Some folks may have noticed that my last two artworks look…kind of similar. " If this looks familiar…don't worry about it," I said, pretending like I'm all clever. They're two otherwise-identical drawings of my old fox girl (not "foxgirl") OC, one captioned with "Anthro" in giant block letters, the other with "Furry" instead.

I prefer to tag my art with #Anthro, because #Furry has some implications I prefer to avoid. I'm not dissing furries, but I say things like "furry-adjacent," "allegedly not a furry," and "I'm not a furry, you're a furry" instead of just calling myself a furry because I feel like the latter would be a bit misleading. I don't identify as an animal in any way. Obviously I'm not a therian/otherkin/etc., but also I don't role-play as an anthro character or self-describe as an animal even in jest or as a fun affectation. I'm a big fan of foxes and lions but I wouldn't put in my bio that I am one. I don't have, or want, a fursona. Again, nothing against those who do. Just, I don't.

Of course, as I said on Mastodon while the poll was running, “Arguably this is just a needlessly long-winded and identity-based way of saying ‘I don’t have a fursona’; perhaps I just need to get over myself.”

In any case, one day I noticed that I was able to see about 8 posts on my old Mastodon instance tagged #Anthro, compared to 148 tagged #furry. So I decided to try an experiment.

The basic idea was, I'd post both versions, each under the corresponding tag, both here and on Mastodon (and later, on Tumblr as well). And then I'd see which version got more traction. Problem was, I'm not exactly popular. I think I got maybe two or three interactions total on Mastodon, though that's basically impossible to check now that the instance is down. Over on Tumblr, as far as I can tell, the two posts gathered a combined total of 0 notes. Here on Sheezy, as I write this, Furry has 0 likes and 30 views, while Anthro has 0 likes and 36 views.

So, plan B then. I posted a poll on both my new Mastodon instance and Tumblr asking which tag users would normally use to see this kind of artwork. The results were pretty conclusive, assuming the small sample size is reasonably representative: Furry beat Anthro 18 to 1 on Fedi and 15 to 3 on Tumblr, the platforms rounding the results to 95% and 83.3% respectively. For you fans of basic arithmetic, that's a combined total of 33 of 37 votes in favor of Furry, or
89.1891…% (assuming nobody voted in both polls).

Conclusion: I'm gonna start making sure I use the Furry tag. (I mean, I'm definitely just going to use both tags where I can.)