Approximately around 2003, an artist in Japan named Mick wrote a small collection of "chapters" of a world setting that would eventually come to be known as "Vilous". Only one of these chapters was translated to English, and that ended up having some unfortunate consequences.
The Red Chapter
The world setting was fairly standard fantasy, with forests and people in armour and wielding big swords, and it even had cat-people. The story itself was conveyed as an isekai, with what is assumed to be a human child with a stun gun waking up in this world with no memories. They are "befriended" (almost murdered) by Rain Silves, a ruthless conqueror who ends up sparing them because the kid is a surprisingly good fighter and also has a stun gun that Rain wants.
The intriguing thing about the story is that the bulk of it is simply Rain info-dumping to the kid why she's Doing A Fascism, but she (rightly) is seen as fucked up. It's really hard to justify under any circumstances the skinning children in front of their parents and then swallowing them alive.
The other two chapters were never translated as far as I know, and I think I once tried to put them through Google Translate a while ago but it came out a jumbled mess, so I have to admit I did not read them. They are, I am told, less centred on war, and cover more ground with domestic sergal life.
An Unfortunate Mascot
Chan culture latched onto Rain in particular, because ha-ha rape and vore funny. The whole conquering thing really appealed to a certain unpleasant group of furs as well, so chances are if you were active in furry communities in the late '00s and early '10s, any art you saw of sergals had a high chance of being accompanied by fash imagery.
To make matters worse, the attention sergals garnered for their creator caused him to dip out because people were being Fucking Creepy towards him, and he really strikes me as an introvert, so imagine some random thing you wrote and drew pictures of in 2003 suddenly blowing up in the Western world like half a decade later and now a bunch of furweebs want to be your Best Friend Forever.
He did try to set the record straight on sergals, explaining that they were not all like Rain. Unfortunately, since only the Red Chapter was translated, the perception of sergals being a warlike species was cemented, and when Mick lamented that he wished people would make some normal sergals for once ("where are the bricklayers?"), everyone ignored him and created edgy warriors with tragic backstories. Or Nazis.
With Mick hiding out, there was nothing to hold any of that back. Sergals became hated in furry culture.
Revival
This changed around 2012-2013. Mick got together with some friends to reboot the entire thing. There had been some earlier experimentation with sergals (what became to be known as Middle Canon) that trialled some physical features (fans joked this was the "chickenbutt" era of sergals and if you see the art you will 100% see why).
New Canon, though, was radically different from everything that came before. The traditional fantasy aesthetic was ditched for something truly alien, and is one of the most visually interesting world settings I've seen. A lot of effort was dumped into fleshing out ecosystems and creatures, and I love how unapologetically weird it all is. Not everyone is a fan, but I am.
The Four Winds
Old Canon only had two varieties of sergals: Northerns and Southerns. The Northerns were larger, more bulky. The southerns were slender and diminutive, suitable for life in desert environs.
New Canon introduced two new races: Easterns and Westerns. Loosely, their traits are:
- Southerns pretty much stayed the same. Sergals in general do the whole "When in Rome" thing, so their allegiance to Agudner, technologically sophisticated goat-people has encouraged them to be more "civilized". Notably, Southerns have their eyes positioned more on the sides of their heads rather than forward, which I bring up because...
- Northerns changed a lot. No longer hulking, fearsome beasts, Northerns fell more in line with Southerns in size, but are more colourful than the Southerns' tans and yellows, though still muted. Their societies are more tribal, less technologically advanced, and confederated (at least pre-Rain Silves). They tend to be superstitious, and for a good reason. Where they live is like Australian outback-levels of danger times a thousand. They are notably neotenous, forward-facing eyes being a youthful trait that they retain through to adulthood.
- Eastern sergals are the Big Bois now, though peaceful, and are notable for their typically achromatic fur. They like to fish.
- Western sergals are, or were, the Pretty Bois, flamboyantly coloured. They chilled with the Nevreans, a dino-bird species whose males also are gay as hell. Sadly, Rain Silves' armies swept through and wiped virtually all of them out. :(
I should mention the other species who live on Tal, their home planet:
- Agudner are a peaceful anthro goat species descended from a more war-like group called the Agur. They allied with Southern sergals early in history, and the two played off each other's strengths really well, building up an impressive civilization in the city of Gold Ring.
- Nevreans are those aforementioned dino-birds with strong sexual dimorphism and gendered roles. Women are expected to protect the more fragile and effeminate men. There's a lot to be said about toxic masculinity here as well.
- Talyxian Stalkers are interesting. While sergals, nevreans, and agudner are considered "Eltus", or a collective of species considered "human" ("human" likely meaning "sapient", and likely descended from humans, but more on that later), the Talyxian taxa are completely separate, engineered life forms that often look like biomechanical beasts, fungus, or insects. Stalkers specifically are like mecha-tigers with a wide variety of body types, are hermaphroditic, and can either be feral or an educated member of society.
