What does your persona and or fursona mean to you?

[Twigz0n]

I became curious of this subject ever since I started getting videos on my YouTube feed about creating personas/fursonas that you feel represents you fully, and that you’ll still relate too as time passes. I thought it was an interesting thing to bring up at first because I hadn’t really thought that this was ever a problem that would bother people so much? But upon some reflection I realised a while after that I’d kind of felt similar. In that the fursona I had up until that point just didn’t really feel like me anymore, and that if anything, their design was just a stand in, a means to an end so that I could have something to represent me online.

I created my first consistent fursona on a whim when I was fourteen. She was kind of basic, just a fox that could be either feral or anthro with glasses because I wore glasses and I liked foxes because of their big bushy tails. Her design had many iterations and alternating designs, but at the end of the day I never really felt all that connected to them. These days I keep her around but see her as more of my oc that represents the person that I wanted to be and the values I had when I created her.

These days my persona/fursonas are all kind of work in progresses. I have some furry ones and humanoid ones in the works. I do find it interesting how more out there my ideas for my personas are now compared to the one I made when I was a kid lol It’s been fun to explore different sides of myself and my interests with them as well.

I hear this a lot from people questioning their gender identity that creating their fursona/persona was a way for them to explore gender in a way that felt safer and less intimidating. Which I find to be really beautiful personally. Despite being a cis gal I do like to play around with other types of gender expression through my personas and ocs at times.


So that got me wondering what people like to use their personas/fursonas for. Do you still relate to them or not? Have they ever changed throughout years or stayed relatively consistent? Do you have more than one sona? Do you like to use personas to explore your own personal identity? Or are they just a simple means to an end for you?

[xwindows]

I'll be intentionally vague here, because the identity I use here is not the one I use for art...

So that got me wondering what people like to use their personas/fursonas for.

The artist!me has a drawn persona which is an inaccurate self-portrait, explicitly for uses as self-insert in anything related directly or conceptually to real life event or my view, but sometimes also certain what-if situation or something I wish happened.

Basically, he is just an avatar that I could use in my artworks to depict either of "this is me (doing this real thing)", "this is sort-of-me (doing/feeling this concept-depicted-here-in-Hollywood-exaggeration)", and "this is not-me (imagined to do this bizarre fantasy thing)", equally, without much guilt. In other words: a tool to separate myself in the real world from "myself" (scare-quoted) in my artworks.

Since this one started from a self-portrait, how it came to be was quite simple; unlike...

Do you have more than one sona?

Ha! In my case, it's complicated. I have one intentional reality-based persona with clear purposes-- the one I mentioned earlier; then I later randomly came up with another character (a high fantasy character) with idealized features (1), but with no real purpose. While I would sometimes draw my persona in not-real events, I originally intended these two to stay in different universes-- never to cross path with each other.

But I had my lapse of judgment and drawn them in the same frame once... and I could never looked at them in the same way again; I also couldn't stop drawing them together either. In my head, they'd play out sometimes as each other's alter-ego, sometimes best friend, sometimes life partner, or all at once; it's a mess-- not in a bad way, but still a mess nonetheless.

Doesn't stop me from trying, but my head still hurts every time I try to come up with concrete backstory for them to this day.

Have they ever changed throughout years or stayed relatively consistent?

I didn't intend them to change at all; even my reality-based persona was originally made to immortalize a rose-tinted-view of my own self at the age I originally designed him. (2)

But apparently, I was not (and still not) very good at being consistent and ended up drawing them slightly differently over the years anyway. Then half-decade ago, someone on the 'net have seen my artworks and commented that both of my characters seemed to grow and change in the similar way to how actual people'd age, and suggested I might already have also been using my second character as a persona without realizing it...

That was also the point I stopped fighting with myself on how to handle them, and just treated both as my personas: rational!me vs. imaginative!me, something like that. I also changed my drafting process to just "roll with it" with how I feel they should look like in my mind's eyes, instead of always trying to strictly achieve the looks of their original appearance in my artworks (3); which I think it could make my drawing process more enjoyable and satisfying... but the jury is still out on that one.


(1) And also full of contradiction: think of a magical shapeshifting eldritch entity, with ability of Venom and Majin Buu, hobby of Arthur Weasley, in a role of softspoken male protagonist in fantasy slice-of-life shoujo manga...

(2) ToTALLy NoT To SoUND LiKE Tom Riddle from Harry Potter when he spoke of his horcrux-infused diary...

(3) From a decade ago.

[AY38910]

To be fair, I don't really have any persona beyomd my username.
The significance of why it's this specific chip is explained here.