I’m pretty sure it’s not just a stereotype. I really haven’t seen a more overly sensitive, soap opera-inclined group than furries online. Well, there’s Jhonen Vasquez and Sonic fans, but that can be explained by the fact that most of them are 14 years old. A good percentage of furries, though, are adults, who still manage to throw tantrums that would make a 3-year-old blush. Yeah, I know the majority are probably perfectly reasonable folks and so on, but why do they stick out so much anyway? Furries on deviantART seem to be a constantly writhing mass of “SACREDWOLF667 SAID SHADOWFOX YOU SAID I WAS A POSER” AND “YOU STOLE MY CHARACTER/POSE/COLOURING!” Endless hissy fits on userpages, carried over into the forums and so on. You haven’t lived until you’ve pointed out to a screaming furry in the forums that it’s against the rules to call out other users and besides, the rest of the internet doesn’t care about their petty dramas only to have them summon all their friends to spam up your page with capital-letter comments and links to yiff sites. It’s also kind of shocking how old they are, that they’re still doing this sort of thing. They don’t read the terms of service, they don’t read gallery descriptions and when they get banned their friends spam the admins. Like the Vasquez and Sonic fans a lot of this can be attributed to age since dA users tend to be fairly young, but a disproportionate number of adults seem to do it too. Threatening to leave every other week (often because their porn, specifically banned in the ToS, was removed), disabling comments after one negative or even just constructive comment, posting “IF YOU’RE NOT GOING TO LAVISH PRAISE ON EVERYTHING I DO THEN PISS OFF AND STOP PERSECUTING ME” journals, it’s all there. I’m mystified. Why?
IMHO, it’s simply because either a) Wizards First Rule: People are stupid . b)Some people just have way too much time on thier hands and can only fill it with pointless fit throwing. See, they need keep their emotions occupied because if they thought about the state of the world it would turn them into drooling psychopaths w/ machetes. 
Or both
Many of these kinds of subcultures are full of people who are dissatisfied with the real world and would like to create a better world for themselves.
Often the very things causing this dissatisfaction are social in nature. Its well documented that a few things- like not being able to read facial expressions and other unspoken signals- show up often in what we call “socially malajusted geeks”. Social skills have to be aquired just like language skills or athletic skills. When that doesn’t happen, it can make life hard in many ways. And it can make constructing a fantasy where these problem’s don’t occur seem like an appealing process. I’m not saying all furries are socially malajusted, but for many that is a factor.
The pissy happens because fantasy worlds are by nature private. And people can get very, very, very resentful when other people come in and tell them how things should work in their fantasy world. They lose the control they’ve been craving. They lose what they wanted in the first place- a world where social problems don’t come to haunt them. They feel attacked on the inside, in the place they thought was a safe space. And they will never truly see eye to eye with the other person because you can’t share fully what a fantasy is to you.
This got me thinking, the most pissy group I’ve ever incountered are Drag Queens.
Another supposedly pissy group are fashion Models. Maybe being pissy goes with liking to dress up.
I’m too scared to Google. What is a “yiff” site?
I just read the title and thought ‘Well, wouldn’t you be?’
Here you go. It’s suggestive or sometimes explicit sexual furry cartoons.
Anthropomorphic porn.
You asked.
I think even sven nailed a lot of it. Another aspect is the creativity – the misunderstood artist. Most furries fancy themselves unique artists who have been unfairly maligned by the rest of the world because nobody understand them or their art. Within their furry social sphere everything is well and good because they are associating with like-minded individuals who share the same views. When any of those views clash, and in particular whenever one’s creativity (especially one who is well established in the realm) is infringed upon by someone else they can get pretty high and mighty about having their uniqueness and individuality copied by another member. Furries are, after all, largely defined by the characters they create for themselves, and any attempt to water that down by plagiarism or derision will certainly be met with a pretty impressive shitstorm.
Wiki is your friend…well not really your friend in this case, but yiff is Furry sex
Most of these furries are shitty artists. Look at some of their amateur art sometimes, most of it is too horrible for words.
Their fan fiction is even worse.
Another factor (although I doubt as important as those already mentioned) is that they’re the downtrodden minority of the Internet. Even we comic book geeks look down on them.
–Cliffy
I think it can be said of any subgroup of people (not chosen by artistic skill), that their art and literature is generally rubbish.
Geeks, Greeks, Greek Geeks are all subgroups of people and because people in general tend to be rubbish at art, the subgroups also tend to show the same artistic skill characteristics.
Only if you pick a subgroup in such a way to favour artistic skill would this be different.
I’ve never met a mentally stable furry. Perhaps they exist, but all of the furries I’ve encountered were highly reactionary, lacking in social skills, and thrived on emo/drama. Futhermore, a lot of the more serious ones seemed to love to accuse anyone who makes fun of them of nazism. This is a small, but very vocal group. On some forums and community groups, people will deliberately talk shit about furries in order to get flame wars started.
Possibly because the mentally stable furries have enough sense not to admit to being a furry in public.
Right. Oh, there are crazy people on the internet? :rolleyes: Someone went fishing with batty bait in Loony Lake.
I know what people are on about, but it’s perception. There’s a contingent of furries that get all the attention, because insanity is attention-getting, which may be part of why they do it. They’re just a small part of the overall subculture, as far as I know.
I suspect it’s more than that. Does anyone know about the history of furryism? Did it really exist before the internet? I don’t doubt that there were folks with sexual fetishes revolving around dressing in animal costumes, but furries tend to specifically disclaim that their identity is sexual in origin. (Personally, I have more respect for the folks with the sexual fetish than the ones who draw annoying cartoons and have cutesy cybersex out in public.) Were there communities of folks who went around claiming to be anthropomorphic foxes and whatnot before the internet allowed this ad hoc community to blossom?
I dunno. I simply don’t really believe in the idea of a furry identity. Essentially, these people are furries because they found a group of people on the internet to have cybersex with and to give them an identity. Thus it’s simply not going to be a very stable group of people. A group made out of lonely people banding together is not going to contain many people with normal social skills.
I’d feel sorry for them if they weren’t so annoying.
I don’t know if there was a community or anything but in the movie Crumb, R. Crumb says that when he was young he had a sexual fixation on cartoon characters (IIRC, he wanted to uck Bugs Bunny). I guess that would show that some kind of anthropomorphic fetish existed before the internets but I don’t know if they ever found each other. That’s the kind of think people probably would have kept to themselves, I would think.
Sig Line!
The thing about the Internet is that it makes it rediculously easy for social misfits to band together to form a community that reaffirms one another’s proclivities. The idea that one is a social misfit is easy to forget when you surround yourself with them.