Fur Affinity
is an art-based website devoted to all things furry and anthro, run by Sean "Dragoneer" Piche. One is bound to find a wide variety of creative works on FA, ranging from music to stories to art and photography; while it's not unheard of to find non-furry-centric work on the site, the vast majority of submissions to the site are centered around anthropomorphic/furry characters.
FA does its best to compete against DeviantArt, at least as far as giving an artistic outlet to the furry community. Both DA and FA allow a broad range of content (read: smut), with the difference that DA allows full frontal human nudity, and frowns on the more kinky furry stuff while FA allows the latter and bans the former. Due to these differing restrictions, FA is traditionally a furry's first stop for new furry artwork. Because of its sheer size, it has become the de facto Friending Network for most furries as well.
How you feel about the site depends on how you feel about the furry fandom: It can be a nice place to look at anthro art, a very bad case of Rule 34 gone wild or both.
In early 2015, Fur Affinity was purchased by avatar based chat-network IMVU. In January 2021, IMVU fired Dragoneer, who then announced the following month that he regained site ownership and has formed a limited liability company called Frost Dragon Art to manage it.
This website provides examples of:
- Furry Fandom: As the name says, Fur Affinity is a site for furries, mostly for artists to showcase their artwork but also as one the main Friending Networks/communities for the fandom.
- Loophole Abuse:
- Avatars were not originally filtered by the mature filter, so people with the mature filter turned on would be met with any number of NSFW avatars. A rule was eventually put into place to close the loophole, and avatars must not exceed PG-13 content.
- Submitted artwork used to be reduced in resolution to fit within 1280 by 1280 pixels and converted to JPEG if a PNG was larger than that size. However, people got around it by resubmitting their artwork after initial upload (by editing the post's upload), which caused the image therein to be displayed in its original size, which can lead to huge-sized pics to overfill the screen. In November 2022, however, the site finally allowed users to upload larger images on initial upload without having to resubmit them to maintain their larger sizes (and PNG format), but the site now downscales all images that are larger than certain sizes in megapixels; 3.7 megapixels for those using the site for free or 8.3 megapixels for FA+ subscribers.
- NSFW: Mature content is allowed, but must be tagged as either "Mature" or "Adult" and can only be viewed by logged-in users who have disabled the filter.
- Rule 34: Fur Affinity is one of the biggest sources of R34 porn, and often proof that there really are "no exceptions".
- Shout-Out: Some of the site banners.
- One is a Calvin and Hobbes homage.
- There have been several banners to the effect of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic.
- Sdrawkcab Name: Alternative site mascot Rednef, who originally came around as an April Fools' joke.
- Sitcom Arch-Nemesis: DeviantArt, based on a former ban of furry and anthro art from appearing on the front page of DA.
- Start My Own: What kicked off FA's creation was a sudden ban on pornographic material on fellow DeviantArt clone SheezyArt. And on the flip side of the coin, a number of competing sites have been started since then out of dissatisfaction with FA.
- Viewers Like You: One of the larger sites to be primarily donation-based, though it still takes in a bit of money from sidebar ads.
- Yiff: Being a 18+ site containing user generated content and owing its very creation to another art site refusing to allow yiff on their front page, you're going to get porn.
User content on this website provides examples of:
- Artistic License – Biology: Leaving anthro aspects aside, some art is uploaded into animal categories they clearly do not belong in. Also often Art Major Biology.
- Author Avatar: Mostly "Artist Avatar" in this case; the vast majority of the FA userbase has one.
- Bait-and-Switch: Many artists like to use a Visual Pun and fool their viewers by using a thumbnail with a warning label on it to indicate an "adult" picture, except the actual picture is something completely harmless. A Troll will do the complete opposite. Expect this trope to come in full force every year on April Fool's Day. This seems to have lessened as of late, however, since the site now only allows custom thumbnails on main user pages and highlighting any one of them shows a downscaled version of the actual submission. It still works with any submissions that aren't simple image files, such as Flash or GIF animations, music or writing.
- Barbie Doll Anatomy: Rednef has prominent boobs but no nipples (of course). Fender, however, does have visible nipples in his official incarnations, making this a rare inversion from how it usually works with furries.
- Expy: Many Digimon and Pokémon OCs, some with the same personalities as their original counterparts. One of the founders' Author Avatar is a Guilmon/Monodramon expy, except bigger, purple and subjected to fetish of the week (sometimes with Guilmon along for the ride). This likely also applies to Sonic-based and Brony OCs as they do have their own categories on the site.
- Lost Forever: It's not uncommon for users to post images online, and then abruptly leave for unknown reasons and take all their artwork down without telling a single person about it. When it comes to FA, being a pack-rat and saving everything you like locally pays off sometimes.
- Mix-and-Match Critters: Site mascot Fender is a ferret/fox, but he looks more like a raccoon. Pretty common among user characters, too.
- Mr. Fanservice: Any decently drawn muscular male furries or just good-looking male furries (mostly wolves, canines or dragons) will draw comments about how hot they are.
- Ms. Fanservice: It's pretty rare to find female characters who aren't created for this reason.
- Non-Mammal Mammaries: Averted more often than played straight, but draws more attention when it's played straight. There's also an odd variant where female furries sometimes have species-appropriate Multi Boobage even when males in the same drawing lack the extra nipples.
- Our Dragons Are Different: You can find that users "support" all the major dragon types (western, eastern, wyvern, etc.), but what types actually get drawn is a whole another thing. The same goes for the less common mythological species such as unicorns, gryphons and phoenixes.
- Our Werewolves Are Different: The most common interpretation seems to be that werewolves are anthropomorphic wolves, with additional little something going on during full moon.
- Shameless Self-Promoter: For years there was no rule against it, so users habitually held raffles for free art and usually required the entrants to post a link back to the promoter's journal or watch their account. Nowadays, it's forbidden on account of "spamming to win" and clogging users' inboxes with journals that aren't worth reading.
