Community:Furry culture in VRChat

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Furry culture is prevalent in the VRChat community. Furry characters, or furries, are defined as animals or animal-like creatures with anthropomorphic (human-like) or humanoid traits such as speech, intelligence, and/or bipedal body structure. In addition to the characters themselves, the term furry is also used to refer to people who associate with said characters in some way.

Overview

The modern global furry community is inspired by several types of media involving anthropomorphic animals, such as books, TV series and movies. An integral part of the furry subculture is the creation of original characters. Characters that represent their creator are typically referred to as a fursona (a portmanteau of furry and persona, often shortened to simply sona). However, not all furry characters are fursonas, some might simply be original characters of their own right. They can each have potentially different personality traits or interests, depending on their purpose. A portion of the community, who refer to themselves as otherkin (or more commonly therians among furries) spiritually identify as non-human, choosing to instead identify as their fursonas (or other furry creatures).

Due to being generally more accepting towards people with disabilities and those who identify as non-binary and/or non-heterosexual genders, the furry fandom has grown into a very diverse community with people from all wakes of life. People often find themselves joining the furry community through shared interest in certain media, as a natural extension of having pets, or as an escape from past traumatic experiences in real life. This often leads to furries being more understanding and compassionate towards one another, sometimes even to the point of treating other members of the community as friends without prejudice.

Furries and VRChat

VRChat by its very nature provides an environment where members of the furry community can create an avatar based on their ideal sense of self, and feel like themselves more so than in real life.

A furry avatar typically combines features of at least one animal species (e.g. dog, cat, etc.) with anthropomorphic traits. Less anthropomorphic (sometimes defined as feral) furry avatars also exist, which are more lifelike representations of animals (e.g. walking on 4 legs instead of 2), but due to fully-body tracking being optimized for avatars with human-like body structures, non-humanoid avatars are significantly harder to set up and use, and as such are less widespread.

Since most furries are not 3D modeles, texture artists or Unity developers, members of the community who have any combination of these skills (commonly referred to as artists or creators) have taken on the task of building readily available avatar bases. These are typically distributed on online stores such as Gumroad where these creators are able to distribute their work directly to users.

The bases typically come with source files necessary to customize the avatar, including the models, textures and ready-to-use Unity prefabs or scenes, where all the user has to do is log into the VRChat SDK and click upload to have a functioning avatar, which can then be further customized. These avatar bases provide an easy way for furries to create a VR representation of their characters more easily, lowering the barrier of entry.