Why are you the way you are

[Loosf]

what made you choose your sona's species


Raccoon and opossum felt "right" for me. Not even my favorite animals, those are cats.
But they both felt like good fits for some aspects of myself.

Curious, touchy feely, handling. Tinkering. Feeling.
Resourceful.

Feels like a comfortable animal to represent myself with. Feels comfortable.

The robot was accidental. Still raccoony, but i could not get the sketch snout to look right, but some of the sketch lines looked beaky

so raccoon/crow robot. Why not

hyena automaton just feels good, and the robot dragon because matching actual gear I have lmao.

What about you?

[Trysdyn]

I've always had an affinity for lightning. It's the spec I always picked in RPGs and such. I always had an affinity for fast glass cannons too.

I was a kitsune actually, initially. I ended up goofing around with some friends into TF and they suggested I run around as an eevee until I finished a Pokemon Gen 1 "Catch em all" hack. It seemed cute, why not?

Given my preference for lightning it wasn't long before someone chucked a thunderstone at me. I played along, then realized I really liked being a neon yellow walking tesla coil.

I never finished the hack. That was uh... 6 years ago now? Something like that.

[Sugar Meowth]

I found furry in 2003 and wasn't really sure what species I'd like as a sona. What little thought I put into it then was just everyone's a fox, so I don't want to be and was more focused on others rather than me. I thought raccoons had cool masks and tails and went with that, not even having an idea of colors until a friend offered to draw my character.



I lost touch with them ages ago, but I appeciate the effort they put into it! The little flourish of a chest fluff became something to make them more than maximum generic raccoon. I kind of just ran with it for years, and got plenty of art and did very much grow to like the character, but they were always just an unexplored idea from when I was young, so in 2015ish? I started considering ripping off the bandaid and coming up with a sona that had more meaning to me!

(Big image of actual fursona Sugar)

Hidden text.

With Sugar I spent time thinking about what species I liked, and had long since outgrown the silly stigma that a species from pokemon or digimon or whatever was somehow lesser than something real. I wanted Sugar to represent a more idealized self, they're cute and bright and have some more feminine traits (if we're out here gendering flowers and hearts). I still wanted to avoid just being a meowth recolor, so I came up with some more unique features, the split tail (which is apparently a thing in Japanese folklore? I think Espeon references it) forming a heart shape, a ribbon tied to it, and the flower crown just to be softer and more peaceful in appearance. Sugar is meant to be devoid of conflict.

Since then, the only real change was shortly afterwards realizing I didn't like having the forehead coin. They're not about money, they're about love, and I felt a heart scale item from the games would be a better symbol.

[Beancatte]

I've always felt a deep association with cats... just kinda often sat around and went "wow wish i was one of those" which of course would make my brain implode when I learnt about therian stuff lmao.

[Mixi Blacksand]

It was pretty simple for me. Around 2018 I decided to get into the fandom more than just watching from the sidelines. I've lived by the ocean most of my life, and was always fascinated by dolphins, both in behavior and their sleek shiny beauty. Bam, immediately decided to be an orca and haven't looked back.

[CroaOrca]

I've admittedly bounced around 'sonas quite a bit, so "why I am the way I am" has changed a overtime haha

I was originally an orange kobold named Oats xP I made them as my original streaming fursona because i simply played kobolds in D&D!
Overtime I dabbled with other vibes, especially after redesigning Oats a few times to become more fluffier x3

Eventually that lead me to make Booker, who was a Dragon Moth based off of the Leopard Moth! Leopard Moths are my favourite moths, and everyone i knew always liked the draconic vibes of Oats, so i threw them together! It wasnt more complicated than that but I really enjoyed noire vibe stuff so that ended up being a part of that whole vibe for Booker as well :3 It felt a lot better than Oats did for some reason

obviously as you can tell though that didnt really stay either haha

Croa came to be from my first explorations into VRChat
The Novabeast had just come out and I really enjoyed its vibe, and I found this really amazing VR world that was simple a house on an island with a stormy ocean all around and an Orca swimming about with a few extra orca things present!
It got me interested in Orcas and i quickly became obsessed x3
when I got around to working on VRchat Model editing, I made an Orca nova first thing
Originally was just going to be something i threw together and to share publicly, but I got really attached and ended up using them as my new sona haha :3

So far they've stuck, but who knows what the future holds :3

[SangriaSnake]

I wasnt always a snake. My original sona was a bear. It wasnt until I came out as trans that I adopted the snake sona. And I dunno, I always saw snakes as comfy. Big snugly noodle that can give the best hugs.

