I haven’t talked about furry drama in some time for quite a few reasons. The most important one is that well, furry drama at this point is ultra repetitive. Nothing new or funny happens with furries anymore, or even shocking. It’s always furries going after each other for sharing political views that your coworkers share IRL openly and trying to dig up any and all dirt on them to ensure they are broke, demoralized, and isolated. Sometimes it’s even furries going after each over over masks and shit.

Once in a while though something funny happens. This is the latest furry convention happening, in which the no bad tactics rule comes into play. This is a furry convention that is about to hit the fan in a few months, if it happens. Then to add to that, this is a furry convention run by those who have no idea what optics even are. This is Free Fur All, or what happens when those outside the Cathedral, with zero PR skills of their own, try to run a furry convention.

Why the furries lost their culture war

To understand why furries are melting down so hard, we need to take a look at the fandom itself from the point of a former member. Hey, there’s a reason I’m a former member.

The last year and a half has been quite interesting in my life, but namely it’s where several things happened. Perhaps the most relevant thing that happened was that I finally decided I’m no longer going to identify as a furry or for the most part even adjacent communities. There’s a good reason for this and it’s that I’ve began to realize the furry fandom is a lost, broken cause. Actually, I knew this for quite a while but I still had a tiny, tiny bit of hope.

When I started this blog in 2018, the furry fandom was towards the late stage of its transformation from nerd reject refuge to just another generic left-wing political seething community. I decided to preemptively get off Twitter due to this climate, among other reasons and for a good reason; I sensed something bad was coming. Twitter blocklists were extremely common. People began eating bans from FurAffinity (a website that previously was hard to get banned from). Dogpatch Press and the like got huge on Twitter for being the attack dog for furry Twitter, before they put him down for not going after as many people and dogpiled on him. In a way that wasn’t surprising at all, getting involved in political/culture war fights online will always end with you being thrown under the bus by people who praised you a week ago. Adding fuel to the fire is the fact that nobody remotely “normal” wants to be associated with the furry fandom. Even other nerd communities bully furries early and often.

This led to an important distinction between furries and other movements such as GamerGate, Comicsgate, Sad Puppies, and others that had enough impact to rattle the cage of the establishment. Those had nerds supporting them, the furries had none. This happened for several reasons. The first one is because quite frankly, furry culture fucking sucks. Furry culture revolves around porn, fad species, and boring ass slice of life art. The only thing fascinating is that you can see the escapism and depression in all of it. Why else would you draw yourself playing Xbox with your homies unless you had no homies to play Xbox with? It’s sad seeing the sheer amount of wasted talent in the fandom though, if only they worked on game projects instead. Then there’s the behavior of furries that makes them a target online. Furries didn’t just one day get bullied by everyone online for absolutely no reason whatsoever. They built up their reputation from years and years worth of insane and comical behavior. This led to furries being mocked and their situation being mocked even harder, because quite frankly nobody who would have stood up to bat for them cared because they’re furries.

Then of course there’s the elephant in the room and that is furries are passive creatures. We all know that online they will shit-talk you and want to violently kill you IRL, but for every furry who would kill you over a disagreement online there are a bunch who will either kill themselves or pretend to kill themselves after you pissed them off online. Or in most cases they’ll just give you an awkward stare at you when they see you having fun and seethe about it on Twitter.com. The less shit talking ones will tend to cry or roll over to keep their imaginary illusion of status in a community of nerds.

The aftermath of the war

It’s 2021 and several things have happened since then, and looking back I was naive to think that posting on a blog/forum/Telegram chat would change anything. The first thing that’s happened is that now that the left-wing furries won that fandom war with marginally more resistance than the Taliban faced in Afghanistan, it’s their club now. They have all sorts of pull on the fandom, and anyone who wants to deal with this demographic has to get in line with what the big name Twitter furry celebrities preach. Every Twitter furry craves the callout posts and the block chaining to find wrongthinkers, and they will never forget your name because they have nothing else going on in their lives except maybe their soulless McDonalds or desk job. This has spread to them forcing furries to bend over and apologize for drawing the wrong art, supporting the wrong person in office, or playing the wrong video games. Take it from experience, that won’t save you at all. It might look like it will, in the same way that it might look like Stop-Leak fixed your car. Then that radiator blows up and you’re in a hole money wise, and you need your car to get you to your wage cage desk job.

The end result is stagnation in furry art (even more than there already was), because you have no idea if what you draw will make someone want to fuck your life over. I get it, furry artists are oversensitive and all, which is also why these campaigns are so effective. It’s not like the furry fandom is a religion yet thankfully, as long as you’re not breaking laws I don’t see why you shouldn’t be able to draw anything. But if you are a furry artist and your entire career/fanbase is within the fandom and you’re turbo perma-canceled, well I can see why some people decide to burn their old identity and presumably start on some account where nobody knows who they are. I’m sure a few furry artists who “left the web” did this but that could also be optimism.

Then there’s the other elephant in the room and that is the demographic makeup of the fandom. From 2017-present day (present time), increasing numbers of furries have joined in on the new transgender bandwagon as pasty white dudes became “heckin valid trans cuties” and crusty LGBT+ types joined the fandom for quick sex and porn. The transgender community has many controversies of its own and many parallels (there’s even a whole “it’s not a fetish” mantra there from the talking heads in the community as others say “yeah it’s my fetish so what”). But the big parallels are this: both communities revolve around escaping your identity/body and creating a new one, both have an extremely low entry barrier, mentioning either online starts a flamewar, and there’s definitely manga that targets both crowds (Beastars for furries, Boku Girl for the transgender community, etc.).

