Do you remember when and what helped you discover your affinity for furries? If you do, I'd like to hear your stories!
To get the ball rolling I'll start with mine. While I certainly can't pinpoint the exact date I became fixated on anthros, I can absolutely remember getting Sonic Adventure on the Dreamcast when I was 7 or 8 (2000ish).
Seeing Tails was all I needed to get hooked, and want to be a cool fox like him. I didn't even have a word for it until I started using the internet years later, but my furry fate was sealed from then onward. It was the catalyst that got me into fantasizing about having fur and a big tail, and got me doodling lots of Sonic art as a kid. While I've long since stopped making Sonic art, Tails still holds a special place in my heart over 20 years later.
I've always liked media with anthro characters, but my introduction to the furry community was actually at an anime convention.
I had preordered my tickets for A-kon 2002, and back in the day when you preordered you got a few little comic books from a local comic book store in your bag for free. As fate would have it, one of my free comics was Havoc Inc #2. I stayed up late that night reading and rereading the comic, and then trying to draw the characters. I loved it.
A-kon 2002 came and went (great con) and I started setting my sights on what I wanted to cosplay as for A-kon 2003. That summer, Hamtaro had started airing on Cartoon Network, and I thought it would be funny to make a big mascot-suit style costume of Hamtaro. So I googled "how to make a mascot suit" and one of the very first pages I ran into was Yappy Slyfox's webpage, The Fox Den. After that, there was no escape.
That's really cool, and reminds me of the two communities being more intertwined in the past (from what I've heard anyway). Did you end up creating that suit for A-Kon 2003? A big Hamtaro suit sounds super adorable, though I'm not expecting you'd have pics from then to show it off.