Hey, Quil. As you recall you ordered a commission for me to draw your character Isaac, the velociraptor disk jockey. Since you never actually notified me of the updates to their profile I figured I would check on my own and now have found myself thoroughly confused, and because I refuse to ever sugarcoat things, I'll just say I've found myself rather irritated as well. Why? Your inability to do your research results in a poorly written character with unclear traits. I don't mean this to be rude or mean, I'm just being honest. I've read over this profile a few times and I still have no idea what the hell it is you're talking about or trying to achieve with them.

I apologize if this is sudden and unexpected since you aren't asking for character criticism, but as someone who really cares about his customers and the outcome of their artwork, it is crucial I say something and make criticisms. I want the result of your commission to be the best it can be and capture the character... unfortunately I can't do this at the moment because your character makes absolutely no sense to me.

First of all, do you even know what a hermaphrodite is? I think what you are trying to refer to your character as is intersex. The word hermaphrodite is of Greek origin that conjoins the names of the gods "Hermes" and "Aphrodite". In nature, in order for an organism to be a hermaphrodite would require them to have FULL male anatomy, and FULL female anatomy. The fact that you imply that your character's biological sex is "male dominant", meaning it has integrated sex characteristics of a male and female and having MORE of that of a male, would mean that they are not in fact a hermaphrodite. Do not let the incompetent furry definition of this word influence your character creation, I tell you this since we are friends and I refuse to let my friends fall victim to stupid furry-itis. As I have repeated earlier, I think what you are trying to refer to your character's sex as is intersex. INTERSEX AND HERMAPHRODITE ARE NOT THE SAME THING. THEY ARE NOT INTERCHANGEABLE. Intersexuality refers to a person's biological sex having characteristics of a male and a female, but not necessarily in full. They could have more male or more female characteristics, sometimes half and half. The combinations and ways of this happening are so variant and no two are honestly the same. To add to this, even if it is fiction you need to take into account that hermaphroditism is only possible in certain aquatic animals and insects, and does not occur in any other animal, also considering these are anthropomorphic characters with humanoid bodies, this is even MORE unlikely. A human cannot be a hermaphrodite though they can be intersexed.

Onto other things, I will praise you for recognizing there being a difference between gender and sex as most writers fail to understand this and therefore lack variety in their characters, however...

You say you refer to this character as a female, so why are you calling them an "it"? If they are female they are not an it. You don't take sex into account for pronoun usage, that confuses the hell out of people. I am very against the use of "shi" and "hir" and find it very fucking annoying and am glad you aren't using them, but... calling them an it doesn't make sense when you clearly state that they are a female.

Also how is character a transgender? I hope you know there is no such thing as an "H-to-F" transgender, no matter what a dumb fucking furry tells you. If the character's gender is female then she is wired like one, regardless of her uncommon sex. She's intersexed and is female, so you simply refer to her as an "intersexed female", referring to her as anything overcomplicated and weird just doesn't make sense. Also, nobody HAS to refer to an intersexed person as "shi" or "hir", so you don't even have to point out that she changed those pronouns to begin with as most intersexed people hate it. I'm sorry, this just throws me off and only SLIGHTLY angers me.

Another thing that throws me off is the "tomboyish" behavior thing. If your character dresses feminine and all that then how is she a tomboy? Not that there is a rule to that or anything, it's just now that you word it that way I don't really know how to pose her and such. When you first brought this character up to me, they were a male in gender as well (even if slightly feminine). Posing a character is kind of a complicated process, and now that you tell me this character is a tomboyish female who dresses like a girl, I'm REALLY confused because generally a girl who is a tomboy dresses in a masculine manner. ^^;

You see, even if a girl is REALLY tomboyish, she is still a girl and carries herself differently than a boy. A boy, feminine or masculine still carries himself like a boy would. I can't explain it but there's some instinctive behaviors going on when it comes to gender (and I mean gender, NOT sex). So now I have to emulate tomboy with feminine clothing, which is no problem but your wording just REALLY gave me a headache there. And the reason I make this comment now is because I was sketching Isaac out earlier and this became a sort of dilemma.