[Mandrake]

I've spent a lot of time wondering why I have such an affinity for horses, and I guess it's partly because I used to go horse-riding when I was a teenager. I eventually stopped horse-riding after many years since a) I felt I had reached a ceiling with what I could learn - the next stage was cantering, which I simply didn't enjoy at all b) I eventually realised that horse-riding is actually really dangerous and even though I only fell off once (completely unharmed), I decided to call it quits before a more serious accident could occur. Besides, I much preferred helping to take care of the horses so that I could brush them and make a fuss over them.

Another reason why horses is because of their personalities. They're these huge powerful creatures that panic at the slight sound and stay on constant alert, which I really sympathise with as somebody with anxiety. Also they like eating, rolling around in the sun, and have poor sleeping habits, just like me!

Incidentally, my Chinese zodiac animal is actually a horse, so maybe it's just fate? I was given this red statue to celebrate the Year of the Horse back in 2002 which I absolutely adore. Next year is going to be the Year of the Horse too!

And I suppose being around for the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic phenomenon may have been another influence, although I've actually only ever watched the first series and that was more than a decade ago. I never engaged with the fandom and have no interest in turning my fursona into a pony (I genuinely have no idea what my cutie mark would be)

[TheGreatMilksteak]

I made my sona a raccoon for 3 reasons.

Firstly, I didn't want to choose a species like fox or wolf because I thought they were too commonly represented in the fandom. I thought a raccoon was exotic enough at the time. Looking back, it's a pretty common sona species, so that showed what younger me knew.

Secondly, I thought the idea of having a raccoon fursona named "Frank Trashman" would be a funny "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" reference. Come to think of it, references to that show have formed a lot of my online identity.



Lastly, I saw this picture and thought "They are just like me FR FR."

[DizzyCrisis]

I decided on being a gremlin from Spiral Knights because that game means a whole heck of a lot to me as a person, mostly. Spiral Knights was formative media for me as a young writer and young "I-don't-know-what-a-furry-is-yet-but-I-like-anthro-animals" person due to its (largely unexplored!) worldbuilding potential and art style that blended steampunk, sci-fi, and high fantasy, as well as being one of the first games I would say I got super into. Because of that, the gremlins have stuck around in my brain, and now I am one!

hi!

For less personal reasons, I tend towards smaller mammals like rabbits and raccoons in terms of animals I like, and gremlins carry that sort of energy, I like their goggles, I am a pathologic hipster who likes things more if less people know about them, and they're just very cute.

[EdenCoven]

Mira (I'm up right now so I'm writing this one in first person): A cat. Obvious. So many of their traits were always very relatable to me, and I was kind of jealous of the way humans look at them and treat them.

July: Chinchilla. This one is honestly kind of a luck thing since we didn't design her with the intent of her being a sona at first. She's never felt like changing, though. They're round and soft and just have a certain goofy-but-regal bearing that suits her.

Viper: Snake Demon Thing. Honestly, he has a very malleable sense of self as long as he's a monster of creature. His first ideas were something reptillian, probably a dragon, but then he remembered how interested we've been with demons and worked that in. Ultimately we mashed them up a bit and made something with a lot of features. The snake thing was meant to be more like a little flavor at first, but we've been interested in them for a really long time, too. It just never occurred to us how much he'd appreciate the fangs and the tongue. So, I guess he's motivated by certain means of feeling powerful.

Trinket: Ferret-Doll. She felt like an object all along, being often very separated from our emotions. She has difficulty controlling our facial muscles, too, and she gets tired more easily than the rest of us even though it's the same body. We considered a robot for a bit but thought people would expect us to care a lot about the parts and the internals. Plus, it fit in thematically with the rest of us better if it was an animate doll. As for the ferret shape, it wanted to match the rest of us there, too, and while her off-the-dome idea was a fox, a friend suggested her energy was very mustelid. We spent a lot of time going over a bunch of those but in the end, the ferret is the most domestically coded and there's so many videos of them acting like silly, energetic goofballs that she grew very attached to identifying with them.

[sutter]

My first fursona was a standard Wolf Starter Fursona because I was an angsty antisocial teen in 2003 and that was the done thing. Later on, I drifted in and out of the furry scene, eventually settling on an American badger. They're solitary creatures, not at all aggressive but very defensive of their territory, and I felt like that fit me well. Lately I've been thinking of switching to a wolverine.

[Yardley]

I wanted to be a fox and had made my own fox tail before I even knew what the fandom was. I thought I was totally weird (I mean, I am, but you know what I mean.) I'm not sure why I wanted to be a fox so much but I think it stemmed from Starfox Adventures and wanting to have the tail really badly.

