What you see is as close to what you get as I know how to show you.

[rax]

As I recently mentioned, I'm going to be at Anthrocon this week. One of the things that people do at Anthrocon is commission badges of their fursonas --- it's a big enough social thing that the Anthrocon website has a primer on doing it, and most people you see wandering around are wearing badges that mostly cover their official badge, depicting their fursona [0] in some manner of splendor or adorability. It's a really cool tradition, and a great way for artists to pay their way to the convention, and an opportunity for people to support their favorite artists, whether they be old favorites ("Oh my god I recognize that style from printing out pictures on yerf in high school to piss off the computer lab supervisor") or new. There's only one problem: I don't actually have a fursona.

(If you've known me since, oh, say, 2000, and you're saying "Wait, what?" bear with me here for a while.)

For the non-furries in the room, a fursona is something between an aspect of self and a mask you wear while in furry spaces (cons, MUCKs, conversations, parties at my house, whatever). For some people it's "this is my identity! I am a sparkly blue cat with the following facial pattern! I have the following backstory and magical powers and I always wear a bowler hat!" while for others it's "this is my character, who I pretend to be in alternate spaces and have fun with." Some people have one, some people have more than one, and some people... like me, these days... really don't have any.

Oh, I used to have more than one! In high school [1] when I had this general sense of "this identity is clearly not right, but I don't know what is" this fascinating furry thing gave me an opportunity to try on different identities for size. I tried a bunch of things, a couple in person (inasmuch as you can pretend to be a fox in person, which is a surprising amount if the people around you are inclined to be nice about it), a few more online, a couple only in my head. (For a while in high school I imagined an aspect of myself as a six-inch blue catgirl named Random. That's your Useless Rax Fact for the day.) These were all useful for me in the process of becoming the person I wanted to be --- they let me try out different ways of acting, of perceiving, of thinking, of being perceived. And eventually I ended up ... just me.

I like to put on cat ears or wear a fox tail, sometimes, and enjoy the differences in all of those things I wrote about up there, but I don't think of myself as a different person, or even a different aspect of person. I'm just Rachel wearing cat ears, like I could be Rachel wearing a power suit or Rachel wearing jewelry. When I went to Anthrocon last year, I had a blast and a half, but one of the things that was uncomfortable was people asking me my name and "what I was." I would respond "Rachel!" and they would say, almost universally, "But what's your furry name?" [2] "Still Rachel." "OK, what do you look like?" I want to respond I look like this dammit, do you know how much work it took me to look like this. But they have no idea, so I usually just kind of shrug my shoulders. This makes commissioning badges difficult. :)

I've actually considered developing a fursona or two just so I can get in on this awesome art scene. Having the username "raxvulpine" a bunch of places makes furries (reasonably!) assume fox, which (unreasonably!) makes some of them assume that I will be willing to sleep with them. (The furry conception of foxes is frustratingly all yiff and no Reynard. [3]) I'm sort of tempted to pick some animal with aggressively non-sexual stereotypes, build a character around it, and work from there, except I have tons of fox and cat costume pieces already and I don't really want to put a lot of effort into being that woodchuck chick. ...Probably.

Someone I was hanging out with last year suggested I should just commission badges of random things, and it was more fun that way. I discovered myself to be too shy to actually do this, last year. I should do it anyway this year. Suggestions for random things I should ask for are greatly appreciated!

(Random aside: As I was writing this Cassandra handed me a piece of paper from a pile of stuff she was sorting where I had scrawled "Furries don't want to pass, but they can't help it" along with a bunch of Race for the Galaxy scores. Make of this what you will, I'm out of analysis for the evening.)

[0] Sometimes, plural. Fursonas? Fursonae? Just fursona again? I DON'T KNOW.

[1] When I wasn't taking advantage of there being time for Klax.

[2] I suppose I could say "Rax," but apparently there's another furry Rax, and after the first couple of times I was introduced as "Not that one!" I sorta backed off introducing myself that way. :)

[3] And no abnegation, and no Aesop, and no Stephen Dedalus, and... Seriously, where does this all foxes are in it only for the sex thing come from, and can I stop it? There are so many better bad assumptions to make about foxes!

Comments

[jld]

and I don't really want to put a lot of effort into being that woodchuck chick.

But if you do, we may finally discover the answer to that famous question: How much brick would a woodchuck chick chip if a woodchuck chick could chip brick?

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

[2] Yeah, seriously. Goodwin had tried to introduce me to you and Cassandra a while before we got to know y'all through Bill, and I assumed you were the other Rax and just completely blew off the suggestion.

[3] I am afraid I am not helping the 'foxes are only for sex' thing lately.

[eredien]

Ask for a Klax badge. Or a Klax/Timecube badge.
Or a Joyce badge. Or a muted posthorn badge.

Re footnote 3: Legions of fox furs have been complaining about the yiffy fox stereotype for 10+ years. If anyone can stop it, it's you...but I won't bet on you. Good luck!