I won’t go into detail about this issue or my thoughts on the most vocal group on the internet, but there are three things that are relevant with the community crossover. The first is that the transgender community is not only almost always left-leaning, but they have a tendency to enforce groupthink on its members harder than the furry fandom does. This can be seen clearly in outlying parts of the transgender community, or how privately some of them will take shots at the community at large. The second is that they have a persecution complex that both helps them get shielded by the governments/big tech, and makes them the most trolled community in the west. This goes hand in hand with the belief that Trump or something is going to literally kill them when they lose some special protections or aren’t give any. They also almost always have extreme-left wing viewpoints, and being transgender means you’re pretty much locked into these viewpoints community wise.

The third (and most relevant) fact is that now that this group has pull in the furry fandom, they have a 100% track record of having the rest of the fandom bend over for their every whim. e621 in particular began censoring “dickgirl” and “cuntboy” tags, using shit like “gynomorph” and “andromorph”. Furry conventions began kicking out anyone who misgendered someone, and putting up “gender neutral bathroom” signs over the hotel bathrooms. Nobody wants to lose users based on a vocal minority that has plenty of enablers.

The other groups as well filtering into the fandom (who happen to be all-in on identity politics and just the “me but animal” aspects) are the same way but to different extents. It’s guaranteed that they will identify as trans/non-binary and have at least 20 disabilities. They also share the same brand of extreme left-wing politics.

As a result of this crossover, real world issues have begun affecting the fandom more than in the past. Political events such as elections, manufactured scandals/protests, and especially that virus that totally did not come from China have begun affecting the fandom. If you stay silent about this HAPPENING of the day, you’re a racist and a part of the problem. Nothing is apolitical, everything is political you bigot. There is no escaping the message that is broadcast to you everywhere from sportsball games to Call of Duty’s main menu, you will chant the words or you will be a literal Nazi.

Perhaps the biggest singular event that has driven the fandom far past whatever point of no return it was at was the virus and lockdowns killing the furry con and meet scene. Furries were doing great jobs of attacking each other for announcing they were going to be hosting meets and threatening to ban people from conventions for going to meets and in some cases even borderline doxing people. Isn’t it funny how furries decided to act just like the imaginary trolls, turned up to 11?

Special Mention: The Zoosadism Saga

There is one key event during the 2017-21 timeframe that stands out with distinction however. Let’s talk about one of the most infamous furry fandom scandals of the 2010s, one that blew up way outside the fandom and manufactured media and into circles that normally could not give two shits about the furry fandom. This is a scandal that turned numerous furries into clout chasers pretending to care about morals all for e-fame online. This scandal would be known as the Zoosadism scandal of 2018, or what would happen if book Patrick Bateman was a furry and not schizophrenic. This was a giant scandal that literally everybody was talking about for a period of time, and would be influential in the leadup to the fandom’s current state.

So what was the Zoosadism saga and why was it so big? Well some zoophile infiltrated a different group of zoophiles that were abusing animals, and the interesting thing with zoophiles is that despite fucking dogs they want to tell the world how they are morally superior to those who say, eat animals as a trojan horse to acceptance. He gathered up tons of telegram chat logs and uploaded them with evidence that these people in the chats were abusing animals with a sexual element to it as well. He should have gone to the police but there were two problems with this: he’d probably get vanned too for being a zoophile himself, and police tend to not give a shit about animal sex cases. An article about a white, female, and popular furry banging her dog and getting away with it said it best:

The thing about bestiality is that nobody actually takes it seriously. Kind of like prison rape. Everyone thinks it’s just a big joke. And like prison rape, lawmakers have done fuckall to keep it under any sort of control. There’s a couple of reasons for this. First and foremost, the police have an impossible enough job keeping up with real crimes against actual people as it is. Second is that the very nature of the crime is too icky for people to even want to acknowledge. For example, it is believed that the Florida state legislature voted down a proposal to criminalize bestiality simply because it was considered too “out there” for discussion.

Initially nobody gave a shit because there isn’t any reason for someone to normally care about something so fucked up. But what made this post get taken seriously was the fact that one of the people involved in this chat was a furry named Kero the Wolf, a furry YouTube e-celeb. Suddenly furries began to take this seriously, and this overnight became the biggest drama online for a few weeks. I mean if a furry e-celeb was in an animal abuse ring, who else was?

Now anyone who has been online long enough remembers the story of Luka Magnotta, and knows that the internet hates nothing more than animal abusers. You can guess what happened next, and to say furries and the internet were pissed was an understatement. If the political saga was slow change, the Zoosadism saga was the darker and more fucked up version of the Rainfurrest saga in terms of infamy and discussion. Outside the fandom, people like Mister Metokur (back when he still talked about crazy shit online) made videos on it (this series is the best summary of the saga from someone with no horse in the race). Within the fandom though every single e-celeb wanted to get in on the hot scoops. Everyone’s favorite agricultural discussion board hosted the leaks and multiple threads there popped up discussing this.

