NothingSpecial: gender-bending transformation stories, comics, and occasional poetry =^_^=
Hey! This is the personal website of NothingSpecial, a.k.a. nothingsp, a.k.a. a certain not-particularly-normal person on the Internet who enjoys telling stories in multiple media about characters undergoing transformations into other species, sexes, and even modes of life, grappling with the implications for their daily lives & personal identity and their own feelings on the matter, and ultimately (spoiler alert) coming to terms with it =^_^=
I've been in the TF community for over twenty years now, but haven't had my own personal corner of the Web for my work since Freewebs shut down my original page back in the Pleistocene. Figure it's about time I changed that, so here we are. If you're looking for the content, I have prose stories, comic art/sketches, and even a little poetry which isn't too terrible (or so I'm told,) as well as a selection of links to places and people I find excellent within the community.
I also have a presence elsewhere on the Web – you can find my art at deviantArt, FurAffinity, and Weasyl, and my writings at ScribbleHub, RoyalRoad, WebNovel, and WattPad; also, most of the better stuff from my earlier phase as a writer can be found on Fiction Branches.
(Additionally, and with absolutely no pressure as I'm in no wise a "starving artist," some folks have asked me whether I have a Patreon set up. I don't – I'm not consistently prolific enough to feel justified in taking money from folks on the regular, and I don't really wanna set up any kind of "rewards" structure, since I do this for myself – but I do have a Ko-Fi account, and if for some reason you ever feel an urge to toss a buck towards things you're welcome to enjoy for free, you can do so there.)
And now, since there's space left on the page, I guess I'll talk about myself a li'l bit.
A lot of people in this community can point to formative childhood memories of being exposed to this or that transformation scene in film/animation or literature and having something in their brain go hey, hmm... when the creators' intended response was more along the lines of omigod, augh! – so much so that it hardly seems necessary to cite examples. Disney's Pinocchio is practically universal (along with The Sword In The Stone;) for myself, the Narnia books, Alexander and the Wind-Up Mouse, and George Shrinks (along with a smattering of Greek mythology) were also among the early signs/seeds of the weirdness to come.
I've heard it theorized that this is a protective reaction of the brain to what it perceives as traumatic experiences in early childhood, re-wiring the responses to produce feel-good chemicals in order to cope with being unable to handle the feel-bad ones. That may be so, but I don't think it's the whole story. Partly because I don't feel this way about other early-childhood media traumas (I am an approximately grown-up adult-type person now, but The Brave Little Toaster still unsettles me to think back on…)
…but mainly because I was never really traumatized by this stuff in the first place. As far back as I can remember, I've been fascinated by the concept of becoming something else – what it'd feel like to experience the change; what life would be like if you had something else in place of arms and hands, a different reproductive system, hormones, and sex characteristics, a major change in size, a body of machinery in place of flesh, or abstract information in place of machinery; what it'd be like existing in a radically different social context on account of any of the above; et cetera. Kid-me could process "this character doesn't like the thing," but I never internalized that.
Of course, it didn't escape my notice that other people did, and I grew up quietly aware that this was not the "normal" reaction – that polymorphs were always Considered Baleful, that the "normal" thing to do upon arriving in Oz was to try and get back to Kansas post-haste, that adapting to the changes for any other reason than to facilitate a restoration of one's "proper" shape was Vaguely Weird, and above all, that embracing a transformation was so far beyond the norm that you just plain never encountered it in fiction. (Or, at least, rarely enough that it was many years down the line before I ran across counter-examples.)
But in my teens, around the time I first got onto the Internet, I made the critical discovery that I was not alone. A random mention in a magazine of a self-styled shaman claiming the ability to shapeshift in the depths of ceremonial trance got me to query several permutations of "turn into a [noun]" out of curiosity – which didn't clarify anything for me re: shamanism, but did lead me to quite a few places where fellow weirdos I never knew existed were putting these shared interests into creative expression.
