FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

So…

Burning Curiosity is a piece of furry media that I have a long history with. For those who don’t know, my time with the furry fandom began as a rather mercenary relationship. I was doing story comms on my defunct DA account for a while and decided to try doing NSFW commissions since many of my clients were furries and I needed money. I was mistakenly identifying as cisgender and stone-cold asexual at the time because my only prior relationship ended with my consent being violated and me being assaulted by my ex-GF. But, I also took pride in my work and wanted to make sure I was delivering a good quality story since it would have my name on it and I had already learned the power of word of mouth and earning return clients. So I started reading other furry yiff stories as what I thought was market research.

It was then that I stumbled across the story for Burning Curiosity, and subsequently the comic. And it was then that I realized that I wasn’t sex-repulsed, I had just never considered the possibility that I was attracted to men [listen i grew up super sheltered, alright?]. Also, because I wasn’t super into anime I hadn’t been exposed to fembois much either. So, Burning Curiosity that was one of the first times I saw a male character subverting their expected gender presentation.

But it was after I read the original story back that I realized “oh, I just cranked major hog to furry yiff stories, I don’t think I can keep using the excuse that I’m just in it for the money anymore.” And that summer day in 2013 was when I opened my FurAffinity and SoFurry accounts. Despite the fact that I’ve never been super into incest [If you'd believe it I’m mildly fond of it on occasions and most times actually ambivalent], Burning Curiosity was absolutely foundational to my unlocking of my queer identity. Hell, it’s PART OF THE REASON my fursona has always been a Ninetales.

I really embraced things then. I wrote two sappy M/M romance series that were meant to indulge in my newly awakened queerness, unrequited feelings for someone close to me, and the fact that I was an isolated rural queer who was desperate for love and affection. I started making and getting art of more OCs. And eventually, I got the idea for an Arcanine OC of my own after seeing so much hot art of the firedog cross my feeds. That's Owyn.

Shortly after conceiving Owyn in 2017 a story popped unbidden into my mind. It involved kinks I was much more shy about expressing interest in at the time, and also it involved someone else’s work, so I kept it private. The TL:DR is that i wrote a fan fiction of Burning Curiosity that included Elan having an mpreg scare. In order to protect himself in the event that he popped out a little Growlithe puppy, Calig and Elan began looking for an Arcanine who could pretend to be a fake boyfriend in a throuple so that the secret of Tyson and Elan would never get out. It was horny and self indulgent, and I basically wrote it so that I could fantasize about Elan and Calig with my own OC instead of with Tyson. That way I could functionally excise the incest from the dynamic and be horny for the fire-type boys in peace. I kept it private, never uploading it everywhere, because I didn’t want to write unauthorized fanfic of someone else’s OCs. That’s a pretty big taboo in furry, and I wanted to respect that. But then I lost it all in a harddrive accident because I hadn’t backed it up anywhere digitally.

“But Alethia, it’s Current Year? What does this have to do with anything?”

Good question, random citizen!

This is where we get to the Open Letter to ScyStorm.

Hi Scy, love your work, if that wasn’t evident enough from the prior part. I genuinely don’t know if I’d be the girl I am today if it weren’t for your writing. Emphasis on the girl part.

During 2024 I was overtaken by a vengeful, horny ghost. I was compelled to restore and revamp the Burning Curiosity fic, and hoooooo boy did I revamp things! It’s gone from being a 3 part indulgent yiff piece into a sprawling 20 chapter epic of raw transgender / disaster bisexual fuckery. This has been absolutely galvanizing to work on and is genuinely some of my best work as a writer to date.

But now I’m at an impasse, because I’m proud of what I’ve made, spent hours and hours working on it, and I am working with characters that fundamentally do not belong to me. So, why am I even talking about this at all? Why am I airing my dirty laundry out for the whole internet to see? Well, I have a couple reasons:

—The original story was written by ScyStorm in 2011. The comic was completed in 2013. It is now 2025 as of writing.

—I know that Burning Curiosity is a big part of Scy’s legacy as a member of the fandom. Since 2015, ScyStorm hasn’t done anything with these characters, as far as I can tell from his public uploads. He wrote the story, adapted the comic with HerrAardy, made some money off a bit of merch [I have the Elan daki don't @ me], and then just let this piece of art he made lie dormant. Nothing wrong with that.

—Because the characters of Burning Curiosity aren’t ScyStorm’s fursonas, I feel this story falls under the category of fan fiction and not unauthorized depictions of someone’s true self.

To go into more detail here, I know that Elan, Tyson, Aideen, and Calig are characters invented by Scy, but they are not his fursonas, and I feel that there is a line here. I know as well as any creator that all characters we make are parts of ourselves, but there’s a difference between unauthorized art/stories of a character I’ve made up and unauthorized art/stories of ALETHIA, my FURSONA who is a direct, non-allegorical stand-in for ME. I consider unauthorized art of a fursona something closer along to the moral grey area of real-person fan fic, which is a line in the sand I will not cross [not judging those who do RPF, this is a "me" thing].

I could just not show my hand here. I could pull an EL James and re-write ScyStorm's fic as chapter 1 and file the serial numbers off, but that would be deeply dishonest and antithetical to everything I stand for as someone who sees the act of creation as something sacred. I'd much rather wear my inspirations on my sleeve with pride, both because I don't think it's shameful to make something that is iterative or derivative, but also because I think it's a sign of great honor for a creative to hear someone else say "your art made me want to make art too!" I’ll never claim that gives me any ownership over Scy's characters, but I want to express my connection to them as pieces of art and to argue for the right for my own art to exist and be shared with others.

Fan fiction is just as legitimate a form of literary expression as any other form of writing and fan fic authors don’t have material ownership over the characters they write about no matter how much interpersonal connection with the fiction they hold in their hearts. If they didn't then there would never be such a thing as fan fiction, and the world would be worse off because it would be deprived of millions of words written by impassioned people who were so altered by a story told to them they had to write and write and write till the spirit of creation could be fully exorcised. This story, this SAGA, is deeply about queerness, self-discovery, and how a piece of art changed a girl for the better. Art leaves marks on people and this particular piece of art has left indelible marks on my psyche, my heart, and even my body post-transition.

And that's what I hope ScyStorm or HerrAardy or anyone else who reads this comes away from this story understanding: this is, in my most soul-rendingly earnest way, a tribute to not just the work of the original author/artist of Burning Curiosity but to furry creation as a whole. I have survived, but not unaltered, and I'm so, so grateful that I was able to change.

And to the readers who just came for good porn, enjoy your yiff, get it while it’s hot! I hope reading this brings you as much joy as it brought me writing it.

Signing off,

SilverAlethia