FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

The remote origins

Well, I got read a lot of fairy tales from all over the world when I was a kid.

Funnily, it was mostly the polynesian fairytales where it were sharks that, like the humans , had good and bad characters, where bumans and nonhumans fell in love with.

And it ws usually for the better of both.

The other stories where there were love affairs between mortals and supernatural beings were, in general, of east asian origin.

In case of the japanese kitsune, the fox fairies, it was often love between vixen and human male, but often, too, to the detriment of the human.

There were a few persian fairytales, with dragons and human maidens, where the love stories were often to the detriment of the dragon.

Finally, in the closer european spaces, it fizzled out, with the wolfess Asena marrying and mating with a crippled human male, giving him a bunch of strong sons - but due to the cultural background, not a word was said about their daughters, which interested me a LOT more than their sons at the time.

And then there was historically a huge gap, until Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote Tarzan, and there was the city of Opir ( Ophir ) , where human kings took lionesses for their queens, and their sons had the golden eyes of their mothers and the ebony skins of their fathers, whilst their daughters had the tawny manes of their mothers and their statures.

I.e. the girls came after the mother, the sons after the fathers.

That story I read on my own around the age of 12 or so, and it sparked some ideas.

Because, the only other stories where such a situation has occurred were the polynesian stories,where sharks and humans came together, and usually it was always the girl that inititated the friendliness. Mostly a sharkess.

With the lions, human males selected their mate, and it went down the drain.

So, the first lession I had learned from those stories was that the girl should select her mate when things should work out nicely.

Next, canines already lived with humans, so my primary focus , as I thought it most easily to understand in a story, would be with humans and canines, and the canines clearly being the movers in regards to things of love and passion.

I wrote a few ... dabbles.. cant call it anything more... of human-canine interaction, and vulpine-human interaction for a more exotic flair.

That was around the age of 16 or so. 1993, I just had gotten my Commodore Amiga, and used it more for writing than playing.

Nothing more happened for a while.

Then I found pictures from Eric Schwartz ( nowadays on FurAffinity ), who also used an Amiga, and had his animations and pictures published on several Public Domain disks and disk-collections on CD.

So I saw my first graphical art of a ladyfur that wasn't childproofed kid-cartoons on TV.

The Internet arrives - The age of IRC

A few years later the internet became available and I went on it, with a Modem initially, and found in the IRC chats of DAL.net and then furnet.irc that theres ot only plenty of people that likesd such ideas, but that there were many , many who wrote such stories, wrote them well, and ... went into the delightful details.

Combined with my frustration at both fantasy & SF stories available at the time in Germany - usually translations from english books - for them having to me absolutely idiotic worlds - Like instant teleportation over galactic distances, but nobody thinking about using that to just prepare a huge moonbase on the gorund on earth and then just teleport it up to the moon to harvest ressources, or having a loyal robotic servant, and having him attent your every whim instead of telling him to buld a few copies or put his super brain to solvign a bunch of nagging issues of the stories,....

Well, I was picky.

Similarly with magic. Can cure death but not injuries? Can destroy a city but not enough control to light a campfire? Dabbling kiddo magicians! Get some training!

I In those years where I was stil lat school I mostly did text roleplay, telling stories together with others.

Shortstories, true, but many, and on most delightful issues.

Many of the shortstories were either about a human, me, fumbling his way between a ladyfurs tighs, or oftentimes being lovingly snared and drawn there, or of a small, flamboyant, not exactly sane tiny male fennec fox that went out to seduce the tall hairless ladies, who just didn't knew yet that small fennecs are the greatest gift to all females of the universe.

Small in stature, great as a lover, you know?

I kept many of the logfiles.

And going over them years later when I moved from the Amiga to a Linux PC, I found that there were recurring themes. The human met the mostly canine ladies in a SF setting, there weren't robots or any fancy high tech stuff.

It were space stations, rest and refit facilities of giant scale with populations of their own, with a lot of traffic but mostly in-system traffic. No forcefields, but giant airlocks.

The fennec usually picked the human females up in a bar where they had arrived as dusted travellers with their riding lizard, or as part of a caravan, usually with female knights drinking nearby.

The fennec showed them the town as part of hs strategy to get into their pants, from the big clothes-optiuonal lake in the city plazas center, to the jewellers - remote relatives - to the piercing studio - his uncles business that, though msotly his three wifves did the piercings to prevent the geezer from drooling on the female bodies that wanted the peircigns ....

You know, I realized I had two lovely settings there.

In both cases, humans were known, but relatively rare.

So, around 2000, I started making notes of these locations and occasions, and intentionally pushed them, took others along there, showed them the secrets spots, like an overhang of flowers , which form a visual and scent screen right beside the main thoroughfare, where one can you know ,get very personal - as long as one stays quiet.

