An impression I get from a lot of people who aren't deeply familiar with Second Life, is that there is an assumption that furries on Second Life are merely buying their avatars more or less stock, slapping a hat on them, and calling it a fursona. They don't feel like there's a lot of effort or creativity that goes into furry avatars on SL, on the part of the person wearing it.

Now, I want to be clear about one thing: I don't think it's fair to invalidate people's fursonas merely because they found their fursona in an avatar they purchased on SL. It can be empowering to wear your first avatar and have it start to feel like you. It's not less-than merely because other people might have a very similar avatar.

And the reality is, for most furs on SL, the process of developing a fursona via avatar is much more complicated than that, even if it might start with a simple stock avatar.

I'm going to try to keep this brief, but there's a lot, so here we go:

1. Base Avatars
There are two kinds of base avatars in SL furry. I'm going to be making up some terms here because I don't know that the community has really decided on anything, but bear with me.

The first are 'stock' avatars. These are kind of what you'd expect - they are avatars that work out of the box. If you just want to be a fox without any fuss, you'd probably buy a stock avatar. They are designed to be immediately recognizable, often have built-in features that are associated with that animal, like options for slitted fox eyes or whatever. Usually you can pick from a variety of skins, if you'd rather be a red fox or an arctic fox or whatever.

The second are 'modder' avatars. This is a broad category of avatars that are either designed from the beginning to be 'adaptable' to modders, or have been adopted by the modding community because its features make it easy or appealing to modify. They can appear similar to stock avatars in that they are typically sold as an out-of-the-box species that you can wear immediately, but they usually emphasize the ability to change the shape, make adjustments, and have built-in modding capabilities to dramatically change the shape and skin.

Some are sold almost as blank canvases on their own, such as the kemono, which technically comes with a skin and a head, but you'd be hard pressed to figure out what exactly it's supposed to be, or find anyone who wears them. Yet it's very popular, because people like the body shape as a base to create totally new avatars. And more dramatically; there's also the Regalia Project, which literally isn't a functional avatar on its own, but more of a tailor's dummy of sorts, a literally incomplete package when absent modding efforts.

In some cases, mods are even made for non-furry (human) avatars to make them furry, creating an even broader pool of content for furs to draw from. For example, my hyena's body is a customized skin for a furry hyena mod for a rigged mesh body made for human avatars.

Both 'stock' and 'modder' avatars can be modded, and typically are, to varying degrees. The latter category simply has a larger market of mods, and those modifications are often more dramatic in how they change the avatar, giving the player a lot more freedom in creating something unique.

2. Heads and Other Bits
In Second Life, avatar heads are pretty important! Two avatars could have the same body shape, for example, but different heads could dramatically change how one perceives the avatar. A lion head and a wolf head on the same body with different skins, may not even really be recognizably the same body. But the same head on different bodies, well. People recognize faces.

So does that mean that Second Life is full of cloned faces? Not even remotely.

Obviously avatars have their stock heads - the ones that come out of the box. And you can mix and match heads you like with bodies from different avatars that you like, for example. This became relatively common when the new wave of rigged mesh bodies started appearing - people wanted to keep their old heads, but wanted to put them on the newer, better, more feature-rich bodies.

But there's also a market of modder heads! People create heads, sort of like skulls. They do not come with a skin, they are often just white shapes that modders are intended to make skins for. There's a lot of these, and they come in many shapes that are meant to be roughly generic enough to support different species. this allows modders to make very different shaped versions of the same species' heads. And because they are roughly generic in shape, the skins can often make them look unrecognizable to each other.

People also create stand-alone parts like ears, tails, eyes, legs, paws, different sized hips or chests or whatever, specifically for specific avatars. And then modders create skins for those mods which weren't even part of the original package to begin with! You genuinely are often modding mods for modded avatars. This is only possible because we have such a big and dedicated community of creators.

The end result is that with the exception of furs using default stock avatars out-of-the-box, it's actually pretty rare to see two avatars that look the same. Even for an animal like the possum, which doesn't have a dedicated stock avatar, there are different paths you can take to mod different stock/modder avatars to create a possum that looks completely different than if you'd gone down a different path.

Even before you get into personal creativity, the process of putting together an avatar from different parts, created by different people for different purposes, results in an immense variety. Even if you never add a single personal touch to your avatar - this is not a cookie-cutter push-button fursona dispenser.

3. Personal Touches
This is the part that is going to be the most difficult to describe, or even define. Personal touches can be a lot of things, from using tools to make small changes to the shape or size of things, to building features or entire parts of an avatar, wholly from scratch.

Personal modification is introducing unique changes to parts of an avatar, that no other avatar has. This might be altering the color or shape of part of the avatar, or its placement and alignment. These can be be relatively easy and small changes which may not dramatically change the appearance of the avatar, but along with other changes, can go a long way to differentiating one avatar from another similar one. Depending on the parts you're using, more dramatic changes can also be made. For example, for my hyena I am using some 'arm fluff' that consists of some textured prims. The prims have been completely re-colored, re-structured, re-sized, and otherwise modified to accommodate bracelets. They basically look nothing like they did when I purchased them. At this point I might as well have just built them from scratch.

You can also modify skins - though doing this yourself with a purchased skin technically isn't 'allowed' in the rules - sometimes the creator of a skin will happily take payment to make adjustments to one of their creations, such as adding a design or changing coloration. This isn't uncommon at all. Some people also use tools to modify skins on their own, but that's a gray area. Personally, I feel that if you're just making personal changes to a personal skin, I don't see a problem with it.

Creating stuff from scratch is also more common than you'd think. People create their own traditional body modifications, their own fur accents, avatar parts, and accessories. They do their own skins and textures, add features that weren't part of the original avatar or mods they're using, etc.

4. Finally!

Obviously everyone puts a different amount of effort, time, and skill into their avatar. Some are new, some are old. Some have traditional art skills to supplement their creative efforts and produce avatars that are almost wholly unique, while others are just trying to do the most they can by mixing and matching and making small modifications.

The end result, however, is that when you are on SL, with some exceptions (such as after a new stock avatar becomes popular) almost every avatar you see is unique. And I don't mean in some trite way, like one person's eye color is different from another's.

I mean that part of the experience of being on SL is building and iterating on your avatar to make it unique.

And there are so many avatars and mods and ways to put avatars together, that even people who don't put a ton of personal touches on their avatars, tend to end up being relatively unique.

The notion of SL furries just being a lot of clones is a stereotype that hasn't been remotely true for a decade, if it ever was.