Just chillin'

Made a cardiophile pic of me relaxing because why not? Also I like this semi-feral style I drew myself in. Will probably use it more often.

This'll be my featured post for now. Even though it's simple I like the way everything turned out. The pic says a lot about me and my hobbies. It's also about how I came across the furry fandom in the first place.

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For as long as I could remember I loved animals. As a kid always drew them, I watched every pbs documentary on them, I'd offer to care for others pets, I loved going to the zoo, I volunteered at shelters, I checked out and bought countless books on them. Animals animals animals.

There are hardly any spaces in my life where I didn't have a pet. Home just never felt complete without one.

And as a child I would create my own animal characters. They were very complex, complete with their own backstories and families.
Then when I was 6 I learned how to sew. I would make simple costumes of these characters.

What I didn't know was that these were my first fursonas or at least the very beginnings of them.

As I got older I began to get into things like warrior cats and I was always on flipnote hentena looking for animal amvs. I also watched a lot of old flash and mspaint animations on Newgrounds and YouTube.
Right around middle school (and briefly afterwards) I also had a lot of emo and scene friends. I had always felt drawn to various alternative styles and fringe cultures but I didn't try it out then because I was bullied pretty badly and I didn't want to give my bullies another reason to pick on me. Anyway, alt friends were awesome and many of them shared my love of animals. Especially one of my best friends in middle school.

She was emo and she loved wolves. She always drew them and showed me pictures of her wolf characters. We both enjoyed drawing our ocs together and sharing the various stories that we came up for them. We also liked "sparkledogs", anime wolves, and other early 2010's feral furry emo stuff.

Then one day she told me something I'd never forget. We were 13 years old and she had decided to make a deviantart account to share her art with. I didn't want to because I never liked social media (to this day I have little interest in it but I deal with social media because it's a necessity now).
She said that there was a group of people like us who love animals and making their own animal characters. They're called furries.

I was so excited. I said "We're a thing?! We're actually a thing?!"
Finally somewhere I felt like I could belong. Something I could belong to.

My childhood had been pretty lonely. Grew up in a broken home, dealt with sexual abuse, got bullied all the time. It didn't help that I also moved a lot. So not only was I the "weird kid" but I was also perpetually the "new kid". People don't want to be friends with you because their friend groups are already complete. The longest I've stayed in a school district was three years. So even when I managed to make friends I lost them anyway.

Those "edgy" things that everyone complains about? The "god awful sparkledogs". The stupid random humor?
Those are the things that put a smile on my face through the bad times. Seeing odd looking technicolor animals helped me to forget the shit that was going on around me.

I'm turning 21 in a month and I still like all of these things. While I'm not of any specific alt group I love many elements of emo, goth, scene, and others. I still love "sparkledog" characters and I hate art elitists who say that your oc is bad because it's the "forbidden colors" (black and red, rainbow, black and rainbow, has heterochromia, etc.)

This was never a phase for me.

So please don't hate on edgy or "too brightly colored" furries. For some of us that's how we discovered the fandom.

I don't do it because I'm trying to be intimidating. I'm 5ft2 so that's not happening. I'm not trying to be cool. I'm not trying to be rebellious. I'm certainly not faking trauma (I've been through some things that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy).
I do it because I like it. I do it because it makes me happy.

Thank you for reading