One more thing, because I don't want people laughing at you... your character does not have an "unconventional gender", because she's still a girl. She may have an unconventional SEX but that's different.

I apologize if this post sounds preachy, I don't mean for it to be. I just have difficulty if a character is poorly researched, and no offense but your character is EXTREMELY poorly researched. The concept you're trying to go for is very unique but the execution of it in writing has come out rather sloppy. This sloppiness will become congruent to how I draw the character and I don't want that to happen. You're one of my most patient and generous customers and it would be really uncool if the result came out bad, I don't like letting people down.

So, all I'm saying is for future reference please research your character, or clarify some of these confusing things with explanations. ^^; Thanks dude. Again as critical as this sounds, I'm just trying to take my work seriously.

Hot tamales this is a long criticism.

I realize this is probably a very confusing character and I myself was wondering if I had insufficiently explained her/hir/it to you. This is largely due to the fact that, as I say, Isaac is supposed to be a representative of the more experimental aspects of my personality; you'll find the imaginations of this furry to be fairly strange.

A large amount of the confusion was, as you guessed, largely due to a confusion on terminology, and I appreciate your correction. When I say "male-dominant hermaphrodite," that's largely due to a lack of a better term. The reason Isaac's (skipping pronouns for a bit) anatomy is built the way it is is that most "herms" are built female-dominant. In this case, Isaac is "male-dominant" in the sense that both male and female genitalia are present, but the masculine is more pronounced and mammary organs aren't present. In this sense, yes, intersexed would be a better word and I'm glad you corrected me on that.
As much as I've researched the concept of hermaphroditism, I can't say anyone's ever put it as well as you have.

The "it" versus "her" confusion is simply because when I commissioned you the character was still fresh in my mind. In hindsight, it probably would have been better to hold back on commissioning a picture of this character until I had a better idea what to call her, but I suppose I was still deciding exactly how to refer to her. I chose "it" at the time because it's just a simpler choice. This irritates a lot of people and I'm very sorry, and you are accurate in saying being of female gender regardless of sex warrants use of "her" rather than "it" - this simply hadn't occurred to me at the time.

The issue of using the phrase "transgender" is just an oversight on my part. When I sat down to write this I basically knocked out Isaac's profile along with everybody else's (planning to flesh it out more later, obviously; in fact you'll notice I'm still missing some characters) and I guess I wrote it down to clarify the idea to myself rather than anybody else. I do this to myself all the time; in fact when someone proofreads a draft to a story they'll often hand it back to me only to end up watching me redpen myself. That's all that happened in this case, and looking back it's pretty much the same story with calling her "unconventional." I'll remove the reference pronto.

I think "tomboy" was absolutely the worst word I could have used to describe Isaac, because I was trying to get across that she is something of a rebellious type. As I sit here before you, I do agree that I had explained this in absolutely the worst possible way. See, even being a writer it's often difficult to really drop an idea onto paper when I've never explored it before and I've never had a character personified quite like Isaac is. Her attitude is that of a girl (being of female gender) but she isn't girly in the same way a pwetty pwincess would be. She has a very frontal and argumentative attitude, being brought up in a culture which values aggression and stubborn argument. This is yet another case where second-guessing my terminology would have been an excellent idea, but I don't have a lot of experience with characters like this and "tomboy" was the closest phrase I could think of at the time.

I'm actually really glad you're bringing all of this up, because it's showing me where I'm deficient in my ability to characterize. The reason this confusion exists is because I always like to try new ideas out, and one of the ways to do that is to experiment with character types and traits. Isaac Jabberwock, as a character, was invented to challenge my own perception of character and polarization and basically unconventionalize as much as possible: you don't see enough male-dominant intersexed characters in furry artwork; I don't think I've ever seen an intersexed character whose gender differs from their sex; and I personally have never written about a character of such gender or sexual status. So this is very much a learning process for me.

Also, I never told you about these updates because I wasn't consciously aware I had changed anything. I'll have to go back and reread that, but I do apologize for the confusion.

So don't be afraid to get preachy with me; it's the only way I'll learn.
I'm glad you're trying hard and I'm very happy you're taking your work seriously, so if there's still confusion then let me know and I'll see if I can help clear it up.