Takin' the liberty to be personal for a sec'...

Somethin' I've been experimenting with for the last year or so is various, more-feral forms of Ryke's design.
After all, Ryke started out as a feral Vanguard from the Floraverse universe; but as I nailed down my own self-identity over the years as a bird/raptor therian, n' started to draw out the shapes and forms that I particularly enjoy seein' in my self-representation, he shifted.

The bipedal design I share so frequently in my commissions is somethin' I deeply love, n' in many cases it comes close to touching the way that I genuinely see myself. But there's a primality in me that can't really expressed fully in the anthropomorphic form.

So, I worked. I got closer and closer, melting my self-identity down and iterating on various raptoral designs. I've always been fascinated with Deinonychus and Utahraptor in particular; I hold a special love for the various characters represented by other people. Taking the liberty of naming some influences,  Phinja,  Deiny~,  Xane and  AriththeGryphon among others helped me on that journey by commissioning art and sharing stories that almost-perfectly encapsulated my own species dysphoria.

By exploring the same space that I was exploring, with more-or-less interaction, they lay groundwork for me. Conceptual handholds in the form of ideas and art, which helped me identify forms of identity that I could further investigate.

Like everyone else, I am the accumulation of my influences n' experiences; as I gain experience, my so-liquid self-identity shifts. It will shift again, too; and that's okay. But I finally found in artistic representations of pyroraptors somethin' that came closer than anything else before.

Every otherkin has their own journey of discovery, and I personally hold no spiritual beliefs. I'm merely a scientist enraptured with the beauty of the universe.

Or, you might say, enraptored.

Thanks to  AlvaViva for this one. It's as close as I've gotten yet to feelin' like myself. ♪