Weird that you think that a bunch of 13 year olds being ok with something means OP is lying about not being ok with it…
Holy shit, is Gen Z the new Millennials? Gen Z is commonly agreed to be the generation born between roughly 1995 and 2012, meaning that the oldest of them would be 30.
Existential crisis aside, my real point is that I’ve been around the internet a long time - long enough to have seen the start of hate against furries - and I’d like to take your second part and play with it in that context because I’ve heard it all before somewhere.
For the record, I don’t “hate” furries, I won’t stop talking to someone because they’re a furry, but if you make it impossible for me to look past it, we’re probably not gonna get along.
So let’s start with the good faith interpretation, as furry is a subculture/hobby, so we’ll replace it with something similar:
For the record, I don’t “hate” Marvel fans, I won’t stop talking to someone because they’re a Marvel fan, but if you make it impossible for me to look past it, we’re probably not gonna get along.
Kind of a weird statement, as there’re weird people who take it too far in any fandom, whether that’s Marvel, trains, anime, furries, or whatever else, but not the weirdest thing to say by any means. But, knowing the history of the internet in this regard, let’s take your statement and change it to represent what the anti-furry sentiment actually is:
For the record, I don’t “hate” gay people, I won’t stop talking to someone because they’re gay, but if you make it impossible for me to look past it, we’re probably not gonna get along.
That’s right, the furry hatred was thinly veiled bigotry all along. There’s a reason that they used “furfag” in the old days. It’s been a longstanding thing for hating furries to be “cool” because it was an easy way for bigots to hate minorities openly. Furries have major minority populations in the fandom (I think like twice the size compared to the world? Probably even higher), and so hating on furries was an easy way to hate on minorities - especially LGBT people as the fandom is commonly connected to the LGBT community in the cultural zeitgeist. So when they said that the OP isn’t going to win, I believe it’s in relation to that history - especially the whole “it’s cool to hate furries” thing that still seems to pop up amongst young kids even today.
burntbacon@discuss.tchncs.de 3 days ago
Dude, that was a 4chan thing. It wasn’t about “bigotry.” Everything had fag added to the end of it. Newfag, oldfag, furfag, gamerfag… hell, I even saw gayfag thrown around a few times, though I’m pretty sure those were fully ironic since only a dolt wouldn’t realize the idiocy of it.
EldritchFeminity@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 days ago
And 4chan was filled with bigots. It was a major part of the alt-right pipeline that put America where it is today. Just because it was used ironically doesn’t mean that it wasn’t also used seriously. There’s a whole essay on the furry hate that revolves more around the damage done by that one CSI episode (and I’m pretty sure another similar show a few years later) that characterized furries as sexual deviants than anything else, but the use of the 4chan furfag moniker was also a part of it, and that spread outside of 4chan.
4chan for its part, though, really proved the saying “say something ironically enough times and eventually you start saying it unironically.” Although that’s less related to the furry thing and more to the whole edgy teenagers posting racist jokes growing up to scream about Jewish space lasers creating climate change.