my baby's in the white fluffy clouds

so i think i (at least, the part of me talking to other people most of the time right now [0]) might be a lion. i love foxes, and i'm not _not_ a fox, really, i don't think that's a thing i could simply stop doing or being! just. i think of foxes as tricksters or trickster-adjacent, finding clever ways around work and problems or avoiding getting ensnared in problems to begin with, or talking their way out of jams. i have done that many times in the past! it's really cool! but at the moment i feel called to things in my local life and in the world around me that can't be outclevered, that are really about just doing the work. and with my fox mask on i kind of chafe a little at that, tbh, i keep looking for a solution that isn't there to a puzzle that isn't really a puzzle. the work is scary! the work is too big to do alone as a slinky forest creature who dodges traps and answers riddles!

( image cut in case it fucks up your reading page because dw is kinda like that sometimes )
and maybe it's weird that i see being a lion as being about _doing the work_, given the sleepy/lazy/&c. image of "lion around," but i think especially for a lion whose maleness is deeply contingent, who is not the leader of a pride, who's not the patriarch and has kind of intentionally set any chance i might have to be the patriarch on fire and watched it burn itself out floating away down the river of bring aggressively and openly trans... wow this sentence also went down that river, bobbing up and down, losing whatever clause was supposed to go here as it went. that's fine. the estrogen in the water supply will wash away prescriptive grammar and/or give it hips. it's fine.

because here's the thing: lionesses do the work, individually and collectively, managing raising children and hunting and social organization at the same time. inasmuch as those are things that lions do, at least, as opposed to human concepts being mapped imperfectly onto lions, which is kind of what furry identity is at the best of times: taking the ways we've anthropomorphized animal behavior and turning it back on ourselves in a way that lets us learn more about both ourselves and the animals who are not us. and i'm not a lioness. i'm a _boy_ lion. but in a way i can only be after having chosen irreversibly not to be a man and to forcelose the possibility that i will ever be seen as a man, so that i can and must do my share of the work. that could be its own entire thing i write about some other time i guess.

and let's be frank: a regal lion from the savannah, coded with some sort of implied Naturalness is maybe not a thing in my right of way, anyway. [1] But a white lion --- not even a pure white lion, a beautiful pastel disaster with funny-colored rosettes, a copy of a copy with weird body issues who was raised in an environment divorced from the originary [2] as an entertainment [3] rather than a hunter or a warrior or whatever? yeah that's kinda me. like i feel like my upbringing kept me in isolation from my _own_ culture let alone any culture i might try to appropriate based on a furry identity. that is also probably a different post than "hey i got a new fursona look at it i'm pretty" but. hey i got a new fursona. look at it. i'm pretty.

i also wanted to like... really reflect my actual material body in the way this fursona looks. this isn't _exactly_ me in a couple of ways, but i recognize myself in it in a way that is sometimes hard when more of the detail of my body shape is abstracted away, while still thinking i look _damn cute._ the artist did an amazing job and was very helpful in making that happen and if you like to look at or commission furry art i really recommend kresendoe for both of those things!

( footnotes )