Sexualized Spaces?
Let’s learn from history, please, so as to not repeat its follies.If the horror known as conversion therapy has proven nothing else, it’s that telling LGBTQ+ kids that sex is evil is only going to lead to misery and suicide.
(No, I’m not pulling punches on this one. Religious nuts just love to drive queer people to suicide, and only 20% to 25% of furries are heterosexual.)
Nature abhors a vacuum. If you don’t step in, someone else will. If someone else is incentivized to do so, they probably won’t have the kids’ best interests in mind. Neither anti-sex puritans nor would-be sexual predators should be given access, let alone influence.
Neither should right-wing extremists, such as “alt-furry” (a movement of imbeciles who follow someone’s fursona named “Foxler”–literally “Fox Hitler”–yet try to insist they aren’t Nazis; yeah right).
What Should Be Done?
Art by circuitslime.
First, accept that a lot of furries are underage and shouldn’t be exposed to adult content–even if for no other reason than legal risk. (If anyone objects to that, you should feel very concerned about being alone with them.) Furthermore, there are some adults that don’t want to be exposed to NSFW content either.
Being sex-positive isn’t the same thing as being horny. Sex-positivity requires an understanding and respect for consent and boundaries. If someone doesn’t want to see your lewd art or photos, don’t go out of your way to make sure they see it (i.e. sending it to them directly).
Have an After Dark social media account for 18+ users? Block minors that try to follow you (and consider making your account private then screening your follow requests to filter out minors).
However, I don’t think we necessarily need a separate “label” for SFW furry content. Labels make you more susceptible to being coopted by perverse motives.
Worksafe furry groups on Signal/WhatsApp/Telegram/Discord/etc. are all valid.
If you’re underage and yearn for a SFW space for your furry fandom participation, talking to Moms of Furries is probably the best way to get started. Unlike random furries, their entire schtick is “make the fandom easier for parents to understand, and safer for their kids to play in”.
The threat model is complicated, the lines are blurred, and there’s a lot of shades of gray, but ultimately just letting people have worksafe spaces in the fandom is a good thing.
Just don’t let anyone try to convince the folks in those spaces that people who do enjoy the adult side of the fandom are bad and deserve to be shunned. That’s the anti-sex puritan bullshit I’ve talked about.
Murrsuits / Pup Hoods / etc.
Like clockwork, a pocket of furries (usually the same agitators mentioned in the previous section) will surface with some sort of hatred/shaming towards murrsuits, pup hoods, and other harmless sources of fun and self-expression.(A murrsuit, by the way, is a fursuit that’s specifically intended for use in sexual encounters, and usually has extra zippers for the wearer’s privates.)
The exact nature of their outrage changes with the season. Some folks (like the dumb narcissistic troll who once created a database of murrsuit owners) make unsubstantiated claims about health/cleanliness with sexual fluids and murrsuits.
Others are lazy, and make general hand-wavy statements that strike a moral chord with most people, but don’t actually make sense when you think about them for very long. Their structure looks like this:
- If some people have sex in their fursuits, then fursuits are sex toys.
- You shouldn’t have sex toys around kids!
This is a lazy attempt to manipulate the listener, for two reasons:
- If some people have sex in their fursuits, that doesn’t actually make fursuits sex toys– and even if it somehow did, it still doesn’t make it so for people who don’t have sex in their fursuits.
- Lots of people have sex while wearing clothing. Wouldn’t the same logic applied to fursuits apply here too? And if so, are you arguing for everyone being naked around children? I sure fucking hope not.
Similar arguments are often raised about pup hoods, because of their apparent BDSM/kink connotations.
If they’re being worn in a non-lewd, tasteful manner (i.e. nobody’s genitals are being exposed, there’s no visible “bondage”, etc.), there’s nothing special about the anti-pup hood arguments. Same shit, different day.
What Should Be Done?
Simple: People really need to get over their fear of sex.When you see someone trying to shame another adult for having a sexuality, tell them to fuck off and leave the other person alone.
People with healthy sex lives don’t owe you anything, except a baseline for hygiene that literally every murrsuiter I know already exceeds without ever having to be told. There’s no action item here.
