I love your fursona

Hey, you. I love your fursona!

Yes, that’s right, I mean you, fursona-having person. I’m blanking on your name, sorry. In fact, there’s a real good chance I don’t know a damn thing about you. I just wanted to tell you your fursona is rad, and seeing it brightened my day a little.

You might be wondering what I like about it specifically, especially because I liked it enough to say something to you. This wall of text you’re sitting on did take a little more deliberation than clicking “+ Fav” or whatever. There are a number of details I could mention: color scheme, overall design and vibe, the text blurbs on the ref sheet, the smile, the frown, the pose. I may like all, some, or none of these things, with or without other facets of your fursona, but I know you don’t want to sit through all of that. Instead, I’ll tell you what I like the most about it because those qualities will have the most eloquent explanations by far.

Fursonas are and aren’t a lot of things. They represent those to whom they belong in some way but usually on a deeper level than just being an avatar. There’s a reason I keep calling it a “fursona” and not, say, an “avatar,” a “main character,” your “brand,” or a “favorite OC.” Anything can be your avatar. Bugs Bunny can be your avatar, and there’s not a damn thing Warner Bros. is willing to do about it; that’s how inconsequential it is. Your fursona, however, has to come from you. It can be a real or fictional species using general or proprietary concepts (hello, pokésonas!), but that specific character’s unique traits, personality, and identity must all be your creation. Creating a fursona is an inherently creative effort.

Fursonas take the form their creators need them to have, and they’re liable to change or be replaced entirely as their creators’ lives progress. They can be role models, expressions of our better selves, expressions of selves we keep hidden, spiritual totems, or “just me as a furry.” They can be alphas, omegas, sex gods, average Joes, heroes or villains, anything or nothing at all. If your fursona is what you want it to be right now, then it’s doing its job.

I remember when I was thinking about what fursona I wanted. There seemed to be some level of exhaustion with certain species, whether they were the new flavor of the month or among the most commonly chosen ones. Perhaps some of those fursonas didn’t have enough distinguishing characteristics for the crowd’s tastes. It’s easy to look at this chatter during the nascent stages of fursona creation and assume that one must make something original and unique, or else it will be classified as derivative trash by The Fandom and exiled to a garbage glacier in the ocean.

I’ll say this now for fursonas and for every form of art: anyone who says that originality is a requirement for creativity doesn’t understand either.

Wolves are among the most common fursona species (sorry to call you all out). Creating a wolf fursona is not inherently uncreative; wolves are present in media and mythology in many places, and people often ascribe desirable traits to them, such as strength and loyalty. They’re closely related to dogs, but they’re wild and perhaps more independent-feeling than a domesticated canine. Though they aren’t nocturnal, they’re often associated with the moon and, by extension, nighttime, which have their own connotations. There are many reasons someone would represent themselves as a wolf, and as long as it’s what they truly want, it’s a great choice for that person. It’s an expression of those wolf-associated traits through the additional lenses of the creator’s personality and desires, and their interpretation will be unique by virtue of the creator being an individual.

As consequential as I just made it sound, a fursona isn’t an objective description of one’s personality, nor is it such a direct proxy of it that it can be picked apart for reliable psychoanalysis. Sometimes a wolf is just a wolf. Fursonas, like people, are not puzzles that can be “solved” with the right figuring. Maybe this wolf has seven blue stripes on his back because he embodies the determination and drive of The Chariot, the seventh card in the Major Arcana of Tarot, and that particular shade of blue dominated a vision the creator had while camping in Oregon and tripping balls on psilocybin, or maybe it’s because fuck you, it looks rad. I don’t know. I’m not entitled to know.

Those two paragraphs are all to say that I’m positive that if you’re generally happy with your fursona, then the species you chose is the right one, and it shows.

Many characters are expressive (this is arguably a design goal). Not all of them are fursonas (or non-furry fursonas who serve a similar function). I may like these non-fursonas quite a bit, and they may all come from a genuine place, but none of them have the same connection to their creators, which is more of a commonality than a specific through-line. Depictions of most characters feel like expressions of things that happened and feelings that were felt. It’s all very past-tense and immutable, i.e., dead.

We know that fursonas are fluid, as are people. That’s what they have that we have. A depiction of a fursona, by default, is a statement of what is rather than what was. Seeing a fursona happily working out at the gym, for example, means they (the fursona, not always the creator) are inclined to do this. We can imagine that this happens often. Perhaps if it shows they had a negative experience at the gym, we can imagine it wasn’t repeated, or they only do it out of necessity.

What one can do with a character, one can do with a fursona unbound. Characters are invariably bound to something: a story, an image, a purpose, or an idea to represent. Fursonas are bound to people, and as people change and grow, their fursonas are guaranteed to either change and grow with them or to be set aside. Changing a character at the pace of life is difficult because we’re used to characters being fixed in time, even those who change dramatically over the course of a story or five; those stories determine where change is allowed to happen and where it stops. Even freeform roleplaying characters find themselves cryogenically frozen between sessions. Fursonas can change at any time in any way, beholden only to their creators. That image of that fursona having a bad experience at the gym? The creator can add a note that after meeting a new workout buddy, they went more often together and had a better time. The text and the image are both canon, as are portrayals at cons by fursuiters since before the Apple II. These animal-people are breaking out of fiction, and they are coming to canonically boop your nose.

If I had to give social media a single bit of credit, it would be for the introduction of such immediacy to widespread communication that if you believe what you read, you can almost feel someone else’s life rushing past your own like a train hurtling toward a different stop. Before, you had to go outside for that kind of thing. What we have over the Internet is an extremely high-latency version of that—imagine Second Life in 2005 without a broadband connection, just avatars rubberbanding around a grass-covered plane and random objects popping into reality one at a time while the chat box pours nonsense, frustration, and moments of humanity. That’s more than twice the amount of information a microblog feed can get across, but microblogs have kinder system requirements and your dog can probably use them.

It’s only with this understanding that I can conceptualize what I see in fursonas, including yours.

As we have gotten closer to recreating suitable conditions for social life in a space entirely defined by humans, we’ve given ourselves the tools to redefine pieces that we couldn’t before. We can represent ourselves in physically impossible ways and do improbable things within a shared social reality if we choose to. An unexpected phenomenon in Second Life was the prevalence of avatars who were conventionally attractive humans living conventionally luxurious lifestyles. As printed in an article I can no longer find, “They had the chance to build anything, and they built Malibu.” This is not to accuse every furry of being a boundless fountain of creativity, but that every furry with a fursona has a leg up in this department by simply imagining themselves as someone who looks wildly different and may, in fact, have different experiences than what perfectly matches commonly held ideals.

Fursonas don’t merely communicate as people with fur, scales, and feathers, but as envoys from different worlds who are equipped with the experiences and influences of their creators. We can explore different contexts, adjust our assumed identities or create new ones, and express ourselves while being objects of our own expression. It’s fractal creativity that leaps between media and knows no boundaries. It’s what helped break me out of my shell many years ago, and I continue to enjoy seeing everyone’s ideas take form, whether they’re fluffy, scaly, feathery, or anything one can conceive.

I love your fursona.

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