Why are you the way you are

[Cania]

I'm loving reading all of these stories!!

i fell into hanging out with furries in VRChat because of AutomaticTiger, but I could never find a good humanoid avatar. They all looked so bad, unless I wanted to be an anime, which I did not!! So in my search for an avatar that didn't look like Complete Ass I found Mynx:

https://skamps.gumroad.com/l/mynx

Particularly her:

I was extremely nervous to, as I put it at the time, "steal furry valor" because I didn't really consider myself one. But I said fuck it and bought the avatar. That was a couple of years ago now, and she became the only avatar I used. I kind of felt like "I'm not a furry, I just play one on TV" and I now know that nobody around me believed me lol

That was 2.5 years ago. This is how slowly I operate. At no point did I consider myself a furry, despite often hanging out with furries, essentially having a fursona, looking at metric tons of furry art on Cohost, and feeling lots of joy whenever I inhabited her. But because she was "off the shelf" it didn't count to me.

Last month, I went to Furality, again because of the same blue cat, and when I started working on a new outfit for Mynx, I realized that I really wanted more control over my appearance that I didn't have with her. And then I spent the next 4 evenings dancing with furries for hours and something just. Broke.

And here I am! 38 years old, new furry. This isn't out of the ordinary for me, I didn't come out as trans/nb until I was 32 despite having inklings of it for my whole life and having vocabulary for it for at least 8 years. I didn't get on hormones until last year. I'm just slow at things!

But once I figured it out, I went fast. I spent the next week or so working on getting the Faelyn base to look like Mynx. I retextured her from top to bottom using Substance Painter, a program I'd never used before, and I named her Jynx:

I'm still a little self conscious about how this design is essentially just Mynx painted onto a new body, but I think between the glowing gold tattoos and some of the work I've been doing to differentiate her, I'm feeling a lot better now.

On a serious note, furriness as identity work has become incredibly important to me in the past few weeks, so it's really affirming to see that other folks have used it in the same way. I have had a sudden acceleration of self understanding after figuring this out. It's really wonderful.

okay bye <3

[The Green Herring]

The creation of T.G. Hightower, The Green Herring, can be summarized as follows:

1. Changed my username a long time ago to "The Green Herring", choosing that instead of "The Red Herring" for reasons I no longer remember
2. Drew a green cartoon fish avatar for myself in 2020 when I was getting back into ZZT
3. Got back into doing art regularly as a result of making Cyber Purge
4. Designed a furry version of the avatar when I decided to be more open about being a furry after lurking in furry for years
5. Became openly genderfluid
6. So did the avatar
7. Finally gave the avatar a proper name
8. Loud and proud genderfluid counterculture artist fish

Never underestimate the value of "just running with" something.

[Mixi Blacksand]

And here I am! 38 years old, new furry. This isn't out of the ordinary for me, I didn't come out as trans/nb until I was 32 despite having inklings of it for my whole life and having vocabulary for it for at least 8 years. I didn't get on hormones until last year. I'm just slow at things!

Takin' it slow gang. I've known what furries are and enjoyed the art since the late 90s, but didn't make a sona and officially declare myself furry until 2018. Didn't realize I was aroace (or honestly know that was a thing) until my mid 20s, and didn't come out as trans until around 35. 6 years later still haven't started transitioning IRL. Better late than never, as they say.

[EdenCoven]

We were late 20s before ever considering being anything queer seriously. Combination of like, being severely repressed and also the asexuality just meaning we never cared to think about anything of that nature and the general constant rotation of genders meaning no feelings about that would ever stick. Then over a few years we admitted to being furry, some kind of ace, some kind of nonbinary, some kind of therian, and then finally the plurality that made all the "some kind of"s click

[ExoticCrystal]

Honestly, it's a really tough question! I actually have no idea how I came up with Exotic! I think I just designed him one day and then reiterated upon him over a few years! In the beginning, he wasn't based on anything but later on, as I did more lore making, I decided to make him based on a few species I've made. Guess I just felt making something brand new represented me more than picking something already established!

