Image source: Epicwang / Postsecret
Click here if you want to skip this preamble and just read some short stories
From 2009 to early-2012, an author called Feathertail wrote a number of stories about humans transforming into anthropomorphic animals. She and her partner shared them on a website of their own making, called Becomeyourfursona.com
This website no longer exists, nor does the online persona of Feathertail.
Transformation has always been a staple of furry art, for reasons that I think are pretty obvious (unless you simply don’t know what “furry” is, I guess.) Sometimes it’s a wish fulfillment thing, sometimes it’s a source of horror and drama, and most often there’s a little of both.
If you’re very tuned-in to the furry subculture, you might also be aware that Transformation as a subgenre is a very, very, very common porn category. Lots of people find that kind of thing erotic, and that is just a fact about the furry fandom. There’s nothing wrong with that, but let me get this out of the way here and now:
The works shared in this post are all safe-for-work and family-friendly.
They sometimes deal with mature subject matter like death, violence, mental health, psychological horror, and so-on, but none have explicit sexual content, and none were made for the purpose of titillating the reader.
When going down memory lane to find this stuff, and while reading through them again, I was reminded most of Animorphs – a series aimed at 10 year olds. I would personally say 13+ is a fine age to read these, and I was younger than that when I found them.
A Bit of Background
Don’t expect a biography here – Partly because I don’t have a lot of details, and partly because I’m concerned with the ethics of it all. Documenting internet history can at times feel voyeuristic, and for reasons I’ll explain in a bit, I was on the fence about sharing these stories at all.
Still, a bit of context is useful.
If you were to sift through web archives and defunct accounts, you’d find a bit of inconsistency regarding the pronouns used for this author. That is because she came to realize she was transgender while she was still using the Feathertail alias.
Feathertail being transgender isn’t just a frivolous bit of trivia. It’s the kind of thing that, just like her being autistic, and ex-Mormon, had an obvious influence on her work.
At times these concepts are just there on an allegorical level; her characters often have to break away from families that mistreat them or don’t understand them. But other times she explicitly wrote characters who raged against their Mormon upbringings, and in one story I recovered, she wrote from the perspective of a repressed transgender teenager.
Feathertail’s writings and her blog posts I read back in the day were actually my first exposure to the more repressive and abusive aspects of the Mormon church.
Like I said, I was pretty young at the time, and so I really only vaguely knew that they were a religion with some funny beliefs. I remember this really cold, grim feeling inside, like finding out a friend is going through something you’d never taken seriously before then. Like, “Oh. I see now. It’s not funny at all.”
These things about her, which made her stories so rich and interesting, were seemingly a large part of why she disappeared from the internet. As she said on April 30th, 2012:
”I'm infosuiciding because I can't take it anymore. I don't want to be Feathertail. I don't want to take commissions. I don't want to be hurt or stalked by my family. I'm hurting badly and don't have any ways of dealing with it.
I'm slowly working through things. But this is no longer a part of my ways of dealing with them. And I can't pretend to be this person, or this writer, anymore. I'm sorry to everyone. I'm sorry for letting you down.”
To that I really just want to say: You never let me down, you inspired me. Reading back, I got a little embarrassed realizing how deeply your works influenced me, just because it is SO obvious. I hope life is treating you well, and that I’m not embarrassing you terribly by digging this stuff out of the depths of the Wayback Machine.
On the off chance that The-Artist-Formerly-Known-As-Feathertail really truly found this blog post, (That's a somewhat mortifying thought, ahahah) and you want something edited, redacted, or want this taken down altogether, please let me know. I don’t share my email openly, but you can DM me on any of the three sites at the top of my links page.
...Well, Twitter’s DM feature has been super buggy and doesn’t show notifs anymore, but still. I’d surely see it eventually.
Enough sentimental rambling! Get on with it!
Right, let’s get to the furry fiction.
I managed to dig up and save quite a number of these stories, as well as some stuff she’s written about her and her partner’s worldbuilding. In this post I’m only sharing a handful of stories, the ones I think that are the best written or that that resonated with me most as a kid.
For the most part, with just one exception, I think the worldbuilding in each speaks for itself, so rather than over-explaining the premise I’ll be adding content warnings (when applicable), and my personal thoughts on the stories.
Now, going in chronological order:
Blind as a…
This is the only drawn-out transformation I've written. It takes place over the span of weeks, though, and the child that it happens to is blind ... which makes for an interesting combination! Set in Edwardian England.
Content Warning: This one gets painful and bloody in a medical horror sort of way, which is mainly just worth mentioning because the protagonist is so very young. The gruesomeness is not excessive for the genre, no worse than a TV medical drama.
Clawheld’s thoughts: I actually thought I wouldn’t manage to get my hands on this one, since I couldn’t find it in the Wayback Machine, but I was blessedly wrong. Life found a way.
It’s funny, I remember that whenever I read the stories about characters turning into fruit bats, I developed a strong craving for fruit. Something about the descriptions of how much more flavorful fruits tasted to their senses just made me like, on autopilot, go to my kitchen and demolish some nectarines.
A lot has been said of the trope where a disabled character gains some kind of superpower that essentially “cures” their disability, it’s a pretty nuanced issue that I don’t feel totally equipped to weigh in on, but I think the genre and setting of this one works in its favor. I think I had just read The Secret Garden around that time, so it was very, like… “Oh I see, she’s disabled and all, but not as helpless as her family thinks. Even before she got sick they were unfairly isolating her!”
The transformation is painful and disruptive, but ultimately empowering. It changes how she sees –
… It changes how she perceives her own disability, and it’s sure to permanently change the family dynamic.
