It's funny. This creature (above standard reference art by a person known as Harlem) was never meant to become a fursona. Nor this picture as its primary reference. It's funny how history works out.
So back in the days of yore, when the MFGG (Mario Fan Games Gallery) forums were in their prime in the late 00s, everybody browsing the forums was expected to have some sort of an OC. Me, registering on those forums initially as FlygonBreloom (and later down to Flygon) never ended up with a "true" OC, I was still an ordinary Flygon and/or Breloom for all intents and purposes*.
So, I ended up deciding to make a proper OC, taking all my thoughts and feelings on character design in 2009/10. In some sense it was reactionary, I was afraid of making something that was too fanciful - I saw myself as quite plain at the time.
These weren't the earliest drawings of this iteration of the character's design, but they were the ones I was able to find archived about. There's an interesting few divergences already - the initial design had prominent whiskers on the muzzle, the ringed ears (hmmm), and the forepaws not having the fur socks.
Eventually, through the early months of 2010 the design was continually iterated on, until I had a character I felt I could use for various means and purposes. Including as a placeholder character for any artistic projects I'd be involved in. And as an OC character to use on MFGG.
Then Flacko happened, and brang her interpretation of the character's design to the table.
This actually predates the Watermelon-holding picture (as seen in my profile picture - I've had the same profile picture since 2010**!), and still has some of the prototypical design elements... but by and large, this is when the style method for drawing Flurrets gets much more refined, particularly beyond my drawing skills of the 09-10 era.
It isn't worth categorising too much the slower evolutions beyond then, this post is already much more indepth than I intended to go into.
It is without overstating that without the assistance of
Flacko (aka. FlackoWeasel) that I would not be the creature that I am today.
So how did this end up as my fursona?
Complete accident.
It's simple - so many people assumed that it was my fursona, that I ended up saying yes for simplicities sake. The thing is, I ended up vibing with and associating with the character. I spent so much time designing the thing, and putting my own self into it, that I ended up designing a character representative of my heart and soul anyway.
It was actually intended to be a non-sexually dimorphic species from the start - there is other drawings of the character/species drawn in whatever way gender-wise. This actually ties into the fact it was meant to be a species for me to use rather than a specific character, but, well, people assigned
the Flurret to being
me, and it became too difficult to explain to people that no not every drawing of a Flurret represented me as a person specifically.
So we fast-forward over a decade later!...
Having a more outwardly feminine profile for a pngtuber ended up being useful, hahaha. My identity on this sort of thing isn't entirely static to this day, realistically. It is a mess. But that's a ramble for another thread.
(I believe this hi-res variant of the pngtuber's only been seen on RachelRetro's streams?)
But this has lead to a specific and extremely strict rule that whenever they are drawn as anthropomorphic, they may only be drawn femininely.
That's the story of the original character/species turned specific accidental fursona!..
I hope it wasn't too long!
*The story of the Flygon half remains to be told another day hahaha. That may be the much more complicated and difficult one to tell.
**This is a slight mistruth - the profile picture did actually have the forepaws redrawn to brown to be on-model for me, after a decade of them being beige instead.
