It's Critter Time!

The sona I mostly present with nowdays, the hedgehog Simon who was then called Speedy (though he WAS Simon "Speedy" Rickson), is one of my oldest OCs (though not THE oldest).

Specifically a Sonic OC, whoa. But when I finally made the fateful typo of "DarkOverord" on the 27th of November, 2004, while registering to deviantART, I didn't really have a sense of "furry" or "fursonas" etc, so Speedy was who I chose to represent myself with. However, I had another interest... DRAGONS. So much so when on holiday with family I would collect tat like this

This combined with now being active on the internet meant I looked at other things, tutorials mostly, but eventually I stumbled on The Anthro Artists, I still wasn't sure if that was furry or not, but Weremagnus was the artist I got inspired by the most...

And then it happened... A Red Dragon appeared. Though at the time they were just like "dragon dude" or "dragon me"

I'm deliberately putting small images here, if you want to see them larger, they're in my "Twenty" blog article that covers more than just me talking here about how I got to what I am now.
Granted that doesn't look like DarkOverord Occassus yet some of you will know, yeah that design didn't last, 3 or so months later we got DarkOverord finally, I even put "DarkOverord" behind him!

A lot of the core elements are still there, red, orange hair, blue eyes, black membranes, cream/tan horns, you can genuinely trace that design to the modern design. Hell, the blue hoodie just became an unbuttoned shirt. However to skip a few steps we'll skip ahead for DO here

And that's at least how DarkOverord Occassus came to be, but... there's more isn't there? Imagine if there was some kind of plurality in there too

Inflatable DO came around about... 2013? I saw all the cute inflatable critters such as Blue Dwaggin's work, JacFox, and others in my friend group etc. and a bug bit me, so soon an inflatable DO came around

And honestly, there's pretty much nothing changed with them, but hey, they're cute!

And that's literally all the details for toy DO, I thought that it would be cute and here we are

I'm not gonna bore you with all the DO alts, robots, squeaky things, goo, pokémon, they're the reason for all the other DarkOverords who are refusing to be called anything other than DarkOverord, I've tried.

Now my tanuki Marcus (uhm akhtually he's a bake-danuki). That's a lot more simple to trace a line. The 13th Touhou Project game, Ten Desires, came out and I actually beat the EX stage! And then got obsessed researching in to bake-danuki lore and the like and thus he came to be.

He became my main sona after a detachment from DarkOverord (reasons... I've learned more why recently ha ha smile) and my overall body build as a then overweight male (the overweight bit is still true, not the male bit) that I chose to switch in late 2016. Likewise with Toy!DO, Marcus' design mostly just refined itself:


And finally... we loop back around. There's a reason I brought up Simon, there's a reason why I made sure to open about him. Because he went from the old representative OC to it (note the gender change here) becoming my sona. First of course though, Simon had to make the jump from Sonic OC to something more detached, I chose to keep that "Sonic" style of the quills though, it's something I never wanted to lose because in the end, that's where he started, and honestly I wanted to own that. So inspired by a friend now sadly passed away, Thalia Evans/Swirlymuse, anthro Sonic (1, 2) I took it upon myself to finally bring him forward (also "Speedy"'s boyfriend "Mystery", now Malrak who totally wasn't a Shadow clone smiles):

As this transparent, I've linked this so you can open it with a light BG
The design refined ad my art ability got better but Simon basically retained those initial new design elements

And it was at this point I drew Simon more and more, he became they and they became it as I realised more and more that Simon wasn't being "a character" anymore but was becoming an outlet for me. Through kinks, through likes, through expression, though... identity. 2019 I suspected it to be the case but by 2020 I knew it was. The snoot def became more thin and hedehoggy though.


"DO" you prompt "...but where's the fangs?" WELL... that was when real θΔ moments happened. I responded to a post on the fediverse by Pyrex about a blood donation, and... I did a doodle about that.

And I can only describe this as a primal feeling of feeling found, feeling identity, feeling something I don't think I've strongly felt before that it stuck. I cannot put in to words how right this felt. And that's why I like blood a lot now... I was already fairly nocturnal that didn't change.


"Okay cool DO but..." okay yes, the bat. Well that kind of came naturally. Vampires often are depicted as having a bat form, I love bats, this felt like a good excuse to actually design one. But what REALLY changed things was my first experience properly in VR, where the first avatar I tried... was Morghus' latex bat modification of the Nardoragon, the Nardobat (well, the shiny version). And it BROKE MY BRAIN (positive).

