So I'm gonna tell you the story of a fandom that has been ridiculed for decades.
That fandom, having constantly been made fun of, having been equated with dog fuckers and everything, and forever scarred from that CSI episode (Fur and Damnation, if you need a reminder), have grown to be extremely defensive to criticism. They will stick together for the most part because that's what they evolved as a fandom to do when shit was thrown to them.
That fandom, always bracing for people out to get them, suddenly finds itself in a situation where many of its own are now accused of doing stuff so horrifying it defeats sanity. This fandom, having never had to deal with anything close to what has unfolded before their eyes, have no idea how to react. The accusations and evidence is the stuff of nightmares, something so insane it defies belief. Late-night /B/ shit.
Is it any surprise that the default reaction of so many of the people in this fandom is to huddle together and defend the accused?
I'm not defending them, they're fucking exceptional, but when you take into account everything that's been thrown at us over the years, it becomes a foregone conclusion that this is how any fandom would react to something like that. Can you blame us? You will because that's how you roll but we don't want to believe this insanity was happening behind our backs, that it went undetected for so long and that it happened under our noses.
And you might laugh at the people who are acting like this is gonna be bad for our fandom's image, because this is on a completely other level than what we're used to and it's particularly sensitive because it happens to involve actual animals. This is the worst case scenario, and after everything I just wrote, I ask again: Can you blame the people who are worried about the fandom's reputation after something like this?
That shit could've happened in any other fandom but it happens to be coming out of ours this time and that's what makes it worse to us as a whole. Equating all of us to this flow of subhuman garbage is the same as equating (and I'm not invoking godwin's law lightly here) all of germany to nazis and their atrocities because they're german and thus genocidal white supremacists. And we know that the moment this hits the news, not if but when, this shit'll stick to us longer than Fur and Damnation ever did.
I love the stuff you guys do, there's horrible people everywhere and documenting and ridiculing them is the lord's work, whatever the lord is to you, but there's nothing constructive to equating an entire fandom to the acts of people who had no business being in it. You will do it anyway, I can't stop you, but knock it off with the "LINE THEM UP AND SHOOT THEM ALL ASDKFASDFJASJF" autistic shrieking, it's not helping anyone and it only makes all of us on this very site look unhinged to outside viewers.