A bunsona grew over time when I jokingly got my artist friend to draw my fox as a bunch of other animals and I took one look at the rabbit and went "OH. Hang on a minute." I did give my fox character nice big ears so it wasn't a big hop to bun ears and now they're on equal footing. Less bun art, no ref sheet and only the fox fursuit, but I'm still rabbit up when I can. ^^

[Cayman]

I've always had a habit of inventing a character to represent myself, growing beyond them as I gave them their own personalities, and eventually shedding them as an OC and grasping for the next thing myself.


My first sona, Lucien, reflected my aloofness, hesitation, and first coming to terms with my own mental state and how it affected me moving through the world. As I grew through that, he became an echo of my teen years made his own man; one unsure of the world, not good at relating to others, and preferring to get lost in worlds of fantasy.


Khora was my college sona. Headstrong, pretentious, but still craving friendship and connection above all else. He's a teen just approaching adulthood and all that entails, sure he can take what that entails but will definitely have some growing pains.

Towards the end of college, I shed him as an OC as well, and started focusing more on myself. To be honest, I kind of stopped being a furry for a few years, as I'd moved to NYC and was adapting to the very human pressures of being a poor kid suddenly adapting to that lifestyle. Towards the end of my tenure there, I rediscovered my love for the furry milieu, but didn't know quite what to be. I decided to just be me as a crow, and took on a very dorky name, Clockingbird


This is also when I started putting some effort into art--I've always wanted to be a cartoonist. Unfortunately, I didn't stick with that for too long. I moved halfway across the country, and had to start a new life again. Same story, didn't do much furry stuff since I was reestablishing myself. It's only been somewhat recently that I've felt more myself.

I adopted a cat around the same time I decided that playing with species would be fun. I commissioned a picture of Cayman as a cat.


Something clicked in me right then. Something felt right, in a way that I hadn't quite experienced before. I'd been a crow for years, I liked the bird jokes and felt connected to the species, but wow. I realized I'm a cat. And this is how I could express myself. I thought a bit more about what I wanted, what I wanted to be, and eventually found another artist to commission.


This was it. I got this, and this was me. Sure, a little idealistic for who I wanted to be, but it kind of gave me a roadmap, and something about being that felt really good. I'd been futzing with furry identity and people using my furry name for a while, and insisted people use my given name for me for a while. This changed it, though. I got to choose who I am, how people see me, even my name (and eventually, my gender identity.) It was something in the back of my brain that got me into furry 20 years ago when I was Lucien, but it finally clicked. I'm Cay, this is how I feel. It may not always mesh completely, but it's a significant part of my identity that I like being.

[Cayman]

I wanted to be a fox and had made my own fox tail before I even knew what the fandom was. I thought I was totally weird (I mean, I am, but you know what I mean.) I'm not sure why I wanted to be a fox so much but I think it stemmed from Starfox Adventures and wanting to have the tail really badly.

Oh wow, extremely relatable. I can directly trace my interest in furry to Starfox Adventures and the associated fan forums way back when. (More evidence that forums rock.)

[beeps]

Neurodivergent, anxious, trans, otherkin-thing meets alien, shapeshifting, cryptid. It's a match made in heaven, really.

[HakariSquish]

Being a Fish/Shark was all too fitting.

I don't stop moving.
I prefer being near/in the ocean.
My favorite food is fish/sushi of any kind.
I prefer the cold.
I get a burst of energy when it rains.
I am dumb as bricks sometimes.
I will eat any food in front of me.
I do not stop eating and am always hungry.
Fish are my favorite animal

[realHisuianZorua]

i am small and not fond of people

[Def.X]

I was using raccoons as avatar pictures before even becoming a furry, so it was obvious for me that I was a raccoon.

And then (May2024) I played the ATLYSS alpha on itch.io (game wasn't on steam yet), and I felt something when creating my silly character.
I needed to be him.
Never felt like that before, and I quickly turned that short thicc mouse into my new sona.

Still remember and feel my old raccoon self inside, but I'm also a mousey now.

[Ribbon]

Starting out when designing my original fursona, I knew I vibed with goats. Stubborn and sometimes headstrong but overall chill creatures. That's how I wanted to be. But one day at work when I saw a coyote, I also wanted to add "scrungly" to the mix.



But later on, further into transition and the plural realization. I felt a little bit "out there" in terms of feeling isolated and beyond comprehension. I started leaning more into the idea of my 'sona being a shapeshifter and running around VRChat more I realized that I really like being big, like between 9-17' (~2.5-5m) and there was a really cute goat dragon avatar I use that really, really meshed with me. I love the feeling of scales and just had to make my fursona match that vibe while still keeping key goat features. For some reason, I fell off hard on being a coyote so that was an easy drop.



