I’m so tired of the furry community and the twisted, backwards culture it breeds.
See, the furry community is largely composed of outliers. In many cases, with how vaguely “furry” is defined, the only thing they have in common at all is that they’re outliers. And the one thing a large group of miscellaneous outliers has in common is that they want to mind their own business and not feel oppressed for whatever thing makes them outliers.
That’s all fine and dandy. Until you put a bunch of teenaged outliers with little else in common in a box and let it fester for a couple decades.
The result has been that furry has an unspoken golden rule of tolerance. Universal tolerance. Tolerance for everything and everything. You can be weird. You can be socially inept. You can have a gross or creepy fetish and make it most of your public identity. You can lie, cheat, and decieve. You can be irritating. You can be a conspiracy nut. You can be whatever you want.
And a great many furries will tolerate it all. Because, you see, the one thing you cannot be is intolerant. Of anything. Not just of identity or minority, but of particular actions or behaviors, no matter how directly or indirectly harmful to everyone else. The one exception is overt unprompted meanness, which can be classified as “trolling”. More on that later.
It’s hard to pick out specific examples, because this is more a social phenomenon than an individual one, and I don’t think many people realize they’re acting in the name of tolerance. But the culture reflects it if you back off a little, and sometimes you can catch individual glimpses of it if you squint a bit.
Take, for example, the original conversation that led to this recent Pommy kerfluffle. The only two people in the channel left with lingering distaste over Mel’s apparent abrasiveness were Pommy and Sundance.
The two self-identifying furries involved in the conversation.
The problem isn’t that Mel is abrasive, or that she’s a girl, or that she’s in charge. The problem is that she actively refused to tolerate someone’s behavior. That’s all. Those same two people have had trouble criticizing the behavior that annoyed her in the first place, because it came in the form of dumb jokes—and dumb jokes aren’t a form of intolerance, making them impossible to feel bothered about. Mel is expected to put up with anything and everything, because that’s just what you do, and most furries don’t have enough social exposure for it to be much of a burden.
I’m willing to bet InlineMantine identifies as a furry, too, based solely on his criticizing Mel for being direct (i.e., intolerant) and giving other skeezy behavior a free pass.
This is the other side of the coin from my real primary annoyance with the state of the furry fandom: it’s obsessed with appearance. Substance means nothing if it doesn’t look good. These are the two reasons FA gets an infinite free pass: criticizing it means not tolerating its flaws, and that is unacceptable; and it appears as though the staff are working hard, so that’s good enough.
Dumb jokes and ironic snark and other forms of noise or irritation don’t appear to be directly causing problems, therefore they must not be. Mel was the first one who appeared to directly confront anyone, therefore she must be the problem.
Ah, but then, how could furries be mean to Mel? That would mean not tolerating her, either.
And this is where the rumormongering comes in. Passing around rumors out of sight isn’t a direct form of confrontation, so it doesn’t count as intolerance—but it harms her appearance, which is the most brutal punishment in the world of furry. Now that there’s something fundamentally wrong with her, as suggested by rumor, it’s okay not to tolerate her. This is the loophole, and the big ironic wedge in the center of the furry community: altering someone’s perceived appearance doesn’t count as intolerance, and if someone appears to deserve poor treatment, the gloves come off. (You may observe that meanness is oft accompanied by accusations that the target is a “troll”—precisely the same thing, excusing the intolerance by altering the target’s appearance.) So it’s okay for any amount of cruelty to befall Mel, because she appears to deserve it. It’s okay for FA to permaban me for my grayhatting shenanigans, because I made FA look bad.
This is hypocritical and nonsensical, yes. Where’s the line between what can be tolerated and what “appears” to earn punishment? I have no idea. But a whole lot of bizarre furry behavior I encounter can be explained as either a deep obsession with appearances (slash lack of perspective), or an expectation of universal tolerance.
Perhaps the worst part is how ripe this is for abuse by anyone with sociopathic tendencies: it’s absolutely fine to make people feel as bad as you like, as long as it doesn’t look like you’re trying to. Thus there are some real scumbags hiding in the furry community and sowing misery wherever they please, and anyone who calls them on it is deemed in the wrong.
It’s juvenile, shallow, and unfortunately infects the majority of the fandom. I still don’t base any expectations of a person on self-identification as a furry, but every time I see a new correlation I sigh a little.
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fucking furries
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