- Talyxian Rooters are robotic-like humanoids who are Doing An Experiment with the planet Tal. Not much known about them.
- Enoca used to be aquatic people in Old Canon, but here they may be alien traders from off-world. I dunno too much about them.
- Talyxian Hunters are insect-like "wolves" with wings that kinda serve as solar panels, and they'll recharge by sunbathing. A notable Hunter is Zyn, a cat-person in Old Canon, but now a wolf in New Canon, serving as Rain's companion for a while (and is where Rain got her name from, more on that later).
The Homeworld of Tal
Tal, previously Birousu, is an interesting planet in that it's mostly uninhabitable save for a small patch roughly surrounding a salt lake called Colvilous Lake (derived from 'Vilous' the name of the parent star in their system, and of their god). There are implications that Tal is a bit of a terraforming project gone awry, or that whatever ancient civilization lived there before really fucked shit up, and now the descendants are left picking up the pieces. Honestly, all of that (and a lot of other things) are in flux, so I'm going to keep this section light.
The most important take-away from the environment is that there's a strong ecological bent to the whole thing: green plants are considered part of Eltus heritage, and they are protected and revered, especially since the rest of the planet is either a nightmare jungle of Talyxian wildlife and meat-trees and tentacles and mind-altering miasmatic gas, or simply irradiated wasteland.
The Whole Rain Silves Thing Is Still Around, Kinda
The short of how Rain came to be in Old Canon is that sergals are superstitious, and Rain was born with yellow eyes (sergals typically only have grey or blue eyes). This was enough to make everyone in the world, mother included, want to kill her, and Rain fought her way to being a general who united the Northern tribes and made a good go at conquering the whole planet (which back then wasn't a near-total hellscape).
I seem to recall there's this whole backstory with her tribe, the Shigu, being responsible for eternal war or something when the creator of the Universe, Vilous, left a life-giving sword in the care of a steward angel tasked with guarding Tal, and a Shigu ancestor tricked the angel out of the sword and killed the angel, scattering its remains to avoid the angel making a comeback, but also unleashing a curse. Part of Rain's campaign of terror is recovering the body parts of that angel to unite them, ending that curse. A noble goal. It's just unfortunate that she was incredibly fucked up, regularly engaging in rape and cannibalism. And honestly, it wasn't like she was gonna give up power once she ended the curse.
Anyway, she didn't succeed. She could never quite crack the defences of Gold Ring, and it didn't help that she was a fluffy Northern with an army of fluffy Northerns attempting to take a desert city.
There was also the matter of a coup. Her son, Jakk, didn't really like his mom constantly trying to love and kill him at the same time like he's a Clouseau, so after a certain point he said "fuck this", and deposed her. Rain was put on trial and sentenced to house arrest til her dying days. Glory over, she slowly went mad and succumbed to disease and mental decline. Fans of Vilous jokingly refer to her as "The Fluffy" at this stage, because she got real plump, fluffy, and white, like a hairy marshmallow.
In New Canon, pretty much all of that except the ending got thrown out. Rain saw her family's village attacked and burned to the ground, and she escaped with her sickly brother who died shortly thereafter. She then met Zyn, a talyxian hunter, who took pity on her, and raised her like a wolf — strong Mononoke/Mowgli vibes. Anyway, she derives her name from a peculiarity of Hunter behaviour: when Hunters vibrate their solar panel wings in a certain way, it sounds like rainfall, so there you go. Rain got her name from an unusual but soothing sound from her caregiver.
She ends up saving ... well, at least a few kids out in the woods, and through a set of extremely disturbing revelations that partially involve vore and digestion, we get a glimpse at what the overall story arc might be: humans as we know them in some distant genetic memory held by the network of Talyxian fauna and flora.
The transition from Rain the Heroic Jungle Girl to Rain the Genocidal Conqueror isn't quite clear. She still unites the tribes (who would eventually go on to form a coherent confederacy after her death), but it felt like she got demoted from planet-threatening tyrant to an analogue dictator of North Korea, which makes sense because around the time of the reboot, the DPRK was doing a lot of sabre-rattling, and that must've been intensely annoying to live right next to, having some dipshit shoot missiles into your seas. (I also feel like Mick was tired of the glorification of Rain and felt the need to knock her down a few pegs, making her tyranny won through trickery rather than tactics and strength).
I think after some raids into Southern territory she eventually does make a go for taking Gold Ring, but it results in in the same end (The Fluffy). She is apparently still impactful enough that Gold Ring has arranged their calendar around her, starting from her birth (when you see dates like 30 RC, RC stands for "Rain Calendar", and is 30 years after Rain was born. Imagine being that impressively terrifying).
