Furry Fandom and Drama General

[Lion]

so funny how quick they’ll go from cheering and supporting him because he’s able to make industry wages to hating him because he drew a generic dog girl in a “racist” shirt

 

[⋖ cørdion ⋗]

Life is such a shit show. To be able to amass a collection of things that you like, things that make you genuinely happy... I can't talk shit about this dude. We have to do what we must to go as far as we can in life, and if that's enjoying furry artwork (which, for the most part, doesn't harm anyone, and can be shared and enjoyed be other people), who am I to complain? It's a weird thing to collect, weird thing to participate in, but shit, he has the money and he knows what makes him happy. I hope I'll find that (collection-related happiness) in the future.

To be fair, it's not far away from most "healthy, wealthy, socialable popufursuiters" who print out $800 linen cloth scrolls of their artwork to put on the wall when their lawyer friends come passing by. At least this nutjob got a passion, something most furries do not. Outside pronouns, political views (fuck capitalism) and sexuality, they got nothing.

 

[ExplosiveTeddybear]

so funny how quick they’ll go from cheering and supporting him because he’s able to make industry wages to hating him because he drew a generic dog girl in a “racist” shirt

The people supporting him for charging more than professional concept artists do for industry work for private bad anatomy commissions are the same who support him for badly/not apologising for using a racist slogan. The rest just go "Oh, this guy again. Guess he needs his cocaine fix for the coming 6 months".

 

[HEXbox Carousel]

Nope, you're thinking about someone else. This is why people are mad at Miles.

jesus. mountains out of molehills. sure i'm not a trump fan either but it's such a minor thing.

 

[emo fag]

Damn white people and their *shuffles deck*... living in rural areas

Bonus monetary demand for being brown;

 

[Just Another Furgag Alog]

Damn white people and their *shuffles deck*... living in rural areas
View attachment 1831693

Bonus monetary demand for being brown;
View attachment 1831696

Did you even read before calling him brown? He's a native. I get where you're coming from with the "damn white people and their *shuffles deck*" memeing because it fucking fits a lot, but natives absolutely have the right for this kind of complaining. Land was stolen. That's objective truth.

I'm not defending his ebegging or that shit, just native isn't brown, and natives have valid reasons to make that complaint.

 

[emo fag]

Did you even read before calling him brown? He's a native. I get where you're coming from with the "damn white people and their *shuffles deck*" memeing because it fucking fits a lot, but natives absolutely have the right for this kind of complaining. Land was stolen. That's objective truth.

I'm not defending his ebegging or that shit, just native isn't brown, and natives have valid reasons to make that complaint.

I understand that natives have suffered, but that doesn't mean you have to be shitty to random people filming a cute video?? I know it might be hard to believe, but not every white person who lives in a rural area is some evil fascist millionaire. Also I only referred to him as brown because I've seen natives and other minorities call themselves that .

 

[Mikoyan]

I hadn't heard that one before. Got a link I could read more about it?

This was the article. It developed on the forums after that, which are gone now. Basically it turned out to be hosting some kind of fucky proxy or even prototype site for the Moldovans, not just the redirect they mention there. It went away fast once Yak got caught, though.

 

[totse]

Either way I think the complaint is kind of dumb on a practical level. They can go get a place in the middle of nowhere too if they want. Probably cheaper, depending.

 

[TFT-A9]

Either way I think the complaint is kind of dumb on a practical level. They can go get a place in the middle of nowhere too if they want. Probably cheaper, depending.

They claim they want to live in rural areas, but they're lying or have no idea what they really want. They wouldn't know what to do with themselves in a rural setting.

 

[totse]

Just wanted to share this old writeup I found on Usenet about the descent of the furry fandom into degeneracy. It has a nicely kiwi sort of tone to it and is the earliest thing I've seen that touches on the largely unspoken phenomenon of furries being jailhouse gay.

On Friday, October 24, 2003 at 3:58:57 PM UTC-7, MHirtes wrote:
Just to keep you goons from eating up CYD's bandwidth:
Journey To The Center Of Mark Merlino
Author: Computolio
When one looks at the tremendous mess furries have made of not only
themselves but a small chunk of Western culture (to say nothing of the
internet), the idea of this disaster having occurred even partially by
design is difficult to fathom. The "furry sub-culture" is one of the
great unsung geek tragedies of the Western world, utterly destroying,
ruining and ass-raping everything it touches.
After all, nobody sane could have actually WANTED TO CREATE a safe haven
for people such as Dennis Falk, Sarah Wheeler, Kinberliegh Ann Keister,
Bart "Nekobe" Bakovets, Karl "Xydexx" Jorgensen, every single
alt.lifestyle.furry poster and whoever the fuck Kajima Frostfang is to
get together, right? A "community" for people who absolutely should
never get together under any circumstances lest they form a relatively
small but destructive cancer on the civilized world? Wrong.

