As per my whining I've put some thought into making a furry/anthro ARTPG, but everything I've worked on has been very agnostic about what kind of furries/anthros are in the game. If I was someone else working under other constraints I'd probably do Default Canid/Feline and call it good, but I'm me, so I thought of a few possibilities and dropped an informal poll into one (existing) game's Discord. Results were... not what I expected?
I almost didn't include Reef Themed at all but tossed it in to add slightly more variety. Not a bad kind of unanticipated, but I struggle to formulate an explanation! My friend posited that since it commits the least, respondents might have been doing the thing where they fill in blanks with the coolest thing they can dream up and then eagerly vote for that ideal, and frankly I have no better explanation because who cares about fish?? I mean I do, and I'm right, but historically speaking there's not exactly a ton of aquatic fursonas running around.1
Mostly I didn't think Reptile/Avian would trail that far behind the top. I really didn't think Fat Furry would trail so hard either– fatphobia exists and all but my mental image was red pandas. Nobody hates on red panda 'sonas!
I suspect results could differ if I repeated the poll somewhere else, but... the game I was polling is centered around fuzzy animals, and the Other Games channel spends tons of time on other games centered around fuzzy animals, dragons, dinosaurs... maybe this is just a particularly underscratched itch. God knows that tends to happen in all sorts of game genres.
- I like the bauplan of fursona commonly referred to as "sharks" for what it is, but I object to calling them sharks. That is some "Hallmark inspired by true events" drift. Also the T-rex vs T-regina thing (NSFW) where male sharksonas look like Street Sharks and female ones instead look like boobie dragon fursonas with 1+ fins stapled somewhere along the dorsal line bugs the everloving shit out of me.