I am surprised by how much I like having a fursona. The furry community at large has crafted/evolved an appealing mix of conventions. I was reading an article yesterday about how facial recognition uses a different part of the brain from recognizing purely symbolic images like hearts, sweat drops, highly conventionalized chibi anime expressions, or even everyday stuff like a carrot. A drawing either triggers your mental concept of carrot or it does not, whereas facial recognition involves finely tuned comparison of exact spatial locations. We can convey things like "the cartoon character had hearts for eyes in this panel" with language, because it's a fundamentally linguistic thing. We can't describe facial features with language, but instead have to resort to techniques such as an artist making a series of guesses and receiving corrections.

Anyway the idea I was reading about was that the more "continuous" exact-position-style thinking predates language, whereas language divides everything up into approximations and distinctions. And so fundamentally linguistic media like comic books come up with things like iconic superhero costumes (or other character design tricks) so that people can absorb the information of who's in-panel at a linguistic level rather than with the older facial-recognition part of their brain.

And what I'm trying to say here is that it's fun to have an iconic fur pattern, even if I have no real explanation for why it is the way it is. I see my little drawing with my dots & white chin and there's a gut level "yay that's me" thing which doesn't happen when looking at photos of myself.

ALSO HEY let's get back on topic. The above drawing was made in like twenty minutes or less, though the coloring took longer of course. I could have made the head shape more cutesy like it's supposed to look but I was happy with the speed and decided not to meddle. I think I did the uh cut out of the iris because some comic I was reading did it... mokepon maybe? No, maybe Dreamkeepers? No, that's not it...