The problem is, it’s impossible for there to be any discussion on something this demented anywhere without the threads devolving into page after page of angry posts mixed with dark humor about the situation. The farming society had to deal with shit of its own during this. There were posters being mocked for telling the zoophiles that they should die (giving them enough time to delete everything). There were attempts to find the names and addresses of those responsible, only to accidentally dox at least one random person who signed up to say that he was not the zoophile you were looking for. At one point they were trying to dox someone based on ice cream of all things. New users signed up to be super activists and help the effort out, only to out their real identity in the process and get mocked for it.

While the farming discussion board at the time had staff trying to wrangle the tards and make sure the discussion was only about true and honest facts, Twitter furries on the other hand saw it as a call to arms. Every single nobody who wanted to feel like they had a moral high ground over those disgusting zoophiles got in on this saga. There were of course the usual suspects, such as the nobody popufurs who needed retweets. There was a furry accused of being a pedophile and with a history of waging gayops on literally everybody, who decided to film himself turning over the evidence to his local police. Dogpatch of course wrote articles about it. In between of course there were wrong doxes and false allegations or debates on what crimes which person did. But the big thing is here for a time everyone wanted to overcorrect for the decade or two of scandals by instead trying to police them.

After the saga

In the end the lasting result of the Zoosadism saga was that the fandom at large, thanks to a new generation of younger Tumblr activists, decided to overcorrect and drive on the other side of the road. From what I can tell only one person actually got charged and imprisoned over this, and it just so happened that he was a pedophile molesting one of his family members. After all, like I said police don’t exactly care about zoophilia like they do molesting people. Others had cases dropped because I’m sure they all ran bleachbit on their PCs or something. Way to go furries, you totally locked them all up.

But here is the relevant part in all of this; this led to Twitter furries trying to wage gayops against anyone they didn’t like under the flag of morality. Before the Zoosadism scandal, there were definitely furries canceling each other over petty shit and they did a good job at ruining your reputation within their in-group. Just look at the political shitstorm I mentioned and it’s aftereffects. Or how about the saga of Lapfox/Renard Queenston? Thanks to being canceled he went from packing shows at furcons and having his music sampled in YTMPVS (before they’d get played at nerd cons), to being another nobody on the internet trying to crawl back into a fandom that has declared him a nobody. Sure of course there’s the fact he was crazy and groping his girlfriend in her sleep or something. But even with the Kevin Spacey defense and coming out as trans, Lapfox will never be as popular as they used to be. Their fanbase is only now a bunch of burnouts who want the good old days to come back…except they’re not.

But the end result of the Zoosadism scandal is it led the political types to truly pivot from solely canceling people for wrongthink, to canceling them for something that might be evidence you’ve committed a crime. Did you draw a character that has 4 legs? You want to fuck animals. Did you draw one that looks young? Oh shit, you might be a pedophile (though I know some InkBunny users actually are).

The first problem is that in this cultural witch hunt, lots of contextual questions need to be asked. The second problem is that you’re getting to the point where you have to face the uncomfortable reality of your own callouts and realize that the furry fandom is neither kosher nor halal. That’s when lots of uncomfortable facts come up, and facts that are only allowed to fly because years ago nobody in the fandom really gave a shit. Did you know that two of the old “10 most popular” FurAffinity artists drew porn for Softpaw, a “cub” magazine? Did you know that the founder of Bad Dragon wanted to “cast” models for dildos from animals, and founded a VPN service with infamous zoophile Douglas Spink? Did you know that Bad Dragon’s other founder was outed as a zoophile when a dolphin sex video had his name watermarked in it and went viral? Did you know that InkBunny probably stays up and barely hacked because it doesn’t have a bunch of boomers on there who voted for Trump and hate Biden or vaccines? Did you know in 2012 nearly 15% of furries said they were into zoophilia? The more you dig into the fandom, the more you learn uncomfortable truths you don’t want to year. Some of these are products of their time and culture, but others are hard facts that nobody will touch because they’re e-celebs.

Quite frankly, 7-10 years ago furries really gave far fewer shits about anything really. I’m not going to argue the long played out cub debate to its conclusion and try to psychoanalyze why someone would fap to so and so. But the fact of the matter is, numerous furries I ran into back in the day would jerk off to something considered “cub” without knowing or caring if it wasn’t openly fetishizing an age difference, diapers, or depicting the characters as blatantly underage. Before e621 implemented an automatic blacklist and locked anything tagged as cub out for those without an account, nobody paid attention to that tag on the site as much. Even more would do so if they were jerking off to cartoon styled ferals/quadruped characters, or popular characters branded as cub by some, or looking at Pixiv art where the moon runes talked about incest rape that wasn’t obvious. It’s a hard pill to swallow if you’re a furry, but chances are you’ve just coped with it by tuning out and pretending it simply doesn’t exist.

And then there’s the fact that furries would rather ignore the uncomfortable facts about their favorite e-celebs, and it’s easy to do when nobody whatsoever is pure. Case in point; Dragoneer famously banned Sonic porn for the most part from his site as they were canonically underage. Despite this he allowed Pokemon and Digimon that looked underage as fuck to be drawn still because they were “ageless”, even if the anime depicted them as underage. I guess in this case the famously mocked “5000 year old girl” excuse works on FurAffinity if ‘neer likes it. I’m sure if you draw enough trans flags and BLM signs your crimes will be forgiven as well. So while nothing has changed in that respect, furries are also a lot more aggressive than they used to be in the past. They want to find someone guilty of something, and preferably someone who has wrong opinions because otherwise it’s risky. Why risk it all when every furry has blackmail on each other? Just like how every celebrity made at least one race joke back when everybody on Comedy Central did, some furry drew porn when it was kosher to draw that style of porn.

