Only a hardened few who’ve explicitly sought out this account for some reason will read this vs the thousands who’ve probably seen the suit but hey, I just got thinking about 2014 and how much furry stuff brought me joy then despite being more isolated than I am even now. As mocked as the wub wub style of dubstep/brostep is my god it makes me happy to hear because it reminds me of then.

Anyways, Asterisk was first conceived of two and a half years before the fursuit appeared at Megaplex 2016. It technically debuted at AFO a week or so before but that con was a huge letdown and I didn’t stay long. Megaplex 2016 was actually a complete impulse decision since I was suspicious of going to fur cons until I was 18 because I was afraid it would be murry purry everywhere and I’d get raped. Honestly I don’t think that’s a bad mindset for minors to have with furry stuff and lament that online places with safer and more SFW circles have largely dried up. Fortunately Megaplex actually felt more family-friendly and respectful than anime cons had. Anyways, I got into fursuit making and amusement rides and roller coasters around the same time in 2013 and that grew and grew until spring 2014, when my dad took me to the Florida State Fair and I had my mind blown by what’s probably still the most spectacular lineup of fair rides I’ve seen in my life and I debuted my first fursuit Rainbow Randall at a tiny local anime con. Because Florida is the wintering grounds for most east coast carnivals, it typically has some of the first fairs of the season and can have absolutely ridiculous lineups of rare and elusive rides because units haven’t split up yet and there’s really no other major fairs on the east coast to do. I knew what a lot of them were because I had gotten obsessed with rare flat/fair rides over the winter but man were they nothing short of alien to see in person. One in particular I had a fascination with was the Mondial Top Scan model, the one traveling ride of this kind in the US being the Space Roller. Years earlier when I was 8-9 I saw one at the Ohio State Fair and while I was too scared to ride anything that went upside-down, holy crap it’s burned into me how alien it looked when I was used to truly “flat” fair rides like Scramblers and this was a freaky flipping star-shaped arm that looked like a dropped extradimensional artifact. And then it appeared again at the Florida State Fair, and I now knew what it actually was, and it quickly became my favorite carnival ride (it’s been beaten out by the Zipper now but still up there for me).

Pretty much immediately after the fair I went nuts drawing weird alien furry creatures based on various rides, to mixed success. Didn’t use most of the designs for everything and a lot of rides were just too weird to be too literal with. But a Top Scan-based on that swiveled through several prototype names until settling on Asterisk rapidly became a candidate to turn into a fursuit. The very first design was an Oriental Shorthair-ish cat thing with three muzzles and actually a TON of similarities to the more finalized Asterisk. It had the differently colored toes, lighting bolt arrow markings, stripes across the fingers and toes, and the six eyes and six ears that swiveled freely (which were always intended to be erect… until the costume came out how it did and gravity took over)

Asterisk went through a ton of revisions in those two years as I worked on a materials-priced suit head commission for a friend that I don’t think has seen the light of day since (OUCH). I won’t bore you with the details but the main difference is the markings morphed, color scheme changed several times, head grew longer and less cat-like and more akin to either a dragon, rat, or possum depending on how you want to take it, and some of the laughably physically impractical features like hands that were rotating star-splayed six-fingered things mounted on small motors were dropped. My old deviantart profile is XARALTA if you really want to see the dozen or so iterations, they’re all in their own folder.

But the gist of Asterisk’s final design was to be as edgy and spectacular as possible. I firmly believe fursuit dancers are the rockstars of at least the SFW side of furrydom, that’s the single best way to get attention as a fursuiter and those events have almost always been massively popular. And teenage me saw a similar mystique and draw to them as people probably saw rockstars in the past, and instead of picking up a guitar I decided to try and self-teach how to dance and make a bold edgy character that would be real freaking cool to watch and look good in motion. So here’s just a bulleted list of traits and why they exist:

Long head- most fursuits have smooshed in toony muzzles and I’ve always loved giving Asterisk a long, sloping profile to be completely counter that. Also makes their head a lot more directional and dramatic when I look around or headbang.

