You’re either rather misinformed as to what a furry is, or else need to reevaluate your definition of ‘tolerant’.
Reading that Wiki article is informative, but a little naive.
The reason movements like burned fur came up is because the original definition of furry has been co-opted by the furverts. Like it or not, “Furry” is now the catchall phrase for “Freaks who like to pretend their Troo Souls are really anatomically impossible animals, because they’re special and unique and not at all pathetic, smelly, socially inacceptable geeks”.
Look at Alfador, Doug Winger, FoxWolfie Galen, the guy who writes Kit ‘n’ Kay Boodle. Thalesin, 2 the “Ranting Gryphon”, Cataroo, Gene Catlowe. Hell, just take a browse through the VCL archives, and look up “Tyrannosaurus Sex”.
Sure, there are people who draw anthropomorphic animals for the challenge, and because they love animals and art. Sure there’s people who really, really enjoy cartoons about talking animals who crack wise.
But for every one of them, there’s another dozen like the list I’ve just furnished you with. People who like these things because they either believe that they’re not really human, and think they are a special, trooly magjickal being who is above all other human interactions, or because they want to have sex with them. Or both.
And it’s not just “Sex” as most people see it. Furries seem to have the corner on depraved - Vore, macrophilia, balloon/plushie sex, shtting dcknipples. It’s not enough that they’re kinky and like having sex while dressed up in a mascot costume. It has to be the most depraved sex, the dirtiest, the freakiest fetishes.
That’s why furries are almost universally looked down upon. The few who are “normal” have been well outweighed by the many who are stone cold Freaks, and seem to be out-n-proud of it.
Frankly, this is a lousy reason to give up on the fight. It’s far from a lost cause for furry fandom to maintain the original definition - and it’ll be a long time before it is. As long as those of us who got into it before mainstream attention went to the 'verts alone - and there are a lot of us - are still around, the battle won’t be ceded.
But the original fans seem to be a dying minority. Even the bastion of “We’re not Furverts”, Burnedfur themselves, disbanded a long time ago.
I’ve seen more journals and sites dedicated to “Furry is a sexual identity/lifestyle” than I ever have “Furry is a fandom”. And I’ve been reading up on this stuff for a couple of years now (NB: I’m not a furry, or a “funny animal fan”. I enjoy looking into subcultures, all sides of them). It may be that simple fans are less strident about it than the furverts are, they simply enjoy their animal cartoons and art without banging on about it all over the interweb - which lends more credence to the statement that the term “furry” as an identity now denotes the 'verts more than the fans.
I think part of the issue is that fans don’t necessarily try to self-identify. They like cartoon or anthropomorphic animals, and they share that interest with others who do the same. But the furverts are looking for an identity to detract themselves from the mainstream. So they’ve latched onto “furry” with their greasy, yiff-stained mits and walk around trumpeting to the ages about how they’re special and better than normal people because they’re furry uber alles.
Once upon a time, “furry” meant someone who liked cartoon/anthropomorphised animals. But the language has evolved, in part because of the shameless self-promotion of those like 2 and Alfador and the rest, and the term in general is now geared more towards describing the freaks of the fandom. And with more and more of the original fans subsiding into hiding because of it, over time it is solely going to come to describe the freaks and the 'verts and nothing else.
As a player, I want to be part of a satisfying story and enhance the experience of the other people involved. The characters I play have goals they want to achieve. If those goals conflict with the goals of others, my charactes want to win.
My character in the LARP was an annoying jester (everybody called me Obnoxious, to the point most people did not know my character’s actual name) with a religious mania. Whatever the goal of the session was didn’t matter. His goal was to publicly insult the Drow, and to proseltyze his faith that the emperor of the nation he belonged to was an incarnation of the Celestial Emperor who made the world.
In a pen and paper D&d campaign with a Viking theme, I’m playing a cleric. His goal is to do whatever the gods tell him. After a black sword appeared in the air during his prayers, he grasped it. It did massive damage to his arm, and he found himself unable to put it down. He asked if the gods wanted him to fall upon the sword. When the DM did not respond with a sign, the cleric fell on the sword without hesitation. The DM had actually been in the middle of chewing something, and listening to a noise in the parking lot and had been about to speak the will of the gods. As my character was not supposed to kill himself, the DM had the sword move itself out of the way. More recently, the chieftan of a giant clan was giving another character enchanted mead. When considering things to do so we could leave the giants’ hall, I jokingly suggested ‘we could kill them all.’ I then realized that to the cleric dying in glorious battle with faithless, lying giants was winning. However, it would completely screw things up, and get everybody else’s character killed. As a player, I cared about these things. My character would not. It took me a minute to find a reason why the cleric wouldn’t do it. While the gods would be happy about killing giants and dying in battle, he had made promises to them and others he had not been able to keep- to rescue some kidnapped villagers, to build a temple etc.
There is a huge difference between the character wanting to win and the player being a rules lawyer.
When you’re in character, you should act like your character would. But to leap out of character so you can plead your case for 30 minutes (or longer) with a Storyteller as to why they should have some fairly obscure discipline so they can win their fight is out of line. It’s rude to the other players who are basically frozen in the fight, it takes up game time and makes things a whole lot less fun for everyone.
MET even says that the Storyteller is the final word, what they say goes. If they decide to ignore something in one of the books that is up to them. My example is an extreme case though, with somewhat incompetent ST’s. It’s also one of the very major reasons I stopped going to that game on a regular basis. I would go on special occasions or if I wanted to see people I hadn’t seen in a bit, but very rarely would I go to actually play because most of the time I sat on the sidelines while people argued the books.
That’s why I loved Purgatory. They set things down as to how they were run, the ST’s made up your sheets* and then they played the game. The fights went fairly fast and no one got left standing from for an hour while someone argued the finer points of a discipline. It was very smoothly run for a 50+ group of people LARPing. The other game was horrid and we had at most 15 people!
*You gave a background, clan, generation and name and they did the rest but you had a say in the final sheet. If you didn’t like an ability or something you could ask for something different.