And 4chan was filled with bigots. It was a major part of the alt-right pipeline that put America where it is today. Just because it was used ironically doesn’t mean that it wasn’t also used seriously. There’s a whole essay on the furry hate that revolves more around the damage done by that one CSI episode (and I’m pretty sure another similar show a few years later) that characterized furries as sexual deviants than anything else, but the use of the 4chan furfag moniker was also a part of it, and that spread outside of 4chan.
4chan for its part, though, really proved the saying “say something ironically enough times and eventually you start saying it unironically.” Although that’s less related to the furry thing and more to the whole edgy teenagers posting racist jokes growing up to scream about Jewish space lasers creating climate change.
And 4chan was filled with bigots. It was a major part of the alt-right pipeline that put America where it is today. Just because it was used ironically doesn’t mean that it wasn’t also used seriously. There’s a whole essay on the furry hate that revolves more around the damage done by that one CSI episode (and I’m pretty sure another similar show a few years later) that characterized furries as sexual deviants than anything else, but the use of the 4chan furfag moniker was also a part of it, and that spread outside of 4chan.
4chan for its part, though, really proved the saying “say something ironically enough times and eventually you start saying it unironically.” Although that’s less related to the furry thing and more to the whole edgy teenagers posting racist jokes growing up to scream about Jewish space lasers creating climate change.