Kresta Renstill (drawing done by Foxena )
Favored position: guard
Species: silver phased red fox

Kresta Renstill didn't meet a single fox her age until she was in college. He was a spry little red named Kyle and he seemed to conform to every negative stereotype about foxes that Kresta knew about and validated all the more her hatred for the species. Now being speciest is not a new thing. It's quite common to have preferences for or against certain species or species groups. What was odd about it is that Kresta herself was also a fox.

When Kresta was little her family moved her to a little suburb in Minnesota that had very virtually no predator species in that suburb. The only reason they moved there was for her father's job. But the neighbors didn't really like having a predator species move into their nice peaceful neighborhood but being Minnesotans were very passive aggressive about it. They acted as friendly as they could whenever Kresta's family around but would spew such hate speak amongst themselves like you wouldn't believe. And their children picked up on all of this information but lacked the subtlety of their parents. So while still barely a kit Kresta was bullied by the prey species who threw every hateful thing they'd learned from their parents at her.

But Kresta took these insults as affronts to her species rather than to herself since she knew for a fact that they didn't know her and none of the things they said applied to her or her family. But when she told her parents about these statements her parents just shrugged and told her to ignore them. In their eyes the best way to confront these accusations is to be living proof to the contrary and any who could not see it did not warrant their friendship. The fact that they refused to actively defend against the accusations against her species was not taken as intended. Instead Kresta decided that the only reason they wouldn't defend against them is if they were true and her family were the exceptions to the rule.

And as she began to believe in all of the bad stereotypes about foxes, she came to hate her own species more and more. But being too proud to actually mutilate herself to remove her foxlike attributes she instead chose to hide them, taking to binding her tail and ears whenever possible as she became determined to prove that she isn't a fox, that she is more than it. But being smart wouldn't break that mold; that fit the stereotype. And that's how she came to be involved in sports, for there were no stereotypes about foxes and sports that she knew of. But she still had the problem in that none of the other kids wanted anything to do with her, so she'd have to practice alone until she could get good enough that they'd have to treat her as an equal for skill and not for her species. The only two that were readily available for her were hockey and basketball. And she was terrible on the ice and could hardly skate if her life depended on it.

She took to basketball with a sort of reckless abandon. It became the driving force in her life. It wasn't so much a hobby to her as something that needed to be done. She needed to be good at it or she'll never escape the reality of being just a fox. So once her homework and chores were done she'd go outside and shoot at a hoop in a nearby park until her arms hurt and run back and forth from one end to the other until her legs hurt and keep repeating this until she no longer had the strength to do either. She did this long enough that by the time she was out of elementary school she was picked first whenever they were setting up teams for basketball. Not so much because they had changed their minds about her but because to not pick her meant giving the other team a huge advantage on the court.

In High School the other kids finally stopped with all the name calling and more or less accepted her and her family into their community, as their parents had predicted. And it was during high school that Kresta finally began to learn the sport of basketball proper. Of how to set picks and run plays and when it was better to pass and not just shoot the ball herself. And when they were no longer bullying her she did become friends with a few of the other basketball players on her team and all of whom quickly learned not to call her a fox. For though the bullying had stopped, her own personal hatred of her own species had not cooled the slightest. To her, winning each game was more important than what her own numbers showed, just so long as it became clear with her performance that she was not a fox, she was a basketball player. She even eased up for a while and stopped binding her tail and ears all the time.

And then Kyle came along and reaffirmed everything she hated about her species. Which made her more driven to proving that she isn't the same as he is. Binding her ears and tail became a sort of trademark look for her, as if she were making a fashion statement rather than a declaration of war against her own kind. Playing against other fox she was ruthless and aggressive and a few times got carried away and got a little too rough in handling them. She did make friends in college, mainly herbivore species since that's what she was more used to. But she could get along with other predator species well enough. She did have enough in common with them to have a decent understanding. But she did not befriend a single fox. Never even gave them the time of day. In her eyes there were nothing more than scum and a symbol of everything she had to overcome.

And that was the very essence of her being. Of a fox that hated her own kind. And someone who felt that by being the best guard, the best player there was in the game she would be able to transcend her species and would no longer be a fox, but of something greater.

---

A little bio for a character I submitted to  BuckHopper 's FBA 2013 draft.
The drawing of Kresta (at least a prototype of her, I might tweak details and get a fresh image later on depending on how things go with her) was drawn by  Foxena
The FBA belongs to  BuckHopper

This was mainly an example of me feeling inspired to create not a world or story but a character that amused me. I just thought it quite intriguing of all the potential interactions of a character that hates their own species. If she is accepted I'll probably do more things with her as a sort of break from my more serious stories. Who knows, maybe working on such a character will inspire me more on my main stories. Might do a few more characters to the FBA Draft if I get inspiration to do so and might just make characters just for the sake of making characters to flesh out. We'll see.