[Cania]

Better late than never, as they say.

I think queer folks (and neurodivergent folks) often experience a sort of...timeshifted life. We often have to wait until we're adults to be ourselves, and sometimes even later. We experience "normal" life events all out of order.

For instance, up until my 30's I was always told that I seemed older than I am. I was considering what it meant to die at the age of 6, the implications of nuclear war at 10. I'd already decided I was going to die at 30 by the time I was a teenager. I had a job at 18 and was married by 21. We moved across the country a year later and I established something like a Real Career in a few years. That part of my life moved ridiculously fast, partially because I was zoned out and had put all the personal identity stuff completely on hold.

On the other hand, I didn't properly establish a friend group until my 30's, didn't understand my autism or queerness until mid 30's, didn't get the furry thing till recently, etc. etc. All this stuff came after I felt safe enough to explore it and be a little bit selfish.

But in a way, I am extremely lucky. I built up a good, stable life and have a wonderful marriage that I wouldn't trade for anything, and that's more than I can say for a lot of the cis, neurotypical, straight etc. people I know. And yes, much of that is circumstance but I don't think my experience is all that unique either.

anyway im sure i read about this somewhere and a quick google calls it "queer time" but i can't find anything i particularly recognize. so let's just say i invented this and ignore all that

[moss]

my autistic @ss has been obsessed with dragons since childhood... of course ... i've wanted to be a dragon or other critter as long as i can remember too, and felt that maybe i was meant to be one, since i've always felt like an alien in society (and I understood animals much better than people).

i've had a lot of different fursonas but i always end up going back to being a dragon. it just feels right. i also am a dragon therian, though sometimes that feels more or less connected to the way i interface with the furry community..

i don't think there's really a personality explanation to it, it's just a strong feeling of connection for me! a dragon is just what i feel like! though my secondary fursona is a deer, because i feel like that's an animal that suits my personality. :3

EDIT: ahhh i love reading yalls stories, i love how much furry is a journey of self discovery & finding of community for a lot of us...

for me actually my first fursona (back in 2012... jeez...) helped me realize im trans/nonbinary and i used them a lot to help me figure out queerness n gender stuff through experimenting with how i drew them ...

[Mixi Blacksand]

Better late than never, as they say.

I think queer folks (and neurodivergent folks) often experience a sort of...timeshifted life. We often have to wait until we're adults to be ourselves, and sometimes even later. We experience "normal" life events all out of order.

For instance, up until my 30's I was always told that I seemed older than I am. I was considering what it meant to die at the age of 6, the implications of nuclear war at 10. I'd already decided I was going to die at 30 by the time I was a teenager. I had a job at 18 and was married by 21. We moved across the country a year later and I established something like a Real Career in a few years. That part of my life moved ridiculously fast, partially because I was zoned out and had put all the personal identity stuff completely on hold.

I can definitely relate to some of that. It doesn't help a LOT of us are survivors of neglect and/or abuse as part of our experience growing up. Unfortunately in my case it delayed even wanting to have anything for myself until my late 30s, so now I'm trying to start finding a career and maybe experimenting with romance in my 40s. The furry scene, and particularly the VR scene, have been really excellent in terms of finally finding a self worth caring about. The amount of personal growth and self-esteem building I've had since getting into furry VR and making friends there has been astonishing.

[Foxxhoria]

I was just born a fox really. Some of my earliest art is of me as a fox person, at five years old, long before I discovered that there were any other people who liked to draw themselves as animals.

It look a lot longer to contextualise myself into society though, I suppose. Since society never gave me the variety of experiences I needed to understand why I was dreading so many of the things which puberty were bringing me, why I didn't relate to the boys, and all that.

But I've always been a fox.

