Some people will always find behavior associated with childhood (playing make-believe, engaging in imaginative fantasy, dressing up outside of parties/holidays, identifying strongly with animals/characters) kind of weird when adults do it. Of course, videogames, comics, and cartoons are all part of the same barrel of monkeys.
Some of the same people have a desire to maintain a hierarchy and be nasty to those they perceive to be lower on the hierarchy in order to feel better about themselves. It's nerds being as nasty to other nerds, just as the cool kids would've been to them in school.
Nothing's better than when an anime otaku - who proudly declares they're an otaku, using that word - goes on about say, furries. Or goths, or whatever.
But at the end of the day, it's mostly the same basic thing, yeah. People ganging up on other people to establish a pecking order, when someone above said person is most likely looking down on them with scorn or 'pity' for being an inadequate living creature by their standards.
I'm not sure you could say that everyone who jumps on hatewagons (or plays social ladder games) for subcultures is themselves just another nerd - the magic of today is that the Internet has plenty of genuinely undifferentiated whitebread folk on it, and the jocks from school are here too now, to continue being jocks about life.
However, perhaps it is worth noting that in the early days of the WWW, back when it WAS more often nerds and geeks alone who would be digging through the internet freakshow... that much of the early hate for any subculture deemed strange or 'uncool' was indeed originating from people who were purely nerds. Just the nerds who were imagining that they were now the cool people, the norms.
As kind of a side topic, I do think one reason why a few concepts like furry bother many fine, impressionable young adults is that culture in general (until the last couple of generations, at least) has heavily repressed and codified adults expression things that are too... whimsical. Displays of imagination and "non-serious" behavior are looked down upon as immature and childish. Everyone is conditioned well and good to strive to be an adult when they hit puberty, and feel shame and fear at the prospect of being singled out for a lack of stereotypically adult mannerisms and values.
So here you have these people who are into whimsical, wild, colorful, weird, genre-bending characters. They play with personal identity, to whatever degree. Yep, it's bound to give plenty of people the willies, as their reality has not been constructed to contain a box in which to contain such things. At best they fall back on trying to force-fit the deviants into an existing category, usually derogatory. (Because that as well, is how society conditions us - Burn the Witch.) At worse they freak out.
In a sense, I kinda laugh whenever I see someone, today, still saying furries are stupid because they keep whining about everyone taking them seriously. That, in itself, is ironic for a few reasons: not the least of which is how often other geeks and nerds get very up in arms about the fact that the world doesn't take them "seriously". Video games as art threads, anyone?
Though it does also have some basis in the solid Internet mentality of blaming the victim: everyone dogpiles on a target. When target complains about dogpiling, everyone say that they're just taking the internet too seriously. Use this accusation as justification that target "deserves what they get", and increase dogpile by 200%.
IIRC, the classic meme of "fursicution" wasn't even made by a furry. It was coined by authentic trolls of the subculture to laugh at people who said everyone was going overboard about furries. Then other idiots picked it up, going on about how "those dumb furries, did you know they say 'fursicution'?"
But, that's one danger of using memes and groupthink instead of reason to navigate your internet experience.
Don't worry about it. Today he's attracted to grown men wearing fox costumes, just like any other normal person.
Normal people are into fursuits too?
I did not know that.
But then, I've never met a normal person. I was beginning to think they didn't exist.
She looked so shocked and wasn't even able to hide it very well lol. I guess she didn't really like furries.