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Friday Fun Thread for September 20, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Every time I see furry artists cancelling each other because one of them drew a guy fucking a cartoon dog that was only 17 years old in one of the Nickelodeon spin-offs, I become even more grateful that foxy Maid Marien didn't groom me as a toddler.

Wouldn't even have such a problem with furries if they'd stick to their own communities and leave the rest of us to play Blue Archive in peace. But the number of furry communist they/thems who do nothing but witch-hunt for artists who drew, said, or thought something "problematic" makes the entire community too toxic to coexist with. I can't imagine how awful it is to actually be a part of it.

It'd be funny if it were just the they/them Marx fandom furries -- hell, it wouldn't even be the most defamatory thing from DogPatch Press, somehow. But I think that the problems the furry fandom fight with are just particularly prominent, because the most arguable border cases and the central version of the prohibited content are visible without the FBI getting involved or having to read three hundred pages of crappy Harry Potter AU fanfic for context, and the resulting internal discourse has given some of the witchiest and witch-hunterist people a lot of ammo to work with.

There's been similar problems throughout the various writing spheres, Archive Of Our Own gets regular attacks over it, it's one of the main Tumblr Discourse platter options. And the New Right has its own versions. I think there's a broader matter where it's become the new room temperature.

I mean, SomethingAwful was the original furry community. That should tell you all you need to know about how things were going to play out.

The fact that 4chan splintered from SA because of loli is similarly informative about the politics of its people, for good and ill.

Furries are hypermasculine superstimulus, loli (and shota) are hyperfeminine superstimulus, neither one wants to admit the obvious implications (though zoophilia is the lesser of those), and the narcissism of small differences does the rest.

(Actually, I wonder if that means diaperfurs/cub fans are more likely to be bisexual? Furries are generally gay and lolicons are generally straight, so maybe furry lolicons are more likely to be a mix compared to the average.)

Furries heavvvvily predate SomethingAwful: for adult content focuses VCL dates back to something like 1995, PureYiff and YiffStar to 2002. For SFW content, Werewolf(.)com was not solely furry but had more furry and therian content than SA, was on its second or third software iteration by the time 4chan launched; WereWeb had been launched, had its height, and died before 4chan launched. And that's ignoring IRC or UseNet communities.

The entire original Burned Furs mess happened before 4Chan existed, and started before SomethingAwful was founded. (Thankfully.)

Furries are hypermasculine superstimulus, loli (and shota) are hyperfeminine superstimulus, neither one wants to admit the obvious implications (though zoophilia is the lesser of those)

Sorry but I'm lost. Do you mind elaborating? What's a (hyper-masculine/-feminine) superstimulus, how is furry masculine, how is dubious anime porn feminine?

I assume the obvious implications you imply are that furries probably wanna fuck animals and hentai people probably wanna fuck children.

how is furry masculine, how is dubious anime porn feminine?

Look at the faces.

Furry [well, unless it's actively trying to avoid this... and ends up looking like a girl/boy in a onesie] is typically so far divorced from facial neoteny it might as well be bara. Anime characters, by contrast, tend to have round faces and large eyes- emphasis is on soft/round/cute/happy, not hard/angular/ugly/angry.

(Western animation tends to have a mix of both- the largest exception to that was, of course, My Little Pony (specifically Gen 4), and now you know why 4chan liked it so much.)

Mind you, this is just the broad strokes of it- it's a lot more detailed (and honestly, a lot more normal) than I make it out to be- but these are the broad strokes as they relate to the people who are most taken by that stimulus.

I'm still having laughing fits from his post, so sorry if there's typos in this.

I think what he's getting at is that all furry porn is literally gay bathhouse sex orgies, with slightly more literal bears. It's hyper-male-sexuality in the sense of bro-y casual sex where the guys drink beer and lose their keys fisting each other.
If characters are sexual they are grotesquely so, with comically large sex organs and insatiable appetites (often literal ones, because eating each other is sexualized too). Non-sexual characters literally don't exist somehow, because the scenes bounce from frat party to shower room to bdsm club. Even the straight porn is gay male hyper-stimulus. All the furry transsexuals you see dress as bimbos and get enormous fake breasts because their fetish is at its core a hyper-male sexual fixation.

And on the your hand your typical loli book has an awkward girl who looks like a potato thinking about her feelings for 30 pages (or 60 chapters if it gets serialized). She is possibly caught in a love triangle between her kindly vampire English tutor and a dark and handsome werewolf delinquent who rescued her from bullies on his motorbike. One or both of these relationships may be socially forbidden, heightening the emotional tension. When they finally have sex there will be flowers in the screentone background.
The story would become a best-seller on Amazon's ero-fiction self-publishing charts before being banned.

The way he said it is guaranteed to upset both sides (which is why it's so hilarious), but the basic truth behind it is undeniable.

The way he said it is guaranteed to upset both sides (which is why it's so hilarious), but the basic truth behind it is undeniable.

Huh? Why is it guaranteed to upset both sides? It seems obviously directionally correct to me (I'd nitpick that femininity is more prominent than masculinity rather than being hyper-feminine, which implies the near absence of masculinity to me) from the lolicon side and I have pointed to research supporting much the same conclusion in the past:

Recall Kinsella's suggestion that lolicon be understood as men performing the shōjo to come to terms with an unstable gender identity (Kinsella 2006: 81-83). If being a man ceases to promise power, potency and pleasure, it is no longer the privileged subject position. Akagi explains that lolicon is a form of self-expression for those oppressed by the principles of masculine competitive society (Akagi 1993: 232).32 Lolicon is a rejection of the need to establish oneself as masculine and an identification with the "kindness and love" of the shōjo (Akagi 1993: 233). This interpretation reverses the standard understanding of lolicon as an expression of masculinity to one of femininity. This is, of course, not the only way to approach the wide range of lolicon images, but it certainly highlights the complexity of "pornographic content" and its uses.

What's there to be upset over?

for those oppressed by the principles of masculine competitive society

Fucking academics. Saying "men who are getting off using the mental/sexual pathways that [normal] women use to get off with, by projecting themselves onto the self-insert female character just like everyone who read 50 Shades does, maybe because a thing or combination of things in their brains makes that the more attractive option" doesn't need to be this hard.

But then again I'm also of the opinion that the real reason we don't have an accurate taxonomy of sexual behaviors is that we don't have the language to express them, they're all defined by their [statistical] normal distribution anyway, and then people just take language not meant for them and wield it as a weapon so maybe it's pointless anyway.