So in the end, there is more of an incentive to cancel people for wrongthink as usual under the guise of doing the right thing. Maybe there is some incentive even for being popular too, some furry on Twitter tried to cancel Bad Dragon only for the archives to get delisted from IA because BD has much better opsec than most furries. I’m sure Inkbunny would have a giant DB dump or something too if they were a social media site harboring Trump voters like Parler and Gab were. Then again as the Vinny and James Gunn sagas showed this same thing applies to both types of celebs too. If you’re useful to the Cathedral, a cause, or your content is well liked, you can get away with shit that would sink a nobody and then some.

Free Fur All: Yiff Ops 2 (Normiecon Prestige Edition)

So this leads me to talk about the absolutely perfect storm for drama. Furries have been declaring for a year that no wrongthinkers are going to be allowed in the new LGBT++++ fandom. Anyone to the right of Lenin or Mao is going to get purged and mocked online and anyone remaining is on borrowed time minutes away from the cancellation and hit pieces. Then it became a giant fight between other furries arguing about what was okay to jack off to. Don’t think that others will stand up for you either, as I mentioned everyone else online hates furries.

But here’s the thing. You’re a furry and you’re too deeply invested in this fandom. Unfortunately you’re also right leaning (specifically the boomer AARP and Fox News version). You don’t want to find a new community, your friend circle or imaginary one is in the fandom. You’ve convinced yourself this fandom is the place to be, and you won’t give up. Nevermind the fact that your former friends in the fandom kept folding or turning on you when it was trendy, and have turned you into the top punching bag in the fandom on Twitter. People said they were your friend until you got involved in drama and then they dogpiled you, remember? So you find yourself in a tiny minority in the fandom and begin to take the “build your own” meme to heart. You know, the one Stonetoss made fun of a while back in that comic everyone reposts and edits in that sphere.

You decide to get your pals, and a canceled 2000s furry fandom celebrity who used to be “everywhere”, and start your own furry con. You don’t give a shit, anyone telling you that the fandom is fucking toast are just angsty blackpillers online. You’re going to wake up dancing like the people on Good Morning America do, sip your coffee and frozen breakfast meals, and get ready to launch the best con ever. A con run by the canceled furries for real American furries.

If you read the previous paragraphs and understand the furry fandom situation, you know why this is going to go as well as if Frank Hassle decided to show up to a furry convention without telling anyone. But this is the current situation in the furry fandom. See a few furries decided to start a new convention called “Free Fur All”, and it’s a fitting name. So far the mere thought of the wrong people holding a convention has resulted in Twitter flamewars, numerous gayops, and even Flayrah (a furry “news” site that shills random furry content like they’re NPR) writing a hit piece on it.

So let me explain what I know from my time around these furries, and from the public information about this that’s been posted. PeaceWolf was a furry convention staff member and the head of a local furry group, and fursuit maker. PeaceWolf said some unwoke boomer-right things on Twitter.com and since she didn’t back down and become another leftist she’s now being targeted hard. Twitter furries constantly on Twitter bitch about her and through a game of telephone (and amplifying non-woke tweets) have turned her into a turbo Neo-Nazi. Hey, that’s how it always happens these days. She then decides to pick the same hotel as the rival convention (in a different time of year) and then decides to get another unwoke furry onboard: 2 Gryphon.

Now of course picking 2 as an option for a furry convention is risky but also symbolic. See, 2 isn’t exactly fit for the (current year) fandom. He’s another washed up furry who’s entire gig was “I’m XYZ but also furry”, in this case a comedian who’d show up at shitty comedy clubs or open mic nights trying to one day make it. But he was a known name in the early furry fandom, to the point where he was around other 00s fandom celebs a lot. He got known for his mediocre brand of edgy, mid-2000s humor that was fairly popular on Comedy Central or forum posters at the time. I’d say famous, but he was more “famous” within the furry circle of the time by doing standups that started around furry fandom in-jokes before turning into edge. There’s a video of him in fact with two other furry celebs who would go on to have careers outside of the fandom online. One of them became a car YouTuber who earns 6 digit views every day and has gotten praise from other top channels in that niche. The other became an animator cranking away on his series that’s totally not Star Fox. What did 2 do? He kept all his eggs in one basket. He went to Anthrocon and a few other cons year after year until he was canceled for being unwoke by making suicide jokes straight out of forums in the mid 2010s.

On one hand there’s some symbolism to unpack here. He was one of the first scalps in the fandom’s woke age. He also had some fans from the old days who wanted to see him do just one more show at least, so of course they’ll be ready to bat for him. But on the other hand there are two things that are going to be issues for him. The first is his history of not being quite woke. The second and more important one is, 2 has one scandal that overshadows anything related to culture wars. See, 2 had a boyfriend who went by Toast the Rabbit. In 2016 (after a 2012ish police raid) he got thrown in jail for well, literally possessing CP. Now normally the proper response to this is to say that “I didn’t know he was downloading it” because quite frankly why would you? It seems common in the furry fandom for this to happen as well for some reason, a former friend of mine and a popufur on Twitter both had roommates arrested and electronics seized. 2 on the other hand raised suspicion when he claimed he was just downloading a zip file and couldn’t use a computer, a variation of a classic excuse. Now that’s a pretty bad way to defend yourself.

