And the mods moderate under a faceless banner. Three images I submitted for review were found in violation. The adult women in them were too cute and the show style was unacceptable to them. I don't know who made that decision. It was just "Staff."

Yes, it's shown as a "collective decision" but I rather believe it is a very personal move from one or another mod in his own conscience only.
What I noticed is that the contact is usually extremely rude, no "hello", no presentation, just a warning text as if the guy was already pissed off or condescendant. An admin is the very face of his site. When he writes, he shows the tone of the site. From my rare direct contacts, I have an extremely poor opinion of FA admin's politeness, whoever they are.
If this is a personal move, it self-explains (this is just one rude person) but that means they all must be taught how to talk to their "clients" (this is what happens in any professional enterprise), but if this is the way they are told to interact...

Luffy gets to take the fall so Tyra can continue to pretend to not be involved

I don't know about this reference but as far as I understand, it's exactly that indeed~

Luffy is the lead "child protection" admin, Tyra and their followers one of the old staff who was a major contributor to the spread of the "anti" cult position on this site, just to clarify

Ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooh...................................
Many thanks for the clarification, this does set some tracks~

ya that's just sad

I wouldn't be surprised if a new furry art site with a more robust foundational vision will kick off in the near future.

FA has ossified.

I would be extremely happy if that was the case, but unfortunately what I have seen is that multiple sites are popping up, diluting the fandom even more, and half of them rapidly disappear because the creator(s) didn't foresee all the hard work it requires...

That's par for the course.

IB seems to be a solid contender IMO - though I'm also seeing a number of artists saying that they'll switch to posting their content on twitter (which IMO is kinda risky) and Discord (even worse)

Don't start me about Twatter and Discord the well-named LOL

The main problem of IB is its no-human in sexual activities policy - I totally believe that is what allows them to host cub safely so that is a minimum drawback compared to the advantage, but it is still very incomplete. That is the site I will switch to however if I decide to leave, the community is a lot more opened and friendly, and the moderators ARE polite. After all, I already got a lurker account there under the same name, I would move there without much effort~

To be fair, IB has ZERO problems with posting censored art of humans and linking to a full version offsite. It's not a "moral" issue, it's a legal issue with hosting. So while it might not be the catch-all for hosting all of one's art, it is still a place for community and for artists to keep their following.

True but to me a censored artwork is sliiiightly not the same as a non-censored one And yes, it's a legal issue, exactly what I meant indeed, that is why I don't have any personal problem with that decision.
IB has always been my second favorite furry place, it just became #1 a few days ago.

there is no site needed, there are already enough. Inkbunny, Weasyl, Sofurry. They just have to be used. I'm no artist, just a commissioner, but I crossposted everything to weasyl and sofurry and the engagement there is pretty low, and it will stay that way until more people go there, but you have a chicken-and-egg problem. Watchers will not go there if their favorite artists aren't there - and artists won't go there if they get no audience.

You are indeed true, the problem is that there is no consensus as which one would be a lighthouse gathering a large majority of artists like FA was. InkBunny is the second most important actually as far as I know, but its cub tolerance makes it a scarecrow for many. And below IB, all the others have a ridiculously light traffic (DeviantArt excepted but it's not a furry site and it has its own, REALLY bad issues) - leading to exactly what you described.

Sites themselves are the wrong model for a community. It should not be possible for some dickhole with money to declare this half is no longer welcome, regardless of the other half's opinion.

They've been at this for thousands of years and divide and conquer is one of their favorite tactics. Learn your history and by their actions you will know them.

I have never been interested in all those little internal wars so I'm not here to judge (above all without knowing everything about the TWO sides), but for the few I saw it never appear this way to me. Just an accumulation of bad decisions, but "bad decision" is usually something easy to avoid... when looking back at it with time. Not when the fire breaks out.

When the same "bad decisions" keep getting made,that's called a pattern. And if you look at who makes those decision,it becomes obvious why they keep making them.

Oof, what a disaster...

I don't think it will threaten FA's popularity and existence much. There is enough interest in the new generations and they usually don't care about history. Those who ARE affected though, are us, the oldest ones. Those who "are not a good match for the (current) community". But it's OK, we were important at first but we are expandable nowadays - in fact, without us, the site will be able to slide effortlessly toward a new kind of spirit. You know, the Twatter-kind of spirit.

