I learned a lot over my couple-month stint running the Twitter account ShitFurriesSay. Nothing's happening there now, so don't go follow it, it'd be a moot point.

Now that there's over a month of distance between myself and the end of the account, I've had time to process not only what I learned from the comments people had, but from things I became more sensitive to and aware of over my time during.

First off, it's really touch and go what is and isn't "funny" in this fandom. I don't want to say furries don't have a good sense of humour, of course we do. We pretend we're big animals online and generally dork out, not having a sense of humour about it sort of kills part of the magic, I think. No, what happens more often is there is this invisible line drawn in the sand that you do not cross. Why don't you cross it? I don't know. It's not a line of offensiveness, or a line of over-sharing. There's some strange tipping point in self-deprecating humour that goes from funny to annoying.

I get it, I may not have been the best candidate to run a furry parody account. I'm no Tina Fey, I understand this. It was a simple parody account, too. And yet, I received a lot of "this is just trying too hard" or "it isn't funny, these parody accounts should just stop", but there was one brand of criticism that always disheartened me.

"I just don't like self-hating furries."

I had this said to me, or about the idea of what I and others were doing, a few times, in a few flavours. This was the criticism that always stuck with me. If you thought it was stale humour, that's okay, that's a valid opinion. I wasn't going to be the next Patton Oswalt with ShitFurriesSay. But this idea that there was something...wrong with poking fun at the community you belong to. It just didn't make sense to me. It still doesn't.

Who among us hasn't made a gay joke? Or for those straight and bisexual people, I'm sure you've made jokes about your sexual orientation. It's not an uncommon practise by any means. Same with race, same with certain groups that grew out of music genres (which means this isn't just groups you didn't choose to be in). And yet there was a mostly-quiet, but apparent opinion that making fun of furries was akin to punting kittens off of rooftops.

There is a far more visible line, though, when it comes to "making fun of" and "being hateful toward". I have seen some art and commentary labeled by the author as the former, when it was truly the latter, a precision attack on one or many people's character in a way that was vicious and rude. But comparing "lol derp fur" to "You are a horrible person and you have AIDS!" is like saying your pimple is as bad as that malignant tumor.

Maybe I'm looking at this all from a skewed perspective, being on the side of the situation that I am. I love being a furry, I do. I have met amazing people through this community, and wouldn't give up the friends and lovers I've had for the world. Some furs talk of leaving the fandom, or that furries suck while still attending cons and meets and generally being cancerous blobs of hate on the fandom. I don't think I did that. I think I said, "See how silly we all are sometimes?"

I may be wrong. I'm okay with being wrong, I really am. I just want everyone to know that there was no harm meant, it was all a loving jab. I've learned that, among other things, from running the account.

I'll just leave this here, though--a favourite quote by Lisa Lampinelli. If you don't know her, she's a fabulously abrasive insult comic. This is what she has to say on making fun of people: "If you don't love everyone, you can't make fun of anyone."

Lu out.