Okay, I get where you're coming from. It's frustrating. But that's every fandom, since the internet began. And now it's spilled over from the internet out into the real world. I've never been on a forum, chat room, Facebook group, or in a town or a school or a workplace that didn't have it to a degree. But some groups are a little more tight-knit and insular than others, and there's splinters of those groups, etc. There's plenty of people in the fandom who have little to no serious baggage, they're just not very well known because they don't produce much if any content, they just stick to their small circle of friends.
And a lot of the hugbox mentality of both fandoms creates its own kind of shunning and ostracism and appeals to another form of lowest common denominator. Some places you basically can't have a strong opinion on anything, you're essentially not allowed to be angry, people's definition of aggressive and hostile is what most well-adjusted people would call assertive. And what's worse is there's plenty of people who know full well what the word assertive means, and dislike it just as much as aggression regardless. A lot of the fandom's angriest, snappiest and meanest furries became that way because they were betrayed, stalked, threatened, assaulted, doxxed, randomly unfriended/blocked or banned for petty reasons by people they thought were their friends.
The entire fucking Alt-Right and its many subcommunities is full of people like this. The YouTube community is full of Michael Jacksons, 30 and 40 something glorified children's entertainers who, true to the stereotype, are basically using their channels as a gateway to lure and groom children. Another one seems to get exposed every month.
But all these people exist in the real world, not just in arbitrarily defined and self-segregated online communities that thanks to social media pretty much all blur together now. Everybody seems to know at least a few fans of something there's an entire online fandom about. To truly escape any of this shit you'd basically have to be a hermit and a luddite.
Okay, I get where you're coming from. It's frustrating. But that's every fandom, since the internet began. And now it's spilled over from the internet out into the real world. I've never been on a forum, chat room, Facebook group, or in a town or a school or a workplace that didn't have it to a degree. But some groups are a little more tight-knit and insular than others, and there's splinters of those groups, etc. There's plenty of people in the fandom who have little to no serious baggage, they're just not very well known because they don't produce much if any content, they just stick to their small circle of friends.
And a lot of the hugbox mentality of both fandoms creates its own kind of shunning and ostracism and appeals to another form of lowest common denominator. Some places you basically can't have a strong opinion on anything, you're essentially not allowed to be angry, people's definition of aggressive and hostile is what most well-adjusted people would call assertive. And what's worse is there's plenty of people who know full well what the word assertive means, and dislike it just as much as aggression regardless. A lot of the fandom's angriest, snappiest and meanest furries became that way because they were betrayed, stalked, threatened, assaulted, doxxed, randomly unfriended/blocked or banned for petty reasons by people they thought were their friends.
The entire fucking Alt-Right and its many subcommunities is full of people like this. The YouTube community is full of Michael Jacksons, 30 and 40 something glorified children's entertainers who, true to the stereotype, are basically using their channels as a gateway to lure and groom children. Another one seems to get exposed every month.
But all these people exist in the real world, not just in arbitrarily defined and self-segregated online communities that thanks to social media pretty much all blur together now. Everybody seems to know at least a few fans of something there's an entire online fandom about. To truly escape any of this shit you'd basically have to be a hermit and a luddite.