[beeps]

I'd already decided I was going to die at 30 by the time I was a teenager.

oh god same, I absolutely didn't expect to make it this far

[Cania]

I'd already decided I was going to die at 30 by the time I was a teenager.

oh god same, I absolutely didn't expect to make it this far

congratulations on making it this far!!! and same to anyone else who felt the same way and still made it. <3

[Finchtale]

This is one heck of a loaded question.
I spent a looong time bouncing between different sonas. Every single time it was something that felt right but that feeling would always be very fleeting, causing me to never really stick with a single sona for more than a year

That continued until I decided to look into amphimorpho in more detail when I was having a particularly rough night. I didn't think they were for me at first, but soon after joining a community filled with them, I was very rapidly infected and I haven't looked back since.

Since then, I fully identify as a shapeshifter and as a cryptid. If I ever want to be something else, I can just do that for a little while.
It's lead to some surprising finds through experimentation with shapeshifting. For example: I never expected I'd love being various invertebrates (velvet worm, slug, moth) so much. Nor did I expect to find a species that almost rivals amphimorpho (rabbit/hare) in terms of comfort, but I sure did!

[AutomaticTiger]

It really depends on where you want to start the timeline. Is it that I got really hyped about striped cats in grade school for a bit? Was it Calvin and Hobbes? Tigger? The Jungle Book? Tailspin? There's a lot of potential onboarding points for the idea of tigers, and it was probably a lot of little things just...boiling in the background.

I get involved in Second Life for various reasons most of them related to youthful horniness (I was 19) and gender feelings I was increasingly trying hard to grapple with that I justified in various ways. I'd been into furry art a long time without saying "I'm a furry", and eventually got a fox avatar because I wanted a furry avatar and it seemed a good place to start?

Then one day I saw a blue tiger avatar, and without a lot of conscious thought I've ever been able to recall I bought it. It didn't really hit at first, I kept using it in fits and starts, more when it got a tech upgrade to make it closer to SL's 'cutting edge' at the time (wow it used Sculpty Prims. If you dunno what that means it's OK, there's people in high-school right now born after they stopped mattering). And one day...that's the avatar I used. It just was, I might switch it up a little but that was my default, that was the thing I was.

The more time passed, the more pieces I saw. I still dunno if there was something subconscious or I started retroactively making a narrative but the important thing was...Tiger meant something. It meant a lot of things. Eventually that would entail my low key therian identification with tigers. And now it's funny because...I feel weird in VR if I'm __not__ a tiger for too long. It's the damnedest thing.

And while there's been some shift in colors back and forth over the years (usually returning to blue with time, or the present where the situations a bit more complicated but blue is still the important one), I've never not been a tiger. Fifteen years now, and it's been tigers all the way down.

[Ja'aran]

I basically got assigned mine, a live stream chatroom took a vote and they decided upon a Snow Leopard. The streamer then sketched him out, and I later took that sketch and got a commission to give him big muscles. Legit, I cried when I first saw him, he means so much to me.

[Xinjinmeng]

[StarlightNecromancer]

I've always had an affinity for bats and bat-like imagery. Preferring it over anything else.

Likewise I've always had an affinity for robots, so it was only natural for my sona to include that. My sona is as much an therien thing for me, though not quite. That's me, and if given the opportunity I would make that my real physical body

Silverwing and Transformers did a lot of this heavy lifting

[Enbyeon]

I've been lurking in the furry community since the early 2000s and I've had a few attempts at sonas and interactions with the rest of the community that lead to meeting some good friends but also some really bad situations that put me off the rest of the community. I also wasn't comfortable being furry-on-main and preferred to focus on my non-furry online presence.

Anyway, in 2009, I started playing Champions Online and one of the unlockable costume pieces was a bear head. This was also roughly around the time I played BlazBlue and the Tager meme "Real SOVIET Damage" was peak humor. So I decided to make a space bear called "Real Soviet Damage" and eventually I had more online people in my life referring to me as "Bear," so I just made that my de facto "non-furry furry sona."

