Plus, it's pretty liberating to just change? It feels pretty good to remind myself that my online appearance is malleable and that I at least have more control over such things online.
Like, obviously we're going to set plurality aside for a second here and focus on just me just andrea, but I don't know how many people who follow me on here know that I was not a coyote until about a little over a year to a year and a half ago. We should explore! We should change! Nothing is impervious to the passage of time and we are changed for better and worse by the experience of our lives. It's true that some larger traits endure for incredible amounts of time, but the me I was 5, 10, 15 years ago were totally different people, and that's not even counting the transition or anything.
The internet is by nature more ephemeral than we think, and this is the perfect place to shift and bend and find a shape.
i wasn't always a cow, snake, chimoora, thing.. that was really recent in the scheme of things.
sure, the cow wasn't new when i made 'the change, but that really doesn't matter here. I've had two fursonas for longer than I've had one, and it allowed me to explore myself in a whole lot of ways.
There was, for a time, a dichotomy. Lupi, the dragon who took her name same as I did,, from my made-up username for a shared Minecraft account 10,11 years ago, was very... similarly emergent and experimental. She went through a lot, gradually finding out what she was, and what I'd be under her.
I joke that to me, she's the original Autism Creature. She doesn't like agency, she seeks comfort and attention, she's nonverbal, and her existence is purposefully inconvenient.
Marion, the cow, was... a bit? more planned. I was goofing off with a friend over skype while bored in the backseat of a car, on the way to the beach 8 years ago now. They were really just intended as a dedicated "fuck around get naughty" OC because I was discovering where Lupi's limits were in that, and that they weren't always mine.
They settled into being almost the inverse, me putting a hoof forward and taking charge of a situation, being a smooth talker, charming, capable of and willing to enact things upon the world around them. They were two sides of a coin like that.
Over time, that analogy kind of broke down as Marion found themselves filling out and developing nuance, but the line I've been trying to get around to saying... They're like shells for a hermit crab. Lupi was a great shell for a lot of my formative time online and as a person, but at some point, I just started to outgrow her, first in little ways, then in big ones.
Making that decision to trans the moo's gender 4 years ago set off a whole chain of events that really upended the way things were, and when I made that switch, it wasn't long before I knew I wasn't gonna be able to go back. It was like a weight off my shoulders, kinda, like i'd found a bigger shell.