At some point in the past few years, furry has stopped being fun. I would try to argue that it's less fun in general, but for sure just for me.

At one point, furry was a thing that the weird kids made fun of you for being into. The anime dorks made fun of you for being a furry. Remember that big diagram where the highest tier was "Published sci/fi artists and writers" and the lowest tier, below absolutely everything was "people who write erotic versions of Star Trek where all the characters are furries, like Kirk is an ocelot or something and they put a furry version of themself as the star of the story"? That was like, what furry was. Yeah, it wasn't fun to be the lowest of the low, but I always felt ok there, because (at least for me) punk rock was always like, embracing being the scummy, shitty person who everyone hated, so it worked. It wasn't that you were a loner and a loser sitting alone with your weird interest, once you found furry, you were among your people. There was power in community. There was solace in not being alone.

But now, it's like all the nerds have decided that they're not nerds anymore, and they can they reshape this into a hierarchy and can they themselves step on some heads?. Most of the people I know absolutely hate someone else who they have almost everything in common with. If they went to the same high school, they'd be best friends, but since they're in this one weird fandom, they fucking hate each other - usually for something that happened like 10 years ago that they refuse to talk about. Everyone fucking hates everyone else. And since it's mostly a left-leaning fandom, it's not like 50% hates the other 50% for obvious reasons like the rest of the country - it's like people arbitrarily fucking hate each other for the dumbest shit. I honestly can't even keep track of who hates who and why anymore. The gossip and drama is so overbearing, its crazy.

And now to make this into a personal thing: this has nothing to do with what happened with ANE. This is just everything in the fandom. I just don't fit into it in the same way anymore. I have enough bullshit in my real life that when I hop onto twitter for a few minutes and I see who the new pariah of the day is, I realize how disconnected I am from it all. I used to say "I don't care" but I did. Now, I really don't care. I "car crash care". But I don't care. I don't think I have it in me to clamor around and try to impress anyone in this fandom. I don't have it in me to try to reason with children, literal or figurative. I definitely understand why people disappear from the fandom.

It's been said that you can't really quit furry. I think if you find furry in an organic way, (you liked one cereal over another because of the mascot when yo were 4 and didn't truly understand why), your favorite cartoons were only animals, Robin Hood gave you that funny feeling, etc, then no, you can never really "stop" being a furry. But I certainly can see how people are like "fuck this fandom, I'm out". The first party I went to at my first con there was someone who was saying "this is my last con" and it really made me feel like "but why? I'm just meeting you now! This is so depressing, this is night one of the rest of my life." And I get it. Too much bullshit. At some point, you just gotta bounce. Or step back. Or something.