Horse TF WIP and some new years thoughts concerning identity and being

Hey folks, I just wanted to share a WIP of a horse tf I am working on. I am getting some progress done on art and things are getting a little better for me. I am really happy with the anatomy here and the skin texturing I am experimenting with. It also shows a bit of my process in how I do these manips. (Usually I do the head last cause it's the most complex, so right now, kinda headless.) For this tf I really want to capture the transition from bipedal to quadrupedal, but wanted to do that from a very "upright stance" that shows just how "off" the anatomy is becoming in the transformation and gives some visceral feeling to the change in center of gravity and the restructuring spine/back and arms becoming legs. In a lot of tfs I don't see much focus on the barrel with hooved animals or much of a focus on the actual anatomy change between species, especially giving weight to this that gives a sense of becoming four-legged. So I wanted this to really show the overall shape by which a bipedal human becomes a quadrupedal horse, and used an upright pose that is strained to show how unusual the proportions are becoming relative to the human body, and how unusual the proportions of a human are to the horse body. It's an in-betweebness that emphasizes both difference and sameness. That breaks down the artificial (cultural) barriers that distinguish a "human" from a "horse".

Now, that out of the way, I wanna talk about some things that help folks understand what I've been going through and why I have been struggling to make TF art.

I appreciate the support people have given me and my art despite falling really behind on completing and sharing artwork. I am working my way out of this funk. Aside from IRL issues I've been facing, I think one of the big things for me is that for a very long time I haven't felt quite right about TF art, and just, kind of the community as a whole. I don't kinkshame, and I'm not knocking anyone for this. But for me personally, my interest in TF has been because of my identity as a therianthrope. I feel like for much of the wider community, there isn't as deep of a focus on identity and self, and the focus is more on fetishizing TF and other-than-human bodies. At the same time there is not much artwork and literature that actually show the human truly becoming actually nonhuman in any meaningful capacity. A lot of literature I read and art kinda "preserves" humanity. And it doesn't really explore any connection in identities and being between human and nonhuman beings. Part of this is because I think there is actually a pretty prevalent and demeaning view of nonhuman beings that doesn't see us as persons. I see that most visibly in a lot of the dialogue surrounding "mental tf" and "identity death" which (wrongly) treats becoming a different species as "murder". As a result...I feel like there are a lot of tfs that, even if into a "feral" form are simply a human wearing a fox, or wolf, or horse, etc. body. It's like a human in a suit. (Mind you, I have also seen this erode the actual meaning of "therianthrope" which has been absorbed into the furry community and treated like just an "intense form of furry" where folks don't actually view themselves as nonhuman...that is not what a "therianthrope" is...folks actually understand that they are, ontologically, themselves, nonhuman.)

So in TF art there isn't a lot of true ontological change, and it doesn't show the realities of overlap, indistinction, and mutual shared being between different beings. When dialogue about TF that treats any true, complete TF into an actual different being as "death", it's like shutting down all philosophical interest in anything that would be relevant to my own identity as a nonhuman being. And it feels like there is no dialogue to be had and no one to hear me express myself.

Really, I think there are two TF communities. There are folks who are nonhuman/therianthropes themselves who are interested in it because of who and what we are. I can, with 99% accuracy, tell who those folks are just by their art style, the themes in their art or writing, and the kinds of art in their favs. I see it right away. I have always been right whenever I messaged someone. The art has a certain interest in real animal anatomy, in true changes of being into the actual animal or nonhuman being. The art has a certain melancholy to it, both philosophical and personal. A certain sadness, dysphoria, both with one's own body, and a kind of misanthropy towards the callousness and cruelty of humanity. But also certain feelings of liberation in the TF that come at a cost. The art has a certain "us animals are not actually seen as persons" feeling that carries an even deeper sadness about how we are seen by most of humanity as less-than. The art celebrates the nonhuman being, at the same time it has a realness, a rawness, of all the emotional, psychological and physical implications of actually becoming a nonhuman being that doesn't hide, shy away from, or pretend that the actual realities of being a nonhuman animal aren't real, as gross, weird, alien as they might seem to humans...and at the same time celebrates that by acknowledging its reality and wanting to be that. These folks aren't pretending nonhuman beings aren't exactly what they/we are. And they aren't pretending to want something other than the reality of what being such and such animal or nonhuman being would actually entail. It is like a living narrative, one that is an expression of the artist's or author's own identity as themselves a nonhuman being who is also themselves in between two forms: in between inherently by being in a human body, and being a nonhuman being, identity, self, spirit, soul, ontological nature, what have you. For therianthropes like me, TF art is self-expression fundamentally, an expression of our condition of being...the inbetweeness of ever TF subject who is neither human nor nonhuman, who is transitioning between, who is becoming nonhuman in the ways that we seek to be our truest selves in our lives...TF art is a real representation of that.