Rain's war campaign, in which she does succeed at subjugating what nevreans weren't able to flee to Gold Ring and at wiping out the Western sergals, runs through her 30s. She survives into her 70s, and the storyline moves on from her to, in my opinion, something far more interesting.
Ring of the Rust
Here is where things "get political", as some idiots on the Internet might call it. There's a kind of...racial vibe to the Eltus in Gold Ring that might have familiar analogues to present issues of human racism and sexism that in Vilous are centred on the Nevreans.
When there was an influx of Nevrean refugees into Gold Ring from Rain's war, integration didn't go as smoothly as hoped. These involuntary migrants disrupted quite a few things economically, and the sergals and agudner of Gold Ring came to kind of hate nevreans, specifically nevrean women.
Nevrean women were the stronger and less festooned of the species. They were the labourers, the fighters, the protectors. They were, well... masculine, whereas the males were feminine. Cute. Fragile.
Nevrean males quickly found their way into domestic jobs like housekeeping that were often sexually exploitative. Females, on the other hand...well, they were seen as being more uncivilized, brutish, thuggish. The overall perception of these women was one of inherent criminality, and this racial profiling was systemically perpetuated. It did not help one bit that a core belief in traditional nevrean culture held that a woman is useless if she doesn't have a man to protect. Outcast status even within their own society was easy to slip into if they didn't have a pretty boy hanging from their elbows.
Fleeing their homelands to be dumped into cosmopolitan city life did have some significant impacts, however. Being disconnected from that strong tradition of gender roles, First-generation nevrean youth began to think this whole sexism thing was kind of bullshit, and a counterculture movement organically formed in Gold Ring that every Eltus species ended up participating in: the Sabi no Wa, the Ring of the Rust, likely an allusion to being the ugly, imperfect opposite of a ring of gold.
These were the rejects, the delinquents, the unproductives, the thugs, the unmarketable poets and artists. It had a very beatnik vibe to it. Music, and electronic music specifically, is a core component of the movement. Underground clubs were flocked to. Political rallies were had. The pressure was turned up on the elites in Gold Ring to not have a cow, man.
It wasn't all love and peace signs, however: nevrean youth fought against gender roles with a vengeance, with some nevrean women defying masculine expectations and dyeing their feathers to be as colourful as male feathers, and some nevrean men rejecting the notion altogether that a woman was their sole source of protection. They armed themselves with guns, the great equalizer.
This civil rights movement culminated in nevreans finally winning the right to vote in Gold Ring, around 75RC. Talyxian stalkers also earned a kind of limited personhood status, because while feral out in the wilds of the Magoe swamp-forests, they are sapient, and can learn to be productive members of society (which is kind of fucked up, but it's presumed their civil rights movement is ongoing).
"Present day" for the current Vilous canon is 100RC. A whole generation has passed since Rain's death. There are still plenty of problems to be had in Gold Ring. One of the side comics Mick has doodled has a sergal named Mr. Yagi rescuing a Talyxian stalker cub from being bullied by local sergal children, but overall life is good. They even have a strange form of analog/digital Internet via what I can only assume is a packet radio setup connected to tape printers.
Tyrannical Baggage
You may have spotted a problem in the above lore dump. From the very beginning, Rain Silves was the load-bearing character of the entire world setting, and despite trying to rein her in, the Eltus built an entirely new calendar around her life and death. Rain Silves was the primary draw and dead weight of the Vilous world setting, appealing to edgelord channers, being a curse to her creator; a character who is simultaneously the most important person in her universe but is also the person you should care about the least if you want delivery sergals and bricklayer sergals and bread-baking sergals.
We have now hit a point where there has been such a divergence in what Mick wanted the world setting to be, and what fans made out of that world setting, that unsurprisingly Mick and her crew have pulled back once again. The incongruence of the Japanese and English wikis became irreconcilable, and all work has ceased on updating the English wiki, effectively walling off Western fans from the latest world-building developments. Work on the manga appears to have ceased as well.
I imagine it'll come back when people are ready, just not now. We'll see what happens, I guess. Mental health first, y'know?
Cheese Theatre
Backseat Driving
As alluded to before, not everyone was a fan of the new canon. Most weren't even aware of any kind of significant canon, and simply used sergals like your average fursona species, with plenty of mixing and matching of traits.
A small subset of die-hard fans loved the new stuff so much that they made it a point to pester anyone not getting sergals right. Artists who drew sergals were harassed for drawing sergal heads like dog heads. It didn't help that some of the Vilous crew engaged in a bit of this reply-guying of art.
