On how a video game about fucking a bear interrupted furry discourse
People don’t realize the absolute comedy that just went through Furry social media.
See, feral smut (i.e. smut of four-legged characters who otherwise satisfy the Harkness test) has always been a contentious subject in the furry fandom, due to how easily it leads to unwarranted real-life accusations of zoophilia. It’s an annoying bit of discourse that has been rearing its head every other year since the modern fandom began four decades ago.
Which, you know, pretty rich, coming from the fandom where a pretty large percentage readily admit to having had some form of sexual awakening over the TLK and MLP:FiM franchises.
And anyway, that discourse was exactly what was going on last week. People getting harassed on Twitter, as an extension of the whole “groomer” moral panic. A lot of fandom relative newcomers parroting arguments right out of the Burned Furs movement (a late 1990s/early 2000s movement dedicated to “purifying” the furry fandom from “perversion” and “degeneracy”).
And then, just as the discourse was at its most heated, Baldur’s Gate 3 entered the chat.
Suddenly, everyone was talking about the game that will let you fuck a bear. Yes, a bear, as in Ursus arctos. A Druid shapeshifted into a bear, to be fair (again: the Harkness test), but a bear nonetheless.
And mainstream media erupted with reports that the game’s sales skyrocketed based on that scene alone.
And the discourse suddenly screeched to a hilariously embarrassed halt.
Very, VERY amused at all the people complaining about the Halsin x Astarion scene from the panel who don’t seem to realize that those two will only be a thing if you’re PLAYING AS ASTARION and CHOOSE to romance Halsin. Furthermore, having sex with Halsin in bear form is ALSO a CHOICE.
If that isn’t your thing…IT IS IN NO WAY DIFFICULT TO AVOID IT. Good grief.
It was just the team showing things off and having fun by choosing two popular characters for the scene, and THE AUDIENCE AND CHAT were the ones making the choices.
I actually saw someone saying they couldn’t wait for the game to come out so they could find mods to remove it. You want a mod to remove something that’s completely optional and requires specific choices on your part to trigger? Ok then.
(Also…people..please stop censoring words. This is tumblr. We don’t do that here. It screws up screen readers and people using filters to not see certain words. Stop it.)
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