WentTheFox

Brony Era

When I was just starting out in the furry fandom I struggled to find the best character to represent myself. Sure, I always liked movies with talking animals, and on occasion I would obsess over my favorite character from the latest talking animal movie for a little while, but everyone around me seemed to have their fursona, and I personally felt that I needed one of my own.

My first foray into any furry-adjacent community was joining the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic fandom around mid-2012, and that basically defined the early years of my character's development. My favorite character (best pony) from the series has always been Vinyl Scratch and early on I just used pictures of her as my identity online. It was oddly fitting, as my former username also started with the abbreviation "DJ", and she just so happens to be an electronic musician character in the series.

On one fateful day, while watching a freind of mine livestream himself doodling, he decided to make me a doodle of a unicorn pony character as a gift that would eventually become my "OC" (original character), which likely qualifies as my earliest fursona. This was also around the time when I was still experimenting with drawing on my own, both digitally and traditionally, and as she was my sona at the time, she basically got the profession of being an artist as a result.

Since I've been getting into web development as a hobby at the time, I figured I'd pick the name and color scheme of the character based on my newfound interest, and thus Double Colon, the PHP-colored unicorn mare was born. Yes, she was female, as I both personally disliked the appearance of male characters from the show, and having a non-male character also felt more interesting at the time, even if it didn't truly represent me. At this point in my life, I still considered myself fully straight, and spoiler alert, things changed after I had found my place in the fandom, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Her "cutie mark" - which is usually a symbol on the side of the character's rear end that indicates their "purpose" or what they're most skilled at - is a symmetric pattern that looks like a flower. The simple reason for choosing it at the time was that it was easy to draw from any angle, and even if the rotation was slightly off, or it was mirrored, nobody could really screw up its placement too much, which is a nice plus when getting a bunch of art of my character was one of my favorite ways to irresponsibly spend my modest income at the time.

Naturally, because I had this character the longest, she's also the one with the most artwork made of her out of all of them, but as I grew and the 4th generation of the show ended, I gradually lost interest in the pony fandom in general, and looked to the broader furry community as the next logical step.

Quadruped Furry Era

The next chapter began with me branching out to interact more with furries in general and break out of the brony circles I previously confined myself into. I began to search for artists who could draw both ponies and furry characters, and ultimately one such artist helped realize my vision and turned it into a fully-fledged fursona.

In part because I was lazy, and also because I like to avoid trying to fix things that aren't broken, my entry into the furry fandom began with an animal that had the exact same name and color scheme as my previous (pony) character, only now in the form of a feral fox.

The colors were lifted straight out of the pony's design, with the pattern on the tail paying homage to the "cutie mark" of her predecessor. She doesn't really have an in-depth backstory, she lives in a dense forest where she was raised by the local flora and in the process she's developed the ability to communicate with plants. As for why I choose her to be a fox, the simplest explanation I can give is that it's my favorite species when it come to real life animals, and I also feel like I share a handful of personality traits with them.

The character still stayed female, but by this point I was starting to struggle with figuring out my own orientation, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to truly identify myself with any character that did not fit what I felt was right for me. As it turned out, this creature also could not live up to the task of being my final form, no matter how cute she was.

Anthro Furry Era

Things took a drastic turn, for better or for worse, when I was introduced to this strange piece of software called VRChat. This game - which isn't really a game, more like a social platform to meet people and do activities together in a virtual space - has changed my life, and that's no exaggeration. Back then I was under the impression you needed a VR headset to play at all, and it wasn't until a friend told me that the game can be played on desktop even without a headset that I took a nosedive into the rabbit hole.

Just as I thought I had finally figured out making my own fursona, this new environment - the so-called "most expensive free game" - also set a new, higher bar for self-expression in the form of 3D avatars. Now instead of just having a fursona, you could actually be your fursona.

There was just one small problem: the platform itself, plus the community resources and tools for creating your own avatars, primarily centered around creating humanoid avatars (that stood on two legs) which obviously did not fit my newfound fursona's four-legged nature, so change was inevitable.

I went through nearly a dozen pre-made avatar bases, created my own textures for them, and then proceeded to try them on with great embarrassment, given I had next to no prior experience with texturing 3D models at the time. I eventually came across a base model (the first version of the Tosca Rex) that came with a great default texture out-of-the-box, and only needed minor adjustments to the colors to make it feel like something I could identify with.

Apart from some bioluminescent markings that were included in said default texture, this character borrowed basically all of its design elements from the feral fox, with one of the biggest changes yet to any of my characters since I joined the furry fandom.

One thing led to another, and ultimately I bought a VR headset along with a set of full-body trackers (there goes the "free" part of the game out the window). Since I would essentially be wearing this character as an avatar and "driving" it myself, I made the decision that this next character is going to represent me and my identity as accurately as it reasonably could, and so its gender was set as male, while still keeping the same name from before.

With time I also came to accept the fact that I am most likely not straight, which was only made clearer by being more active in the fandom both in- and outside VR and interacting with other like-minded members of the furry community. I used to fear of being queer, but this is where I have found some of the most kind, caring and understanding people, many of whom I am friends with to this day.

This basic character design and name has stuck with me throughout all these years and I thought to myself: finally I have reached a fursona design that I can just use for the rest of my life. If you have been reading attentively so far, you won't be surprised in the slightest to learn that this was in fact, not the case.

Mint Era

I originally just wanted to introduce a new design element to my existing character, but after such a long time, I naturally accumulated a bunch of art, all of which would suddenly become "outdated" if I were to change anything about how the character looks, so I decided to start from scratch.

Sometime during the start of 2025 I made the decision to change my online identity, mainly to stop people from thinking I was a musician. My old name originated from a social media website automatically generating it based on my two first names, which just so happens to abbreviate to "DJ". I felt that after completing my username change, it was also time for a new character design to go along with it.

Following the logic of the new name, which essentially translates to "mint fox", and indicates my general affection towards the smell and taste of mint, I commissioned a 3D texture artist (with whom I already worked with previously) to create the latest iteration of my identity: Went the mint-scented furry fox.

Beyond the name and character design (the latter still being under construction) nothing else is changing, he will just be the new representation of me moving forward, while I leave the old name and color scheme behind as a character of his own right, with all the ups and downs that me, my friends, and anyone else who has interacted me in recent years have come to associate with it.