I'm not sure if it's a generational thing as I've mainly noticed this happening with people around my age, but god damn, so many of my friends have just become so open, unchained and unashamed when it comes to their furriness recently. More and more it feels like that innate anxiety of being openly furry has eroded in so many of us, myself included, to the point where it's practically nonexistent. You know how we used to be all like, "Yeah, I'm a furry, pretty cringe huh? Haha! Yeah..." Granted, we're still like that to an extent, but I feel like the degree to which we try to restrain that side of us has diminished significantly. Like yeah, we still acknowledge our weirdness, but in a much much more positive way I feel.
There's still a lot of us who look to the approval of normies like we'd literally die without it, and I certainly used to be one of those people, but I feel like quite a lot of us are finally saying "Fuck that noise." We don't need their approval; never have, never will. The opinions of queerphobic cishets are about as important to us as the approval of fucking mosquitoes sucking the blood from our veins. Fuck them. Fuck them all.
I could be just projecting here, or maybe I'm looking at too small of a sample size to be able to accurately gauge whether or not this is a trend within the fandom itself or merely a trend amongst my friends and acquaintances, but nevertheless, I can't help but comment on what I see unfolding before my very eyes. More furries, myself included, are going to furmeets. Wearing furry-made attire in public. Saturating their social media feeds with more furry content than ever before. We just feel much more present, both as a community and as individuals.
We are everywhere. Some people like to think of the fandom as a white-collar hobby for STEM majors but there are furries from all walks of life, and it's so, so much more than a "hobby" for us. I won't harp on too much about the kind of community we've built; others have done a much more eloquent job of that. I will say this, though; there's something that we're starting to admit now that I feel like we were all just a little bit too scared to say before. Maybe it was because we thought that it's cringe, childish, embarassing or just plain foolish, but whatever inhibition was preventing us from talking about this openly seems to finally be going away. Hell, if you're too scared to say it, I'll just do it for you; cuz you're probably thinking it right now:
We don't want to be human.
At a VR meet the other night, someone said "I've never met a therian before" - and multiple animals immediately chimed in with a correction.
In the space of time we've been on the Internet, it has gone from a "oh, we're not like those furries" thing, to a label so much of our friend group embraces.
I think since the start of the pandemic, a lot of people have realized that life is too short to try and keep parts of your soul caged, and we now find whatever ways we can to embrace them.
