On Painting Everyone with the Same Furry Brush

When I first clambered onto the internet, I used the name “Phovos the Raptor” as my online persona. The name, to me at least, sounded unique and cool and slightly badass, and was fitting for a 16 year old girl pretending to be a 16 year old boy who spent most of her time writing bad Bionicle fan fiction and being overly apologetic towards Bohrok and Rahkshi. In hindsight, it’s not a great name at all, but I still occasionally use the name Phovos if my preferred usernames Medic and Retvik aren’t available. These days though, I tend to leave the “Raptor” bit off.

Of course, being a naive 16 year old, back then, I never realised that “Phovos the Raptor” was the exact sort of name a Furry would use. In fact, I wasn’t really aware of what Furries were for a long time, as far as I was concerned, anthropomorphic animals were just, eh, a thing. I mean, what’s wrong with a humanoid wolf? People love werewolves and vampires and stuff, right? Why was a Furry any different?

These days, I still don’t get it, if I’m honest. Would I call myself a furry? Probably not, because I don’t have a ‘fursona’, a specific anthropomorphic form that represents me. I have created characters, lots of them, but they are characters that appear in stories rather than being my ideal form. But I know plenty of both furries and furry-haters.

I later found out that some of the hate towards furries was possibly because of all the sex involved. Because there’s a lot of furry porn out there. Do a search for furry art and you’ll be inundated with tits and bits. But really, a lot of the idea that all furries are sexual miscreants comes from misconceptions in media. All these furry conventions are just full of people having sex and things like that! Apparently. There’s always some retard who might fuck up the nearby hotel where the convention’s at, but that’s people being bastards than a specifically furry thing. Sports fans are also known to becoming destructive, especially when their teams lose, but we don’t say that all sports fans should die.

And sure, there’s a lot of furry porn but there’s also a lot of porn in general. Rule 34 exists, after all. Really, sexy images of humanoid dogs doesn’t seem nearly as bad as sexy images of kids’ cartoon show characters.

I’ve also heard a lot of horribly negative stuff said about furries, about how they all want to have sex with animals and how they recruit children into doing… things. Frankly though, those two things – having sex with animals and recruiting children – are universally said about literally every group of people who are hated by another group of people. And it’s always a tiny percentage of any group that actually perform these things. Like any group, be it gamers, sports fans, TV show fans, religious groups, whatever, the majority of people are normal and boring and aren’t interested in zoophilia.

My point is, the hatred of furries is no different from any other sort of generic hatred. They’re hated because they’re different and maybe because they do things in ways people disapprove of, while also being considered obnoxious and infectious and apparently trying to spread their ways and force everyone to be like them. You can legitimately take a lot of these arguments and throw them at anyone you don’t like.

If anything, it’s just another group that it’s ‘cool’ to hate because a small percentage of the group are obnoxious pricks. But because of common misconceptions, all these groups get painted with the same furry brush. Because clearly, if one member of a group is a bastard, then EVERYONE in said group is a bastard. Or at least, that’s how most people seem to think these days.

Why can’t we all just be friends?

Editor’s note: I wrote this a really long time ago, but I feel my point still stands. Why can’t we just be nice to each other?