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), only that DA allows explicit adult art inside a paywall. 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.
From 2015 to 2021, Fur Affinity was owned by avatar-based chat-network IMVU, before it was bought back by Dragoneer after he was fired from the company.
Works hosted/used to be hosted on the site:
- The Bedfellows
- Cashmere Sky
- Crossed Claws
- The Dynamite Twins and Friends
- Grant
- Not What I Was
- Of Fear and Faith
- Peter & Company (1998)
- Peter & Company (2005)
- Simon And Freddy
- Thebe and the Angry Red Eye
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.