Independence Day
Those angsty people on LiveJournal. It's fun to tweak them, isn't it? Maybe it wouldn't be if you knew what they had to go through. Written as a commission for Arbutus, and inspired by my experiences with autism.
Content Warning: Part-way through the story there’s some anti-indigenous racism, in reference to the protagonist’s experience reading about Native Americans in school. The type of racism that is common in childrens’ classrooms.
Clawheld’s thoughts: Oh man, this is possibly my favorite. This is the one that I most wanted to save and share, it's just so unique, so well-written. This was one of the author's favorites, and I can't fault her there!
It wasn’t my favorite when I was younger. I found it uncomfortable and anxiety inducing, and I honestly just wasn’t grown-up enough to understand it yet. Now as an adult who has some very similar experiences to the ones described, I think Independence Day is extremely touching and cathartic.
The fact that I had to run some kind of errand each day, five days in a row for Thanksgiving Reasons is probably a lot of why I came back to this story. So I guess I owe this blog post to my stressful Thanksgiving week.
I’m also fond of how the worldbuilding all comes together, I think this one is the most efficient and clear when it comes to communicating its world.
Crystal Core
Would you rather come back to life as an anime robot designed by an iElectronics company, or as a walking fursuit? Find out how Creator-Unreal's character chose!
Clawheld’s thoughts: This one is so damn cool. And sad. And sometimes, when it wants to be, pretty funny. At one point in this story, there is a span of just a few paragraphs that made me laugh out loud, then sincerely cry.
The protagonist is peculiar, yet likable. A sentimental character trapped in an expressionless shell.
I love how the themes of alienation, grief, and trauma come together. The science fiction elements at play support the themes in such an interesting way, while still keeping the world near enough to ours that it feels grounded and relatable.
Crystal Core is probably more likely to resonate with you if you wear fursuits, have ever worn a fursuit, have ever received a warm hug from a fursuiter, or otherwise think fursuits are charming. At the very least, it helps if you don’t think they’re creepy.
Me personally? I’ve always thought fursuits are really cool. I have my own preferences for what makes an appealing fursuit, and the ‘suit described in this story sounds awesome.
Crimson Snow
Wouldn't it be nice to become a wolf and just run off into the woods? You'd never have to worry about humans trying to hurt you again. Oh, wait ...
Clawheld’s thoughts: While Independence Day and Crystal Core are more to my liking nowadays, Crimson Snow was my favorite as a kid. I loved, and still love me some werewolf-y violence. I'm very into Low Fantasy in general, especially when the imagery is so unapologetic and mystical.
At the time found the character’s voice and inner world so relatable. I was that kid who dressed badly and acted awkward and wished he could be a wolf instead of a teenage human being. In fact, I found her so relatable that I thought she was younger than she actually was! The protagonist is in high school, but I falsely remembered her as a late-middle schooler.
The writing is more meandering than the others, and its sometimes a little exhausting to be in this kid’s head as she bounces between “I’m on top of the world and nothing can get me down!” and “This is the worst, everything is so hopeless” and “I’m pissed at my stupid parents!” and “I’m such a pushover...” But, well, that’s what it’s like to be a teenager.
It’s also very endearing that her wolf form is so… Designed. She isn’t just becoming a wolf, she is becoming her fursona.
You can also very much tell that this is just one story in a wider canon, with other were-[animal] characters who follow the same rules and lore. The loose ends don’t bother me, I like the mystery, it’s just noticeable, you know? In fact, that was part of the appeal.
This setting definitely captured my imagination, for a while it became my playground of choice when daydreaming. Because of that I find it very cute and nostalgic, and I find myself hoping this weepy wolf-girl gets her happy ending.
Endure to the End
Those feelings that you have are wrong. You are damned because of them, and you will be separated from your family forever unless you stop having them, right now. And start being the person WE want you to be.
Content Warning: Homophobia, transphobia, parental abuse, religious abuse
Another thing to note: Endure to the End is an outlier here in many ways. Most obviously, no transformation takes place. This is because I have only managed to recover Chapter 1 of a multiple-chapter story. It also is the only one that presupposes that the reader knows they’re reading a story about furry transformation, in an established world where humans sometimes do that sort of thing. It uses lore that was established by other Feathertail stories (similar, but not the same as Independence Day’s world).
Clawheld’s thoughts: This is an interesting story. It stuck with me for a very long time, as it was probably the first time I read a story with a transgender protagonist, and definitely the first time I saw a trans guy depicted in fiction.
The reveal in later chapters that the protagonist secretly, deep down wanted to transition and live as a boy really took me by surprise as a kid, even though now I can see that it is pretty clearly foreshadowed from Chapter 1. It was so new to me, so gutsy.
Much like Crimson Snow, I misremembered the protagonist as being the same age as me. But this was different, for every aspect I found relatable, there was something strange and new, a sort of pain that I struggled to understand.
I was sad, I was intrigued, and I devoured the rest.
The contents of the rest of the nonrecoverable chapters were very bittersweet from what I can recall. The protagonist undergoes an incredible, miraculous transformation, at the cost of his family. This disturbed me. It still disturbs me that so many people reject their kids when they come out.
But a common theme in Feathertail’s works is that sometimes you need to leave your family behind in order to be your true self. That it's unfair, and difficult, but sometimes it's the best thing you can do. Those people don't deserve you. You don’t owe it to your family to repress your feelings and hate yourself, and you don’t have to let them back into your life.
Parting words
I guess that’s not the happiest note to leave off on, but not the saddest either.
That’s all the stories I felt like sharing, at least for now. They might not change your life and blow your mind the way it did mine, but I felt it was worthwhile to share my favorites and talk about how much they mean to me. What’s the point of nostalgia if you keep all those memories to yourself?