While it's on my mind lately, I wanted to take a moment to document these four encounters with furries I've been through. I enjoy playing video games socially and will usually find some community to join any new multiplayer game. This was especially true during the pandemic lockdowns where locals or gatherings were shut down as well, which is when most of these happened. I'm very open to playing with (almost) anyone, but I've only had a session with four furries my entire time doing this since they're not my first choice for an opponent/partner. While I'm not going to say it is dissuading me from doing so in the future, I don't think I'd ever forget any. What genuinely surprises me is how other people seem to be in the same boat as myself: they'll tolerate furries, but still don't like them.
The first instance I wanted to bring up was some random furry who asked to join my active group for a game. I've played with one of the people already in the group before, and he sent me a private message asking if we should really allow this furry in, but I said he's definitely harmless. As it turned out, the furry hit every stereotype about furries you can imagine. He had the "furry on the internet" voice, only talked about his furry boyfriend, and when somebody said the word "not," the furry alluded to dog penises. The guy I knew sent me another message saying "thanks a lot" after these comments then invited the furry to elaborate more by feigning ignorance, and I quickly joined in. "What's funny about the word 'not?'" "I want to know, I love funny things." "Me too! Can you explain the joke?" The furry legitimately caught none of the sarcasm and coyly said he didn't want to explain further, saying something along the lines of "if you know, you'd get it." He was generally this dense the rest of the session, as he also didn't catch the repeated allusions to burning furries both other people kept making.
A second instance was a drawing game online, which I also briefly joined a community for to play a few rounds. Even without friends, you still get some novel moments. One session had a large amount of people playing, around 10. One person was clearly an artist given the speed and quality of his drawings. I can also draw quickly, so he reached out to me after the first few rounds to do more art games in the future. A few days later, he showed me a message he received from one of the players in that session. This player made a massive lore dump leading up to the revelation that he recently decided to be a furry, and asked him if he would be willing to draw his proposed fursona aftering seeing his drawings in the art game. For free, of course. The specifics of the fursona were something along the lines of a bara-styled wolf. My new acquaintance asked what he should do and I told him to draw a crude rendition of the fursona praying in a church. He took my suggestion and made a lazy drawing of a bara wolf fursona being crucified. The furry never got back to him.
My favorite encounter was on a server for playing Mario Party over emulator netplay. Mario Party has always been a guilty pleasure of mine, and for those who aren't aware, it's pretty much a board game/minigame collection designed to destroy friendships. I didn't know this until long after the fact, but one of the players was, once again, a furry. I completely shrugged off the furry's utterances during the game as failed attempts at shock humor, but he constantly made sexual moans regardless of context and would make offhand sexual comments about the non-human characters in the game when they were onscreen. What's important to note is one of the things you can do is specifically target a player to steal their resources in the game. One of the players had a personal rule, which was he targets people at random unless they steal from him first. When he had the chance to steal, nobody had recently stolen from him, so he used a random number generator which prompted him to steal from the player in last place: the furry. The furry got extremely upset and asked why the player didn't target me, who was winning at the time, and we both told the furry that was his rule: he picks at random.
This completely set the furry off, who then kept insulting the player's intelligence for stealing from the person in last place. Also playing with us was, surprise surprise, the furry's boyfriend, and he clearly thought the furry was overreacting but had to play mediator to avoid upsetting him further. I forget the context leading up to it, but the furry eventually made a statement that caused both the player who stole from him and myself to say "cope, seethe, mald" at the same time unprompted. It was a magical moment. I never even met this person before in my entire life. This caused the furry to make one last angry comment before going silent for the rest of the game out of spite. And I know it was out of spite because the boyfriend tried to get the furry to say something, and the furry just told him to shut up. The last thing the furry said was something like "everyone lost because of you" to the player because I wound up winning that round by a very close margin. We went our separate ways when the game ended, no rematch.
I wound up encountering both the player and the boyfriend a week or so later in another match. I forget who first, but my second encounter with the player who stole from the furry was unremarkable beyond us having a laugh about the furry's behavior and enjoying another game. I mostly regret not reaching out to him, since he was a great guy. However, I ran into the boyfriend and he shared the aftermath of the game which, frankly, still shocks me to this day. The furry boyfriend, in a fit of rage, removed all things Mario Party from his belongings, like the ROMs and the emulator from his computer. Not only that, but the furry sold his Nintendo Switch console along with the game in it. I assume it was because he only bought a Switch to play Mario Party with the boyfriend. While the Switch was the furry's, the game in it was actually the boyfriend's, according to him.
I hold on to sincere hope the boyfriend was exaggerating to complain about the furry, but, and this ties into my fourth encounter with a furry (which is actually my first), it isn't too far-fetched. I have the perception that furries are very, very salty when it comes to video games because I once played with a furry in a competitive shooter, and I used the in-game taunt function literally one time after killing the furry in-game simply because we were communicating with each other (as any sane person would do). This furry had a ridiculous, over-the-top reaction and blocked me on all possible platforms even though we weren't in contact with one another, us knowing of each other through two degrees of separation. I only found out because somebody who knew this furry asked me what I did to him. I concluded it was me using an in-game taunt which set him off since I couldn't think of any interaction which could be considered negative in any capacity and I recalled him complaining about taunting in the past which I glossed over until I thought about it.
Although few of these are fairly recent, I've adjusted myself to treat playing with furries like a balancing act. Can I tolerate them long enough for them to do something hilariously stupid or unforgettably embarrassing? Although the answer has invariably been "yes," my perception remains "no" and I do my best to avoid them. I can't say why I agreed to play with these furries for these encounters you can literally count on one hand. But what makes them stand out to me is that they're uniquely bad. I've played with players who decide to share their stupidity, but I've only heard one or two which stick with me. I've played with players who are absurdly salty, but the ones I can remember only stand out because of how much they brought down the mood. Furries seem to stand out because when they're stupid, it's in such a special, distinct way that normal, random people can't bite their tongue. And when they start raging, it's in such a pathetic, hilarious way that it's more believeable it's some 1,000IQ comedy skit character acting rather than a person who's genuinely this petty. I both don't ever want to play with a furry again and can't wait until it happens, because it's been a cherished memory of sheer insanity every single time.
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