I’m happy to open our second weekly discussion topic:
This week we’re going to cover a phenomenon that’s been around in the fandom forever but which has resurfaced these last few years in the form of typically younger furs (13-21), often called “puriteens”.
This new manifestation of reformists tend to be very vocal in their opposition of certain NSFW traits in furry characters such as anatomically correct genitalia (knots, sheaths, etc) as well as feral yiff / feral NSFW artwork.
Typically active on twitter, but progressively also on other platforms, people holding these beliefs are controversial due to their tendency of conflating and accusing people who enjoy this type of NSFW depicts of animal molestation.
I’m trying to be mostly neutral in this description, so please accept my apologies if the vocabulary is a bit too formal. Anyways, here’s a few key questions:
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How should the furry fandom react? Embrace it? Reject it? And if so, how to deal with the risk of being “called out”?
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Is their point valid but are they simply to loud and aggressive?
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Or are their methods correct and it’s time that the fandom received a wake-up call?
Please feel free to share any opinions that you have. As always this thread will stay up for at least a week and will then be locked. So make sure to voice your opinion in time!
Also, by leaving a comment you can, if you want, in the same comment propose a new topic for next week’s discussion!
Note: this topic is not marked as NSFW as it is educational, thus please don’t be too explicit in your wording or use spoilers to hide any potential explicit text or images that you might want to use.
Edit: This went a bit out of hand, but it’s very very late here and I might not be around until later tomorrow so I’m locking this thread and have removed any comments that went down a tangent while I figure things out. Tomorrow (technically today) I’ll try to reply to any DMs that you have sent and will try to see if we can reopen the topic and how.
Personally I do believe we as a community need to reject the puritan idea in all it’s forms.
If anyone is being called out, it could be viewed as online harassment and it should be documented and reported to website administration (if on central network social media like Facebook, deaddit, and dead bird site.)
If you are on any decentralized social media and they are calling you out on your instance, document their attacks and report them to the instance administrator. If that instance administrator will not do anything, leave that instance for a better instance like Yiffit.net if on Lemmy or packmates.org if on Mastodon.
What they propose over the community is censorship. It is not a valid reason. It is a means of control. If we give in to their demands on this, they will demand another thing be censored and we will have to give in to appease them. Then another, and another, and another till the fandom itself is either dead or a husk of it’s former self because it censored everything out of it on the clean web and drove everyone that was a part of it either into seclusion and never talking about furry fandom or really limiting it down to encrypted matrix chatrooms and onion links on the dark web because puritans destroyed what we had on the clear web.
We should be allowed to freely think and have our own ideas and depict what we want in media we either make ourselves or commission from artists. We shouldn’t be limited by other peoples narrow ideas, views, and beliefs. Whether they are children or adults.
Their methods are not correct. Again what they are proposing and forcing on us is censorship. The only wake-up call the fandom needs is to realize that these puriteens are fascists trying to shove their fascist ideas down our throats or make our lives miserable if we don’t comply.
And we need to stand up to that. It should be made fully clear that they are not welcomed within the fandom if they want to force us to cowtow to their demands of censorship.
They need to accept the fandom for what it is. Otherwise they need to leave the fandom.