At some point I wanted to update my look so it was more in line with me but still "plausible deniability anthro not furry" look, so I did and changed my screen name presence to "Real Soviet Bear." This would go on for a few years and I think it wasn't until 2017 that I was more open about being a furry. Anyway, after I got sick of being asked whether I was Russian on my streams for like the bajillionth time, I swapped my name to "Real Slavic Bear." This did not help the Russian accusations as people just assumed that being Slavic meant you were Russian.

Somewhere during this entire process, I made another sona called "Neman," my green dragon (which you can see dancing away on the 1996 theme). This was a design I worked on daily for 2 weeks before I gave all my notes and refs to an artist to combine them into one look. I considered making Neman my main a few times, but while I adore the dragon, and he felt mine, there was always something missing there that made it feel more like a stage play mask than me.

Fast forward until like... 2 years ago, I was doing VRChat world hopping and was curious about Sylveon avatars, so I tried one that was a modified Umbreon base and got extremely weird feels. I'm not therian, and I've never felt dysphoric when it comes to gender, but there was definitely some wires in my brain that got really intense.

I looked up the original avatar and made a ref and edit with the help of my partner, combining the umbreon and sylveon look. I had previously experimented with identifying as nonbinary, but it took me a while to figure it out. Two weeks before I switched to Enbyeon, I never would have had a Pokesona (I even complained to my partner how I don't see how I'd ever do that) and I never would have put my queerness in the forefront. But things clicked into place I guess. And my nonbinaryness is the "I don't care about gender, including my own," so obviously having pride colors be a default of my character to show how much I don't care makes sense.

[Enbyeon]

-snip-

This was a lovely read and thank you for sharing it with us.

[SlushieCat]

I've been a lot of things over the past 16 years, most of which I don't have art for.

I first found furry on the Deviant Art Messaging Network, aka dAmn. I was a fox with angel wings. It was cringe as hell but I look back on that fursona fondly, mainly for that reason.

Next was Lucario. But I couldn't just be a regular Lucario, I had to be different! So I was purple and didn't have the chest spike so that I could hug better.

Lucario naturally evolved into a Jackal, which was probably the shortest lived fursona. There was nothing special about it, I was just a regular ass jackal.

After the jackal was what I consider to be my first real and true fursona, mainly because it was the fursona I created after I realized I was trans. I was a purple fur-covered dragon with white hair and short little brown horns. The included image is the only SFW artwork I have of them. This fursona eventually changed because on more than one occasion, someone linked me a piece of art by a well known japanese furry artist whose name I cannot remember. It featured a purple dragoness with white hair and she was fucking gorgeous but so similar to my design that I decided I needed to come up with a new one.

Hidden text.

The new design was that of an eastern dragon. This is where I started getting really into color schemes with three colors, a primary and secondary color that really complimented each other, and an accent color that I felt just fit really well with the two. I still do most of my designing with this thought process in mind. I was eastern dragon for a really long time, like 6 or 7 years, probably my longest fursona so far. I still love them.

Hidden text.

After that some shit happened in my life, I realized I wasn't just trans but also binary. Gender got weird. I became a lion for a few months. I've got a lot of art of the lion and I decided every time I got a piece I would tell the artist to just do whatever they wanted with the hair as long as it wasn't just a mane. This one is my favorite of them.

Hidden text.

Sometime in early 2020, while at home, like most people were, I was fucking around with a picrew and made a red cat with blue hair. I stared at them for a long them and then was like "Oh. Oh okay. That's me." I've been that cat since then. They've evolved a little bit as time went on but truly they are me, and I am them. Some day I should make a gallery of all the art I've gotten but I'll put my favorites here.

Hidden text.

[flatwood]

I never really clicked with the fiddly, cuddly and cutesy side of the fandom. For a while I was on the outside looking in. Talking to people with established or general ideas of how they’d want to represent themselves to others within the family.

