I thought hating on furries was a 4chan meme that became a tiktok meme.

But I’ve a few reasons why that meme may have gained traction. Firstly it’s not a sexuality like homosexuality. It’s more of a fetish, and people make fun of fetishes all the time - see feet, or, idk, midget. I’m sure some maintain its not sexual, but the community overwhelmingly is. Second, it has associations with beastiality. Now I’d assume the vast majority of furries don’t harbour sexual attractions to real animals, but it’s certainly on that side of the Venn diagram, which may cause some concern. Finally people involved generally seem to be social outcasts. You don’t see many captain of the football team furries or cheerleader furries. If school kids are already picking on the weebs and the nerds, finding out some of them dress up like animals and hang out is fuel for the fire.

As for calls to killing furries, I’d wager the majority of that is just joining in on the meme. I’m sure furries would get bullied at school, but as for vehement violence I doubt it transcends the bullying that the D&D kids receive. Not that I condone any violence or bullying towards anyone, furries included. But if you were wondering why people dislike em, maybe this helps.

It’s primarily cringe culture. Some people choose to make themselves feel powerful by bullying and harassing others, and furries are often “easy targets.”

My guess is it’s pretty similar to drag hate.

Someone has a discomfort with blurring certain boundaries in society, and they express it as violent eliminationism — especially after being encouraged to do so as an “acceptable target” by bullies, propagandists, or other haters.

Just as with drag costuming & performance, furry is not itself a sex practice — but it’s often closely connected with queer sexualities.

Furrydom also applies queerness to things that many folks feel protective of, such as cute animals, and characters that are (or appear to be) from children’s media. That triggers the “queers are pedophiles” delusion, which is not new — look up Anita Bryant but has been heavily popularized by fascists of late.

It’s cringe culture, the same reason people make fun of weebs or anyone else who goes outside of the “norm”. There’s also the issue that some people think that it’s too childish or too sexual (or both at once, somehow)

It’s a knee-jerk disgust reaction towards any group different from the norm. Furries are also overwhelming queer, so homophobia ties a lot into it.

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I might get downvoted to hell but here goes. Unironically roleplaying as animals by wearing costumes and finding that sexually stimulating is fucking weird man.

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.

My guess is that they confuse furries with people who are sexually attracted to animals or animal characteristics.

In reality, furries are people who partially or fully identify with what native people would have called their spirit animal and modern furries call their fursona (except with more or less human features, because they meld what they see as their spirit animal with their human self).

But because drawings of fursonae exist, rule 34 ensures that there is porn of them. Some people really like that kind of porn, unrelated to whether they’re furries or not, and I believe it is those people the hate is directed at.

As for why, I would guess it’s something like “how dare you sexualise animals!” (or maybe even a subconscious “how dare you make a drawing of what I believe is supposed to be an animal that is actually sexy to me!”, similar to how some conservatives are so vehemently against homosexuality because they secretly feel tempted, and then get caught at a gay orgy later). And/or they see it as something like a gateway drug to bestiality (sexual abuse towards animals).

Take a walk around Furcadia, check out some user generated dreams, and report back to me what you find