This isn't moldy at all. That's just a straightforward hot take.
If you want to mycelliate it you need to say horny fandoms are an astroturfed release valve allowing PMC pornographication to suppress natural working class cum & anger.
:theory-gary: Huff deeply of the spores and the oracle will speak thru you.
Creates/reinforces racist cuck anxiety, sexist caricatures, normalizes sexual violence, dehumanizes women. Sure there is niche indie porn that avoids that but the MindGeek shit is dominant.
Furry art (porn included) is generally non-corporate, for what it’s worth.
Let's say you like the style of drawing in a hentai, but not the content. You are horny and want to masturbate, You are now consuming something wrong, and connecting it to your sexuality, because you couldn't find a more pure thing to satisfy yourself with in time.
At least softcore only gives me weird fetishes like office ladies and monster girls. Volcel police are already en route, I don't care anymore.
Furries are just people who want to dress up as animals and fuck. People have been doing that for as long as we've got records, I don't see why we need to overanalyze it. Like, Zeus, Father of Olympus, used to turn in to a duck and go pick up floozies at the bar. It's just one of those things.
Also, I don't think people are addicted to porn, I think capitalism is super alienating and isolating so people don't have much sex and porn is the artifical form of sex. If we weren't living under capitalism people would fuck more and there'd be a lot less demand for porn. Plus the economic side of porn - Lots of people do porn because they need the money.
I have no comment on weebs.
You want to dress like a bear to communicate with your bear spirit and then go maul people? Vikings would totally respect that and consider you an important warrior.
I don’t think people are addicted to porn
Then you haven't met someone who is addicted to porn. Idk if you're just exaggerating or something but this is definitely a real thing.
They go waaaaaay back. Old period Egyptians would show up at a con, see a bunch of furries, nod sagely and say "Yes these must be holy people".
weebs
Even in Japan the anime fandom is a kinda fringe thing that's looked down on. I think that anime is a cross-cultural touchstone in part because it was cheaply imported onto American kids networks in the 90s and 00s, and in part because a lot of the mainstream stuff is directly marketed at a certain class of extremely alienated individual that exists in every sufficiently-developed capitalist society.
Even in Japan the anime fandom is a kinda fringe thing that’s looked down on.
You are mistaking otakus for "anime fandom". Otaku culture in japan is very well defined around certain stereotypes and there is a stigma around people who describe themselves as otaku or look like one, also guilty by association with NEETs/hikikimori Those stereotypes are weird mix or true descriptions but also punching down examples of the latter include:
-Otaku often depicted as overweight which in Japan is very bad even though IRL I don't even think there is a statistical difference.
-Often depicted with glasses or some extravagant clothing choices which is typical Japan if you are not dressing "appropriately" at your job you must have a damn good excuse.
-As I mentioned very often associated with some other condition like being a NEET or hikikimori, the stereotypical person with a computer 5 monitors in a single dirty room full of figurines used condoms, tissues etc...
So I'd definitely caution against using Japan's hate as some corroboration because without understanding the cultural differences you risk siding with a reactionary oppressive culture obsessed with norms, appearances and behaviors that must not deviate from a certain range of acceptability, the hammer and all that.
As for the broader anime fandom if you take away the hate towards otaku and NEETs then all the things we talk about most people there probably have no idea beyond your typical 40yo boomer claiming something something anime after midnight is "bad"(hint: most anime broadcast late at night because of industry related issues like ad revenue, it has nothing to do with quality of content).
If we're injecting nuance into this discussion I would say that "weebs" definitely don't include everyone who likes anime, in the same way that "otaku" don't. The two groups have undeniable parallels though, which is why I think they are drawn towards the same style of trash (despite, as Express pointed out, not all anime being trash).
As with almost everything the word lost its meaning, originaly it meant a group of people that were so deluded and obcessed with anime and Japan that they want to live there, renounce their own nationality/culture and "become Japanese", early days it would be those people who start using Japanese language like "desu" or "yo" to end sentences. Anime fans were just that, "fans" so 20 years ago all the children watching Naruto or Pokemon would never call themselves "weebs".
Nowadays usualy anyone who watches anime = weeb at least on mainstream social media and even casuals who watch incredibly mainstream stuff will call themselves weebs.
I think in serious discussions and leftists spaces weeb still carries that original meaning after all some of those types of people still exist, but the fandom doesn't realy see it that way anymore.
Anime follows a spectrum of acceptability. Saying you like some art house thing or something mainstream like demon slayer is completely different than talking about best girl in an idol anime.
I contest that furries are simply a product of capitalist social alienation finding a medicinal solution in wearing animal costumes and/or utilising hidden identities. I don't think furries are strictly about furry-ness but about not being identifiable and retreating entirely into a made up identity.
