How did you get your fursona?

This question comes into my head occasionally—most recently, when a friend announced a name and species change.

Back when I first joined furry fandom (in a time when no one argued about whether fandom is the right word for what furry is; I’m not sure it’s the right word myself anymore), I didn’t think of myself as having a fursona at all. Or, rather, “personal furry,” which was the phrase used to describe “furry character who is your avatar.” (“Fursona” didn’t get popular as a term until around 2000.)

When I joined FurryMUCK in its early days I joined as Mika, the feline protagonist of “A Gift of Fire, a Gift of Blood”, in part because someone was already playing Revar, the story’s impact character, there. He had similarities to me, to be sure. We were both creative people stuck in dead-end jobs, yearning to break out of a rut and find adventure, even when we wouldn’t admit it to ourselves. (This has been a recurring motif throughout my fiction, I think!) But he wasn’t me in the fursona sense, and I never treated him that way.

Then there were the coyotes: Chipotle and, later, Kani. Chipotle was, in her original form, a nebulously-defined vagabond—she was already on an adventure!—who was Native American and had a “shadow walking” ability. (I know. I’m sorry.) Kani was also kind of nebulously defined, with the vague idea of “well, you like coyotes, but Chipotle isn’t really your personal furry, so maybe Kani is.”

Well…he wasn’t. He eventually got a background of sorts through an unfinished novella called “Bed & Breakfast,” which translated to the way he got refashioned on FurryMUCK. A later incarnation of Kani exists in Mensura as nonbinary, which was an attempt to move them a lot closer to me RL; I didn’t get Kani’s re-introduction story working, but they’ll probably make an appearance in the future.

Arilin also came in early, first as a villain in my first true macro story, “Cheating at Solitaire”. I introduced her on FurryMUCK soon afterward, because I wanted to do my take on a giant character there. She’s basically a sociopath in “Solitaire”, but got better over time, opening up a social club for macrophiles called “The Giants’ Club”. (Better over time is not the same as no longer dangerous, which is still true even in her modern incarnation: see “Teacher’s Pet”.)

(An aside about FurryMUCK: As with VRChat of today, it had absolutely no enforcement of theme and setting—your characters could be anything, from anywhere, and have any power. This made it a gloriously chaotic mess. Mensura attempts to retcon all the nonsense of my FurryMUCK characters into a coherent milieu. It’s gotten more developed over time, at the expense of actually retconning its own earlier stories: Saida & Autumn references the Giants’ Club in passing, while later Mensura stories drop the idea—but “Drinking Game” introduces a more setting-consistent analogue.)

So did I ever get a fursona? If it’s not any of these, who is it?

Well, for years, I would have told you that if it was any of them, it had become Chipotle. She wasn’t intended to be, as you might guess. But over time, her background solidified into a markedly different form. She became a celebrity chef, which came to full fruition in her Mensura incarnation. While I’m not a chef, I’m definitely a foodie, and I do love the Southwest, particularly its cuisine. The Native American aspects are largely gone (I haven’t yet figured out what, if any, analogue to that exists in Mensura’s setting), although some of Chipotle’s family practices a shamanistic religion different from Mensura’s dominant one, as we saw in Hurricane. In any case, Chipotle felt more “me” than my other story and role-playing characters. That was the name and badge I starting using at cons, and it’s still a name I use in many places.

But, there was Arilin.

When I began writing macro stories more regularly, I adopted her name as a pen name. (In retrospect, that was unwise; it meant that Arilin Thorferra was writing stories with Arilin Thorferra as a character in them. By the time I came up with Mensura, though, it was too late to change.) Arilin became more well-spoken, more reserved, and with a career focused around literature and writing—something I’ve at least aspired to, even if I’ve never made a living wage at it. In her Mensura incarnation in particular, she has many of my attitudes and more than a hint of my voice. (In the “style and tone” sense of voice, that is, not the way she sounds speaking. She has more of Sigourney Weaver’s voice in that sense!)

In retrospect, it’s pretty clear Arilin has been the closest I have to a fursona for years. It simply took me a long time to realize it.

So, how do I answer the question I started with? I think it’s simply this: at some point, I looked up, she looked back down, and said, “It’s me, you know, don’t you?”