My summer with gay furry fiction (and how I popped my visual novel cherry)

05 Sep, 2026

I've spent much of my summer with gay-themed furry fiction and it all started with reading Circles for the first time.

For the uninitiated, Circles is a community-famous comic by Steve Domanski, Scott Fabianek and Andrew French - a slice-of-life story centered around a found family of six gay men (+ their expanded social circle) living in the same house, glimpsing into moments of their life through both good times and bad across a couple of years in the early 2000s. The first chapter was originally published online in 2001 and the following chapters appeared sporadically through the next several years due to various schedule slips. This might have been a blessing in disguise in the end: between each chapter both the art and writing grew in detail and nuance and by proxy the creators seemed to learn more about the characters themselves as time passed, their personalities growing deeper with each issue. The final five or so chapters were all released in bulk in 2015 in the form of a short story with only a handful of illustrations in-between, and given the events of the final chapters that may have actually been the right thing to do. Despite its overall heartwarming tone, Circles ultimately gets quite heavy (though in a way that really is obvious from the very first chapter so it's not like it comes out of nowhere), and whilst I would've of course loved to have seen the events visualised, I also feel like presenting them as text only and allowing the reader to fill in the gaps through their imagination really helped those final chapters to have the impact they were intended to.

I've known about Circles since I found the furry community but had simply never even thought to read it, until a random bit of internet trawling and whim-driven clicking lead me to it. What was meant to be just a quick glance to understand a little bit more of what it was about (particularly as a fan of Fabianek's art style) ended up being an all-evening to wee hours of the morning reading marathon. As you may have already inferred from the paragraphs before, Circles struck a chord with me. I fell in love with the characters, I fell in love with their stories and ultimately I found myself quietly weeping as the story came to a close.

And then the next morning I ordered a physical copy of the entire story and a week later re-read it all over again.¹

For some weeks afterwards I would keep replaying the events of the comic in my head and supplementing the existing stories with new off-canon off-shoots, thinking where things would go or imagining little pieces of dialogue that took place in the gaps in the story. Besides the general story beats and the characters, the base thing that really got me hooked onto Circles was the simple fact that this was a piece of fiction that was both unabashedly queer and furry - something that I obviously identify with on multiple levels. In hindsight, it's funny how little of something like this I've actually consumed during all my years in the subculture, outside any kind of fan art or the general everything of the community itself; there's been some webcomics for sure and a few bits of written material here and there, but most of the time they've been one-offs rather than a clear story that explores these themes in a method of representation (i.e. snouts, no people) that speaks to me. That's entirely on me because the fandom is awash with this sort of material, from wholesome to raunchy, and I've just been haplessly walking past it for so long - but then, through sheer coincidence, I ended up falling in a small rabbit hole of for the rest of the summer.

Every Bandcamp Friday my Bluesky feed fills up with people posting and re-posting about various musical releases by different artists in the community. I like clicking those links to check out all these random recommendations, and I've managed to find a handful of pretty neat things that way. At the start of August one of those posts was about the soundtrack for 'Northern Lights', whatever that is but out just in time for BC Friday. Though I had no idea what Northern Lights was, the name attracted my attention (an easy way to entice a Nord away from the North, tangle familiar concepts in front of his eyes...), I loved the cover of the album which immediately struck a mood, and the tags on Bandcamp sounded intriguing - ambient, indie folk and post-rock all shaking hands together. I decided to put it on the background during the workday.

I bought the soundtrack the very same day, and I've been listening to this colossal couple-hour release - in full or in pieces - almost every other day since. The Northern Lights soundtrack is a gorgeous, evocative valley of stargazing textures, where gentle acoustic pickings and yearning slide guitars meet spacious ambient textures and wistful piano melodies. It goes through a whole load of moods and sounds from emotional to triumphant and from those gentle space-folk sounds to booming synthwave and other sudden genre jumps, but the center of it all is in those ethereal ambient folk pieces that resonate with the majesty and magic of night time forests and starlit skies. It's such a wonderful collection of music that has unexpectedly risen to be one of my favourite releases of the year². So, looking into it deeper at that point, I learned that what it soundtracked was in fact a visual novel. I have never played a visual novel.

I was going to play a visual novel.

Northern Lights is the story of Cody, an otter from New Orleans sometime in the 1980s who's struggling with embracing his own identity as a gay man, and takes his chance to escape his troubled life by enrolling to study art in a quiet mountain town deep in in the forests of Montana. There he meets new friends and bumps on a chance into ones he thought he'd never see again, learns to accept who he is, falls in love... Everything is so idyllic and works out so perfectly that even his friends call him out on basically living in an unreal daydream; but Cody also begins to experience surreal sleepwalking spells and waking nightmare visions which turn out to be more real than they at first seem. As a story it seeks (and finds) a fine balance between another slice-of-life coming-of-age story from a decidedly queer angle - a tale of love, friends and seeking your dreams - and a burgeoning supernatural horror narrative digging into both the town's own mystery and Cody's strange and unwilling "powers". To cast a familiar anchor point, the vibe is somewhere along the lines of Night in the Woods in its mix of introspection, tension and American small town ambiance, with some good ol' homosexual wish fulfillment hooks thrown in for good measure.