Ugh.
But i really hope everything will deflate soon, as it did with the other zillion times this place had a mismanagement of some sort
..

Oh it will eventually of course. We will just have lost once again a good chunk of friends in the process.
But  BlueStreak98 below asked the right question: where did that move come from? The cub ban was a mass protestation. THIS ban seems to come out of nowhere as far as I can judge. And even if it shakes the tree a lot less, it is a LOT lot more preoccupying in the end as for manadgement direction.

I heard a couple voices about this. One is that there are a bunch of Twatter based kids that are for some reason influential on the management and they are strictly against PERVERSION! I have read a couple of these numskulls antics on the blue site, but I'm not prone to believe this version much, they're just brats.

The second, and more believable imo, is that its a matter of hosting and money. You can't do much against these things, but let's say that a clearer communication would be better, less conflictual, people would somewhat understand cause we all need money...

This is plausible and it highlights an extremely detrimental fact: a fatal lack of communication and transparency from the administration, leading us to build any kind of hypothesis. Everybody knows this is one of the WORST things ever, but as they say, history tends to repeat itself

Yeah. You know, I'm sort of amazed furaffinity kept going SO much, so long, with this kind of unstable administration.

Sometimes i think its because of it. It's chaos, every other minute there's a tire fire somewhere and it usually has to extinguish itself cause there's no virtually anyone that can do something about it.

But is probably this chaos that makes this place still alive, differently from other more ordinated places.

My intention for now it's to stay here and even keep backing up the site, because i owe lots to it. But obviously, my decision could change anytime...

I quite agree with you on all that...
SO good to hear we will continue at least for a while to see your marvelous art around

I'm not an artist and I admit I rarely use FA anymore because there are better places to get art. However I am deleting my account as a small show of respect for the artists who get the tag line

"We do not think you are a good match for our community"

Fuck you Dragoneer.

FA is evolving and still growing, and what we are doing, the way we react, FA doesn't care at all.

I'll just remind you that there's nothing "Woke" about this. It's distinctly anti-woke. I'll also point out that what Ebony Leopard says is unattributed, so hard to prove.

Otherwise I'd lean towards agreeing with you. I'm not gonna rush to leave or anything, but this definitely looks like a bad deal for everybody.

Yeah, I'm going to have to agree with you here. A lot of the 'lefty' spaces I am in myself are quite frustrated at these changes too, especially at how this seems to be more motivated to appease certain payment processors than any honest moral concerns, especially considering how certain carve-outs were made for niche kinks, and how FA refuses to do proper age-gating.

It's the commercial woke, the one all of these multi-nationals realized they could use for covering up the damage their industries are doing to people, while turning the term into a target for the right by promoting a form of it that everyone hates and fits into the right's narrative about liberalism being akin to authoritarianism, when they're the authoritarians using it to destroy liberalism.

I would criticize even your use of the word "Woke"here. I don't think it works, even in this context. All uses of that word outside of the original one should be firmly opposed, and the original meaning obviously needs to be constantly reinforced, due to it's repeated twisting and abuse by the right.

Absolutely

I agree with the sentiment but it's already a few years too late. The right has 'adopted' the word as a catchall to anything and everything they oppose.

Personally, I'm rather far to the left myself, and I'm really tired of seeing any number of people trying to blame this on some sort of leftist thing. There is absolutely zero logic behind this.

Unfortunately, the Administration is completely lacking in transparency regarding this, so it's leading people to all kinds of conclusions about what's behind this, some of them pretty damn wild. I think that they need to engage in some radical honesty here, lay all of their cards on the table, and show us the process behind this. All of it. They are losing trust in clouds of speculation and rumors. Trust in the administration is crucial, and taking a MAJOR hit here.

The financial pressure theory is one of the more logical ones, but it's still just a theory. It's not a good idea to jump to conclusions. If that IS part of the issue, I think that it would be in their best interest to share that with us. Possibly together we could do something about it.

Yep. The opposite of 'Woke'.

don't fall into the right wing thimg of just labelling everything you don't like as 'woke'.

Woke means empathic - woke means 'aware of systemic injustices, and desirous of fixing them'.

It's the right wing who attack things under thge 'protect the children!' banner.

Precisely, Pauli.