It was foxes and wolves and cats and I really don’t seem to gel with any of it. Too me some time before I realised that there’s no real rule for what kind of identity you wanted to build, and it all came to a head when I saw some lizard, dragon and dinosaur art and I was on that like a rash while declaring to my other online friends that “omg you can DO that?!?”.

Originally I was just a generic lizard with no real particular species. After a bit of looking around I learned about Sleepy Lizards which seemed pretty cute and constructed a persona around that with an equally appropriate name. Eventually I realised that Komodo Dragons were a thing and it’s been set in stone since.

I eventually bit the bullet and bought a partial first from a friend and occasionally prat about as a canine. Which is pretty fun. But my heart will always belong to the Scalie sort and always will.

[Ribbon]

I'd already decided I was going to die at 30 by the time I was a teenager.

oh god same, I absolutely didn't expect to make it this far

congratulations on making it this far!!! and same to anyone else who felt the same way and still made it. <3

Gosh, we had no idea that this was such a common experience. That was us too, much love to y'all. - Phoebe (it/its)

[EdenCoven]

I think we had a very opposite-yet-similar experience to some, where we spent nearly 30 years just waiting to be born. There are things you get told are supposed to happen, or that you're supposed to feel, that are part of """"growing up"""" and they just happen, right? We just assumed that something was supposed to click and we'd feel alive at some point, instead of just existing. We were going through the academic milestones and all that, but we didn't really feel emotions or have real relationships or anything. Turns out that some things did eventually click but we needed to meet people we could relate to in some way. And then things don't happen until you have the drive to make them.

[redacted_cat]

Won't lie it's been a journey I guess with how I had so many sonas over years and seems the only common thing they all have are: they're all cats.
Main ones I had since being on Twitch were my eldritch smiling cat and my sassy robot cat.

I always found cats silly and felt it could just fit me a lot with how I tend to act around.
Usually am chill, but having zoomies, end up clumsy and act easily shy/nervous around ones I dunno much yet (but get super kind after being comfortable with someone).

Had a few cats when I was still living with family so guess that also influenced it.

Very recently did settle on that new robot cat to show as my full main online appearance (even though I had him for a while online) and it's been kinda freeing and as I've said to a few, it also felt like a full on coming out moment with how I made it clearer how I feel around, how I act and also how I identify in a way.
Been a big journey towards just stopping being nervous about some stuff I draw or even how I'm bi and sassy instead of just nervously hiding and remaining shy/blurry to everyone surrounding me.
On top of that, means friends get sassy kisses when I'm happy lol
Also loads of lasers and missiles cuz that's always fun.

Big mwah mwah

[Kaedal]

The journey of my fursona is kind of... A little confusing, maybe?

I used to be a grey and orange wolf way back when I first joined the fandom. A few years ago, I wanted to try something new and got a snow leopard/lynx hybrid designed. That lasted a few years, then I changed it up again and designed a kitsune that just... Felt right.

I've since pulled those older forms out of storage and made them just other forms for the kitsune form. Sure they don't follow the same colour scheme, but they don't have to. A shapeshifter can change shape, so why not colour as well?

[DustStar]

My journey is short, and a lot of why it ended up sticking was more retroactive than anything. I've always liked chinchillas a lot ever since my one childhood friend had one as a pet. Cute, soft, and excitable little stinkers who even have a unique way of cleaning themselves.

So I kinda lurked in furry spaces for a while before I finally took a more active role, and when I wanted to decide on a fursona, a chinchilla ended up being picked almost immediately. Funny enough it wasn't until after when I looked up what one would have to do when keeping them as pets that I realized how perfect they were to represent me. From how excitable they get, to the fact that they need do terribly in the heat and need colder climates to survive. It all lined up nicely.

Recently I have considered getting an alternate sona, but I'll talk more about that one after I actually finish making them.