Now of course, that’s probably the biggest mistake these people made. I mean really? Of all the people to hitch yourself to, they hitched themselves to a person who had documented on several sites his “greatest hits”. Opticswise this isn’t that great. But from the other end of the spectrum there is the bare truth, and that is would optics really have mattered? This is where the infamous optics debate has come into play, and the core of that long-running debate is asking if it’s worth it to solely focus on looking good PR wise, or if it’s better to just ignore the mob and even telling them to suck it? Putting some washed up edgelord as a guest of honor wasn’t exactly a good idea.

I could see inviting over the host of a controversial website to a hacker convention or something or even having him do a video cast. I’m sure there are a lot of people who would want to figure out how the hell someone like Josh could host his website even after being censored by numerous hosts and targeted by many takedown campaigns, or maybe even hear his takes on financial censorship. Even if I don’t agree with his site or it’s userbase, I have to respect his ability to keep it up despite tons of threats and DDoS attacks. As risky as it is, there is some reward to be had with him being able to explain how he hosted it. As hated as he is, I’m sure someone would be fascinated by everything. There’s less of an incentive to invite a has-been washed up furry comedian who’s entire gimmick was the dated “I’m X but furry” setup since there’s nothing much to gain.

Do optics even matter? Actually they do. The meltdown phase.

But here’s where the optics thing really comes into play. The fear is that the wrong people are getting to have fun in their nerd club. Therefore they have to go, no matter how hard or dirty the tactics are. There’s plenty of instances of far-left leaning nerds using underhanded moves to get what they want. As one man in their sphere said; “There are no bad tactics, only bad targets”.

The Flayrah hit piece said the quiet part out loud, and explains why there is such a meltdown over this. See, PeaceWolf is now an exiled individual from the loud voices on Twitter who declare themselves the fandom and the con she was a part of. So the Flayrah article runs with the angle that it’s her great big revenge against her old con board. That might be part of it, but it’s also because lately there’s been a growing silent backlash to the vocal voices who declare themselves leaders of a decentralized fandom. So of course the bad people decided to build their own, and this is met with drama. The bad people are not allowed to have fun and must be ejected at all costs unless they maybe convert. It doesn’t help that there are top secret “furry con staff” chats out there, I’m sure one of them will wake up in a bad mood and leak shit and it’ll be a treat to read.

Maybe if 2 Gryphon wasn’t picked as a guest of honor and maybe someone else turbocanceled (there’s plenty in the 2021 fandom), there’d be less drama. Slightly less, because I’m sure every single woke furry has that hard disk with dirt on every furry they’ve met online or stories about them. Maybe if she picked a different hotel I’m sure it would go different, but for all we know she might have been on the hotels good side. If it’s a different part of the year they wouldn’t care because I know of a hotel that had 2 anime cons in different parts of the year around here. It doesn’t matter though, because the cancellation is in full effect. Case in point, here’s a quote from the Flayrah hit piece and Flayrah is far from the harshest site talking about this online:

It’s very possible that the new convention, should they start to see a failure in the numbers they hope to reach in their first year, may aim to damage the hotel’s attitude towards furry fandom on their way out. A sort of take-you-down-with-me approach; it wouldn’t be too unexpected of someone who has a reputation for spitefulness. So building up excellent hotel relations is very essential to protect Tails and Tornadoes from any fallout that results from any pending free-for-all.

One of the best ways to segregate Tails and Tornadoes from Free Fur All would be to sever ties with their shared charity of Safari’s Sanctuary, which PeaceWolf volunteers with, and to instead pick another local charity in 2022.

For the rest of those furry fans who would like to take action, this is the perfect opportunity for our fandom to make Tails and Tornadoes a stable and popular convention going into the post-pandemic era. You’d want to ensure that we treat the hotel staff like kings, and bring unbridled joy to them. This is especially important as the other convention, more aligned towards those with narcissistic tendencies, will likely look upon the staff as tools and treat them as such.

The more that Tails and Tornadoes flourishes without its “OG” leader, and the more her Free Fur All venture remains static in growth, the more she may have to confront the grave errors she made: in seeking vengeance, and in becoming controlled by the anger that social media can encourage.

They don’t want people to go to support the rival convention. But it gets better. There’s calls to action from journalists on Twitter, writing their own hit pieces on the con in a catty “pissed off teenage girl” manner. Hey wait, didn’t Alt-Furry get blasted for doing the same thing to CaliFur in 2017? Oh it’s okay here, because they’re on the right side of history. The calls to action consist of PeaceWolf being on the wrong podcasts and attacks on 2 (which was given), even though PeaceWolf was naive and probably going towards anyone who would let her on even if said people were batshit crazy.

I’m sure the hit piece has some spicy chatlogs of the people running this con being literal card-carrying Nazis with enough copies of Siege to earn hate crime charges…oh. Maybe they’re onto at least one valid point, the guys running this convention have no clue what optics are.