*Empathetic

Although empathic could be good.

Not wanting to show disrespect but to be frank, I know Ebonyleopard a lot more than I know you, and so I rather believe in him. Besides, I am always extremely cautious with people who are hard into politics, experience told me they rarely got an objective vision of things.

Also, it is very possible I am not using the word "woke" as it was defined at the beginning, but that is the way I see it used these past years to designate the extremists of sensitivity (about race, sex, religion and so on) who want that everything revolves around themselves and can't stand when the same laws they want to enforce come back at them.

I would tend to trust Ebony Leopard on this as well I've never seen any reason not to. But I don't like to base anything I do or say on unsubstantiated statements or hearsay.

As far as the actual definition of "Woke", that's incorrect. See Pauli's definition above, or look it up. The more recent definition of it is based on a purposeful and propagandistic, (And racist) twisting of it by the right here in the US.

Fortunately I am far enough and couldn't take care less of what or who is right or left, all I see is that those who use this term nowadays use it in a context I totally agree with - and without any racist bias, far from the contrary. Unfortunately for many, a lot of terms see their meaning change with time and events, that's the way things always go. I have to say I absolutely NEVER saw the "woke" term used the way you showed me.

But many thanks to my great friend  Patpahootie for giving me the original definition, I am always curious and eager for bits of history.

Language evolves, but this isn't the same thing. It's purposeful distortion.

And that term was co opted from American black idiom. It's blatantly racist.

Being from outside the US it's easy for you to miss the subtleties of this. It's not your fault.

thinking about bailing myself. just don't know where else to go.

Yes.
I mean, I know myself where to go but this never will be the same. Then again, "the same" is in the past now, that is how it is.

Perso, je ne sais pas trop quoi dire ou faire par rapport à cette histoire... J'ai pas vraiment tout lu en détail mais j'ai dans l'idée que c'est surtout dans le but de serrer un peu la vis sur certains sujets sensibles, même si je dois avouer avoir une certaine inquiétude que le petit machin vert soit visé par des règles anti-cub un peu trop vagues, je pense que je vais juste attendre de voir comment ça va se passer avant de prendre une décision trop hâtive. ^^;

Oui, depuis que cette bombe a été lancée je pensais au fait qu'il est possible de te chercher des noises pour certains de tes dessins.
Mais je ne sais pas, étonnamment j'ai la conviction que tu vas passer entre les gouttes - tant qu'il n'y aura pas un de ces connards d'autoproclamés "white knight" dont la spécialité est le fouille-merde qui passera par chez toi.

2 years ago I was PERMABANNED outta nowhere for a 10+ years old SKETCH that I forgot I even had in my gallery.
No warning, no anything, just PERMABANNED.

I -begged- to be let in again to "fix the issue"


Once in, I wiped my whole gallery, since this site no longer cared for us artist if they could permaban someone who's been here all this years posting regularly.
I only kept my page open to follow the ones that were still here, but I've not posted my stuff here since then.


I left two years or so ago and DAMN, I don't regret it now~ XD

That happened to me. Not the ban thing, but every single pic I've gotten in trouble over and suspended for has been something I uploaded years ago, back when it was not against the rules, and forgot was even in my gallery. I've never intentionally uploaded something/kept it up in violation of the rules. With each new rule, I did my best to comply and went through my gallery multiple times, deleting anything that violated the new rules, but since it's a big gallery going back to 2005, when I joined, it's always possible that I'll overlook something, and lo and behold, I did. Evidently the upload date doesn't matter to them, only that the offending pic is there; I've appealed each decision and every time the mod(s) were deemed to have acted appropriately. Zero tolerance policies don't work, especially when oversight is treated the same as deliberate disobedience. And yeah, I've been a member since '05, but am not treated like I have.

The administration's whole policy of giving people strikes or bans for work has always been problematic at best. I've always thought that they should just contact you, explain the problem, and have you remove the work. It's too easy to make a mistake and miss something. It doesn't mean you had ill will. Perhaps if you post something after that you deserve a warning or a strike. This new "Rule" is only going to make this worse, maybe even to the point of impossibility, considering how vague and subjective this is, their "Clarification" notwithstanding.

The goal should be enforcing a clear set of rules, not punishing people.

