Yes, there is an active furby fandom. No, it is not ironic. And of course, there's ridiculous drama. I'm going to apologize in advance - since so much of this drama is old by this point, and finding old posts on Tumblr (where most of this takes place) is a nightmare, I can't link receipts. Please accept my apology by instead taking a browse through
Furby Confessions, a furby blog where people anonymously start shit within the fandom. It's a goldmine.
The fandom itself
This part isn't about the drama, but understanding how the fandom is set up, and why there's one to begin with. For the juicy stuff, feel free to skip below.
At the intersections between nostalgia, casual toy collecting, mental illness, and art lies the furby fandom. If you know anything about toy collecting fandoms (Blythe, BJD, etc) you know nothing of the furby fandom. Furby collectors are not interested in keeping their toys in mint condition. They can buy the rarest furby on the market (the Kid Cuisine furby, in case you're wondering) and rip it right out of the box with absolutely no regret. They often customize their toys, whether this means painting them, changing their eyechips, removing their fur and giving them a custom one they made, etc. Most recently, the longfurby genre has become popular (
examples here). Mint is not important to us in the least, and in fact, "damaged" furbies (ones with broken parts, who talk funny, who can't talk at all) tend to be
even more valued for their quirks. The more specific the damage, the more it's sought after. Recently, I went on a mission to rescue the furby from
this reddit post. He’s now one of the most recognizable furby “celebrities” in the fandom.
It also helps that furbies are the perfect grounding machines. If you're familiar with the practice of grounding for people with depression/anxiety/etc, furbies hit pretty much every category on the list. They're also essentially fidget/stim machines, so persons with ADHD or on the autism spectrum get a lot of joy out of them.
Now, I’m telling all of you this in extreme detail to emphasize a point – collectors really, REALLY love their furbies. They don’t love them because they’re “valuables” (most of them…really aren’t). They love them like they’re family. They’re not just toys to a lot of people. Which explains the extent of the drama I’m about to drop on you.
The drama
Oh boy. Where to start. Let’s see…
- A bizarrely high amount of extremist feminists (TERFs, really) come into the furby tag on tumblr and spam fandom users with obscene images of gore and violence.
- Cleancourse: Discourse about how often furbies should be washed, particularly one fandom member's extremely matted furby. Gets incredibly heated and personal.
- A girl once procured screenshots of a controversial fandom member trying to scam her on the price of a furby. Controversial member turns around and proves without a doubt that these screenshots are fabricated. Girl's friends start messaging fandom goers telling us she's in the hospital for a suicide attempt, ashamed at being caught. A photo is posted of her hospital bracelet. We later find out that not only are the friends not real, but neither is the bracelet or the attempt. Girl disappears from the fandom to never be seen again. This all happened over the course of a day or two.
- Very popular furby community member leaves forever after making a (admittedly poorly worded) joke about their furby being a slave/in chains/etc, which caused people to start bashing them for "drawing parallels to actual slavery". If I remember correctly, the joke was originally from Rick and Morty, which caused a whole discussion about people who watch that show.
- There are a lot of adults and an almost equal amount of minors in the fandom. Adults decide to make their own discord chat because they feel iffy about talking acitvely with children. Small handful of minors start accusing the adults of being manipulative abusers, and use the creation of the separate chat as "proof".
- Minor then goes on to admit that they steal their boyfriend's medication to get high in a furby chat of all places.
- In under a month, a string of fandom goers were revealed to draw and like lolicon (cartoon child porn for the uninformed), something that's a pretty big no-no in a community dense with minors. It was scary how many big names were tied to it.
- Minor with serious mental illness believes that their furbies are living beings and begins trying to feed them real food; also uploads a video of them horrifically mangling a furby that was so unnatural it sent chills up my spine. Also wrote a graphic post about how they would sexually abuse anyone who hurt a furby in such insane detail it made its readers want to vomit. All of these posts have since been deleted, and most people who held screenshots deleted them because of how fucking scary they were.
- Any time anyone uploads a video of them on Youtube destroying a furby (hydralic press videos, hot knife challenges, etc). Fandomgoers despise that.
- One particular fandomgoer has, easily, 400+ furbies. She is constantly buying rare ones, outbidding others constantly, and seemingly hoards them. People hate her for this because it drives furby prices up and makes it harder to get rare furbies for a reasonable price.
- Same fandomgoer has about 8 Kid Cuisines, one of the rarest and most expensive furbies out there. She is using the most recent one she bought to test the effects of sunbleaching on furby fur - essentially ruining it herself, instead of using a much more common furby like a church mouse. People are pissed.
- Minor is upset they were banned from a furby discord for "kinning" (god bless you if you don't know what that means) a Columbine shooter. But it's okay, because they were kinning that shooter in an alternate universe where they didn't kill anyone!
I'm sure more will come to me, but that's it off the top of my head. With all that said, though, I'm glad to be a part of this community. It's easy to avoid drama if you get in with the right people (ie, the discord I moderate - you should PM for an invite if you want to get involved in the fandom ;P).