The other TF community is more BDSM/kink-oriented. The interest is in a fetish, which is fine, but it is ultimately an expression (usually, but not always) of human identity and social relationality. There are overlaps, there are not clear lines or anything. And these are interrelated. With the BDSM/kink TF community, there are power relations embedded in this, the shifting power relations of the TF may be the primary subject matter of the fetish. It may involve exaggeration, extremes of body modification, various forms of terratophilia, etc. Some of it is focused on "death of the self" in a kind of sexual eroticism almost "Eastern" philosophical way. I have seen plenty of interviews where the individual being asked to explain TF is clearly only aware of and explaining it from a BDSM/kink perspective and is completely unaware of the other community. I am being clear with this that I do not kink-shame. There is nothing at all wrong with this community existing and people should be free to explore their kinks in expression and art. That is great. I engage with this community to some degree to.

However, the latter community the BDSM/kink TF community has become the most dominant one, pretty much overshadowing and mostly erasing the original TF community which was started by a lot of therianthropes, nonhuman, and nonhuman-identity adjacent people. For ever 1 piece of art that focuses on common interests of identity and being that I relate to, there are about 100 or 1000 more that are just pure fetish art. It seems that the BDSM/kink TF subject has become the only subject, and the only community.

Part of this happened with the fall of personal webpages. With the forum based internet there were sites that were literally dedicated to TF subject matter that focused on therianthropic/nonhuman identity/experience.

Now, most TF art is all aggregated in large media sites like FurAffinity, DeviantArt (which has become an AI shithole). As a result, the fact that such TF is all lumped together but the distinctions are complex and nuanced (not represented by an algorithm or self-sorting label), means that perhaps there was always more BDSM/kink-oriented TF art, but folks who are of the other camp of therianthrope/nonhuman TF art basically had their means of focused art communities completely erased. So like, when I go on FurAffinity and I like <0.1% of the artwork labelled TF, that most of it doesn't even seem like it actually is TF art or no interest is put into anatomy, animal consciousness or anything of the sort, and moreover, I find a LOT of it objectifying in ways that feel demeaning towards me, then I feel like it isn't the community for me any more.

Folks like what they like, and that is fine. The thing that gets me is just the absence of anything for me. And the further derogatory human supremacist views that people have towards so-called "identity death" that completely doesn't understand the TF art that focuses on becoming an actually different being, and not just a human with exaggerated physical traits drawing inspiration from other living and "nonliving" beings.

This literally isn't just a "fetish" for me.

So I grew very disinterested in TF art, except for some artists and writers who do explore these themes. I am pleased with some things I have made in recent times. My technique improved a lot. And some pieces I can tell I was trying to focus more on the real reasons why I do TF art. But overall I am upset at a lot of it.

I'll take a moment here also to mention that when the whole AI TF art stuff hit. I REALLY considered quitting. I am furious about AI TF art. Everything I have talked about, AI TF art is the completely antithesis of this. It has NO expressive qualities related to personal identity whatsoever and is entirely machine-produced fetish material that suits the solipsistic interests of whomever types some words in. People have obviously used my art as input in their libraries to try to make "realistic tf art". I can tell which artists end up in the libraries influencing that cause I pretty much know every single TF artist's style, present and historic, who isn't yesterday-new. It's not even the idea of using AI in the first place. AI art could be a brilliant tool for expression. But the problem with it is not AI. The problem is humans, and the people who use it, and especially the people who code and made it. In its existent form it is the epitome of a capitalist soulless hellscape to put it lightly. So when all this AI TF art hit, I really felt like quitting TF art. I am still finding my way in the wake of that, finding emotional ways of moving forward with TF art.

Returning again to something I have said many times in my life. This isn't just a "fetish" for me.

The fact that TF overlaps with sensuality and eroticism, for me, is primarily through the physicality of it, and the physicality of being an animal or being an object, but for me, this is of secondary interest and value to the larger exploration of self and being (or ontology). It's just that, being a nonhuman being, I don't separate sensuality/eroticism or partition it off in terms of experience and being like much of humanity has (i.e. clothed nudity, suppressed expressions, covering up the body, hiding everything that reminds humans that they are just animals, and also just physical objects (and all objects being spirits in my experience)). Sexuality is inherent to animal being (excepting folks who are ace in certain ways)...but sensuality is absolutely inherent for all because sensuality is not inherently sexual, but is sensory.

But I've felt that the depth of exploring this, especially identity, body image, self, consciousness, etc. went in a really dark direction for me largely because I felt like I was making art less for communicating, exploring, and trying to understand or express things that might be important for therianthropes and nonhuman folks like me. And my art was more focused on expressions of self-destructive TFs, as a form of self-destruction.

