July 07, 2024
July is July Month
One of my goals going into having this site was these self-indulgent looks back at designing my OCs, and since it's her month, why not start with July?
(Thanks to Saucy for drawing her ref!)
She is, of course, a fursona for one of my system, but I originally set out to make a character for the story, and nothing else. The idea was basically just that Pewter had met a witch who inspired them to become one themself. The most sensible storyline from there would be that they meet again years later, they have to grapple with her being an actual person with flaws and problems, etc etc. The plans have changed a lot over time, but so has everything else in life.
Basically, I got the bug to make the coolest lady I could imagine, so there was no way I was going to be able to avoid getting attached. I hadn't yet begun to really interrogate my own gender/genders, but I was already queer and knew a number of trans women which had primed me to think that the character I wanted should be one. This is the first decision I would make that I could later look back on and say "oh." I thought next that she should like being trans. She should be proud of it. She should reject any false ideas of assimilation. I imagined she didn't do any kind of vocal training or modification. She likes her penis. In retrospect, it's kind of laughable to put it that way because she's quite lovely and feminine in a traditional way. It was much more that she was just, again, me, specifically she's my beloved headmate who took her as a namesake. It didn't take long to decide that she had basically the same voice I had.
She's fat because I was always insecure about my own weight for complicated reasons that definitely intersected with dysphoria, and having her as a model really helped make that last part obvious to me. She has an unnatural fur color because I had been kinda conservative with the coloration in previous designs and didn't so I wanted her to be just a smidge more sparkledog-- I think I wanted the fur to be kinda night-sky coloured and then chose other colors based on what I thought looked good. I knew she had to have a shoulderless dress because fuck, I wanted to wear something shoulderless irl. Pleated skirt, too.
She has big boobs because hell yeah big boobs.
Her being a chinchilla is actually not super deep. At the time I had a draft of a novel which I've torn up to be inserted into something else I hope to someday complete, unrelated to the stuff I post on this website. I made a character in that a chinchilla just because it's one of those things where you need to come up with a bunch of different animals for characters to be that fulfill certain criteria (in this case I wanted it to be an animal commonly kept as a pet) and I just picked it kinda arbitrarily. My general love the noble chinchilla was more kickstarted by me getting attached to July than the other way around, and her being one was mostly kickstarted by my enjoying writing that other character. Plus, they're pretty rare among furries. Not super-super rare but pretty rare. You know?
Her powers are time-themed simply because it was a cool magic power and I thought it contrasted well with Pewter's space theme, even if it's actually the other kind of space and not space-time. I went through a few different ideas for the staff, most of which were way more complicated sundial things that I ended up throwing out. The nice, simple sideways hourglass is way better. I also originally wanted some weird configuration for her hair that I thought would look like an hour hand and a minute hand, like from a clock? After a little bit of visualizing I realized that sucked and gave her normal hair instead, but the French braid is kind of taking that idea. I ended up requesting both versions on the ref because I couldn't decide between that and straight. Both are good!
Finally, of course, we have the name. It's hard to remember the entire process of coming up with it now because I went through so many, played around with them for a while, and then abandoned them. 'Midnight' was a frontrunner for a bit. Eventually, 'July' stuck as a first name, but for some reason I made it her last name in the end. It was either because I just thought it sounded better, or I thought she was the sort of person who gets called by her surname, or something like that. 'Bella' ended up being the pick because it had bell in it, so I could tie it into the time/timepiece theme. That's it that's the reason. Of course a commissioned artist works with her design, they'll usually call her Bella because that's the name on her sheet, but internally she was always July in my head. Incidentally, from the 'in-lore' point of view, it isn't her original family name. More of an alias.
Over time, it didn't take all that long to just, feel like there was a lot of myself in her. Of course, the degree to which I identified with certain characters was always changing at the time because I hadn't figured out the way my identity was shifting at the time. After coming out as nonbinary I started calling her a representative of my feminine side, which wasn't wrong, depending on how you think about it. Once we figured things out, it was clear very quickly that the part of us that identified with her was specific and singular and there was no reason to change anything. We called her July from the start, and that's the only name she's ever cared to have.
She declined to write any of this directly, by the way. It just felt like something that should be recounted with a little distance. Maybe you disagree, but our circumstances are slightly unusual regardless. There's no way to really remember where any individual idea about her design came from as far as the system goes. In the end, though, the story of making up a person of the gender you unknowingly are and getting attached to them is not at all unique amongst trans people. There's definitely a distinction between the character as she exists and the real one, but at the same time, she's me! She's one of us! She's a lady we made up, and now we know she's real and she loves the rest of us and dotes on us and just generally tries to live up to that. In a fit of, basically, admiration and love, I made the decision to do her profile first. Have a great month, everyone.