[kelkyag]

Pick some deliberate aspects of "I look like this", and give them as attributes to apply to a semi-randomly selected list of animals? Pink-streaked hair and pink almost-rectangular glasses, on an oyster, baraccuda, dragonfly, grasshopper, poison dart frog, iguana, terrier, llama, elephant?

[rax.livejournal.com]

[2] That's... really unfortunate. I know basically nothing about this person! I'm glad we eventually met up despite the namespace collision. :)

[rax.livejournal.com]

OYSTER <3 This is one of the many reasons you are awesome.

[weirdquark]

The d8 Angel from Eva?

[oonh.livejournal.com]

"My fursona is a datacenter" works about as well as me saying "my spirit animal is a cough drop". (which I said in jest a few years back and seem to have stuck with")

[weirdquark]

Although, seriously, why not treat "what are you" the same way as you did gender in your FAQ and when people ask what you are, say "awesome"?

[rax.livejournal.com]

I could totally ask people to draw fox lines from various fictions I am fond of and refuse to provide any further context!!!

"On a heath beneath winking stars a fox, red reek of rapine in [her] fur, with merciless bright eyes"

"The red fox, the vixen / dancing in the half light among the junipers"

I'll have to flip through Sacred Book of the Werewolf and pick out a description or two that I like.

[rax.livejournal.com]

I do that when I don't think the person I'm talking to will take it as a threat or attempted oneupmanship. Maybe I should do it more anyway. :)

[rax.livejournal.com]

Well, I know some programmable robot catgirls. They could presumably moonlight as data centers... although that's not quite the same thing. :)

[krinndnz.livejournal.com]

Before getting too far, I'm going to plead with you to stop encouraging people to use the hideous neologism "fursona," it's already damn bad enough and the word "avatar" covers the concept with better precision and better recognition and now I'm going to read the rest of this post before I start frothing at the mouth.

[kelkyag]

I admit, on re-reading, oyster is the only one that would seriously surprise me at this point. People are strange critters. :)

[krinndnz.livejournal.com]

You'd need a whole bunch of them to assemble a datacenter, and then you'd run into, ahem, marshalling problems. And more than likely some message-passing issues. It's still a delightful thought.

[rax.livejournal.com]

An avatar is something from Pocahontas 2; fursona's what I've been calling it since the 90s. :P

[weirdquark]

Possibly if you do it in a casual, off-the-cuff sort of way?

"So, what are you?"
"Oh, I'm awesome. How about you?"

Would making a silly "awesome" badge help to show you're not trying to be threatening with your awesomeness or would other con-goers be insulted because if you aren't taking your badge seriously they'd see it as you not taking theirs seriously either? I have no idea how etiquette works here.

[rax.livejournal.com]

That's a very good idea and a very good question. I suspect the people who I would want to sit down and hang out with for a couple of hours are the people who would not take it that seriously. :)

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

As an artist, if someone handed me that, I would look at them like they were stupid… until they told me they don't quite have a fursona and are pulling lines from favorite books, at which point I would grin, say "Awesome!" and try to press you for some idea of where to take it anyway.

[oonh.livejournal.com]

it's a phenomenally bad pun, I'm sorry.

[mmsword.livejournal.com]

Ramiel looks gorgeous in the Eva 2.0 release...

[bookofjude.livejournal.com]

I don't honestly remember enough of what names and animals I went by during my teenage dalliances in furry fandom to actually stipulate any type of current applicable fursonality.

I wonder how popular elephants are?

[wormulus.livejournal.com]

For a while when I really resented having to have badges that say "Hello, my name is..." on them, I would just draw exclamation points in a very colorful way. Or, like, a star. Which is my graphic equivalent of just saying I am exciting and awesome. Hi, I am !!!

And, you know, not that I've ever really drawn furry art, but I would love to draw something of/for you if you ever wanted. All you have to do is ask!

[sovay]

Sometimes, plural. Fursonas? Fursonae? Just fursona again? I DON'T KNOW.

If it's being treated like persona, the plural would be fursonae. I know it's not actually Latin, it's portmanteau, but fursonas just looks even more wrong.

makes furries (reasonably!) assume fox, which (unreasonably!) makes some of them assume that I will be willing to sleep with them. (The furry conception of foxes is frustratingly all yiff and no Reynard. [3])

What, seriously? (I think of them first as tricksters; which are often highly sexual, but that's not their primary defining characteristic. Someone fails mythology forever.) You have sufficient powers of awesome; change the stereotype!

Suggestions for random things I should ask for are greatly appreciated!

A keyboard.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Asking for obscure mythological beings is a great way to a) meet cool people and b) sort out the annoying ones Really Quickly. (I have found that, without exception, the people in furry fandom who tell me It Is Not Okay To Be Not A Real Animal turn out to be assholes in other ways too.)