Social anxiety in many people has grown to the point that they are terrified of expressing the closeness they want with others, they are terrified of the rules that exist in our existing society, for touching others, for being close to others, for general behaviour and more.
Furries have none of these rules. They create their own every day, they break rules and get to experiment in ways that are simply terrifying to do so with your real identity on display.
This is not unique to furries, they just happen to be a very visible form of it. You see this exact same behaviour in other escapist media too. You see it in mmorpgs. You see it on vrchat. You see it at anime conventions where trans people are secretly using cosplay to experiment safely with their gender identity in public.
Taking on a different identity in order to break existing social "rules" without fear of judgement is the reason these behaviours arise.
It is less about the fur stuff and more about the safe feelings that hiding behind a fake identity allows for.
The significant prevalence of physical relationships in a community where social rules are nearly non-existent is not too surprising. I don't think it's that dissimilar to the occurrence of "free love" in other communities where social anxieties were similarly eliminated but through different means.
I think reducing social anxieties would reduce the prevalence. People would no longer feel the need to use fake identities to hide behind while expressing themselves in the truly authentic way they would like to.
Taking on a fake identity among other people also taking on fake identities comes with an unwritten consent between all participants to activities and behaviour that is not what you would usually see. It's an unwritten agreement between all participants that says "you can behave the way you want to behave around me and you will still be accepted for it". This agreement changes slightly between each community, but someone in cosplay at an anime con is generally consenting to other people in cosplay attempting cosplay interaction with them, this unwritten agreement is pretty similar in all scenarios where participants assume roleplay identities.
Right and a scenario where all parties have consented to closeness, touchy feely interactions and things that would otherwise be considered invasions of personal space or outright harassment is attractive.
That's what taking on a fake identity is and joining the community (any of them). It is consent for the kind of interactions that you have already seen that community having and performing with one another.
Nobody minds these interactions because everybody knows that they consented to them when they saw that it was the kind of stuff the community already does and still joined it anyway.
A community of people wearing a uniform or identity you assume in order to take part in them have a set of social rules you can observe before you decide to take part. Each one has slightly different social rules, and each one is attractive for slightly different reasons, consent to the social rules you can observe before joining is a major factor in what makes it attractive.
I think the hottest take I could make on this topic that would upset the furries is that they can be compared to hippies and the free love movement, they behave similarly except they wear fursuits.
Damn. I’m not a furry but I completely identify with everything you’ve described and I’ve had the same thoughts on those being the reasons people gravitate towards that. You pretty much laid it all out perfectly there.
Social alienation makes people vulnerable to porn addiction, and companies make a profit off this by exploiting women. Porn involves all the worst features of capitalism: exploitation, commodification, alienation, and a need for "permanent growth" to maintain profits, which has led to the proliferation of more and more fucked up content, including violence, misogyny, and the sexualization of minors.
Idk about the weebs and furries. I don't really keep tabs on that stuff. My impression was that the furry stuff was caused by people watching tons of anthropomorphic animal cartoons in their formative years, not porn. Although nowadays it could be caused by porn as well, I guess.
So, porn and sexualization of minors - A little over a century ago there were basically no laws against fucking minors. Child prostitution was all over the place and was mostly lumped in with regular prostitution. Even up through the 70s kiddy porn was basically legal and there were official publications, like playboy, that featured nude minors. 70s celebrities fucked kids routinely and no one really thought anything of it or cared. The marriage age was like 12 in a lot of the country.
One of the things that grew out of the Satanic Panic was actual study in to child abuse, and what they found was that abuse was overwhelmingly perpetrated by family members against their kids, and that sexual abuse of minors by male relatives was somewhat common. It just wasn't known before that, no one had bothered to ask.
I'd argue that while we've probably given a lot more minors EDs due to instagrammification of the human body, but in a legal and social sense society has never been more condemning of adults raping kids. It's a crime almost everywhere in the US, it's taken at least somewhat seriously, and it has negative legal and social ramifications that it simply didn't have 100, 50, or even 20 years ago.
Incorrect, the furry fandom is an attempt to destroy social alienation by dressing up as a bunch of massive, fluffy, mythical amalgamations of animal and human. There is rarely a more honest expression of raw human primal vigor and passion found in the socially neutered west. Although this started from shitty 90s werewolf hentai, it has morphed into a social project of bringing people together around a common passion, with hot werewolf porn as a bonus.
Porn is bad but the furry fandom seems good. Weebs are a mixed bag though 50/50 comrades and reactionaries.
They're just hot animal people I dont think theres any need to get so freudian about it