Six ears, six eyes, six toes, six-pointed star-tipped tongue- the six pointed end of the basis ride. Asterisk is not a demonic character and I hard disagree with 6 being an evil number and 7 being a good one. I think 7 is ugly and unresolved and yes, I have a character in a story who holds my own unconventional numerology. Anyways, I’d seen some characters with 4 ears or eyes and figured I’d add two more of each for edginess and to match the ride. Only reason for no six fingers was physical practicality.

Those damn ears- I cannot overemphasis that these are not tendrils or dreads. I even had someone think they were axolotl gills and tbh that was cool take I could go for. They’re ears. They were originally intended to be erect and create a star-shaped silhouette that the whole Asterisk name came from. Unfortunately gravity had its way and they became rather iconically floppy. Also, they can rotate on their bases because they’re mounted on office chair wheel axles. It was my dad’s idea to use the swivels because I had no clue how I’d do it. The effect is diminished because the ears are so floppy, but I can grab and twist any of them 360 degrees and you’ll sometimes seem them roll over.

Unique pawpads- I never saw people with truly unique hand pad designs and still basically never do. People are always kind of fascinated with Asterisk’s hands when they seem them in person. I jumped on the opportunity to make them deliberately bizarre and customized.

Ridges on pads and tongue and thin bars across markings- These are just to give that “row of lights” look and look vaguely like the lighting on the Space Roller in 2D.

Mouth full of wild crooked shark teeth- this is just a shitty carny teeth joke and because it meant I needed zero precision in how I glue them into the jaw. They’re apoxy sculpt with “roots” glued into the foam.

Mouth vision- also unintentional! Asterisk’s suit was designed with a huge/relatively shallow mouth for airflow because it was fantastic on Rainbow Randall. There’s dedicated tear duct vision spots but the mouth worked so much better I shifted to wearing the head differently for that.

Light up eyes- Asterisk used to have some light up face markings before the wiring mostly broke and I couldn’t be assed to keep fixing it. I always wanted to have the body markings light up too and hoped I’d learn how to do so in engineering school. But all I learned was that I’m worthless at electronics anything so this is completely abandoned and I’m a complete luddite in terms of fursuit electronics now. Complete luddite in general really with how I can’t get into digital sculpting and thus have no interest in 3D printing or VRChat and covid made me hate virtual anything so much I want to do everything as physical as possible.

Unique colors- BUDGET! Asterisk and Rainbow Randall are unique colors because their non-white fur was dyed with acrylic paint so I didn’t have to buy a yard of all those colors because I was in high school with tons of time and space and minimal budget. As a fun aside, I almost gave Asterisk black instead of white base fur because I was worried about the markings bleeding (the airbrushing sure did ouch) but there were too many edgy neon and black fursuits already.

Candycane stripes on legs, arms, and tail- edgy subversion of the popular ring markings on fursuit arms/legs. This was deceptively a pain to pattern on the tail because I had to make a clothe mockup and stuff it and then draw the stripe on and cut it up for the pattern.

Zigzag arrows- these are just taken from the actual ride and wrapped around the fursuit form in ways that looked cool and pleasing to me. The ones on the sides of the thighs were meant to look spring-loaded and dynamic. The arrows on the crotch were just natural terminations and not meant to be sexy. If you tried to bang Asterisk you would receive a free coathanger abortion because there are a total of eight wire hangers keeping the jaw and ears from sagging just waiting to stab you in the crotch (teeth are also fairly pokey)

Color scheme- originally had a sunset coloration to match the Space Roller in 2014, went through several changes and settled on the current one eventually. The really weird thing is the irl Space Roller got repainted to something very similar years later.

Floaty underwater movement- Asterisk was always intended to be sharp and aggresive but WOO BOY did the sheer weight and flop of the suit totally kill that. The mannerisms developed at my first Megaplex as a result of how I just had to move in the suit because I had to be pretty big and sweeping.



So basically, Asterisk went from a teen’s edgy flaildancing neon thing to kind of ambiguously dark, eerie, and psychedelic. I’ve attempted to give it more of a backstory or established charactee before but failed. In the end, it’s purely a costume/performance sona that shows up once a year and vanishes like the carnival coming to town.