(Is “worldbuilding” not a real word? Substack and Word seem not to think so.)
Brathor says, “you could potentially do a series about common questions/issues that tend to come up in furry worldbuilding and perhaps discuss a few different approaches to them. What do they eat? How are species differences acknowledged? Is reproduction across species possible, and (either way) how does that affect the way society works?”
Sure! As it happens, if you follow this blog you may know that I’m writing a book about how to write a novel, and I was going to give it at least one furry chapter, so this feels like a question I was going to eventually address anyway. Let’s organize my thoughts over a few blog posts, shall we?
When we talk about furry stories, the worldbuilding is an important part of it. The parts of the world that differ from non-furry stories, the bits we focus on when we talk about the “furriness” of a story, are the parts of the world that are different because the characters are anthro animals (of course), and those differences tend to be centered around the ways in which we in non-furry worlds interact with animals and with our environment.
These include (but are not limited to): How are living quarters designed? What do people keep as pets (if they do)? What do people eat? Who (and how) do they have sex with, and what do the cubs look like? Also, how does their language reflect their furriness?
There’s a lot to think about here, and to start with, it helps to think about what furry is and what it means, at least in terms of the furry community. Furry is a community different from a fandom in that there is no central text, and one of the crucial differences between furry and, say, a fandom like the Star Wars fandom (or Trek, or Harry Potter, or whatever other books or movies have gathered people around them) is that furry does not have a “canon.” In Star Wars, for example, there are movies that are indisputably canonical, meaning that things that happened in the movies are immutable parts of the Star Wars universe1. You can’t have a Star Wars OC (original character) that doesn’t fit into that universe somehow.
Furry, by contrast, is whatever furries define it to be. You want a Robin Hood-style fox who walks on two legs and doesn’t wear pants? Want an anatomically improbable taur species? Want a blue unicorn with lion paws and a purple skunk stripe down its back leading to a fox tail? Snakes, birds, orcas? You do you. All of these fit into the fandom. In fact, the only thing that there seems to be a mutually agreed proscription on is that…you can’t have a human OC in Furry2.
But you are creating your own world with your own rules. There will be, perhaps, only blue unicorn skunk-griffins in your world. So the first question you have to answer in your furry worldbuilding is: Why is your world furry?
There are a few broad categories that furry worlds fall into, and these are not mutually exclusive, but thinking about them in this way can help you figure out the rules for your world. In my experience, furry worlds tend to be driven by aesthetic, metaphor, or exploration.
Aesthetic is the easy one. Honestly, I think it’s a factor in most furry novels, but I’m breaking it out here because it is also perfectly reasonable to make your story furry just because you like the way animal-people look. If you’re in the furry community, a lot of your interpersonal experiences have been shaped by this aesthetic, and likely at least part of your identity, too, so it makes sense to build your world along these same lines. What good is being a fox if you can’t write a story about foxes?
Metaphor digs more into the point of your story, and can cover a lot of possibilities. Generally, this means that you’re using a furry world to represent a real-world problem. Zootopia is the classic example of this, a really well-done metaphor because it uses the predator-prey dynamic to explore prejudice. Because predator-prey doesn’t have any direct correlation in the real world, the film can discuss prejudice without having to drill down into racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. Furry species can also be a stand-in for class, or furries can be used to model different social structures, as in Watership Down. Figuring out your worldbuilding here will require you to think about what you’re trying to accomplish with your story.
Exploration is often an outgrowth of the aesthetic, but with more concrete details. I’m thinking about taking animal behaviors and physiology, like a wolf pack or a hive of bees, and wondering what our society would be like if we’d grown out of those origins. What if we were anthro rabbits who still wanted to live underground, or anthro starlings who couldn’t stop talking to each other all the time, or anthro possums who still played dead when we sensed danger? Or what if all three (and more) of those existed in the same society? How would society have to adapt? Here, also, you’ll have to think about what your story is trying to say in order to make sure your worldbuilding supports it properly.
I think that’s enough for this post. Next month I’ll start looking at some specific examples and solutions I’ve seen to them. And if you have thoughts—or questions for a future writing advice column—let me know!
There were books, too, a lot of them (including comics), and the world in the books was described as the Extended Universe, or EU. When Disney took over Star Wars, there was an official declaration that the EU was no longer considered canonical.
Primate OCs, though rare, can be found. They seem to be rarer the closer they are to human, in my experience, so there are some lemurs, a few monkeys, very few great apes.
There's also When Metaphor Goes Wrong, like when people insist on using furry species to stand in for Real World Races which can often go south real quick