The cool thing about the furry fandom, at least from where I'm standing, is that it isn't even really a fandom, at least not in the traditional sense. Rather than fans bonding over a shared interest in some piece of media (though that can be part of it for some), furries are in effect fans of each other, bonding over a shared experience of naked and gratuitous self-expression. And by the very nature of what the fandom is, its members present themselves with faces and names entirely of their own choosing. In no other community like this is crafting your own identity such a fundamental part of the experience. When I think about all the furries I know, their fursonas, their chosen names and identities, crafted entirely from their own imagination, feel more to me like a true representation of who they are than any "real" face or legal name. Add to that how furry is such an unapologetically queer subculture and one of the few remaining queer spaces that hasn't been infiltrated by corporate interests and sanitized to all hell (though they do still try). I won't say it doesn't have problems and drama (every social space does), but ultimately this leaves furry as a community defined by radical queerness, immense creativity, and the encouragement of profound self-exploration.
I've argued in the past that if you think about Furries as if they were a kind of Punk that spontaneously emerged on it's own, the whole scene makes a lot more sense than trying to think of them like a Fandom™
One of it's best assets is shared in common with the Punk scene as well, in that it's not really one single big scene so much as thousands and thousands of small to medium sized cliques and communities that have some overlap with each other but are otherwise relatively insular. The biggest Twitter Popufur with 300K followers making 12K a month on patreon could be completely unknown to large portions of the furry scene as a result. It's hard for even extreme amounts of clout to travel far within the broader furry scene.
