<3

I love being a mimic, tho <3

i know this is about being a shape shifter but honestly it just hits deeper for me. its just my whole life. ive never been normal. and it really is hard to unlearn what people tell you to do and to be.

I actually drew this to express that very feeling. With myself being so many things people don't consider normal or being something that isn't specifically one solid easy to grasp thing. I'm glad it sang to you that way ^^

I always had trouble with being "one thing". Every 5-10 years, I ended up changing my "base form".

When I was a teenager, I was "half dragon", an anthro dragon. Dragons are cool, after all. (I also felt, even back then, a phantom tail almost all the time. Sometimes even wings.)

Around 19-20, I think, I switched to being a fox. I was signing up for a graphical chat program named DreamShift that let you pick a species from the list. Dragon was on the list, but I thought "Everyone's gonna pick dragon, obviously, so I'm gonna pick something unique. Something nobody else would pick. I'm gonna pick FOX." How little I knew. ^_^;; But fox clicked incredibly well, even non-anthro, so I went with fox even after DreamShift closed down. I was drawn to it because it was small and cute, I think.

Around 25 or so, I got onto Second Life, but this was waaay back when it was new, so the only "starting avatar" you had was basic human. I was trying to create a paper bag to put over my head, and someone seeing that was amused so they gave me a copy of the avatar they were working on, which was a skunk. The bigger tail and misunderstood nature of them drew me in, and skunks became my favorite animal pretty much instantly. So "K'sharra Manimal" ended up having a decade-long impact with a simple gift.

Around ten years later, I was messing around in SL with a friend who was asking my opinion on their avatar (whether they should have paws or hooves as a fox/horse mix). I was advocating for hooves, and as part of it, I was being silly and adding hooves to my various avatars. When I hit bunny, though, something about it struck a chord, and I wound up developing the idea into "Hoofbun". I hesitated for a while, because I had previously held a rule that I wouldn't be a hybrid. After self-reflection, I realized it stemmed from seeing the idea handled poorly in fiction. Something about the mix of cute rabbit with the strength of a horse and the weight of the hooves just felt right.

After about 6-7 years of hoofbun, I found myself spending a lot of time as a non-anthro pet dragon around the size of a large dog. I'd been spending all my time like that, looking forward to time with people who let me be that, and just not really feeling hoofbun. So I finally "made the switch" to it, even though I'd kind of been trying to stick to "real animals (or at least a mix of real animals)", but the main hesitation was just feeling guilty about switching yet again. It was around that time that I started writing "Princess Tells Her Story", which was basically escapist fantasy daydreams turned into a book series.

Later that same year, Hoofbun came back in a big way. I'd been toying with the idea of a Metroidvania with a hoofbun main character, and was developing ideas for her abilities and personality and story. I found myself "feeling" it strongly, and any given day was a coin toss as to whether I felt like two legs or four. I ended up recycling a lot of the ideas into a second story series, "Exodimensional Hoofbun Flopsy", but I felt guilty for going through the whole "I'm changing my main form" only to have it come back. So I realized I was holding myself to another rule, "Only one main form". Deciding to give it a try, I gave myself permission to just... have two Main Forms, for the first time.

And then a month later, life events hit hard at the same time I was re-reading the "Out of Placers" archives yet again, and I found myself resonating with yinglets incredibly strongly. So I ended up making a yinglet self, letting it be a third Main Form, and starting a story series for her, "Modern Major Yinglet".

Now I have all three, Princess, Flopsy, and Vayryn, and I flip between them based on whichever fits the emotions/desires I have at the moment. They're all "facets of the same gemstone", all parts of who I am. While there are book characters who share their names/forms and have their own stories and histories and everything, I still only have the one self/personality.

It's been a heck of a journey, and some of the biggest breakthroughs involved "unlearning" things I was holding on to without even realizing it. ^_^;;

Cool!