Pictured: Mark Merlino and Rod O"Riley at one of their conventions,
fawning over the monstrosity that lies before them.
Many furries (especially the disgruntled ones) will tell you frankly
that Mark Merlino was the man who started the ball rolling, the man who
helped to nudge the furry scene around the U-bend into where it is
today. He's been with furrydumb for a long time; reportedly he boasts of
having helped create the modern furry culture. We might just give him
that credit. Before he came along, what we now call furry was scarcely
more than just some sort of primordial gaggle of geeks made up of the
fannish fallout of both Richard Adams and Robert Crumb. Back then they
called the object of their interest "funny animals". Relatively
speaking, these people were fucking saints compared with their modern
equivalents. After all, there was no internet in sight and that tiny,
tiny population of proto-furries could still be called a legitimate part
of geekdom - rather then the fetish-culture-in-denial we have to deal
with today. When Merlino met up with this group, he helped to change it
forever, molding it to fit his own image.
Although today he enjoys a moderately high standing within the group,
Merlino is not really the leader of the furries. The phenomenon is as
decentralized as the internet itself. No, Merlino is a boss, a kingpin,
a Mr. X. Like a videogame and possibly also action movie villain, he
sits behind the scenes, pulling strings and manipulating his inner
circle of end-level bosses close friends and lovers to effect some loose
control over a vast army of palette-swapped street punks furry
lifestylers.This is the story of his rise to power, as best we can
decipher it from approximately 10,583 useless Usnet posts and anyone
who'll tell us anything.
We've heard two slightly different versions of the beginning of the
story. Both say that he was part of (in fact the cofounder of) a general
animation fanclub in Texas. Both say he eventually parted with it and
went on to do his own thing. They differ as to why. One account says
that he was basically kicked from the club for being gay, another says
he quit when the club decided to place a bigger emphasis on Japanese
animation. It is said that his goal was to create "a gay-friendly
fandom", but in reality it's become more of an embarrassment for the gay
community.
Mark Merlino arrived on the furry scene (even though the term "furry"
had yet to be coined) during the early 1980s and started a couple of
fanzines. That in itself wasn't anything particularly special, but
within the space of a few short years he made a shocking and prophetic
move: the recruiting drive. He tried to "recruit" new people into the
"fandom" in a way that fitted him and his own interests. Of course, the
idea of recruiting anyone into a fandom is absurd, but that was only the
beginning of what Merlino had in mind. The purpose of these recruitment
packages was to attempt to get more people into the sexual side of
furrydumb, something which almost didn't exist back then. He wanted to
lure closeted fetishists out with handouts of early furry porn and the
promise of more( 1). This was done at various sci-fi gatherings; if (or
when) he was kicked out he'd just move on to the next. "Artwork" for
these handouts came from the pioneering furry "artists" of the era,
either Ken Sample or Dave Bryant. Other stuff (mostly non-pornographic,
but pressure was applied to take it as far as possible) was also
commissioned by Merlino and friends. Some of it went towards the
development of a furry-themed tabletop RPG called "Other Suns", which
Merlino and his friends worked on from time to time. (An overview of one
of it's descendants is here .) It featured convoluted rules lifted from
a few other games plus a space travel system with classic Derek Smart
levels of brokenness and needless complexity.

