We categorized 1,353 furry convention themes; these are the results


Somewhere, a volunteer committee sat in a room (or a Discord call) and decided that this year, their con was going to be about space, or pirates, or a haunted Victorian manor, and then spent the next twelve months building an entire event: badges, art, programming, decoration around that one idea.

Do that enough times across enough conventions, and you get an vast library of ideas, literally thousands of hours poured into those themes. We decided to go through our database to check out one thing: What kind of theme the... themes fall under?

Why you ask? Well, Why not!? Data is fun! And we do have a hpyerfocus in organize all furry events in the planet, so there you have it.

You can scroll down for the breakdown of all. But we will also go through our method:

Step One: Learning to Read Furry

The first thing you notice is that we furries have our own dialect, call it daddy jokes and puns, but this is what make our language fun. "Roaring" becomes "Rawring", "Marooned" becomes "MaOwOroned". "Forbidden" becomes "Furbidden" and so on. We can spend an entire day spelling all that.

Before any sorting could happen, we had to build a little translation layer: "fur" folding into "for", "paw" showing up as a wildcard rather than a literal reference, "OwO" and "UwU" doing double duty as vowels and pronouns. Once that was done, the themes stopped looking like Furglish and started looking more boring - but sadly, we needed boring to be able to feed into our monster regex software.

Thanks to the universe we didn't have to deal with a "67" theme... yet.

Step Two: Two Pass-System

Pass one: go theme by theme and infer the most likely genre signal. "Furries in Space!" is quite obvious. "Highlands" points to historical. "Dragon Dance" could be fantasy with a musical flourish. Most themes gave up their genre quite straightforwardly, some put out a fight. A handful, like "Controlled Burn" clearly meant something specific to the people who chose it, but we couldn't really infer a category unless we experienced the con ourselves.

Pass two: roll those individual keywords up into macro categories. "80s," "90s," "Y2K," and "Roaring Twenties" all landed in one "Nostalgia/Retro" bucket.

This ran as an actual two-pass keyword-matching pipeline, checked in order of specificity so something like "Cyberpunk" didn't get swallowed by a generic "city" match. Every theme was tested against category patterns until one fit, or until it earned a spot in the leftovers pile.

Step Three: The Leftovers

About 22% of themes (292 of them) didn't cleanly sort into a category, and that's less a failure of the themes and more a limit we had in our own context. Things like "DYI - Do it yourself!" or "Book End" are almost certainly rich with meaning to the people who ran those cons; we just didn't have the inside context to place them confidently.

Piece of curio: "Mad Science" shows up roughly eight times across different cons and years. Proof that some ideas are just reliably great, and reinventing them is half the fun, though we thought it would be Pirates.


The Results

Here's how the full list broke down, sorted by popularity:

CategoryCountNote
Sci-Fi/Futuristic129Who doesn't want to get BEANed up, Scotty?
Fantasy/Magic106Dragons, wizards
Horror82Spooktober doesn't always happen in October
Nostalgia67Every era, now revisited
Sun Destination57Migration done right: get my Piña Colada
Pirates55Yarr
Movies/TV/Music54Hollywood energy
Ancient/Historical48Rome, Egypt, Vikings
Mystery/Noir/Crime48Everyone is a detective for a weekend
Adventure/Exploration      35Lost cities and forbidden temples, may be cursed
Wildlife/Nature30Let's do what they do on the Discovery Channel
Western29Gold rush and gunslingers
Camp/College27Furry University is now accepting new applications
Cultural Festival27Día de los Muertos, Oktoberfest, and more
Dystopian24Building beauty out of a wasteland
Circus/Fair21Set up a tent
Convention Milestone21Anniversaries and in-jokes about the cons themselves
Gaming21Press Start, insert quarter
Steampunk20Gears, so many gears!
Superheroes19No capes!!
Sweets/Food17Candy factories and pizza parties
Battle/Revolution14We can turn a government in one weekend
Science14"Mad Science" carrying this one proudly
Prehistoric14Furassic Park, naturally
Abstract/Emotional13Sometimes the theme is just "Love"
Urban12Metropolis in furry-style, Zootopia anyone?
Anime/East Asia11Kemono earning its own well-deserved category
Casino/Gambling10High rollers
Sports/Games7No need to be fit to compete
Corporate/Business5Believe it or not, they pull this out
Aquatic320,000 Leagues underwater
Others292Inside jokes and unknowns

In Consurf, you can query all events ran by conventions in the planet! And we track their themes too! You can navigate all the names, puns and actually see their creativity morphing into something new every year. Some conventions even try to connect one theme to another, almost like an inside lore... Looking at you Camp Feral! who is even Stealing Themes as a theme.

This was a fun exercise, and we will do more of those per year in our upcoming "Look Back" retrospective! Stay tunned!


Location: Toronto, ON, Canada

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