As the title says.

It's remarkable. Like 9 out of every 10 artists I've followed over the last couple decades have gone into such intense fetish-drift that I just don't even look at half of their stuff anymore, if that. It's either fetish-drift, or YCHs of garishly-colored but otherwise unimaginatively-designed OCDonutSteels. If I had a nickel for every time I saw some technicolor-pukefest character-result of the owner's Starburst-induced fever dreams, I'd be rich enough to buy Twitter twice over.

Eye-gouging color schemes are not creative, unique, or interesting. The reason you have to pay people over and over to depict them is because nobody would be inspired to draw them on their own. If you have to pay people to repeatedly depict your OCDonutSteel whole-ass-color-palette superspecialsnowflake hermaphrotransfluidgender kitsune-dragon-goddess-demon quadruple-hybrid and nobody of any talent is drawing it for free, it's because nobody finds it inspiring. Nobody. Nobody finds theythemitshehe interesting.

Instead of wallowing in your lack of personality, try coming up with something grounded and subtly unique. The more your character peacocks, the less unique they are, because everyone has a peacock character. Everyone has a walking living breathing rainbow with fur in this cOmMuNiTy. Try putting limitations on yourself and working within those limitations.

where the fuck was i

ah yes. Furry artists. As I was typing: Many artists I follow, or used to follow, have actually degraded in quality over the years. They haven't improved. They've gotten worse. They've gotten sloppy. They cut corners. Many of them clearly just don't give a fuck anymore. Somehow, almost every anime/manga artist I follow on Twitter or on Discord or Pixiv or Instagram has improved, but most furry artists I follow have gotten worse. It's been years since I bothered following artists on here because within a couple years' time, their quality starts to degrade, especially as they get more and more into the commissions... especially the YCH commissions I was griping about earlier.

Furry artists are still running on an old, outdated model of doing business. I see artists on Hentai Foundry and Pixiv and Instagram and Twitter who do like 10 pieces a month, on their own, of their own stuff that they decide to do, that they paywall behind Fanbox and Patreon and Subscribestar and Ko-Fi, and they pull in like $3,000 a month. Hell, some of them don't even paywall their stuff, they just do their own shit and ask people to support them on one of the patronage sites and their fans do.

Meanwhile I watch furry artists cranking out like 50+ commissions a month and they're barely pulling an average of $2,500 a month. That shit's poverty wages for the work being done. I know virtually none of them are raising their prices to match inflation and cost of living.

I keep cleaning my watch-list because furry artists have this tendency to go down what I call "the fetish spiral." Maybe it's not even that the artists do, it's just that their commissioners of parents-house-dwelling unemployed welfare parasites have nothing better to spend the government's money on than endless depictions of the same fetish that they obsess over time and time and time again. Seriously, how many different angles and how many different ways do you need to see your gigahypergigantormacro OCDonutSteel walking through a city and crushing the life out of thousands of helpless living beings? What about that, exactly, is sexy to you? The mass-death of innocents, or the giant... thing, whatever it is, that you would never be able to sexually gratify because you're 5 feet tall and it's like 500 feet tall?

Something I've come to learn, by the way, is that this is called "parasexual behavior." It usually accompanies a lot of other really dark shit.

Your fetishes are not a personality trait. Do something to be a more well-rounded person than making your entire identity based around what you jerk your pud to.

The further I've walked from the furfandom, the more I've felt my mental health improving. I've almost entirely disengaged from it at this point. I still speak to two friends from the furfandom whom I've known for like 20 years, one of whom is an artist, but even then, not as much as I used to. Going from dozens of friends, being in several relationships over the years, and even having two family members who are (were?) furries, to having just two long-standing friends, and maybe one or two somewhat more recent ones, is a journey that I can't recommend to anyone...

Furries in general are psychological parasites. They're emotion-vampires. They suck you dry and leave you a bitter wilted husk, angry and confused and not sure why you're hurting or lacking friends, only for you to look back on those so-called friends who aren't friends anymore and you realize the vast majority of them were toxic parasites. Indeed, you start finding yourself becoming one yourself. As the state of your mind collapses, the desire and drive to self-improve wilts, and you find yourself becoming the same type of vampire like those that used and abused you. Once defeat sets in, you don't move anymore. You freeze in time, trying to figure out where it all went wrong. The few remaining friends you have, you start to overly rely on them, as you continue to deteriorate and lose sight of what you are, where you were going, or why you were ever trying to do anything at all. And as parasite after parasite departs you, you look around and find yourself lost in a hole of abandonment, wondering what all the emotional energy you gave to so many others was for, if it led you here.

Beneath all the danger-hazard-color pastel palettes smeared all over every totally unique and not at all derivative, garish, and/or overdesigned 'character' (most of whom are lacking actual personality), the truth of the furry fandom is that it is a very dark place. It is not where the psychologically-healthy dwell in, and for a good reason. Furries huffing copium will tell you this place is just a wonderful little getaway for all the outcasts and weirdos of the world, that it is oh-so-accepting and tolerant. That's a lie. That's cope. This is not a wonderful little getaway, it's an asylum for people who can, but refuse, to self-improve in any way. It is not accepting and tolerant, it is a wallowing pit of crabs in an enormous bucket, dragging each other down and tearing each other to pieces if they dare to try to get out of the murk of their suffering, if they try to be better or better themselves in any way.

There are no journeys of self-improvement or maturation or personal evolution here in this fandom. Almost every smile hides a forked tongue, every simpering comment of sympathy is from a goblin eagerly grabbing at fistfuls of weakness for the purposes of manipulation and mewling self-aggrandizement, or for an opportunity to eagerly virtue-signal and care-signal for the purposes of getting in the graces of "popufurs." The parasocial relationships between commissioners and artists is its own grimy story, reminding me all too much of a guy who goes to a strip club and drops half his paycheck on the dancers and then thinks they all love him and that he's a total lady's man that everyone likes for his roguish, charming personality.

So, I don't know why I log onto FA anymore. To see what my last few friends here are doing, I guess. But beyond that... there's very little of value left in this fandom for me. The "community" sure doesn't appeal to me at all anymore. There's far more bad and bitter memories of this fandom than there are good ones, and frankly the ones involved with the good memories? I don't need this fandom to interact with them. I watch anime with them instead.

Somehow, some way, the anime fandom is less toxic and degenerate and coomer-brained than the furry fandom.

I can't think of a more damning way to end this ramble than with that, so, that'll wrap it up.

Farewell furry fandom.

You will not be missed.