The "skilltaire" was some alien weasel cat thing Merlino came up with
for his own role-playing sessions or something.
Sometime during this time, Merlino bought a home in Southern California,
which he dubbed the "Prancing Skilltaire". It was often called a "fan
commune" and served as the home base for at least one early furry BBS
and several early gatherings. The new subculture Merlino was promoting
needed to increase in size or at least look bigger, and our best guess
is that conventions were seen as the best way to do this. After all,
they had always been an important part of Merlino's agenda. The first
"furry party" was said to have been organized by him, held at WesterCon
'86 in Sacramento, California. After a few of these, he expanded into
full-blown conventions with the beginning of "ConFurence" in 1989.
By the early 1990s, MUDs were beginning to take off among BBS and early
campus internet users. Furrydumb (and Merlino with it) snapped the idea
up as soon as it was practical; role-playing has seemingly always been a
cornerstone of the furry existence. When it emerged, FurryMUCK would
later take up most of the slack after the BBS-hosted stuff fell into
disuse. The people who set it up are another commune, and perhaps
another story. It may not have been the first or even the raunchiest,
but FurryMUCK survives like a monolith today, withstanding over a decade
of furry typefucking, sad hack attacks from frustrated banned users, and
a short-lived FBI investigation over "ageplay" (read: pedophilic
roleplaying( 2). Merlino would later use it as some sort of springboard
to infamy - offering, at one point, free admission to his furry
conventions to anyone who held an account on the game.
ConFurence continued on, with each gathering possessing a strong veneer
of civility and yet getting raunchier than the last. ConFurence 8 was
seen as the breaking point; after that many within furrydumb started
taking issue with it's organizers. Accounts of behavior that would
become all too familiar in a few short years accompanied a
larger-than-usual assortment of nasty rumors. In an " open letter ", an
attendee listed some of the various incidents he witnessed. Nowadays
most would by default associate furry conventions with all sorts of TO
TEH EXTREAM debauchery; the letter describes nothing that's really new.
In fact, most of the complaints are over things that seem tame, but some
of it stands out. Most notably, the infamous jizz-covered elevator wall(
3) that someone accidentally put his hand in, and that fact that people
were showing up who had no real idea what the gathering was about, who
were there "only for the parties and sex".
That quote is pivotal, in case you haven't noticed. Merlino, his
boyfriend Rod O' Riley and other co-conspirators are said to have
advertised the convention very heavily through alternate-lifestyle
venues. They were eager to attract new people into a group that was less
and less focused on talking animals and more and more focused on drawing
together the SO LONELY. The newly reinvented subculture drew in more and
more people who were shaky on the whole contact with other human beings
thing, people in desperate need of companionship. A very desperate many
got it at the cost of their heterosexuality; others who weren't
heterosexual to begin with usually also got it at the cost of their
dignity. The single-minded nature of furrydumb embraced anything,
anything at all as long as it had something to do with talking animals
and discouraged almost everything else unless it could be warped to suit
furry needs.
In a rare instance of furry self-regulation, Merlino himself would be
ousted from control of ConFurence in a wave of fan-political
dramaqueenery. The fallout from the Confurence 8 convention disaster
prompted many furries to attempt to clean up their act. Of course, since
any deviation from the furry party line of taking the concept of
tolerance and making a total fuckshit mockery of it is looked upon with
scorn, this created a small firestorm that helped ignite the much bigger
but even more pointless "Burned Fur" debacle. Merlino was pressured out
of heading up the convention, and allowed someone else to run it. (He
still helped fund it until it was recently disbanded.) Other conventions
sprang up in the aftermath, trying to woo people on either side of the
debate.
As one might expect, there's been more than a few disturbing rumors
floating around about the more personal aspects of Merlino's life. The
nastiest one is that he sat around Lion King MUCKs under one of his
various pseudonyms TROLLING FOR FRICKEN ANUS, as they say. Early teenage
anus, we might add. We're not sure whether or not anything really came
of it, nor are we entirely sure as to whether this info is accurate or
not. All we know is that it came from at least two different sources and
is as eerily believable as anything else we've heard about the man.
The bitch of it all is that in the end Mark Merlino got more or less
exactly what he wanted. Furrydumb is a clusterfuck of epic proportions
with an emphasis on providing the lonely/bi-desperate/confused/insane
furry fetishist with the possibility of a quick fuck( 4) and wank
material by the metric shitload. Merlino or his immediate partners
didn't really do it all on their own; the retard invasion would have
readily happened without them. However, he did see the course that
furrydumb was taking and did everything he could to nudge it farther on
in that direction. From the beginning, he was quite down with the idea
of thousands of weirdos just like him forming a land of make-believe
where they could feel like they were important, a place where they could
stop pretending that their emotional development hadn't stopped
somewhere before the onset of adolescence, a place where all inhibitions
disappeared, a place where the "hyooman" world was wrong and the "furs"
were right. Good for him and his buddies, but it's unbelievably annoying
for the rest of us, ultimately damaging for it's participants and a
whole new dimension of sickening to watch.
1. If ANYONE has any copies of any text portions of these so-called
"recruitment packets", and other similar material Merlino is said to
have produced, PLEASE let us know.
2. Let me describe briefly what happened:
On both Tapestries and FurryMUCK, "ageplay" areas had been in existence
for quite a while where the CubCentral crowd was allowed to flourish.
This roleplaying of pedophilic acts, coupled with the fact that most
people cybering on these games are underage anyway, became the basis for
a very short-lived FBI inquiry. The Feds didn't really do anything -
there wasn't much they could do. They were only following the online
activities of one person and never got very far before giving up. They
did call a lot of people, however, and anyone running a game that was
even tangentially furry-related got quite a scare. There's more of
course, but like many things that come up in these footnotes, the
subject needs to be fleshed out in a future article on furry
roleplaying.
3. We refer the doubters who continue to insist that the substance in
question was mayo to this newsgroup post :"There was a situation in an
elevator Saturday evening, when I was taking some important guests back
to my room for business. We were discussing said business in the
elevator on our way up to the room when one of the gentlement with me
leaned back against the wall, as most people do, when he found his side
and pants covered in SEMEN!"
4. That is, of course, provided that his/her/it's standards are
especially low.