So since I’ve been in group chats with some of these people in the past, I can explain some of it. Some of them (especially PeaceWolf) are fucking naive. Believe it or not, there are still people running to the Raiders group in 2021 to “own” the left wing furries, not realizing that the Raiders group is a honeypot at this point that has chat leaks every 5 minutes, along with harboring actual zoophiles (including the founder). You know what, maybe optics do matter somewhat. While without context many of these accusations are nothing-burgers thrown around all the time online (the “racism” for one is literally someone falling for the Q psyop and being against Antifa, which is extremely common in my part of the USA), the furry raiders ties are what is absolutely stupid.

Let’s put the fact that they’re edgelords using Nazi symbols aside and the fact that their chats are full of fedposters and edgelords who got rejected from /pol/. Half the people in the raiders chats are moles trying to leak shit to Twitter for clout, it’s clearly fucking obvious this has been the case for the past 5 years, and yet furries pissed off at the fandom somehow continue to be in these groups. Multiple members have had credible zoophilia accusations and infamous figurehead Foxler has been charged with diddling minors. Along with the chat leaks and fedposters present in their chats, I’m not sure why anyone who knows a thing or two about optics would want to touch them. I’m not sure why the members outed with ties to them wouldn’t even try disavowing to save their ass. I’m guess some were naive as shit and assumed that anything canceled was good, without actually looking into why tying yourself to the raiders is like pinning a target on your back.

Put it this way, one of the people leaking shit about the raiders online isn’t even an Antifa member but a horny Nazi who wrote sexual Third Reich furry fanfiction. What does it say about them when furries on the far-right and far-left of the spectrum can agree on one thing for once? Shit, they’ve had at least three arrests already in their group. I know if you’re a furry and pissed off with the current state of the fandom you might find it attractive to run towards the Raiders so I’ll tell you my stance on it: don’t. Even if they’re just manchildren looking for an identity in an identityless world and going with the absolute dumbest one, the fact they’re harboring zoophiles and pedophiles outweighs any political aspects.

Speaking of Q, aside from being a good psyop Q was a great example of why you need to be careful who you identify with online. You could be a boomer/30something pissed off at the way shit is going and decide that this guy on imageboards is totally leaking out evidence Trump will win/save America. As it turns out, by identifying yourself as such you’ve also painted a target on your back for Twitter addicts and federal agents trying to stop the next domestic terrorist. I also heard word from the fringier parts of the web that Q was a pacifier to keep boomers from going postal like that guy who was bomb threatening congress the other week. So now this guy is being branded a racist because he was falling for hope porn in the same way your grandma falls for those Indian IRS/family member arrest scammers.

Then of course, there’s the unofficial group chat saga which has had fedposters (who got banned IIRC) and even a troll sending hate mail to a lurker taking Twitter screencaps using the username “Clyde Cash”. You know, the username a troll from the Chris-Chan saga used. It also was open to anyone without joining and was constantly spammed/screencapped by trolls. While it isn’t their group, it was used by those on Twitter as more ammo to take the con down. They took forever to disavow con chat openly and said “it’s not us” for some reason, I’m sure they hoped it would all go away and only now did they do it.

But who cares. The politically conscious 2021 furry fandom has declared war on Free Fur All and is hoping that via as much harassment as possible, it will go away. Twitter users are bragging about whining to hotel social media pages and threatening negative media coverage. At least one furry chat admin has threatened to ban anyone who goes from his groups. An unofficial chat is being used as evidence that the staff are killing trans people with words. The leader of said chat is the infamous Cani Lupine, who has allegedly bullycided trans people in real life (and not in Postal 2: Share the Pain). This means that of course he is the CEO of the convention. Either way the wrong people are holding a con and it had to go.

If you whine enough, you win

Fun fact: I had everything for this post written out…and then it turns out the hotel canceled them. Yep, that’s right. It turns out whining to the hotel is a tactic that just like Califur showed gets results and it didn’t help that they didn’t disavow from the guy falseflagging them until it was too late. The wokes then decided to brag about their scalp on Twitter, before saying that “connected parties” are going to be harassing their cons too which is pretty hilarious if you ask me. Just imagine their cons getting shut down with the same tactics they used on their enemies, or on Califur. Of course, I can’t advocate for something like that and especially not illegal activities like what has possibly happened and I’m not even being some catty girl in the mall about this either, in the end of this post I’ll show you a Prima Game Guide strategy to save yourself. Really, calling threats into hotels is highly illegal and if you’re found the charges can be big. Some mentally ill dude made thousands of bomb threats and got 10+ years in prison for it, only getting less for having autism.

But I know furry tactics and mark my words, this will happen. Imagine if people decided to start calling every single convention’s hotel and brought up the crazy shit that goes on in the hotel floor. It happened in CaliFur, it happened here, and it will happen again. They’re saying it’s not canceled yet, but I guarantee that every single hotel they find will be harassed and they’ll be blacklisted once that Google SEO kicks in. There are people who behind the keyboard feel there are no bad tactics, and I wouldn’t be shocked if at least one person was calling in threats with a voice changer or some shit. Maybe it’ll just be threats to protest it or something slightly more legal as that was implied by the letter.

