I noticed that some people just have an extreme hatred for furries.
I have a friend and I would not call him a generally intolerant person at all, he knows I am homosexual and never cared unlike all other people I have ever told about that(around 6 people), but he has an extreme hatred for anything furry. Like on the level of “All furries should be killed” not the usual shit we can read on the internet.
I do not understand it, but there is really no way to get him to any not as extreme standpoint.
I think there was a wide and deep vein of “look at these fucking weirdos” that shaped a lot of early aughts internet gathering places. I’m thinking of Something Awful in particular but the phenomenon was certainly a lot more widespread than SA.
While “look at these fucking weirdos” was by no means confined to dunking on furries, I feel like for whatever reason furries kind of became the highest profile subculture to be brought to wider, mainstream attention—and derision—during this era. I vividly remember poking around on SA when I was in college circa 2003-04 and there was a lot of anti-furry sentiment (much of it grounded in the assumption that for all furries everywhere furridom was exclusively a sex thing.) Eventually that anti-furry sentiment was felt across the internet. LiveJournal, for example, was home to a lot of furries but also to a lot of furry-hating trolls.
The internet in the first decade of the new millennium was a deeply weird place. For a good (though extremely distressing!) overview of how and why places like SA became what they did, the Behind the Bastards series on Chris Chan is solid. It’s not furry-related, but a similar “let’s gather around and gawk at and eventually harass and provoke this fucking weirdo” thing played out in Chris Chan’s “discovery” by Something Awful. I’ll put a link below with a caveat that basically every type of content warning you can imagine applies to these episodes , though imho Robert Evans and Margaret Killjoy handle the Chris Chan story with as much sensitivity and compassion as one could hope.
Behind the Bastards: a Terrible Story About the Internet. Two parts, with guest Margaret Killjoy.
5/10/22 Part One: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/behind-the-bastards/id1373812661?i=1000560258046
5/12/22 Part Two: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/behind-the-bastards/id1373812661?i=1000560735697
Like I said, this isn’t actually about furries, but a lot of the “how” in this saga can, I think, be applied to the rise of anti-furridom in the early-mid aughts. Maybe some of the “why,” too.
(And seriously, proceed with caution. It’s an upsetting story rife with mentions of child abuse, ableism, sexual assault, elder abuse, racism, transphobia, suicide, stalking/harassment—I’m sure I’m leaving things out; be advised it’s rough. That said, it’s well done imho and worth a listen if you want a better understanding of how the internet got the way it is.)