Sexual Abusers
They aren’t welcome; get the fuck out! I don’t care how their victims are classified: You aren’t allowed to be a part of our fandom if you perpetrate or support sexual abuse.Underage, non-human, whatever. Leave.
Begone! (Art by Khia)
Sexual abuse isn’t actually part of the Discourse we’re examining. Call those fuckers out and don’t let them back in. You’re doing good work by cleaning house.
Sometimes, you’ll come across a furry who decries the fact that their sexual abuser friends got “cancelled” by “cancel culture” and “social justice warriors”. These putzes ought to be loaded into a rocket and fired into the sun too.
Also: Kero the Wolf is guilty and people who still believe his innocence, or attempt to downplay the severity of his heinous acts, are doing a disservice to the entire fandom. (Or they’re also animal abusers, in which case, they can get yeeted too.)
Babyfurs
There is a very stark difference between babyfurs (people who mix AB/DL with furry) and pedophiles.The former is a harmless kink that involves adults roleplaying.
The latter is a sexual disorder that leads to the victimization of children.
Whenever babyfurs come up in the Furry Twitter Discourse, what’s really happening is the anti-sex crowd is trying to hope you won’t realize these are two very different ideas, and that your well-deserved disgust for one will automatically translate into hatred for the other.
Don’t be fooled.
(Hey, it’s not my thing either, but if it’s safe and between consenting adults, who the fuck are either of us to judge?)
A Word on “Just Fantasy”
Apologists for artistic depictions of pedophilic and zoophilic acts will often try to defend themselves by insisting it’s “just fantasy” and isn’t hurting anyone because no one’s consent was violated.While it’s true that research currently indicates that these kinds of pornography may not be correlated at all with sex crimes, and only the minority of sexual abuse is committed by a stranger, this is not an article discussing what should or should not be legal.
Take that up with the Justice system. I’m not interested in debating what the law “should” be.
The fact that this type of content is usually illegal, and taken very seriously by authorities (to the point of threatening our right to encrypt), is a premise for this discussion, not a conclusion.
And because it often is illegal (see: the Miller test), the furry fandom should not embrace it. Full stop.
I frankly don’t care what a therapist might advise someone with these attractions. That’s between them and their patients. Sexual abuse must not be tolerated, and possessing materials that depict sexual abuse (whether against animals or children) are legally perilous.
It’s also not the furry fandom’s job to be the forerunners of the debate about the social acceptability of art depicting child or animal exploitation fantasies. If that’s your cause, go find a new shield.
It’s not appropriate for anyone to expect a community that already struggles with unfair assumptions and connotations of sexuality to move before the rest of society on any issue even vaguely related to sex crimes.
Feral Art and Characters
Some artists have feral art styles (i.e. standing on four legs rather than two; no thumbs).Feral characters with human sentience are still furry, even if you can superficially relate feral furry art to the kind of content that animal abusers might seek.
As always, there’s a reasonable litmus test available for judging this kind of content:
The Harkness test, made by BeakieHelmet.
Note: The Harkness Test wasn’t created by an academic institution and there is no peer-reviewed pedigree behind it, but it’s sufficient for our purposes. If you don’t like it, design a better one and get it peer-reviewed. Until then, we can continue to phone it in with the Harkness Test and not make perfect the enemy of good.
Neither pedophile (“cub”) nor bestiality/zoophilia art are okay, because they normalize sexual abuse. Cub art in particular is bad, because it has used by perpetrators to groom people into participating (usually as a victim, but sometimes as a co-conspirator).
Ban cub art. Ban artistic depictions of zoophilia.
But don’t extend the bans to encompass babyfur art (which is AB/DL, not underage characters) nor feral art (which is an art style, not actual animals being portrayed).
If you cannot distinguish cub from babyfur, you shouldn’t be leading any moral crusades on social media or cancelling people, because you’re going to inevitably harm a lot of innocent people if you do.
Same goes for feral/zoo.
What About Pokemon Fursonas (Pokesonas)?
