Tentative introduction to my paper.

Here is where I’m going to write some type of compelling introduction about the fandom.

My favorite film is The Lion King. When I was younger, I could have watched it over and over again, completely mesmerized by the artistry of the animation, the sheer breadth of time over which such an epic tale took place, the full-symphony orchestral musical numbers. And the characters, something about the lions in particular got to me. I found them just as believable as any human character, and twice as interesting.  As fervently as my peers would have insisted they were princesses, dressing up like Cinderella or Princess Jasmine, I would play pretend too, in my own way. While I would on occasion dress in my mother’s shiny sequined disco dress from decades before and play at being Esmerelda, Princess of the Gypsies, in my favorite games of pretend I was a lion. Prowling the Savannah with my family, we would go on countless adventures. But as with any child, my fantasies of grandeur were soon replaced with the reality of school, and forgotten about for a time. We all forget our dreams, but only a few learn to gain them back.

Several years later, I found again my childhood interest. Surfing the internet one day, I came upon a website dedicated to displaying art by fans of The Lion King. Most of the drawings were mediocre at best, but a few truly good artists did post on the site. Many of the pictures were of characters I didn’t know going on adventures that weren’t in the movies. A pale brown lion with a black streak in her fur was depicted many times in many different situations including hunting gazelle, climbing Pride Rock, and grooming a friend. Through a little digging, I discovered that she was an original creation of the artist, used to represent her as if she were an animal, to be a sort of alternate animal persona, or as the artist referred to it, a fursona. As I soon discovered, a majority of the characters displayed were the fursonas of some artist or another. Unknowingly, I had stumbled upon an internet lair of a group of social pariahs known as furries, a people who express themselves through anthropomorphic animal avatars. My knowledge of their society and customs would be limited for many years to come, but this interaction was a mere foreshadowing of my later interactions with the furry community, a community I would someday discover myself to have more in common with then I once expected.