My prediction (if it somehow happens)

The whole convention is a shitstorm brewing for sure and it hasn’t even begun yet. It’s clear that simply staying silent about people using your con’s name to possibly false flag it was a bad fucking idea. I’m sure they hoped the furries move onto the next drama storm, but if the con begins it’ll circle back to this. Here are my predictions on what will happen, if it happens. I’m wondering if the usual suspects are going to pull a rainfurrest and call every hotel in the area to get them canceled or carry out some 24 hour yiff op like that. But let’s think in a fantasy realm for a minute ask what would happen if the con somehow went on. Let’s just say they found a hotel that would let them host without giving a crap about hearing Trevor Moore in drag on the phone screaming about Nazis or some shit. Let’s just say this was allowed to happen by those in power to say, “make an example” like with a certain 2017 protest.

The first thing is that of course there are going to be the “bake the cake bigot” types showing up and this is inevitable. Everyone knows about that cake shop series of lawsuits that is pretty much harassment, and if I recall correctly, some of them used it on a furry artist to try to get them to draw trans flag content (which they were against). In this case there are going to be leftists showing up with full gear such as antifa badges and pride flag badges. Will they just ignore them or will someone have a meltdown and result in a Twitter popular incident?

The second prediction is that some infamous provocateurs will show up. I’m talking people like Foxler, Magnus Diridian (the Confederate flag fursuiter), or the old-school military cosplayers and police dog fursuiters who used to be at every con before the new brand of leftists began whining about cops. They’re infamous for being banned at numerous cons all at once. With how cons such as DenFur made a big deal of lying to Foxler saying he could come in only to kick him out on site for Twitter ass-pats, I’m sure one of them is looking for a place that hasn’t banned them. This will go viral on Twitter as proof that Free Fur All is harboring Nazis.

The third prediction of course is that the woke types will just decide to do the same thing they canceled their enemies for online and start harassing the hotel harder. We’re talking fake threats from Google Voice or SIP numbers or threats to beat the fuck out of everyone at the convention. Maybe it’ll be a repeat of RMFC on Twitter even, or a Califur style hotel harassment situation. I know the latter will definitely happen as the hotel caved after the usual suspects harassed the shit out of the hotel.

I know the people running this con mean well, but they really did not seem to look at the optics of being with too many “problem people”. Then again nobody does, I’ve heard the Dreamkeepers crew has an open /pol/lack in it too and Dave doesn’t give a shit because his audience now is Comicsgate, not furries. I hope it’s successful, but it’s clear that the people running it really need to take a good hard look at their optics. From what I have learned, it’s a lot harder to start a furry con than most conventions. You can’t get sponsors unlike different conventions because furries will whine about big corporations ruining the fandom. There isn’t an easy network for starting a con unlike with anime cons. Then to top it all off, the organizers of Free Fur All backed themselves into a PR corner with this. It’s too big to ignore and it’ll get worse for them over time.

It’s not too late to leave the fandom though

This leads me back to the part about leaving the fandom. It’s not too late to simply stop being a furry and find another scene, or even just reject scenes entirely. The furry fandom is completely compromised. But worst of all, nobody outside the fandom will take you seriously if you try to do anything about it. The fandom’s image is 100% tainted. Everyone thinks it’s either solely a sex community or a community where everyone in it is a sperglord who cannot function in normal society. You’d have better luck making a bunch of buff guys drink Soylent. I’m sure if you bought a few packs of Soylent to help pay that guy working on your car at the overworked and understaffed auto repair shop, they’d take it because their wagie boss said no lunch breaks. They don’t know about the memes about it, they just know that it’s a protein shake and it’ll keep them going just a bit longer. But furries? Ha, try rehabilitating the fandom’s image. It was bad when it was a bunch of white neckbeards, and it’s worse now that it’s a bunch of anarchist crustpunks who spent all their money for rent on furry porn and Nintendo Switch games. The culture around the fandom is so terrible it hurts.

But if you run around as a weird autist who just liked cartoons with talking animals and makes games/comics with that in them? I’m sure you can get along better in communities. Every friend circle has that one weird ex-furry anyhow they tolerate or see as “one of the good ones”. Seriously, find some friends that are not furries and you’ll be happier. Don’t tie yourself to a tainted community known for having the craziest people online. It really is not too late.

You can look at everything I’ve mentioned and come to the same conclusion I did. The fandom is unable to be fixed, it’s broken beyond any reasonable repair. Think of it like a car. You can always salvage some parts of it, but you’re not going to be able to fix that car with frame rot. You can only send it to the pick and pull lot or strip out the engine for another project car, and then kiss it goodbye. Sure there are some interesting aspects of furry art/comics buried beneath layers of fetish bullshit and it can be seen when furries waste their talent on porn. Loot it and move on.

Oh and your friends there? It depends. You might have a few good ones you know and those are worth keeping. But then you can look at the other ones and their behavior and tell yourself. Nah. It’s not worth keeping them around, but then again at this point you’ll have lost the problem people if you’ve had any minor scandal. They’ll still have you on their radar though, so I’d rebrand for when you do anything you’d really value. I really hope you had good opsec for when you’re leaving, expect at least one of these furries to be angry and F5ing your social media pages once a week. You should ditch the coomers, walking unstable time bombs, and lifestylers who see their entire life as being a furry though.