Around 2004 I started writing shortstories again, trying out different locations and creatures I hadn't tried yet.

Second Life, Minecraft, and Online Communities

A bit later, 2006, Second Life went public and free-access, so I joined, and, BANG!

Furries. Lotsa furries!

I had already before joined a german furry website, but its name "Furbase" was often nicknames "Flamebase" as it was really that, flamewars often and unmotivated.

So, I left it after a few years and after some things got out of hand.

But then I founf Furaffinity and then also other websites, like SoFurry, Weasyl and such.

In Second Life I turned playful dabbles into shortstories which I gifted to the partners, and they enjoyed it a lot

And then, Minecraft came!

Suddenly I was able to build the desert town where the fennec lived.

The spacestations weren't possible, but now, given the visual references , I realized I wanted to connect the placeswhere the fennec lived withthe places where the human lived, and so I started unifying the up to then completely isolated story spaces

What had been , around 2005, two, three separate locations grew into one whole.

I had to discard some things, such as that that the barbarians that threatens the desert cities are just one, maybe two species, and not a coalition of many, as I wanted to have a background.

I wanted to have a long history, but that meant that there had to be a reason why humans could interbreed with the other species, but they couldn#t with each other.

I didn't want humans to be magical or special to be able to do this. So I reached far back in time and placed a tool that was desigfned for humans there that was the cause for them beign able to interbreed, but the different species werent.

For else Zebras and Fennecs would have become one unified mixed species already a long time ago.

I needed a reason why, when there was such a long past, there wasn't a human empire, or at least a heavily human-influenced galaxy. Simple: Humans fucked up, got punished and relegated to be mostly forgotten.

And, too, humans have problems getting through the light barrier, but their alternatives are actually much more valuable and useful that translight capability.

So the details for the background came, using lots of internet memes and conspiracy stories. Usign the same trashheap of the internet, I assembled a story explaining where and how now humans came to be at two so different story locations at the same time.

Out of Work, time to work

In 2015 and 2016 I was jobless, so I started to push forward, creating the timeline, the basic background, the species, the "uplift virus" and ,in cooperation with a few others, designed the societies, their members and their cultures.

I had some time on my hands and visited, amongst other things a bookfair. One of the books there infuriated me. It was a childrens book, and whilst, I think, its message was to accept everyone as they are, the fact that one bully threw a stone at three kids and the remaining book only two of those kids appeared, told me that beign is totally okay and people will love you for it unconditionally.

Yeeeaaaah... Not the message I want to teach my children... or have them learn.

So, properly beginning the "Welcome to Valhalla" universe was in 2015, when I decided that, as the first real big story, I would embark on a childrens book, dumping 40 human kids in the middle of a town in the desert, with big zebra mares in armor and gaudily clad fennecs welcoming an them and doing their best to help them fit into their society. The City is Tehuioy, one of the many towns and sietches forming the Allied Sultanates.

The Asgard Habitats are the big joker, for, with their thousands of giant habitats, you can have a medieval society of a million poeple.... living in space and either happily ignoring it, not knowing about it, or living that way because they want to, keepign the high tech in reserve, i.e. children learnign reading in school, learning basics of electronics, mechanics and such , those interested in medicine learning about it to a modern level, whilst the others get to choose if to live as farmers or other medieval jobs, or if they will learn about the hightech needed to run the place.

In which case you'll have the blacksmith knowing both how to forge metal with the hands as well as how to operate a power forge, and how to maintain and repair it, making even your farming peasant educated in how to maintain and repair a water filter, or how to do chemical soil analysis to decide if the plants need special fertilizer , and which.

And, as I delight in it, humans will be a minority, but one cherished and loved. With fangs and claws, a doggygirl has little to fear from a human, unless he uses extreme force. Which ,given his scent as evidence, would mark him for the entire nonhuman population, and, from the moral point of view, make him an outcast from the other humans point of view.

In return a canine hurting a human would face the same situation, though the canine society would consider her rabid when she killed her human lover during passionate play and put her down immidiatly, whilst the humans would insist on a proper court procedure to learn if maybe it was the humans fault.

i.e. one is more forgiving toward the other species than to ones own.

Still, there is even space for criminal stories there!

How could a mentally unstable human commit a murder without being detected or even manage to stick the murder to a rival?

There's nt only space for romance, adventure and porn! There's space for crime stories, for detecitve work, for daring rescues, and so much more!

Today - 2021

Ever since, I am now commissioning art and shortstories, finding myself short of time and focus to work myself on the stories.

But this will change one day again, and until then I'll commission shortstories to get the view of my worlds through other peoples eyes.