And that led me to follow suit. I'd been drawing from an early age and had at least a passing interest in writing, but discovering transformation fiction as a genre gave me a focus for my efforts that I'd never had before; rather than having a couple of nascent hobbies and a nameless, half-articulated fascination that'd been haunting me my entire life, I discovered both a fundamental passion and an outlet for it. While my early attempts were halting and clumsy (and it'd be some time before I got any good as a writer or artist,) once I'd started I just couldn't stop.
This also led me to discover the broader furry community, which I also strongly related to; between cartoons and the works of Richard Scarry (and Narnia, again,) I'd found the idea of people who aren't human fascinating since childhood – and the older I got and the more clearly insane human society seemed to me, the stronger that affinity became.
Not long after, one more bit of happenstance led me to discover another side of my obsession. I'd been aware of sex-change as a potential type of TF from an early age (once I started thinking about the kinds I was exposed to, it didn't take me long to start conjecturing others,) but for Cultural Reasons that was even less well-represented in the media I had access to than TF in general (kid-me noted Help! I'm Trapped In My Sister's Body with interest in the back of some other Scholastic book, but I never did read it.) And in the Neolithic era of the online TF community it had an earned reputation for being even more prone to mindless and frankly boring smut than other flavors, so I mostly avoided it.
But at the back of one of my siblings' Pokémon tapes, I ran across an ad for one of the Ranma ½ movies. There was no real indication of the series premise, but what I did see was so baffling and bonkers that I had to look it up…and God, I just fell in love. Rumiko Takahashi remains one of my favorite artists, and her breezy, comedic approach to what I'd never seen handled in a non-off-putting manner before opened that interest up for me in a whole new way. Granted, you'd be hard-pressed to find a series less interested in exploring the deeper implications of its premise, but it proved to me that it was possible to do something with the concept besides generic smut.
And honestly, the series's carefree, playful attitude towards gender-bending might've been what sold me on the idea; when a character would regularly upend what I'd been taught to regard as a core part of my identity for the sake of a scheme, a prank, or just cadging food (no matter how much (s)he might bluster & protest,) why couldn't that be incorporated into any old thing…?
Thusly I discovered that, while I like stories about characters turning into animal-people or mythical creatures or clockwork automata, I love stories about boys turning into girls (and occasionally vice-versa, that's fine too.) It's endlessly fascinating to me that this can represent a bigger change to a character than even becoming a whole other species…and girl-shapes are fun shapes, what can I say ;)
Happily, that's a real peanut-butter-'n-chocolate proposition, a blend-in that plays well with every other flavor of TF I enjoy – and therefore, that's what I do, here and elswhere.
An interesting question, that. I've never exactly had a defined 'sona; I used myself as a subject for a lot of my early TF drawings, but the end result always depended on what it was I wanted to draw (though TG was inevitable.) Some of my protagonists have been derived from aspects of myself; Stu/Sue in "Probability Experiment" was specifically a deconstruction of some personal issues I struggled with during my own college years, but besides that (s)he really only shares my musical taste. Kit/Kat from "Nyandemic Story" is the closest I've ever come to a direct self-insert, and even (s)he isn't exact.
Long story short, I identify strongly with cats (though the details may vary,) and it's not for nothing that pretty nearly everything I do is a gender-bender story. Beyond that, I'm more interested in exploring these different aspects of myself than figuring out what label(s) to stick on it. At the end of the day, well…I'm me =^_^=
One of the default backgrounds for the IRIX desktop environment was a kind of blue-green pool-table felt texture (or at least that's how it "read" to me.) I liked that as a point on the graph where "eccentric" and "no-nonsense" meet, and wanted to use it elsewhere, but couldn't be bothered to bring the image file over (it was only a 1-bit pattern, anyway,) so I spent a while playing around with the spray-can tool in a paint program 'til I got something that approximated it. Since I'm putting this site up as a personal corner of the Web and a reflection of myself, I figured I'd use it here, as well – it was this or the GeoCities star backdrop ;)