I'm once again starting to feel a shift towards being a bat (I also had really good moments in VRC using an avatar with winged arms and honestly in hindsight should have just given my derg form bat-like wings) but we'll see how that goes. - Finn (fae/she)

[Critters System]

for our individual (headmate-specific) sonas, we've mostly ended up with taking our animal shapes (most of us are usually feral-shaped in headspace), and just making them humanoid. there've been some exceptions to that rule in the past, but at the moment that's the situation.

as for the fursona we use collectively? now that's a longer story :3

we figured out we were furries back around 2016, and right from the start the idea of a fursona kept stumbling us. we had some ideas that didn't stick (most/all of which were quite feminine in shape despite our assumed cisness at the time, something something foreshadowing), most notably a female pangolin design. however, as we went to uni and sank deeper into a dysphoria-powered depression, we stopped trying to actively design a fursona.

it took until at least 2020 and a couple years of knowing why all our previous designs were female to even think about trying again, and still that became mostly thoughts.

even when we sat down hard in 2022, brought up a massive buffet of various designs and such we'd found online, we couldn't settle on anything. we got hilariously close though! the main idea we ended up drafting was a partially plushie goat, but we had several other concepts that, in retrospect, were very likely headmates trying to figure themselves out before we knew they were there. wonder why our main struggle at the time was how sometimes our ideas felt exactly like us and sometimes not right at all????

and then came summer 2023.

we'd realized we were a "we", and while we were still coming to terms with that, we tried to create something that felt like a good summary of the system at the time. what we ended up with was a shark. a blue shark, to be precise, because a) sharks are cool, b) that is, at least from what we've seen, a slightly less common shark species, and c) look we wanted to do a silly blåhai meme okay. problem was, there were several parts of the design we were incapable of agreeing on, mostly related to the humanoid aspects of that design. we kept trying. we tried adding a little pangolin. we did a joke drawing of what it would look like as a plushie, laughed, probably threw it onto cohost (rip). we got stuck. and as the summer ended and we had a period of rapid system growth, the collective fursona project took a break.

february 2024. we are panicking about our upcoming trip to nordicfuzzcon, or rather, one specific detail. we don't have anything to put on our badge. the con was literally less than a week away, so no time for a comm. the only art any of our at-the-time sonas had was very rough. we didn't know what to do.

then, we saw that old sketch from the year before. that funny shark plushie. the joke that we'd spent forty minutes on, a footnote in our at-the-time seven and a half years of trying.

and Of Fucking Course we all got hit hard with the gender. problem solved.

we've kept that sona since. done some tweaking to colors and such (late night "aaaaa gotta get something done" works best for first drafts), added details that we like, and spiced the vibes up a little with just a touch of kobold/yinglet-esque energy. it's good. it's none of us specifically, but it's all if us and we love it for that~

tl;dr: after several years and multiple self-realizations, we accidentally reinvented blåhai

[EdenCoven]

tl;dr: after several years and multiple self-realizations, we accidentally reinvented blåhai

We don't have any kind of collective look but the struggle of finding something that works before figuring it out is relatable as hell. We just ended up having a bunch of them.... and it helped!

[gardevoir]

“…huh. everyone around me says furries are weirdos but they seem way more well-adjusted than my so-called friends. fuck it, I’ll give it a shot. what’s a good animal, an otter? yeah that’ll do”

“man, this is cool, but I wish there was a gardevoir around this furry RP hangout. well, be the change you wish to see in the world, right? I’ll just pick a quick generic name from a PS2 RPG, this’ll be a throwaway character anyway”

“damn, this kicks ass actually. RPing this pokégirl is fun, and I have way better friends now”

“…huh. people seem to like me a lot more when I’m a gardevoir. which would be existentially weird and depressing if they weren’t, like, objectively correct? I’m a way more pleasant person to be around, and it feels better from the inside too. I used to just kinda be lonely and pitiable, and now I have a bunch of friends and a bunch of cool projects I didn’t even know I could do”

“fuck it, dude, what if I just never stopped pretending”

“…oh, uh, yeah, my name’s ___ now. long story. don’t worry about it.”

[swampbutch]

Swamps are the coolest biome on planet earth. alligators are in swamps. alligators are big. big alligator woman.......... big woman............ yay !!!!!!!!!!!!

[rhubarb_nido]

+1 on swamps being the coolest biome. Love me a poison swamp level in video games. I want to be a creature chilling out on a rotting log in a bog.