Guest Blog:
South For The Winter
By Kris Critter
A guest submission for the August 2026 Midway Menagerie, on the theme "Where is furry?"
CW: brief mention of Suicide
I've been Online for a long time.
In any culture, sub or otherwise, it's commonplace to pepper your introductions and getting-to-know-yous with some context: how did the world bring us together, anyway? Who do we both know? What bands do we both listen to? What fandoms do we participate in? Uncovering these commonalities is like turning over stones, to reveal the wild fauna beneath. Shared language suddenly bubbles forth. One man's perspective, suddenly held in contrast to another's, mutual reflections. "I remember that." "Me too."
In the furry fandom, these conversations come with luggage: the kind that comes with not staying in any one place for too long. There are many reasons why our online spaces are transient. Some of it is just growth and change: being a kid and logging into Furcadia to roleplay is a very different experience when you're in your 30s. For some, the impetus to relocate is more violent. Take X, formerly Twitter: microblogging on twitter was ubiquitous for most furries from roughly 2010 to 2020. A decade spent on a specific website, cycling around each other, icons on a feed. I grew reliant on expecting to see the same faces and names, their life updates. I felt plugged into the lives of friends and near-strangers on a read-write basis. An entire other essay could be spent on discussing how that affects the way we relate to each other, but I digress.
Twitter was a home for many of us, for a decade or so.
And then suddenly, people just started to vanish.
Elon Musk showed his entire ass in slow motion, and we, that is the furry community, began to understand that Twitter was no longer a safe place for us. Safety is paramount to furries: being a largely queer and oppressed community of weirdos, when the Nazis show up, we flee. I'm sure I don't just speak for myself when I say that as a furry, that label, that community, comes with a bulleted list of things that make me and my friends targets for violence ahd hatred.
So we left.
But it's not so easy to leave, is it? Many of us still return to check things out, like driving past your childhood home. Some of us refuse to set foot in that place ever again. And it feels good to leave, to remove our attention and access to our selves and our communities. But when we leave, we carve out that decade or so of our lives and leave it behind. Thousands, tens of thousands of words, blogged and spoken and replied to. Conversations, flirtations, engagements, debates, arguments, callouts. Twitter is heavy with the memory and experience of so many of us living our lives in real-time, but now…
It's a ghost town.
Everytime we move, we leave that part of our lives behind. We have to endure the arduous process of finding each other again, with nothing but possible usernames, which are often changed up in these relocations. It's annoying to do that work, but also just disruptive: people I've kept tabs and and who have kept tabs on me are suddenly gone, and I might never see them again. Everytime we move, there's a very real chance of losing people along the way. I use shorthand and call them my friends, even though I've met most of them once or twice tops — Many I've never shared space with IRL. But they matter to me.
I still remember the girl with the cat who died, who suddenly vanished off twitter. I'm worried she killed herself, and I'll never know for sure. I never knew her real name.
These empty accounts exist online everywhere with a tragic energy: where did you go? Did you move? Or did you just give up?
Now we're on bluesky, some of us on mastodon. Some of us have turned to telegram group chats and discord servers. We exist as fragmented forms of ourselves across time and space, bumping into each other over and over in surprising new spaces.
But every time we run, we lose each other along the way.
I hope you all find who you're looking for.