Then when the normies or channers ask if you’re a furry, say you’re not a furry and you don’t like the scene. They’ll understand why you left if you can prove yourself. If furries taint your project, you can feel free to shit on them too if enough normies are buying your game. Deliberately avoid targeting anything to furries whatsoever, and this isn’t solely to avoid a cancerous fanbase but it’s also insurance against being canceled. Chances are if your content is good enough it’ll stand on its own merits and won’t solely be eaten up by those who only have consooming and jerking it to talking animals as their hobbies.

There is life after the fandom and life after crazy online shit. It’ll be a hard journey there but you will be so much happier in the end. Put it this way, furry cons won’t even be around much longer if this continues.

The good old days you had back in the day are not coming back. Nothing you do will bring them back. You can only go forward and try to make the future less shitty, and as it turns out whining on Twitter won’t do anything. It’s your move. The future is a new counterculture, a new era of creativity not tied to the furry fandom. Don’t just sit there and whine that you couldn’t have kids/enjoy life because you waited too long, do something with your life.

One more lesson to learn from this though is that just because someone is canceled by one side of the web doesn’t mean that they’re good people to be around. You have to ask if the risks outweigh the rewards, if they have ideas worth listening to, or if said speaker would bring in more good PR than bad PR. Some people are just disasters waiting to happen if they’re at your event. This can be harder in the era where people fabricate serious allegations to ruin careers, but it’s possible to read between the lines and look at the hard evidence. Considering the Raiders have managed to unify people across political lines in thinking they need to be locked up, I would hope that the people who have ties there and in this con could walk away from that for their own sake but who am I kidding. It’s just the end game of canceling everyone to the point where accusations are ignored because they’re overused.

This is the core reason Alt-Furry collapsed in on itself (and several other movements too), all the fedposters and edgelords drove out anyone reasonable and this was amplified in a community where everyone identifies as a sexual minority. Then on top of that they also had no goal, unlike Sad/Rabid Puppies, GamerGate, Comicsgate, and even more niche groups like PulpRev. They did not want to create anything, they wanted to be the leaders of a bunch of neckbeards who consumed media and look where it got them. It got them nowhere and nothing but infamy with no impact in the end (aside from being a strawman of course). The founder did it for “the lulz” and has moved onto other things in life, the hanger-ons had no direction other than to whine on the internet, and many of them were also fedposters as well. Over time the weaknesses showed harder as others tried to blacklist them or made them fear that they’d be blacklisted, and this made several of them fold and get trolls remorse just to save their status in the fandom.

In the end, you can’t create a counterculture movement by just whining online. Had they created content and had fewer fedposters, maybe they’d have more pull and leverage to do whatever. Which leads me to show what happens when you create instead of just whining as a quick example.

Epilogue: VirginFest 2021 feat. NXP

After I was done writing this, I sent this to a friend of mine who said this was a long read but great, and said that very similar shit is happening in the indie music scenes. While I haven’t been around the indie music “scene” I can state that the music scene has two main advantages over the furry fandom: it has a more diverse (in mindset/demographic) audience that isn’t just a bunch of groupthinking nerds, and it has people willing to support them. There’s more of a sense of community and fandom in music than there is in a group having to call itself a fandom. It’s just like how true shitposters never had to put shitposter in their Twitter bio in the mid 2010s.

He then told me of one event in which the counterculture defeated the wokes, and that was VirginFest 2021. So long story short there is this controversial music scene called “incelcore” simply because the lyrics are usually about depression and frustration with women. It’s branded by some as far-right music and music for future school shooters, but in reality it’s more or less something like Pinkerton-era Weezer or My Chemical Romance. The difference here is just like how punk was stripped down, low-fi, direct, and angry compared to rock of the time, incelcore is the same thing but with emo music mixed in with the depression and bleakness of Joy Division or NIN’s The Downward Spiral. Oh and there’s plenty of edgy, nihilist humor directed at literally everyone (but mostly modern culture). Really, it’s punk for the late 2010s and today and it’s blown up for a reason.

The forefront of this music scene was NegativeXP (aka Shooter, whose original name used in his early work earned him numerous FBI visits), who made a song making fun of specific women you find on college campuses that blew up and made him infamous. But much of his material covered depression, NEET life, autism, media brainwashing, being a fuckup in life, and more topics that are relevant to today’s youth. The same applied with many of his musical peers. He’s a member of my generation online or as he describes himself, an “mkultra victim” so it’s no wonder his channel blew up in views. He makes music for an audience that had been shunned by the mainstream radio acts.

A few days ago on 9/11 he hosted a niche music festival and while he had to have the venue switched to a park due to Antifa threatening the venue, as it turns out the only Antifa members who showed up were like 2 people. A lot of things helped this, from being lower profile to not being hosted for a community that is openly insular and hostile towards wrongthinkers. Sure it was somewhat jank, being an acoustic set in the middle of a park, but it was absolutely fitting for low-fi music about depression recorded in mom’s bedroom and fueled by tendies. It actually happened, unlike this convention. Even with drama in that music scene it still happened.

In the end like I said. If you’re chained to a fandom that is hostile towards you, if you’re stuck with a business model that doesn’t let you adapt. You will always, I mean always be stuck with these people. They will always backstab you, they will always not support you, and they will make anything you do go to shit. Hey there’s a reason people say furries ruin everything and it’s 100% true. You could find the most toxic group of people and it’s probably still less toxic than furries are, and that’s a fact.