There's something about the areas where the line between "media fandom" and "furry fandom" has historically been blurry that appeals to me. I feel like making OCs has largely become something media-fandom culture is shamed out of, for being... "cringe," because "nobody wants to see that."
(If nobody's allowed to make "bad" but earnest art, good art - weird and experimental, sincere and personal, niche and unmarketable - is less likely to be made in that space, too.)
But the absolute second most popular post on this archive, is a flash video from 2005, of a bunch of sparklelions, sparklewolves, and other fursonae of people in the community, singing "Witch Doctor" together. I can't imagine most media fandoms making something like this today. Other fans, at best, are "mutuals" - not members of a community. And it's cringe to make a video of people in the fandom singing together as their idealized selves. Everyone looks back at this kind of thing with shame and disgust now. Either because they think that fandom is better than this now, or because they (jaded by it having the same petty conflicts and serious problems as any other interest-based community, jaded by its recuperation by corporations into glorified advertisement) think fandom is so irredeemably terrible that it was stupid to ever be so joyful about it.
Maybe Warriors fans would do something like this, but they're kind of one of the biggest surviving examples of a place where the veil between furry fandom and media fandom remains kind of thin. Few, if any, media fandoms are as dedicated to making original animation projects, including ones about radically divergent alternate universes or completely original characters, en masse as they are.








