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 )

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!