The only problem I can see with that is that many people might refuse to take the work down. It's possible they did try this but had an epidemic of users ignoring their orders. Of course, even if that's the case, the solution, then, is to just delete the pic themselves but otherwise not bother the artist unless they continue flagrantly breaking the rules (and having old pics form before the rule took effect doesn't count as breaking it, IMO; the pic's upload date ought to be taken into consideration).

That would have a pretty simple solution. At that point the admins could take the pic down, give them a strike, and tell them where they could appeal the decision. I don't think that a significant number of people would do that, in any case.

Taking into account when the submission was made should definitely be a crucial part of this process.

Yeah, but that requires work, and if I've learned one thing about mods and admins during my many years of dealing with them, it's that with a few exceptions they're lazy and want to have a lot of authority but not put in the work, hence their "one size fits all" zero tolerance approach to handling infractions, intentional or accidental.

That's a problem, but not an excuse.

I never said it was. In fact, I live by the saying "an explanation isn't an excuse." Though apparently so do the mods, considering no reason for the pic being up in violation of the rules is ever accepted; all that matters to them is it's there. But that's a particularly twisted, broken version of the idea, used as a justification for harsh crackdowns.

Having people remove it themselves is part of the problem. If they decide something's not allowed - they hold all the power, in whether it stays up. You can't keep it available in spite of them. What sane art sites do, when they're not run by money-robots or undersocialized children, is tell you they've marked a submission as private and explain what (if anything) you could do to fix it.

FA doesn't even have the maturity to open its moderation messages with the word "sorry." And then they act incensed that the artists they contact are not in a good mood.

I agree. this only encourages paranoia and, sadly, self censorship. It's already happening.

Happened to me too, only luckily it wasn't a permaban, just for a month. And it was 7 years old, and definitely hadn't been against the ToS at the time it was posted. I appealed, and the moderator (no indication that it wasn't the exact same moderator) said "Mmmmmnope." Since they said the next "violation" would be a permaban, I wiped my gallery. No point in keeping anything here when any mod can decide on a whim it's ban-worthy, retroactively.

Oh hey, I remember you!!
I am SO sorry to hear what happened to you <_<

You remember me? unexpected~
But don't mind, I was already thinking on making IB my main gallery~

So that was just the final push.

This isnt abt wokeness. Its puritans. But otherwise yeah

^^^ THIS ^^^ is correct.

Looking at that from here in France it all looks the same X-P

welcome inkbunny

Once again it will be the recipient of the migration of many artists indeed

They hunted me down for 15 years old pictures, banned me multiple times, most of the time another mod unbanned me because they didn't reviewed the complaint before banning...

That's the problem with outgrowing sites, moderators just don't have much time to precisely review complains and it leads to serious injustice...

If art, ANY art, doesn't spark some kind of emotion, attitude, platitude, or any thought at all besides what you agree with in a bubble, is it art? Don't get me wrong I have my own beliefs, but that doesn't mean I'm allowed to silence others. If you're into cub/chibi then be into it, it's not my thing so I'll do the logical option and just not focus or subscribe to it.
This is now a problem of conflating their fantasies with reality.

Exactly.

There's a really simple rule: If you don't like it, keep your mouth shut and move on. Grow TF up, people.

I see all kinds of things I don't like. But it's not for me to dictate my particular taste in art for anyone else.

The conversation is dominated by people who think that you are what fiction you consume, that you are complicit both with what the staff of a given platform you're on does, and with what said platforms host. Which is funny, because a lot of this discourse is happening on Twtter, and I'm willing to bet more than a few are frequent E621 enjoyers.

My blunt two cents are that a fandom about sexy animal people, which celebrates and reveres when those those characters sport anatomically correct animal genitalia, maybe shouldn't be casting stones quite so eagerly.

That is unfortunately the OLD way of looking at things.
Thanks Twatter for enforcing the new law: "the needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many"

Reposting my comment on Ebonyleopard's.

FA admins are having a fascistic power trip. There's degenerate art (toon style porn), and now they ban the artists producing it even before the deadline, those artists are considered subhuman, "Untermensch".

Hitler would be proud of FA.

Sounds a tad of an exaggeration to me. More like they're bending to outside pressure.

No outside pressure is calling for instant banning of people for old art like some claim to have been victim of. Unless they have some credit card processing firm person watching over the shoulders of moderators, which I doubt.