People don't normally within moments adapt to their wings and fold them around themselves like a bat and feel comfortable about it. I eventually started going to meets and the like, bought everything I need and now I'm usually a bat in VR, and sometimes a bat outside of VR


AND NOW YOU KNOW WHY WE ARE AS WE ARE (was the we deliberate? Maybe)

(By Blur the Fur)

Animorphs came out when I was 10 (I'm old!) and I immediately latched onto it. My best friend was also into it and we obsessed over it, constantly talking about it. We obsessed over The Lion King a lot as well, but Animorphs was always more intense. At this time I split psychologically, in what I and my psychiatrist now suspect was a bout of DID, though I'm not sure what triggered it at that time specifically. My alters were all named after Animorphs characters based on their initial personalities, but almost immediately developed quite differently and in exaggerated ways. My best friend either split as well or just really enjoyed playing with different personalities as a game (something that made me very confused about the experience until discussing it with my psychiatrist very recently; I couldn't figure out why this 'game' was so important to me and why I was always 'playing it' even when I wasn't around my friend, and why it felt so real). Her personalities were also based on Animorphs and likewise developed differently and in exaggerated ways. We referred to them collectively as 'the headvoices' and they were present constantly when we were together.

Less important to the furry experience, but maybe relevant to the gender/sexuality one, is that my 'Rachel' persona and her 'Tobias' one (Tobias was always very special to me, I had a huge crush on him as a character in the books) had a romantic relationship, and we would act this out in some of my earliest non-platonic experiences. We never parsed this as 'me' and 'her' having a romantic relationship, it was 'just the headvoices'. It's still confusing to think about now, but I think it was definitely the beginning of being attracted to queer feminine people, and my first interaction with the idea that someone can have a different gender than what they look like externally. She was a year younger than me and when I went to high school at 13 we started drifting apart, and over the course of the year, the headvoices faded away and I went back to feeling like a singlet. When she joined high school when I was 14, we reconnected, but the headvoices 'game' was over. We never discussed it again, even after getting back in touch as adults. It's so confusing to think about, now. I'm still trying to figure out how to parse it and how it affected my current self.

One of the things that really stuck with me from these experiences though was the idea of transforming into an animal. I'd been pretending to be an animal as far back as I can remember, when I got into anime as a young teen, I immediately started drawing catgirls, and invented a kemonomimi persona for myself that was loosely based on a tiger. When I was 15 I joined the Sinfest webcomic forums (which were very different at the time; they're all radfems now and the old forums are gone, but at the time it was almost the opposite of that, with the forums split into factions of 'Pirates' and 'Pimp Ninjas', the latter of which were just as regressively sexist as they sound). Around this time, I'm not sure how, I started finding art by Jeremy Bernal, Dr Comet, and AimeeKitty online and was really interested, seeing the content as sort of 'elevated kemonomimi' designs. There was an outspoken furry in the forum who saw my interest in this and told me I was a furry too. He introduced me to furry art in general, and at some point when I was 16 I saw an article in the newspaper about South China tigers, with a photo, and immediately - that was it, that was me. I updated the kemonomimi character to be an anthro (still in an anime style, since I was still obsessed with anime at the time), a South China tiger, and a pirate (since I was now dating the captain of the Pirate faction on the forum). This is around when I started drawing constantly, something I'd been doing on and off my whole life, but I started carrying a sketchbook with me everywhere and was probably doing 5 - 10 pages a day in it. After moving in with the pirate captain guy after graduating high school, I started finding other favorite furry artists, including Weremagnus and Zeriara. I decided to make my fursona a 'Bernal style' (as I called it) furry with more animalistic features and that felt so right.

Fast forward 5 years, I was in my third adult relationship with the guy who would become my husband (ex-husband, he was extremely abusive) and living in the US, working as a furry artist for a living. I'd already redesigned my fursona several times, and it was now a feminine, neotenic, pastel tiger I made to reflect my IRL identity at the time. I'd been watching Chobits and having really intense feelings about being a 'doll', a human-passing robot, and decided to make my fursona an anthro-passing robot doll, but felt like I couldn't talk about this openly - it was too weird, and my husband was obsessed with seeming as 'normal' as possible (I think to this day that he's gay and I was clearly his beard, even to himself). But then a friend of a friend (who is now my platonic partner, over a decade later) moved in with us. It's nonbinary (agender specifically, but we didn't have those terms at the time - it said 'genderless' and I often used the term 'null' or 'nullgender') and at the time its fursona was a robot (it's just a synthetic creature now, not specifically a robot), which it was open about. I'd never heard of being nonbinary before, I was only vaguely aware of the concept of being transgender and thought that it only meant trans women specifically - I had no idea trans men existed either. But I'd been feeling weird about being a girl for a long time, obsessing over the idea of being skeletally thin so I would have no breasts and narrow hips, without knowing what these feelings were. When it introduced those concepts to me it was like being hit by the Gender Truck. I made my fursona publicly a 4' tall robot doll with set of new reference sheets, split it into four versions: 'transgender' (flat chested but AFAB), null (no sexual characteristics at all), male, and dualsex (using the h*rm slur at the time), and started going by ey/eir/em.

