For those of you who know me well, you'll know I have gone through multiple characters during my time in the fandom, but, funnily enough, not really had a fursona. Oh certainly I have cosplayed characters I have made, but they've had their own backstories, personalities, and individual meanings. This is the first time I have come up with a character that pretty much is me.

Why did I come up with Dennis you might say? Well, I have been through something of a low patch regarding my relationship with my other characters. Yes, I know, they're fictitious and exist only in my mind and creative work, but artists can have a relationship with the entities they create, and for Giovanni and Gideon, it wasn't necessarily a healthy one.

Giovanni is a representation of someone I would like to be, a character I aspire to be like, but sadly fall short of by some considerable amount, and it makes me feel inadequate. Gideon is an amalgamation of the traits that, in small doses, help one assert themselves, but he is someone who exhibits these traits in toxic amounts, and all too easily beguiles one into enabling their worst excesses. As such, holding myself to their standards was not good for my mental well being.

I have been doing some soul searching as to why I came up with these characters to begin with, and found that there was a lot about myself I dislike, and used these characters as escapism. Stuck with these people, it made me feel inadequate or weak, that the person I was in real life was such a dislikeable person, that my only escape was to become these characters.

In order to balance out myself, I would need to celebrate myself, or, at the very least, embody my more benign or likeable traits, and that's why I made Dennis. Dennis is short, stout, and sleepy, like many koalas, and yes I am much the same. I am short, chubby, and I do enjoy a good nap. These aren't necessarily bad traits, they're just me. Dennis enjoys nerdy t shirts, and all kinds of geeky things, like I do, and that too is a good thing I like about myself. Dennis does have his aspirations, but he likes to take it one day at a time, in a way he can handle, and, most of the time, he is contented with what he has and does just this, making good with himself, and this is something positive I feel, that even though I don't achieve the incredible in a day, I get through it and sleep all the easier knowing I did it to the best of my ability.

And yes, let's talk the elephant in the room, Dennis is intersex. I am not intersex in real life, but this is something I hope to properly address; being comfortable in my sexuality. I, like Dennis, have my softer, tender side, but don't really see these as gender fixed traits - Dennis doesn't see his vagina as feminine, he sees it as masculine. In his own words;

"I am a guy because of my vagina. Some guys have vaginas, therefore having a vagina makes me a guy."

Yeah, the logic doesn't necessarily make sense, but he identifies as male, and he finds his vagina to be a very male thing, because some men have one, and are still men because of it. It's why he calls his vagina his "little dude", but that's a story for another time.

So yeah, I felt like it was time I played as a character that was me, rather than be someone for whom either made me resent who I am, or brought out traits that made me into someone I didn't like. Let's all hear it for Dennis!