Being Cringe is a Good Thing, Actually

Laughing at furries is an ancient Internet tradition. The Japanese perform tea ceremonies. The British chat about the weather. Christians go to church on Sunday. Netizens gather to laugh at furries.

Of course, not all netizens. Some are furries themselves. Those that choose to take on all the ire of the frothing masses for… what purpose exactly? Teenage omegastick could never quite figure that out, along with the millions of others who regularly participated in the Great Tradition.

As a loner nerd with no siblings and little PC oversight, I was raised on Internet forums: 4chan, Something Awful, Bay 12, and a host of other long since dead web enclaves. If there’s one thing socially-disaffected nerds love more than berating each other over pointless trivialities, it’s uniting to berate someone else for having more fun than us.

Was it an “at least we’re cooler than them” thing? That would make sense, but we also took great pleasure in picking apart any idiosyncrasies in the behavior of “normies”, who decidedly were cooler than us. Hey bro, wanna go watch some sportsball and wear fashionable clothes?

There was always this nagging doubt in my mind, though. As much fun as it is to be a part of the “superior” group and getting to feel better than other people, it is a… shallow kind of fun. Much more shallow than the fun the people we were laughing at were having. They were often spending quality time with their friends and obsessing over interests without a care in the world about what people thought of them. In fact, there was probably a degree of envy involved. Envy that they could get over themselves for long enough to pursue the things they wanted.

Looking from an observer’s perspective, I’d definitely prefer being the target of the ridicule than the one dishing it out in many of those situations.

- omegastick