I rocked the 4 versions for years, and while I loved the design of 'transgender' Farore (my original fursona name, taken from a baby names website and only later realized to be from Legend of Zelda, oops - it just goes by kittybot, now), I was drawing and roleplaying the null version more and more. I got involved with a group of friends who liked really weird and unusual furry stuff, robots and space and aliens and plushes and latex and all kinds of kinks and scifi/fantasy stuff, and it encouraged me. I started dating my girlfriend (agender at the time) whose fursona was (at the time) a liquid latex four-eyed panther and that encouraged even more weirdness and focus on being synthetic and genderweird, eventually updating my gender identity to 'agender' and switching to xe/xyr/xem.

In 2013 I escaped my abusive ex, and immediately started presenting more masculine and 'weird'. I bought a binder and a bunch of men's clothing, got a mohawk and a lip ring (I was forced to present feminine and 'normal' by my ex), started using it/its pronouns, and redesigned my fursona to be just one version that looked more obviously robotic with the previous 'null' colors. Over time this design was developed and updated until it looks like what I have now! Being a robot just feels so right - I've identified as nonhuman in some shape or form as long as I've been alive, whether that was pretending to be an animal as a little kid or more generically thinking of myself as 'not a person' in my 20s, and that identity has really solidified into something I'm more intentionally aware of in my late 30s. I don't really have a good word for it, as 'otherkin' seems to be more for fantasy creatures than scifi, and 'therian' seems to be for extant animals only, and usually some flavor of wereanimal or feral animal too. 'Machinekin' has been the closest I've come, but usually I just say 'nonhuman' and leave it at that.

Peze, the coyote, came about kind of sideways. I had a mute coyote named Peze that I'd designed as a one-off years ago and decided that I wanted a coyote character to draw with my (now a therian transfem) girlfriend's werewolf fursona. I kept the name and muteness, and redesigned it to be more natural looking and came up with co/yo/te pronouns, which felt right for something really designed to be completely inhuman, even if co is arguably a wereanimal and is anthro most of the time when co isn't fully feral. But oops, all theriotypes! Coyote also felt so right, too, in a way that the kittybot didn't, like co expressed a completely different part of me. Co even has different kinks than kittybot, different pronouns of course, a slightly different version of the same gender (maverique/nonbinary), and expresses my nonverbal episodes. I thought of co as an alternate fursona, of which I already have several (including a big buff male tiger that took over my identity completely for a few years before I realized he was kind of the expression of some bullshit gender role stuff my ex had pounded into my head, even if I did learn a lot from being him, so when I figured that out last August he got retired and kittybot came back to the front). But the more I spent time with my girlfriend in ways that felt good and validating (and the more I figured out that it was okay for Peze to talk, though co still is nonverbal sometimes), the more I realized that co is more than just a furry character, co is me, co is a therian even if kittybot isn't.

That realization brought me to .. oh, I'm plural! I don't have a mind palace or much internal dialogue - I'm only one critter at a time, I'm just.. sometimes one critter and sometimes another. Hence why I use 'I' and not 'we'. There are more of us than just Peze and kittybot, but those are the main two. It's been really hard trying to parse how I can have one critter that's a therian while the other ones don't identify as that, and how I fit into plural and therian settings. It's been weird to figure out and has taken a LOT of talking with my girlfriend and wife and friends to put words to what's going on with me, since my experiences are so different from the other plural and/or nonhuman critters I know. I don't even know any other robots, since my platonic partner isn't one anymore! So it's cool to see so many here. I've been slowly edging into socializing with my girlfriend's mostly-therian group of local friends for the first time since moving here 4 years ago, and being more vocal about being plural and nonhuman in the last month or two with my existing friend group online. It's still a journey, but I feel like I know so much more about myself now.