I think that the ideas of mandated strikes and instabans are wrong.

The idea of pressure from financial institutions are entirely possible, but unsubstantiated at this point.

I see no sign that this is a fascistic power trip on the administration's part though. That doesn't even make any logical sense.

Someone on another journal that the staff isn’t bending to no one, so no, there’s no pressure from outside forces.

And that person generally doesn’t know what they’re talking about anyways.

I never saw things that way but I admit there is something disturbingly similar

I wonder if that isn't perhaps a side-effect of the furry fandom becoming too mainstream along with how boring and "politically correct" the world has become. i.e.: I went to TV Tropes and the Panty Shot page has been made into definition-only page with no examples of the trope itself where before there were plenty.

One thing I noticed is the high ammount furry hate stuff I bump into on the most random and unrelated places. It seems that hating on furries has turned into a trend.

Yes I also noticed this disturbing fact here and there.
If you want to be honest, that furry hate has always been there, but I feel like it moved from "those incomprehensible people" to "those disgusting people"

True. It has always been there.

I either never really noticed it or it has increased so much that I finally realized how bad it got.

Oh, that's been a thing for quite a while now. As an obscure minority, we're easy to take cheap and uninformed shots at.

I have thoughts, although I'd prefer to elaborate in e-mail. While I'm still using FA, I don't trust the site or its admins enough to put my opinions anywhere where they can see them.

I understand you.
Now at least they get an idea of the shockwave they generated. Not that it will matter much in the end, of course. FA can and will live without us without skipping a beat, we are not the targeted audience anymore. Our time is done and gone.

That is a sign it's already over.

The kicker though is that nobody, not even the "woke" folks as you call them, was demanding this change. I could understand if there was some kind of groundswell movement to ban certain material but there just hasn't been. If anything, calling this change stupid is one of the most unified sentiments I've seen from the fandom in some time. I don't know for whose benefit this change is being made.

Inkbunny has the best UI but since it doesn't allow photography it's relatively useless to me. Weasyl and SoFurry have such tiny user bases that they're barely worth the effort of updating. I do miss the days when the entire fandom was centered around FA but if we're being perfectly honest with ourselves that hasn't been the case in several years already. It's the biggest furry-specific site, but the fandom has put down roots elsewhere. I'll keep using it, but it'll never be the only place I set up shop. That's just too limiting in this day and age.

You are asking the right question there: where did THIS come from? I'd really like to know because, as you rightly say, I didn't observe myself such a demand rise anywhere. Buuuut I'm not keen on rummaging through shit either so I know I miss a lot of things.
I am quite puzzled.

Indeed, I've seen no real answer to that question. Plenty of speculation, but no answer.

Well things on this site have been too quiet for too long, so I guess we were overdue for some new hijinks from the administrators :p I understand they're going to start banning adult art of shorties and unevolved pokemon now? In that case, I wonder if Sonic characters will end up on the chopping block, too. Well well well, I guess we'll have to wait & see what happens in the coming weeks, and how these changes are going to be implemented and enforced. Probably poorly and sporadically, but weeee'll see.

From what I've seen on several journals, these changes already have been poorly implemented, several users having been banned without any warning at all contrary to what the administration journals declared

This is NOT....NOT....once more...everybody now! ......NOT...... how you protect children, its a woke mentality that is seeping like a plague into everything, art, movies, shows, ads, it needs to be stopped, it is giving people with low self esteem issues and very very small penises the feeling of being included in something, even if that something means segregating half your user-base... its giving them an excuse to feel better then someone else... its absolute rubbish... but what ya gonna do? ya know? is his site... i did not pay anything to be here...but...it is what it is i guess.

As I said indeed, this site doesn't need us anymore, it wants the newest generations, the old ones are a burden and are welcomed to leave.

I would just be careful about using “woke” like that. owo I didn’t know you were from France but people in the U.S. who hate “Woke” stuff are usually associated with racism, prejudice, and anti-LGBT (against transgender people especially.) Might make you sound worse than you mean to if you’re not actually like that. nwn;

That is indeed what  sikfock666 and  patpahootie pointed to above, indeed - thanks for confirming!