 

[Cuscuta]

Just wanted to share this old writeup I found on Usenet about the descent of the furry fandom into degeneracy. It has a nicely kiwi sort of tone to it and is the earliest thing I've seen that touches on the largely unspoken phenomenon of furries being jailhouse gay.

Regardless of how much this is true or not, calling the furry fandom "one of the great unsung geek tragedies of the Western world" is incredibly overly dramatic, and very Mad at the Internet.

I'm also not really onboard with the premise that the entire state of the modern furry subculture can be pinned on just one guy. Things like this are an emergent phenomena, and I would bet it would have turned out similar eventually without Merlino's involvement.

 

[TFT-A9]

Merlino was absolutely a piece of shit. Didn't do it alone, but was likely the biggest contributor to the problem. I strongly suspect the Burned Furs thing may have been poison-pilled by Merlino flunkies infiltrating and posing as completely unreasonable assholes, but there are plenty of perfectly sincere completely unreasonable assholes in the fandom anyway, so who knows.

 

[Dahmer]

Just wanted to share this old writeup I found on Usenet about the descent of the furry fandom into degeneracy. It has a nicely kiwi sort of tone to it and is the earliest thing I've seen that touches on the largely unspoken phenomenon of furries being jailhouse gay.

The whole idea of the fandom being some sweet wholesome sin free utopia that was corrupted by one man is hilarious. Every fandom has horny degenerates in it, the furry fandom is no different.

I also find it funny this was apparently reposted by MHirtes, who is himself a giant fucking degenerate with a toe ring fetish.

 

[Corn Flakes]

The whole idea of the fandom being some sweet wholesome sin free utopia that was corrupted by one man is hilarious. Every fandom has horny degenerates in it, the furry fandom is no different.

Yeah, people claiming that furries were clean and wholesome at any point are full of shit. Every fandom has their perverts and degenerates, otherwise we wouldn't have the Pixiv art horrors thread. It's just most fandoms either attempt to ignore, distance themselves from, or sweep their seedy underbelly under the rug.

From what I gathered, though, Merlino did help differentiate furries from other fandoms in one way: he helped a lot in developing the internal culture that allowed the fetishists to thrust themselves front and center as the face of the community. He wasn't the sole culprit (not by far), but a lot of the older furries I've checked with do drop his name as someone who had a high enough profile "back in the day" to get shit done. So while he didn't "corrupt" the fandom, he definitely had a hand in not only airing out the furries' cum-encrusted laundry, but also making that a tradition.

 

[The Ultimate Ramotith]

The whole idea of the fandom being some sweet wholesome sin free utopia that was corrupted by one man is hilarious. Every fandom has horny degenerates in it, the furry fandom is no different.

Yeah, people claiming that furries were clean and wholesome at any point are full of shit. Every fandom has their perverts and degenerates, otherwise we wouldn't have the Pixiv art horrors thread. It's just most fandoms either attempt to ignore, distance themselves from, or sweep their seedy underbelly under the rug.

Uh... the post did not say tha they were a wholesome utopia, but rather tha they were saints only compared to the modern fandom.

 

[Corn Flakes]

Uh... the post did not say tha they were a wholesome utopia, but rather tha they were saints only compared to the modern fandom.

