ayuthetigress-blog

[ayuthetigress-blog]

It’s autumn, and unfortunately I can’t enjoy the falling leaves outside due to quarantine. I took this photo yesterday on my way home from a dairy.

[ayuthetigress-blog]

Greetings From a Big Big Kitty

 I’ve had this Tumblr blog for a while now. Time to finally make use of it. 

 My first post will probably just be me telling a bit about myself. First of, yes, I am a furry with a Sumatran tiger as my fursona. It’s a label that I spent years of thinking whether or not I should call myself that, and as a result, be part of the fandom. The thing is, I’ve always liked anthropomorphic animals. Growing up watching animal filled Disney movies allows me to have a high affinity towards them. I also had a huge collection of children’s animal encyclopedia. Why? I honestly have no idea. I was just really into zoology back then. And guess what? My love of it came back on my second year of uni when I did a course on adaptive behaviour of animals. I found out that I loved zoology more than biochemistry, something that I thought I’d be doing instead.

 Also, anthropomorphic art and photos of fursuits is something that I also always secretly loved. They would often appear on my old Twitter page and I had to resist the urge to retweet because I don’t want people to think I was a furry. Back then, I just think they were neat. 

 As you can probably guess, I didn’t want to call myself a furry before. Much of this is attributed towards both the actions done by bad people in the fandom, and the stigma as a consequence of it. If you’re a fur, you’d know that the term “furry” refers to a fandom, and not a fetish, which is often the initial interpretation. And while there are those who do perform sexual acts in relation o the fandom (I don’t really mind as long as everyone involved all CONSENT to it), there are those who have gone off the deep end and...well...actually have a thing for...ferals. News about bad furs abusing animals would often pop-up and that made me reluctant to be part of the fandom. I don’t want people to think that I’m one of “those people.”

  I just honestly decide to finally call myself one on the August of 2019, after stumbling across a video by YT-er by the name solarsaber that explained how furries are nothing more people who are into anthro animals, and that there are still many positive people in the fandom. If it weren’t for her, I may not have call myself a furry. 

 Another fur that also inspired me to be part of the fandom is Dr.Wildlife. Someone RT’d one of her post to my old Twitter timeline of her doing scicomm (short of science communication) whilst fursuiting and it’s honestly one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen! As someone who is doing scicomm myself, I believe communicating whilst fursuiting really helps to get audience’s attention. Thanks to her, I decided to join in on the fandom and made a goal to save up for a fursuit and use to make zoology scicomm content on YT. I can always do it without the suit, but I’d like to think that audiences would love to learn about animals, whilst dressing up as one. 

 Yes! I love science and science communication! That’s the second thing that I want to talk about myself. As mentioned before, I loved zoology as a child, followed by general biology years later. I also loved content creating, despite not being so good at it right now (hopefully that can change in the future). Hence, I decided to mix my love of both and become a science communicator, a field that’s relatively new, but I guess that’s the beauty of it. Everyday we are finding newer and creative ways to talk about science. Coming up with novel ways of doing so is an accomplishment itself. Just look at furry entomologist Entobird livestreaming ant feeding on their Twitch channel!

 Right now, I am an biology and psychology undergrad student at Auckland Uni in New Zealand. Fun fact, I’m not actually a Kiwi. I’m Indonesian, and only came to NZ to study my bachelors degree because of how affordable it is compared to other countries. If I was really a Kiwi, I would have my sona be a kea or a kārearea/NZ falcon instead of a tiger. This country has so much amazing bird species, I think I’ll write a post about it someday. 

(Fun fact, did you know that keas have similar intelligence to that of great apes?)

 Once I’m done with undergrad, I’m hoping I can work for a while before trying out for post-grad. But of course, with the pandemic currently going on (I wrote this in 16/04/20) I’m not sure how that will turn out...

Anyways, I think I’ve written enough for now. Next, I’ll be talking about why I chose a Sumatran tiger to represent myself. Take care, readers, and I’ll see you in the next blog post~

(Art by MissyMerlin and Strrrid)