I had no idea what to expect - to be brutally honest, my first thought was that this was going to be some sort of a dating simulator because that's how damn little I knew about visual novels and all I had was a bunch of stereotypes in my mind (I spent my first hours of the game literally thinking that each new character with a 'cardboard cutout' was a future boyfriend candidate). But Northern Lights very much emphasises the novel half of visual novel - it is, by all accounts, an illustrated story with a clear narrative path of its own and specific character relationships it wishes to explore during that. To date (asterisk here - I'll get to that) there are only a few times where the player has to make choices but they're all relatively minor tweaks to the wider proceedings. one branching path which influences the initial background tone of an establishing character bonding moment, a few times where you can optionally enjoy a full flashback sequence if you want dig into character lore deeper instead of Cody summarising the events in dialogue, and a couple of events where you can choose whether you'd like to partake in something more NSFW if you haven't blocked that content off altogether from the settings (the game's about young gays in love - things will eventually get steamy and it's your call whether you'd like to see them on the screen). By and large, you are reading a book but with (some of) the events and characters visualised for you.

I fell in love with the story and the characters head over heels. Like said, I went into this with no expectations or understanding of what I was about to get myself into, and that blank slate approach turned out to have a positive effect. I was swept by the characters and the story in part because I had absolutely no idea what I was genuinely getting involved in, becoming attached to their narratives in the process and increasingly eager to see how things would progress. I described this as 'queer wish fulfillment' earlier which might just be me holding a mirror against my face but, especially after Circles, I found Cody's story of self-discovery and romantic blossoming genuinely moving and resonant, to the degree that a) for a good while I found the subtly sneaking-in horror elements an unwanted distraction from the hapless gays in love and b) when the first kiss happened I found myself earnestly emotionally overflowing². I just seem to love stories of gay revelation and the nervous first steps of following who you are, especially when it seems to occur to young adults somewhere in the American midwest, with all the cultural and genre trappings that come with it.

Northern Lights is currently a work-in-progress and it currently "finishes" on an enormous barrage of big plot moments which twist the plot into high gear, completely sold me on the supernatural side of the story, and leaves everything on an agonising cliffhanger like a TV show series finale. Like Circles, I couldn't stop thinking about it for ages after I had finished my first playthrough, running the characters and events over and over again in my head and expanding on everything through my own imagination like a hapless fanfic daydreamer - and so now I've subscribed to the Patreon and hang onto every update. It's not just a great story that opens from simple proceedings to something far bigger and adventurous, but it also opened a whole new medium for me. I never knew just clicking through dialogue while staring at (mostly) still images was so engaging; especially when the soundtrack behind it is so evocative³. At the end of the day it is basically just another form of comics and I'm 100% into those as an art form... but it's funny how you end up creating imaginary borders around yourself for some things. Now I keep wondering, what else have I missed by ignoring visual novels as a storytelling medium?

But, at least I can rectify my errors going forward...

Sleepover Simulator was another discovery through a random post that appeared on my social media feed - though this time it was a piece of smutty fan art. But it mentioned it was based on a visual novel and you know I'm now all about this stuff so hey ho let's click, download and go.

Sleepover Simulator is another tale of young gay furries at the precipice of discovering themselves in a small town in the US Midwest (I have a type), but apart from that it's a whole different kettle of fish to Northern Lights. There's no supernatural twists for one and it's overall lot shorter and a lot more grounded and contained, taking place in the space of one night when three friends gather together for one last sleepover like they used to when they were kids: before the campy cowboy fanatic Colby leaves for college, the moody and totally-straight-believe-me-bro Austin makes a hasty escape from the small town to find a place in the wider world and Jesse, our POV character, stays behind while his two best friends leave. In real life time, this is about an hour's worth of playing/reading. Over the course of the evening the three young men reminisce about their shared pasts, reveal truths about themselves, find their differences more gaping than ever, and ultimately Jesse yearns to ditch the town himself - though with whom, is decided by the player's dialogue and interaction decisions throughout the evening⁴. Oh and there's also going to be sex. Sleepover Simulator is decidedly NSFW and it appears rather suddenly, so there's that to keep in mind.

Again, this is just the kind of thing I'm a sucker for - three young queers talking about their feelings and learning about themselves in a low-stakes, personal setting. I am but a fly on the wall, peeking into an establishing moment in the lives of fictional people and the drama that bubbles under, and it pulls me in. The writing is good - it's all simple and earnest dialogue with little pretension or grandeur which fits the minimal premise perfectly, and even if each character feels a little dramatically exaggerated at first they grow to feel real as the evening progresses. The presentation itself is minimal too with blocky low-poly character models, broad-strokes backgrounds and no music, and this has been used really well in a manner that creates a strong mood and emphasises the characters at the centre of it all. A key aspect in creating that extra layer of depth is the voice acting, as all three characters are fully voiced for the entire game. None of the actors are professional (that I know of?) but they all do a good job, further underlining the differences between the three guys through vocal tones and mannerisms in a manner that sells their attitudes. I admit at first it almost took me out of the game a little, but then as everything progressed I couldn't imagine not having the voices accompany me through the (micro-scale) twists and turns of the evening. The writing and voice acting together enrich these characters and give them the kind of depth you need to learn to care about them.

Sleepover Simulator didn't quite trigger the same post-completion obsession that Circles and Northern Lights did, but I think that's fine. Not everything needs to be an experience to live through, and I actually quite appreciate that this was a smaller, less vivid experience. It's something I could easily see myself play through from time to time, like re-reading a good comic and taking about the same amount of time, and during its short duration it did a good job getting me hooked and interested in the lives of the three friends and their shared history. And it's made me want to already go and find out something else in its vein - I've been bitten by the visual novel bug and I keep being fed well by my sudden stumbles into the realm.

This summer has been very up and down for me, but some of the biggest comforts I've had during the season have been in the company of fictional furry queers living entirely different lives than I do.

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#flint plays games #furry