Some furries argue that Pokemon-based fursonas–and any art thereof–is inherently non-furry and therefore any lewd art of their characters is gross and problematic. This warrants a closer look.Many Pokemon are clearly at, or above, human intelligence (i.e. the psychic types). Furthermore, the fact that Meowth from the anime learned human speech and can directly translate what other Pokemon are saying implies that it is possible to communicate affirmative consent, in the framework of established lore.
Speaking of which: the canon lore for the Pokemon franchise confirms the existence of human-Pokemon marriage (source).
When you combine these observations, it’s pretty clear that Pokemon are generally capable the Harkness test, so these “Pokemon yiff is zoophilia” takes are either arguing for a special case (i.e. either a specific species of Pokemon lacks the sentience that the rest seem to, or the characters involved are violating boundaries), or they’re intentionally engaging in social manipulation to push an agenda.
Also, they’re fictitious creatures. Splitting hairs over this is really petty compared to the harm real people inflict on real animals.
The NSFW Feral Art Acceptability Matrix
If you’re in doubt about whether a piece of NSFW art passes the Harkness test, consult the following table (while being pessimistic; if you can’t tell whether a character is a feral fursona or a dumb animal, always assume the worst):
Human Anthro Feral Animal Human ✔️ ✔️ Ehhh* ❌ Anthro ✔️ ✔️ ✔️ ❌ Feral Ehhh* ✔️ ✔️ ❌ Animal ❌ ❌ ❌ Ehhh* This table assumes informed, enthusiastic consent, between adults.
* It might pass the test but it’s still kinda weird for humans to be depicting it in art. Be very careful that you’re not producing material that inadvertently promotes sexual abuse and/or aids groomers.Update (2020-06-28)
I’ve actually gotten a lot of grief from two camps over this section of the post.One camp wants all feral art to be banned because of a “slippery slope” fallacy, and they believe my argument here doesn’t go far enough.
The other wants all feral art to be allowed because they believe “people can distinguish between fantasy and reality”, and believes my argument goes too far.
People who dig their heels in on extreme, opposite positions will never be made to agree. Neither this blog post nor a painstakingly-researched scientific study will sway their minds, and I have no desire to even try.
I am neither a puritanical moral crusader nor an apologist for sexual abuse. If you are, know now that I will not amend this post to further your agenda.
Consent is what ultimately matters, and since animals and children cannot consent, all art portraying either sexually is harmful.
But if the art doesn’t portray animals or children, it’s fair game (even if you or I personally dislike it). There are much bigger fish to fry than a (largely) harmless fantasy; what are your priorities?
Popufurs
Before I started this blog, I used to write articles on Medium. My most popular one tackled the topic of “popufurs” directly. Go read it.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEJ3usS7bb4
Furries Over the Age of 30
One of the dumbest talking points that recurs on Furry Twitter is the “gay death” discourse, cheaply repackaged for furries. So you get a lot of dumb takes like this:https://twitter.com/JamesCerulo/status/1349071850265972737
The entire concept of Gay Death is stupid, and has roots in the kind of vain heteronormativity that produces dumb memes like this one:
https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1371862131117801480
Here’s the simple solution to this age discourse whenever it comes up:
- You can be a furry at any age and it doesn’t fucking matter
- Underage furries shouldn’t be in adult spaces (but can certainly claim their own spaces, and that’s totally fine as long as it’s not being used solely to perpetuate the kind of puritanical bullshit that often drives LGBT youth to suicide; see above)
- The greater the gap between your age and another person’s, the more conscientious you should be about leading them on or taking advantage of them in any way
Let’s be real: We’re all nerdy weirdos and anyone who tries to treat the fandom like a high school popularity contest is totally missing the point of a fandom full of nerdy weirdos. Just stop.
If you’ve read this far, consider yourself fully briefed on the recurring topics in Furry Twitter discourse.
If another topic starts rearing its head often enough, I’ll either update this page or write a sequel article to cover the new badness.
https://twitter.com/ArcticSkyWolf/status/1349372061198778368
https://soatok.blog/2020/06/24/resolving-the-reoccurring-discourse-on-furry-twitter/
#antiFurryBullying #furry #FurryFandom #recurringTopics #SocialMedia #Twitter
