What I do love is every time I read an article from an investigative journalist who as infiltrated a Fur Con the article almost always comes back saying something like "These people are almost normal" The truth is we furs are in no way different then Trekkies, Star Wars nuts, Larpers, or people who work for Renaissance Festivals (Having worked at a couple of renaissance festivals I will testify to the fact that festies are a little weird.)
Actually, there is a significant difference between furries and Trekkies, Star Wars nuts, Larpers, and Ren Faire people. All those groups have the equivalent of a holy text. For Trekkies and Star Wars nuts, it's the actual movies and episodes that define what is and is not canon for those worlds. With Larpers, there are rule books for different games. And with Ren Faires, there's the actual history of the Renaissance. With furries... not so much. This means that the furry fandom is less clearly defined, which may be part of why people outside of it have trouble understanding it. A Trekkie can point at an episode of Star Trek and say, "That's what this is all about." From what I've seen on these boards, explaining furry fandom isn't quite as simple.
My point is that we have become our own subculture, outsides see Trekkies and Star Wars nuts as being strange in their cult like devotion to a TV or movie franchise, what saves them is that the movies and TV shows are popular, but if you were to go walking down the street and see a Klingon in full regalia, or any of the alien races from Star Wars you'd probably think "That guy's nuts!" For the most part like us they keep their stuff for cons and movie openings only.
The view of outsiders to LARPers isn't much different, what would you think of a bunch of nutcases dressed in foam rubber armor, (yes I have seen this) whapping each other with foam covered plastic swords. There are still many people in the general public who think these guys are Satanist, dealt with a couple idiots like that myself in high school though I have never LARPed.
Festies now we're dealing with a whole different load of nuttiness (I am not deriding them since I worked at three festivals myself) what saves them is for a couple of weeks people like to come and see knights jousting or people acting out highly abbreviated Shakespeare and doing dances that are literally hundreds of years old.
Society for Creative Anachronisms now those guys make Festies pissed off with their plastic and duct tape armor and have been black balled of having an sort of organized group come to any festival in the US possibly in the world.
What furries have that is different is that we are brought together mostly because of a love of anthro art and writing. For the most part we are harmless and of those who fursuit (I hope to be among their ranks as soon as possible) their suit allows many of them to be far more out going then they would normally be. The fursuit acts much like a cosplay costume of a an anime lover. A furry who is normally a very shy furson feels freer to interact with others because they are wearing an emotional armor of sorts. I read in one undercover piece about a parent who said that his daughter loved going to fur-cons because of all the giant plush toys that had come to life to play with her. The fursuit lets us play out a more outgoing furson, one that many of us wish we could be like all the time.
