About Arilin and this site

Arilin Thorferra has been involved with the furry and macrophile community since the 1990s, writing dozens of short stories and several novels. Ms. Thorferra also created the Giants’ Club, a gathering space designed for those of varying sizes to mingle with some degree of safety. She’s been credited/blamed with bringing multiple people into the community over the years. Later, she became one of the earliest faculty hires at Mensura College. While she had little formal training in teaching, the combination of her experience as a writer and as a community organizer made her attractive to the college’s founders as they assembled this unique educational facility.

Illustration by Ransom

Professor Thorferra came to Mensura from Stravell, a country on another world, through an unfortunate techno-magical accident. Like our world, hers also features races of different sizes, albeit only two: the Rha, cat-people like herself who are giants on our scale, and Liliren, mouse-people of a similar scale to us. Unlike our world, where Mensura College became the first locale mixing the different sizes in centuries, in Stravell the races always co-existed. The co-existence is largely peaceful, but Rha society is afflicted by a level of systemic prejudice against Liliren based on size. Ms. Thorferra suffered from those prejudices herself, but finding herself as one of the few giants in Mensura—before the founding of the college—led her to a quick shifting of attitudes.

There are rumors on campus about Professor Thorferra having a somewhat darker past, particularly regarding her behavior in Stravell. While she grew up poorly socialized and manifesting sociopathic tendencies, particularly toward Liliren, those days are well behind her. She now enjoys a reputation as both a gracious host and a well-liked professor.

It is, however, strongly advised that you turn your papers in on time.

Arilin’s stories are usually furry (e.g., with anthropomorphic animal characters) and usually with giants. The giants range the gamut from gentle to apocalyptic, and her subjects include science fiction, fantasy, horror, and romance. Some of her work first appeared in MegaMorphics, a macrophile-themed APA. Amateur Press Association, a kind of fanzine. Others first appeared on Arilin’s Fur Affinity archive.

Arilin’s author first introduced the character of Arilin on FurryMUCK, a text-based roleplaying game—sort of the ancestor of MMORPGs—in the early 1990s. This was just after Arilin appeared as the villain in the story “Cheating at Solitaire”. Over years of role play, Arilin became more complicated and less villainous; her (wildly inconsistent) story appearances reflect this journey.

The now-canonical version of Arilin appears in the Mensura setting, along with some other roleplaying “alts”—other original characters—from her author. Like Arilin, their Mensura versions frequently contradict both their original roleplaying incarnations and past story appearances; if you find two stories on this site where the same character changes personality a little—or backstory a lot—that’s probably why.

And, yes, there’s an awkwardness in using a pen name shared by a major character who appears in several stories. By the time it became clear Arilin had become a major recurring character, though, it was too late. So it goes.

If you’re here, you most likely know what “furry” and “macrophile” both mean, but if you wandered in accidentally, here’s the quick summary.

  • Macrophilia is faux Latin for “an attraction to, or paraphilia involving, giants”; a macrophile is someone who experiences that attraction. “Macrophile” was, as far as I can tell, coined by furries, although it’s widely used by fans of human giants now, too.
  • Furry entered popular culture some years back as “people who dress up in animal costumes, possibly to have sex,” but the term is broader than that. “Furries” are both animal people, like Disney’s Robin Hood, and fans of such animal people in stories and art. While a sizable minority of furries do dress up in “fursuits” (costumes), it’s still a minority.

Neither furries nor giants are inherently fetishistic, and not all the stories on this website are overtly explicit or kinky. (Arilin occasionally jokes that her true fetish is character development.) The gallery page has a “Show/Hide NSFW” toggle on it, and more explicit stories have content warnings. In practice, though, treat the whole site as inappropriate for work, children, and prudes.