As a fox named Tiller told me upon check-in, “Everyone here is welcome - except Nazis.” This message was particularly salient this year, after far-right provocateur Milo Yiannopolous made some highly public threats last September to gate-crash the convention. In so keeping with its increasingly family-friendly image, the fandom has become intent on promoting itself as a beacon of acceptance and inclusivity, and MFF is no exception.
That’s in part due to the i ncreasing number of younger children and their families who are gravitating to furry culture - during my time at Midwest FurFest, I saw children as young as seven attending dance competitions and meet-and-greets accompanied by their parents, having stumbled on the fandom via YouTube or TikTok. MFF is widely touted as the biggest furry con in the world, and its attendance has increased exponentially in recent years: While the con saw only about 1,000 attendees in 2005, it reported more than 10,900 guests in 2018, and Matt Berger, media-relations lead for MFF, estimates that 12,000 were in attendance this year.
As the voice-over to an intro presentation for FurFest sonorously boomed over a dubstep beat, “You know you are more than a human.… Now you are the beast that slept inside your mind.” If you fall into any of these categories, then furries are your kind of people, and FurFest the place to unleash the human-size sergal (a fictional rabbit/shark/wolf amalgam) within. Maybe you’ve long thought it would be rad to buy a $10,000 curvy hippo costume and enter a breakdancing competition. Maybe you’ve always felt an inexplicable affinity with Tony the Tiger. Maybe you really liked drawing wolves during eighth-grade homeroom. While there is a contingent of furries who do derive sexual pleasure from the subculture, the fanbase is much more broad than that. Like most subcultures, the furry fandom is a largely internet-driven phenomenon, providing a label for a pre-existing feeling that has always lived, dormant and unnamed, inside a select number of people. The mainstream media has historically painted furries as sex-crazed, socially maladjusted freaks who enjoy rubbing up against each other in giant bunny costumes.