So despite getting some distance from the chan era, people were still turned off to sergals because it was only a matter of time before someone came along to correct you about your sergal, that you were doing it wrong, that there's handy guides for drawing sergals readily available, why aren't you drawing them right?
The Vilous crew eventually did get the message that it was a bit rude to be correcting artists, but unfortunately to this day there's still a few artists out there who refuse to draw sergals to avoid any potential harassment (though I imagine they're safe at this point. Can't say I blame 'em, though).
Klacegate
Though sergals and the other species in Vilous are "open species", Mick has asked for compensation if someone makes above a certain amount off his creations. Legally, there's no real way to enforce this unless a trademark is established, and those aren't cheap to acquire or defend. In fandoms like furry, don't be a dick is a generally observed rule. It's not like Mick has attained any kind of Suspiciously Wealthy Furry status (at the time I recall seeing he literally lived in a shack out in some mountains in Japan), so why wouldn't you kick a little bit his way?
Klace is a furry and amateur gamedev who did not see being a dick as being an obstacle in life, and used a sergal in a visual novel he was developing without compensating Mick. I think the game was a visual novel called Major/Minor. Word made it back to Mick that his species was being used in a Steam game, and Mick reasonably asked for compensation, something that Klace knew he wasn't legally obligated to do even thought it would've been the right thing to do. So, he didn't pay.
If I really wanted to, I could dive deep into this scandal. It would mean, however, that I would have to refresh my memory on everything that went down, and that means digging into a file I have in disk storage named "klacegate.zip" and honestly I don't feel like doing that to myself. The tl;dr is that Klace eventually removed the offending sergal from the game so Vilous fans would leave him alone.
Klace would move on with his life, perhaps wiser, perhaps not. I saw his name mentioned here on Cohost as being the organizer of some anthro game festival on Steam. I had to laugh.
Bossing around Justice4Sisk
This is another one I don't have the time or the energy to dig into with any significant depth. From what I remember there was a trans woman named @Sisk (I'm pretty sure that's her on here) whose fursona was a sergal. It eventually came out that she was in some serious legal trouble, so some of her fans organized a campaign to help raise funds for attorney fees.
I can't remember how it happened specifically, but someone named Boss Sergal on the Gold Ring Gazette team really took offence to the whole campaign. I think the accusation was that Sisk was exploiting sergals for personal and political gain, as the Justice4Sisk movement was heavily ACAB in nature. His callouts led to a disruption of funds to the campaign, resulting in some pretty heavy backlash against the Vilous crew. Mick ended up having to compensate the Justice4Sisk team out of pocket for the loss of cash for Sisk's legal defence.
I don't recall that Boss was dismissed immediately for this, but I seem to recall his role in GRG faded quite a bit, especially when it came out that Boss might have been intentionally misleading the Eastern team on Western fan sentiments. I guess all the hardcore ruthless-business Capitalist cosplay was just a cosplay. Shrug.
The Good Stuff
It wasn't all drama and crises, of course. Sergals (and nevreans and agudner and talyxians) do mean a lot to a lot of people. The worst of chan culture is now distant in the rear-view mirror. A lot of alt fur groups collapsed, and the sergal being a mascot of a furrified version of some of the worst ideologies on the planet has given way to sergals just being silly cheese heads who merp. Sergal fursuiters making "cheese wheels" are a staple at a lot of furry conventions now, and they're a popular avatar in virtual worlds like Second Life and VRChat. There's even a group making a Vilous MMO!
I like to think that in the end, Mick got what he wanted, just not in his own stories. The sergals in our world are not edgelord warriors with tragic backstories. They're just regular folk who have regular jobs and just happen to be highly angular.
If you're a sergal and you're reading this, you get it. Being a sergal makes you happy. Being a sergal is a vibe. In an unquantifiable way, sergals have improved your life. The same goes if your fursona is a nevrean or agudner or talyxian. Outside of everything else, outside of lore or drama, you are happy being the shape that you are.
That's good enough for me.
Epilogue
This post got a lot bigger than I expected it to, but it also feels tremendously incomplete. It's been sitting in my drafts for several months, but with the demise of Cohost nigh, I hammered out the last few bits in a rush, and am pushing it to prod.
I wanted to go into even more detail with example artwork, and even highlight some of the more notable fan works such as Joandventure of tgchan fame, talk about @sergaljerk, the most notorious corp in an MMO called EVE Online (led by @nurbs), and gush over Rinn the Dancing Sergal who is also a highly competent composer (he scored the music for the Duke Nukem Forever 2001 First Slice trailer I cut together. PLEASE, HIRE HIM TO MAKE MUSIC FOR YOUR GAMES, HE IS GOOD.
But...I'm out of time. We're all out of time, aren't we? Hopefully, your curiosity about sergals and their history is sated, so I'll leave things here with a good night, and good luck out there.