I was replying to @Dahmer, not to the post he quoted. There are dumbasses these days who think there was some point in time furries were actually "clean".

 

[Dahmer]

Yeah, people claiming that furries were clean and wholesome at any point are full of shit. Every fandom has their perverts and degenerates, otherwise we wouldn't have the Pixiv art horrors thread. It's just most fandoms either attempt to ignore, distance themselves from, or sweep their seedy underbelly under the rug.

From what I gathered, though, Merlino did help differentiate furries from other fandoms in one way: he helped a lot in developing the internal culture that allowed the fetishists to thrust themselves front and center as the face of the community. He wasn't the sole culprit (not by far), but a lot of the older furries I've checked with do drop his name as someone who had a high enough profile "back in the day" to get shit done. So while he didn't "corrupt" the fandom, he definitely had a hand in not only airing out the furries' cum-encrusted laundry, but also making that a tradition.

I'd argue it's because the fandom has gotten so large that the porn and weird shit just tends to be front and center. We're not talking about something super narrow like people thinking that Onceler from The Lorax is hot. Because the fandom is so large and manages to incorporate or absorb lesser fandoms (such as The Lion King or Animaniacs), then there's just a much larger pool of degeneracy to pull from.

People who romanticize the fandom as ever being clean are people who were involved in the fandom in the 90s when it was just a bunch of weirdos drawing Looney Tunes fanart before it evolved into the fursona driven cum den it is now.

Though I wouldn't say this is something that only applies to furries. The internet as a whole has grown in scope and scale and finding any porn that scratches your weird fucking itch is much more easily accessible now than any other point of internet history.

 

[Corn Flakes]

I'd argue it's because the fandom has gotten so large that the porn and weird shit just tends to be front and center. We're not talking about something super narrow like people thinking that Onceler from The Lorax is hot. Because the fandom is so large and manages to incorporate or absorb lesser fandoms (such as The Lion King or Animaniacs), then there's just a much larger pool of degeneracy to pull from.

People who romanticize the fandom as ever being clean are people who were involved in the fandom in the 90s when it was just a bunch of weirdos drawing Looney Tunes fanart before it evolved into the fursona driven cum den it is now.

Though I wouldn't say this is something that only applies to furries. The internet as a whole has grown in scope and scale and finding any porn that scratches your weird fucking itch is much more easily accessible now than any other point of internet history.

I don't know, man. I would argue that the weebs are a much larger fandom than furries but even though randomly finding hentai is a bit of a meme, you can actually avoid most of it if you avoid the -boorus and whatnot, as opposed to furry places where you will find NSFW and SFW content hosted side by side.

The anime/manga fandom is an actual fandom. The people there are mostly fans of complete creative works, with characters, plots and resolutions, and while there are OCs and fan characters they aren't required and they aren't immediately assumed to be your avatar. The furry fandom isn't so clear cut. Yes, there's a sizable "fan" element to the furry fandom (that is, people who are in it because they're fans of a specific piece of work), Zootopia-fans-turned-furry being the most recent crop, but you can see the difference very clearly in one of the big rites of passage for a new furfag: they're all encouraged to create a fursona.

I think I've said this before, actually. Furries aren't a fandom. They're a lifestyle based on aesthetics. While some are in it because they enjoy stories featuring anthropomorphic characters, most are in it just because it appeals to their tastes/kinks. Since they don't have anything to actually base their interests on (there are no fandom-wide stories and/or characters to make fanart/fanfic of), they just turn inwards for inspiration. And what do they have inside? A lot of social awkwardness and pent-up sexual frustration, which gets overcompensated with their "in-character" behavior being obnoxiously "social" (even though they don't know how to be social) and 300% horny on main. You see it all the time with people who start out looking like normies, joking about how they're making a fursona but they would never get into certain fetishes... and then one or two years later they're neck-deep in nipplevore.

Shit, I need more coffee. I don't know how to finish this.

 

[TFT-A9]

I was replying to @Dahmer, not to the post he quoted. There are dumbasses these days who think there was some point in time furries were actually "clean".

It's really not about being clean, because fuck knows if you look much you find seedy underbellies on a lot of fandoms, but holy fucking christ on a cracker furries turned the filth to 11 and ripped the knob off. I wonder what would have happened if Merlino had been part of just about any other fandom. Trekkies turn from awkward nerds into alien sex fiends, maybe?