Everybody loves a good scoop. Everybody gossips. People have done it for centuries and it’s nothing new to the furry fandom, but the concept of gossip is one of the many facets of society that became overwhelmingly amplified by the advent of the internet. It used to be that gossip was confined to your immediate vicinity; “I saw Bob buying lingerie at the specialty store the other day but he’s not married, do you think he’s a transvestite?” Et cetera.
It used to be that no one outside of a dozen mile radius (or less) would ever know who this Bob guy was. The things he did (or did not do) behind closed doors was limited to wherever he and you lived and, collectively, the people you spoke to on a regular basis. The online world became something of a shared space though, everyone existed there without the limitations of geography so it didn’t matter where someone was when they did something. It was on the internet, anyone could see it. Anyone could talk about it. And people did.
“Furry” existed before the World Wide Web. Not for very long however, so it’s easier to just round it down to a subculture that was predominately nurtured and allowed to blossom thanks to near-instantaneous worldwide connectivity. The guy who showed up at the book store and exclusively bought issues of Sonic the Hedgehog even though the comic sucked and who also never seemed to actually have any friends now had plenty of friends online… and just as many other people who rubbernecked at every forum thread he posted in as “JeremyDaHedgehog84” to gawk at the latest nonsense he was rambling about.
Furries traditionally have always sort of had a bad rap online. Whether it was Portal of Evil, Something Awful, 4chan, Encyclopedia Dramatica, /cow/, or the Kiwi Farms there has always been a cabal of some sort spectating and taking notes. Adjacent to them were places such as Eat All Furries, Vivisector, Crush Yiff Destroy, lulz, and a dozen LiveJournal groups; furries have always had a predilection for eating their own for any, or sometimes no, reason at all. There have been entire online communities that were nothing more than an evolution of grade school zap notebooks made about furries by furries.
Fundamentally, I understand why these places exist. I understand the very complex social role that these mechanisms fill, however things in the online world are always in a state of permanent escalation. Simply talking about who’s taking commissions and running away with the money or whose fursuits are actually just a bunch of cheap material hot glued onto car seat foam eventually stopped being enough of a high. There were bigger targets, bigger beasts to defeat. Today the flavor of the month has been attempting to out people as child groomers; prior to that it was outing people as being homo- or transphobic. And, concurrently with that era, there was a gold rush of trying to label people as zoophiles.
I can think of perhaps no one else who was scrutinized through this lens more than Varka, the founder of Bad Dragon. I’ve talked about him at length on this blog (further reading: Human After All) and if that meandering post is too long for you to digest the summary of it is that while I knew the guy significantly more closely than the vast majority of the fandom I still wouldn’t say I had that good of a read on him. There were things about him that I was suspicious about myself, things that I had witnessed with my own eyes or heard with my own ears, and things that other people had relayed to me through their own research (further reading: The Misunderstood Tale of Herpy). But I was close enough to one of the fandom’s most notorious “people of interest” that for a period I nearly became one myself. I’m reminded of an adage of standing too close to fire, or something like that.
In the 2010’s there was something of a “fad” on social media where people would larp as news correspondents within the fandom. Nobody had an honest story to tell though, this was the era of cancel culture and the only stories that people brought out their little penny pads for were the ones where they could claim credit for ruining peoples’ lives. If the scoop didn’t have the potential to lead to someone losing their following and subsequently vanishing from the internet, they weren’t interested. Everything was fair game.
Don’t misconstrue my words though, some of the people who were the target of these yellow journalists definitely had it coming, but the part that always seemed to rub me the wrong way was that in my experience these people never appeared to carry out their deeds with an established identity. Exposés and the like were always done pseudonymously, posted by people with usernames that mocked their targets or the fandom in general yet these were supposedly sincere attempts to right the community’s wrongs? I don’t know. Of course, sometimes these identities would become established themselves in the process of sharing their receipts but that’s not quite what I mean; when I say “established” I meant it in the way of “this person is a noteworthy artist or writer who feels strongly about the wrongdoings of Person X”. It was never someone with a measured and dedicated investment in these shared spaces.
Anyways, Varka. About a year before I decided to leave the fandom there were people circling the wagons around an artist whose name I will not mention because they’re not the focal point of this journal and I don’t want to make it seem like I’m stirring up shit from nine years ago that I admittedly know very little about. But, this person has sort of always been in a negative spotlight for a multitude of reasons and they had one of the earliest examples of what today we’d call troll “orbiters” following them around and obsessively documenting everything they did and hyper-analyzing it. Eventually there was a lull in activity surrounding this person, so that network of orbiters had to go somewhere.
I don’t remember what it was exactly that triggered it, if anything, but Varka became the interim pet project of this collective. One of them, a person who showed up in the fandom literally just to run an online tabloid rag, made it their personal goal to destroy Varka. Millions of furries before this one have tried to do this, and that’s only a minor exaggeration, and none have succeeded. But sure, this random nobody was going to be the one to do it. Remember that scene in Billy Madison where the bad guy bribes the school janitor to spy on Billy and the best he can come up with is “Billy likes to drink soda”? This is the level of tabloid we’re dealing with.
