Madison Rye Progress

Spoiler level: consequential — Qoheleth

Hold My Name Beneath Your Tongue And Know:

Michelle had a long string of unfruitful, short, abusive, and otherwise quite boring relationships back phys-side. She (for I do not call myself her anymore; she was her own person, just as I am) struggled with that, and that was actually the origin of her picking a skunk as her fursona. She said that she liked the aposematic stripes. "Stay away," they said. "I am not for you to bother."

Similarly, at one point she started to question just how much of her body was involved in how she was treated by her partners. She liked it okay, to be clear. She was chubby. She was short. She was cute! I remember her thinking that. There were times that she wished she was skinnier, yes, but most of the time? She felt okay.

Still, when she did worry about her body, it was particularly in how it played into her interactions with romance. She liked being cute, and wanted to be seen as cute, but did not particularly like the way that that played out for her. After a bit, she sought out a reduction. It was not expensive, nor was it difficult to achieve: a consult, a counseling session, and then a surgery, all in the span of a month.

The end result was not quite what she expected. It was not just that she was relieved of back pain — though she was — nor that she was treated differently with regards to her body — though that was also true — but that she was happier. She did not experience gender dysphoria, in other words, but after this change, she experienced gender euphoria. It was then that she cut her hair shorter and changed the way that she dressed. It was then that she decided to stick with skunk, owning it as a view of herself rather than simply as a response to some dick in a furry sim that she then met in person.

All of us in her clade have carried over that euphoria in some form or another. Perhaps it is in the ways in which they look. Perhaps it is in the pronouns that they use (several use ey/em pronouns as another little tribute). We are all queer, in our own ways, and for some of us more than others, that queerness surrounds gender. I am a nonbinary trans woman. E.W. is a man. Dear's answer to the question of "What is your gender?" is "You are asking the wrong question."

look if you're an author and you're worried about misrepresenting plurality in your work because you're not plural, just become plural its not that hard.

o-oh...

Spoiler level: negligible — Toledot, Mitzvot

E.W. of no clade:

I remember teaching myself to hunt, promising myself that I would start small with snares and then work up from there, thinking that I would not let myself eat until I could eat food that I had caught myself.

Eating itself is optional, sys-side. One can simply turn off that ability, just as one can (and most do) turn off the need to urinate, defecate, get the hiccups, and so on.

The mind, however, remembers hunger. It remembers it so viscerally that, should you neglect to modify that out of your sensorium, you will feel it just as intense as you did back phys-side. It remembers the feeling of satiation that comes with eating. It remembers the feeling of being too full, of being sick to your stomach. It is a part of life, and even being infolife, we remember that from before we were such.

So I remember getting so hungry and weak by the third day that I pinged Serene, my cocladist who had built me my little wilderness, to see if she could help. She laughed and ruffled my fur and called me a dumbass, saying that she had not included fauna because I had not requested it, so of course I did not catch anything. She brought me a hamburger and I ate it so fast I got sick.

Spoiler level: none

Dear, Also, The Tree That Was Felled:

Yes. Sort of. We call this 'bubbling up', which is when an individuated fork merges down and then the down-tree instance assumes their identity. The issue, however, is that when merging, the down-tree instance has the ability to selectively merge memories, while they cannot release their own memories, except in the instance where there are conflicting memories, wherein one can choose the up-tree instance's memories — this usually means a reinforcement to the point where the down-tree instance's memories in those cases feel more like a whimsical imagining rather than quite real.

See also: Mitzvot - "She Who Haunts The Storm"