And I love horror yes. Always will. But there's a level to which my relationship with my art was partially survival, that doing this work has been partially to get by each month. (And with talking about self-objectification and such to survive, it is really demeaning and tells me people think of me as less than a person when they pose as me to try to make money or create accounts that use my name to post artwork that isn't publicly shared. Like talk about objectifying and demeaning a person: liking the art but viewing the artist as less-than-human. The disrespect I have put up with over the years to do this is incredible, and I wonder how much damage that has done to my psyche between art-theft, identity-theft and so on.)

On another level, my art started to become just anger against the TF community and humanity as a whole, so I just wanted to come up with whatever disturbing TF I could to manipulate the human body in ways that expressed my anger with it, and anger with how, quite frankly, monstrous, brutal and callous this civilization is towards the living world. And part of that was self-destructive ideations surrounding the impossibilities of being in the right body/life I face with species dysphoria that is only worsened by a community that, on the whole, has forgotten the existence of nonhuman people like me who explored TF art and themes in its early days online.

There is such an exploitative attitude towards the "nonhuman" by so much of humanity, and I feel that has become the dominant attitude everywhere. And it is horrifying to me. It's like careening towards annihilation, ecological apocalypse, in every banal cultural attitude of human superiority people express in their daily lives. So, that was the real horror to me. Not my artistic creations. But the horror of seeing so much callousness that treats every living being as less than a person.

I tried to do some pieces about dysphoria and such, but it didn't come out right. It was only pain but not much expression of self, nothing positive even in the pain. Just pain. And this isn't really the reason why I started making TF art more than a decade ago. It was to express experiences, identity, to explore consciousness, body, etc. because I am a nonhuman being, and I experience my body and self in a radically divergent way from individuals who experience and understand themselves as human. And part of that experience is pain. But pain became the whole expression and nothing else. Self-destructive pain.

So, with this horse TF piece, I am trying to go in a little bit of a different direction and more returning to why I started making TF art. I don't want the art that I share to be overtly sexual or sexualized. Physical, bodily, sexual, erotic, nudity...that's all well and good...but I don't want to objectify myself, the subject matter of TF, or my brothers and sisters across species, and I don't want that objectification to erode the meaningfulness that underlies this in communicating this art with others. Because ultimately I think even the very idea of separating sexuality into its own box is a kind of foundationally colonialist and, quite frankly, spiritually ill behavior spread across most of "Western" culture. Personally, I think it comes from a life-hating cult Christianity which hates the body, especially hates the animal, and consequently hates the idea of sex, nudity, eroticism, physicality, touch, sense experience, all of that. This separation of bodily animal being into its own box that is distinguished from the so-called "human" and the so-called "human identity" is entirely an invention of that cult and doesn't actually exist. (To me, there is no such thing as a "human" even.)

 That doesn't mean I won't explore body horror and the like, and won't do some more unusual TFs like into "inanimate" objects or plants, etc. But even considering this: I am an animist. I don't believe there is actually such thing as an "inanimate" or "non-living" object. I don't experience the world that way and never have. So to treat an "inanimate" TF as "inanimate" to me is not capturing the inherent animacy and vibrancy of all objects as beings and persons. (Yes, I experience everything as personed.) It was more like I was making mean TFs and hurting myself by betraying how I actually see and experience the world, consequently betraying who I am as a person, and demeaning myself as less-than-a-person by treating my own self a the nonhuman, as the horse that I am, as just a thing. And consequently I started to just focus on mean TFs and objectifying eroticism.

There are certainly senses in which "death" is involved in transformation, but that is true for all changes. Becoming older is the younger self dying. But also every expression of being in the past is already embodied in the future beings. A transformation may erase all contextually relevant things that might be described as the "past self" whether that transformation is aging or becoming a different species, or becoming dirt, but also all deaths are always-already alive within the living. The living soil you walk on is literally a million billion corpses of dead animals and plants and fungi, etc. You do not exist except as already a million billion "identity deaths" that are living and composing you. The concept of "death" itself in the West is, to me, wrong.

So, what I want to get away from is the humanist and anthropocentrist attitudes that influence TF art that objectify and treat the "other-than-human" as less than, wholly Other, incomplete, or a kind of "annihilation" of the "human". So I am going to try to put that into my artwork, even with "inanimate" TFs, and be more respectful towards myself and who I am.

Now I understand that some folks might not appreciate this perspective. I get that. And some folks might be looking for something else in my art than the reason why I do this. I don't look down upon anyone (but I am critical of those who look down upon others, including nonhuman beings), but I do need to live by my truth. And not living by my truth in my art out of fear was driving me to no longer want to make TF art at all. If you've read all of this, I appreciate that you took the time to do listen to me ramble about my own thoughts. And yeh, on some level this feels very egocentric to talk about, cause it's just me rambling about my perspective. But I share this with the hopes of maybe giving some useful thoughts to feelings other's might have, and to explain what has been going on for me, and why it has been so hard to create aside from other struggles I am going through.

I am finding my way forward, and finding a new direction for everything that I do. And it requires being true to myself. This is why I removed a lot of my artwork. It either didn't represent me or other reasons that are more private.