busybee fluffy rambles

The best that I can find is that the term was popularized by Zack Parsons, assistant editor of Something Awful, in a satirical and somewhat mean-spirited book entitled “Your Next-Door Neighbor is a Dragon: A Guided Tour of the Internet’s Strange Subcultures and Weird Realities.” There are limited prior references to the word existing but that seems to be where the term actually caught on.

I distinctly remember that before then, people just referred to their self-representation characters as “personal furries” or “mascots” or the like, and I remember having people on certain toxic forums making fun of me for having “a ‘fursona’ or whatever,” and at the time it was a term which I’d not even heard of before.

But then what’s even weirder is that the term “personal furry” has been all but forgotten by the Internet, and even on WikiFur it’s referred to as just a type of fursona, with not even a hint of a historical note regarding when the term “fursona” came about or where it came from. Wikifur claims that it’s a core part of furspeech, but I don’t remember it being used at all in the 90s, whereas most of the others were definitely things that I saw used back then (and most of those have fallen distinctly out of favor, aside from “somefur” which I still see sometimes, but not very often).

What do other older furries have to say about this? Am I just completely misremembering my history or has the fandom as a whole just completely forgotten a big important chunk?

Of course every time I mention a “personal furry” someone always comes up with another parody of that one Depeche Mode song so I mean it’s probably for the best that the term fell out of fashion, and I mean, “fursona” really is a much better term for it and it’s completely unsurprising to me that it won out.

It’s just so weird that people have been, like, actively rewriting history to say that this is the term that was always used. When I played Secret Little Haven I just chalked that aspect up to a vague anachronism written by someone who wasn’t there, but now I’m finding articles that insist that the term “fursona” was already established in the mid-90s, the only citation for that being a paper written in 2020, which in turn doesn’t cite its sources, and simply says,

At some point during all of this avatar-based activity in the mid-1990s, the term “fursona” became commonplace. It is difficult to trace exactly when this occurred, though I have managed to track down a Usenet posting from 1994 using the word (Lester 1994); here it is surrounded by quotation marks, which suggests that the word may not have achieved a critical mass of popular usage at that point even within the fandom.

Which does indicate that the word was at least first used in a furry space and not on Something Awful (which didn’t exist at the time) but a single Usenet post with a one-off portmanteau (that doesn’t even seem to be used the way it is today!) does not indicate that anyone had adopted the terminology. 1994 was also before I’d discovered the fandom (I first learned about it in late 1995 and joined in early 1996) and when I joined people absolutely referred to the sort of character I embodied as a “personal furry.”

(The paper also posits that the existence of fursonas as self-representational didn’t really start until Twitter and Tumblr and that is absolutely, totally, completely wrong.)

Anyway this feels like the sort of thing I’ll just quietly rant about and never get any closure on, but if one of my fellow greymuzzles wants to weigh in (I know there’s a few of you reading this!), that’d be peachy.