The way I've seen it used certainly wasn't as such, but I am also wondering if there isn't a perverted double effect. I mean, being anti-trans, racist and all these intolerant things is something I totally stand against, this is without any question. But unfortunately there are many people from these communities who are overpushing things to frankly unreasonable ends. And when that happens, woe to those who DARE pointing out the excess!!

As far as I have seen from my little corner in France this is indeed what's happening - I have countless examples of this kind where being from a minority allows you to do whatever you want even if it is against the law, but tell this and you are labelled as -phobic.

This is a normal processus however that always repeats in history: when you have a repressed minority that suddenly gets its way to light, it tends to do things in excess until a new balance is reached.

Not really, those are people who cry racism and the sort at every given chance.

No, being Anti-Woke doesn’t make you racist or any of the other buzz words they love to throw around.

This is odd and almost concerning, but I have not concerned myself with FA's rules for some time. (And accordingly not posted.) If FA drives away it's artists then they will just gather elsewhere. And if the trans-omniprotesters drive FA's artists away, then the result is almost the same, just less patient.

This is the core of the problem, they will not "gather elsewhere", they will scatter everywhere. And in fact, it's already what's happening. I just lost a good bunch of great artists because I don't feel like opening an account on Twitter, SoFurry, Weasyl, Subsribestar, Discord, Newsground................

This's so sad and worst. I'm sorry to hear that.

I guess "entropy" also applies to communities and websites...

Be careful

And also, I got added to the watch on your FA account, take care.

I saw that, thank you

No problem.

Please don't make art harder to find. Wiping a gallery doesn't hurt FA - just us. It is what they are doing, to us.

But yeah, fuck this site.

Every stupid file-host gets huge and makes money by serving a niche, and then cries out that nobody could possibly get huge and make money by serving that niche. Like there's no way FurAffinity could succeed unless it becomes DeviantArt. "Somebody bought that thing you loved and destroyed it." So fuck it. Both middle fingers raised as we kiss this place goodbye.

It should not be this difficult to deliver JPGs to perverts.

Please don't make it more difficult, on the way out.

I am still pondering things but one thing I am almost certain about, is that I will not wipe my gallery here, even if I am more and more convinced I won't upload anymore art, or just a couple things only.
With these grotesque rules and reports of already banned artists without warning, I am not protected from being axed myself though.

Il y a quelques jours, Alphonse Lavallée m' a attiré l'attention sur ce changement de règles ici.... Parce que, habituellement, c'est vrais que je ne prête jamais attention à ces questions de tambouilles intérieures.
Alors, je dois dire que j'ai gardé un souvenir assez maussade de la mésaventure subie il y a plusieurs années, quand FA a brusquement flashé sur un dessin que j'avais posté ici (Isabelle et sa nièce, si tu te souviens bien) et m'a banni carrément pour trois ou quatre semaines... Ils n'ont même pas prévenu, ni cherché à discuter, ni demandé quoi que ce soit : la punition est tombée, et puis c'est tout !
Et, par ailleurs, j'étais sommé de purger moi-même ma galerie, sous risque de la voir tout simplement disparaître....

Et là, maintenant, je me demande si je dois commencer à m'inquiéter... Parce que les gars de chez FA semble viser prioritairement les trucs Pokemon / Digimon, mais je crains que ça ne recommence à tirer tous azimuts.
Et quelque-part, ça m'embête, parce que je me demande si certains de mes personnages, assez ambigus, ne vont pas entrer dans leur collimateur...

C'est bien ça le truc : leur nouvelle règle autorise toutes les interprétations possibles, au risque de voir les admins eux-mêmes se contredire les uns les autres (j'ai cru lire que c'était déjà le cas d'ailleurs).

Stuck around for long enough to see some stuff myself.

It started out with people who took their affinities seriously, sometimes spiritually. They spoke to the collective non-human identity and the yearning for a different world. They began to draw, to write stories, about the worlds they envision, and how different life can be without the artificial shackles mankind has put around itself.

Within there were different moral norms, different sexual norms, different interpersonal norms. The freedom of exploring a species that engaged differently with sexuality, at different ages, and how interwoven sexuality was with basic social interaction, were all themes explored. Back then nobody dared to judge. It would have been antithetical and a "human" thing to do.