When someone is loud enough about their intended goal they’re bound to attract attention of course, so the kingpin who’d been going through the aforementioned artist’s personal affairs with a fine-toothed comb hopped aboard the Varka Train. Their first order of business was, I presume, to just Google “Herpy” and poke the first person they came across who was associated with it. Me.
Out of the blue I got a random DM on Twitter from this person consisting of “OwO *notices Herpy admin*”. Completely unserious. I ignored it. The other person, the one who started the tabloid, followed my account. I figured I’d see what they wanted since there was clearly something going on. I got to talking with the “kingpin” person, the one who’d sent me the OwO message initially, and they definitely came off as a little strange asking me a bunch of fairly broad questions about the forum that I’d been disassociated from for a few years by that point. They were upfront in telling me their main goal was to “take down Varka” and that it would be in my best interest to cooperate with them because otherwise they wouldn’t be able to guarantee that I’d be safe from “collateral damage”. Their words.
I was being not-so-subtly extorted by some random person on Twitter with an axe to grind. I took the threat about as seriously as the person relayed their first message to me with the OwO face and disregarded it. I’d previously mentioned I’d answer a few questions about Herpy whenever they sent them my way. I recall getting a Twitter ping on my phone so I checked the app and saw that I’d gotten another message from them. I opened it and saw that they’d sent me three or four questions about Herpy. I was out of the house at the time having dinner with a friend so I closed the app and stuck my phone back in my pocket and went about the rest of my night as usual. My phone pinged one more time a couple minutes later and was then silent for the rest of the evening.
When I got home I figured I’d humor these people and clarify whatever they were asking me about but when I sat down at my computer proper and opened Twitter to read my messages I saw that the second ping I’d gotten was from that same person. Twitter (now X) probably still functions this way today – I wouldn’t know, I haven’t used it for over eight years – but when you open a DM it will show to the sender that it has been read. The person who messaged me saw this and I assume believed me to be avoiding them because that second message was a very succinct “I know you read this message André”. (For context, Andréas is my middle name but within the fandom I’d swapped my first and middle names around, dropped the “AS” at the end, and took the “H” out of my surname to come up with a pen name.)
Genuinely, who do you think you are speaking to me like I’m a kindergartner who dared to glance away from the time out corner? You’re going to whip out what you think is my first name all of a sudden because it sounds threatening? Was I supposed to be fearful that I’d been DOXXED by this person? Doxxed using the name I’d signed all my stupid stories with and printed all over this very website? I’d have been more nervous if they called me Louis because maybe then I’d have known something was up.
The questions I’d been sent were complete nonsense too, things that I’d heard literally nothing about. They asked me if I knew anything regarding Varka attempting to buy animal urine from shady dealers? That was literally the first question. I do not even remember the others but I’m certain they were just as absurd. Despite how annoyed I was with these people I gave them an honest answer which was to say I didn’t know a damn thing. Maybe Varka really was buying piss from the dark web or whatever. If he did I certainly never caught wind of it, and his house never smelled like a barn so chances are he probably wasn’t doing anything of the sort.
You had my attention, and despite being needlessly threatening and annoying because I dared to have a personal life outside of petty crap on the internet, I was still willing to give you an audience. And you wasted it on that.
Mercifully, I never heard from any of them again. As you might imagine none of these people had any vested interest in the furry community at all, they were just demagogues looking for a dopamine hit of social media attention and being quoted in all the YouTube callout videos that certainly had to be just right around the corner. When that never happened, they packed up and left. That one person’s dream to be “The One” who took out the king? Failed. Disappeared. Like they never even existed. Deleted their handles, deleted their glorified WordPress website, and willingly let their domain lapse and get picked up by some squatter. Varka never got cancelled, he just ultimately fucked off from social media to live his life in private because he made his cash and probably realized there’s no point in being online anymore because it’s all bullshit.
It’s difficult for me to definitively say what occurrence was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me and directly led to my departure from the online world, but this is probably the closest I’ll come to having a concrete answer. This would’ve been about the summer of 2017 and I closed up shop on January 1, 2018 after spending the last week of December 2017 quietly packing everything up and making peace with matters. I was largely done with writing stories and my life was such a damn mess that it just wasn’t even worth it to me to participate in a community where people behaving like this was the norm. I ran message boards for some guy 10 years ago (at the time), that’s it. Had no idea the person I took the keys from would turn out to be a real lightning rod, if I did I would’ve told Varka to pound sand.
I didn’t have the tolerance nor patience for this nonsense so I too decided to just call it quits. I’m not sure I miss it. I certainly don’t feel any kind of wistfulness in hindsight. The rest of my life has gone on since 2018 and I feel like all things considered not having some nebulous dark cloud of internet mavericks looming around has been an improvement. It’s unfortunate in a way I suppose, but that’s simply just how I feel.
Until next time.