Why Are So Many Gen Z Kids Becoming Furries?

Society is over! First I've heard about this but then I remembered that NavyTiger was big into this stuff when he posted on this site.



Furry influencers on TikTok are bringing the long-misunderstood subculture to a whole new generation

Jen’s daughter is nine years old, with shoulder-length brown hair and darting, fearful eyes. She’s anxious and withdrawn, and her mother says she doesn’t get asked to go on play dates very often. When she speaks to people she doesn’t know, she keeps a careful distance, like she’s trying to decide whether or not to pet a tarantula at a zoo exhibit.

But then Jen’s daughter becomes Emily the deer. She has a pink head with zebra stripes, white tufts of fur, and giant, ink-black antlers. In an instant, she goes from withdrawn to animated and gregarious. “She’ll put her head on and go play and join the other kids,” Jen tells me, as we watch her daughter chatting gaily with other sundry woodland creatures.

Emily and Jen have just attended a meet-and-greet for furries who are influencers on TikTok, the hugely popular lip-syncing app used primarily by teens. The pair have driven about an hour from their home in the Chicago suburbs to attend Midwest FurFest, an annual convention for people who are involved with the furry community, a stigmatized, highly misunderstood subculture for people who identify with anthropomorphized animals. Although the common conception is that the culture is inherently sexualized, the reality is that being a furry means different things to different people: some furries like drawing character art, while others enjoy dressing up in fursuits (full-body costumes) or creating their own fursonas (animal characters).