Good things came out of this. Within the community strong family bonds between people across the world began to form in the online medium. They formed strong families in formats outside the man-and-woman standard that was the only one accepted at that time. They began to speak out. On how society's masks hinder us. On how Christian oppression was holding back people from loving, uniting. Some took their families as a sort of reunion with lost members from past lives, for others it was a return to more sincere self-expression inspired by that of animals, again unbound by human society's shackles.

This birthed progressive values. Dared to imagine one's life and relationships outside a template forced on us all. Gradually, it spread as the fandom grew bigger and bigger and began to have more public visibility.

Today many of these values still exist as an integral part of the fandom. But those entering now do not know the struggles nor origins that lead to this. Once mainstreamed, it seems that all people cared about was the aesthetic of sexy animals and fursuit cosplay. Society as a whole has moved to the left, lagging behind much of what the furry fandom pioneered in its day.

But mediocrity is now setting in. Instead of continuing with the principles that started out this fandom to begin with, some want it to "settle down". But who decides where it should settle? Apparently, the hordes of normies, the credit card companies, and a little nudge from puritans and useful idiots of the anti-porn far-right who've found in this an avenue to erode a fandom they failed so many times to take down by tackling it head-on.

There is precedent to this. At the turn of the millennium a group called Burned Furs and their leader Squee Rat - later outed as a Nazi - argued that the community should rid itself of the "degenerate" elements. These included LGBT, Plushophiles, Otherkin and more. It struck directly at the driver of the emerging fandom - the benefits of unbound exploration of what could be beyond the established human mores - and the fandom rejected it.

To take the current position - already dumbed down by how commercialized things in the fandom have become - and say "okay that's enough", to encase it in a rigid block of ice with the arrogance of considering that "you got it right" and that THIS is the form it should have, takes away the very soul if what made the fandom so attractive to begin with: its dare to embrace the wild side, without shame, without prejudice.

The fandom was feared for years. Ridiculed on the news, even when the news was a terrorist gas attack at a convention. People disowned or kicked out or fired for being part of it. Even opposition from animal rights groups who argued that if you're into drawings of animals having sex you can't be anything other than a zoophile and an animal abuser. It got to where it is by continuing to be untamed and unapologetic.

To see people who have been elevated into places of power and privilege now throw parts of the fandom under the bus - just because normies and society still have a hard time adapting to them - is one of the most perverted reversals I've ever seen. Ripping out authenticity for the sake of obtaining the embrace and acceptance of the oppressive moralistic gatekeepers who seem to have at least partially accepted the Furry Fandom is an abomination. This system must be taken down not joined with!

It is also incredibly shortsighted. The public at large has only just begun to really accept the fandom, and in recent years concerted right-wing efforts against porn, LGBT people, minorities and systemic spreading of lies and moral panic have actually begun to swing society back to the right. In Florida already a Furry convention had to ban minors due to the extended effect of anti-trans laws based on "groomer panic". When these fascistic forces will rev up the engine and look for more scapegoats to turn into enemies, the Furry Fandom is a likely next target.

Today the original pioneers of the fandom and its foundations are either busy with their personal lives, have settled down with their own families, have been minoritized by the massive influx of new members, and some have passed away. The galleries are full of YCH commission posts, people hardly post personal journals, let alone talk about their intimate feelings that brought them into the fandom or personal visions for its future. The sexual expression is consumed as commercially as any other pornography, and even mainstream porn sites harbor compilations of furry art and animations.

There is a story behind the furry porn. Just as there is behind normal porn. A story of normalizing the sexuality and sexual expression that Christianity has forced us to internalize so much shame for. Of exploring feelings and fantasies with your peers as a form of deeper bonding. Of more sincere exposure and interpersonal communication in a shrewd society where all wear masks. Of being better versions of ourselves. This pursuit must stay unbound of the mores of society if it seeks to overcome them. But society has managed yet again to turn this into a soulless commercial product, and now the vultures are beginning to circle.

Given the state of things, my hope is that artists from around FA - especially those who don't draw cub - go make accounts on sites like InkBunny and begin posting their art there. If we are to overcome this tempest, segregation must fail. The aim of the anti-porn forces that have found a way to fragment this community is to divide. By making sure as many non-cub artists as possible are posting alongside their comrades-in-arts, the attempt to set the community narative as there being "normal furries" and "cub pedos" will fail. There must be only one Furry Fandom, and it must include ALL of us.