Lifehack:

Instead of wondering if something is normal, ask if it's harmful.

Dressing up as an anthropomorphic animal character isn't normal, but it makes a lot of people smile.

Being exceptionally talented isn't normal, but it sure offers a way to enrich your life as well as the people you care for.

To hell with normal. To hell with being afraid of being called weird. Furries figured this out decades ago. Many anime fans and gamers, too.

Yet, I hear people ask things like, "Is it normal to feel the way I do?"

I dunno.

Does it make your life harder? Then you might want to do something about it. Does it cause harm to others? Definitely do something to correct it.

But to cry when you watch movies? Or to want to cuddle so much that you lose any interest in actually having sex? Or to hate the world we inherited so much that it hurts, and so you channel it into helping others suffer a little less?

Who gives a shit about normal. That's human.

@soatok Without furries, there wouldn't be Multi-user Dungeons. Back in the 80's and 90's, it was furries that first started developing those social interactive text-based games and it just went on from there so thank you furries.

@gocu54 @soatok MMO games as a genre also grew out of Graphical MUDs, although it seems those were already made by large "professional" teams, which makes sense given the additional complexity of having a graphic engine

Interesting piece of history: look up "Habitat" from LucasArts to see how unthinkably *cursed* UI design was, before Ultima Online (itself at the time often called a Graphical MUD, although it succesfully coined the new term MMORPG) started a doctrine shift