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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   25596 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 4, 2025

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During the Furry Wars of the 00s it was a common understanding that people who were really obsessed with hating furries were probably furries themselves, or at least felt the call of the fur in some way.

...What were the furry wars?

Starting in 2000-2004, the furry fandom became visible to people outside of the fandom to a much greater degree than before. This also coincided with a lot of social media sites with a large focus on pointing out and sneering at people they thought were weird, with the most famous being SomethingAwful.

This went about as well as a house on fire.

I don't know much about the SA-internal side of things, outside of there just being several purges of people suspected of being furs from their forums (tbf, SA purges people from the forums as a fundraising effort, or just because Lowtax thought it was funny). But from the furry side, it was pretty common for fairly small furry spaces to just randomly get swarmed by twenty trolls out of the blue.

Some of this was tongue-in-cheek or self-deprecating. But a lot of it was just point-and-look-and-the-weirdos, and sometimes surprisingly mainstream. There's a Daily Show skit called To Boldly Gay where furries were a good part of the punchline, and I'm not going to link it because it didn't censor the smut sketch it was making fun of, and that was cable television. CSI's Fur and Loathing is probably the most infamous.

(Sexual politics of the time, given the broad gay-or-gay-adjacent bits of the fandom, probably had an impact, too.)

One of the joking-not-joking responses is that while the media reporting was probably just the standard Jerry Springer stuff, the trolls, at least, sure seemed to spend a lot of time and attention scrolling through art or writing that supposedly made them violently ill. And just like the then-prominent gay marriage debate proposed that the people most strongly opposed to gay marriage were really closeted, after a few high profile (if not very-well-proven) examples, a lot of furries took some cases of user overlap between CrushYiffDestroy (a furry-self-critical forum) and the SomethingAwful forums as evidence that many of others were really using the movement to summon their own army litigate disagreements in a more favorable environment under an alt.

Congratulations on not being a furry (I also, don't know what he's talking about, what're the odds there's a Kiwifarms thread about it though lol)

It doesn't seem like there is such a thread on the Kiwi Farms. I think the topic is sufficiently old (from the 00s apparently) that nobody has explored it yet.

Furries remain something that I can't, quite, accept that they exist.

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