FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

This might get long, so I’ll keep this opening brief. My handle is changing from Apatapa to Whisker, my avatars will now depict a jaguar instead of a tiger. I will continue to write and upload filth for your amusement. I may also start uploading SFW stories.

That’s all you really have to know, but if you care to read more I have a story to share.

Some people reading this may also know me as Fumble. This was my usual handle online prior to Apatapa, and I have done a lot to keep those identities from never crossing publicly. Well here they are, together, and another beside them. For ages I did not wish for the SFW side of me to be known along the NSFW side of me, but that changed some time ago and I have been left in the lurch wondering what adjustments to make ever since.

When I first started writing erotica, I sheepishly dumped it under a disconnected pseudonym I was certain I’d run from: Apatapa.

My first smut story, Samel’s Summer, was equal parts experiment and joke. I was at a place in life where engaging so directly and openly with my sexuality felt impossible, yet that piece of me was begging for acknowledgement. When I dove into this story I didn’t put my heart into it at first because I couldn’t take myself seriously while writing it.

Because of this much of Samel’s Summer does not meet my own standards and yet people really enjoyed it. The first few encouraging comments I got on my smut made me so excited that I didn’t want to stop. Hell, even I ended up falling for these characters. I’d conceived them as tropey jokes but I ended up finding so much of myself in them that I wrote a whole extra series just for Davie, Battered Boar.

Prior to starting Samel’s Summer, I was working on a novel through 2019 which was the first time I had chosen to write in a world entirely made up of anthropomorphic animals. At the time I identified as asexual, but I always knew that label never sat quite right. Nonetheless, I was surprised when that story started taking on sexual tones, but felt it true to the characters so I leant into it.

I’d written TV-style sex scenes before. A bit of build up, then a clear nod where things will go before the chapter cuts. The first actual sex scene I wrote was between two Definitely-Not-Charr-Original-Fiction-Horned-Cat-People ™ and it involved an anxious, terrified and inexperienced character opening up to someone who was confident, self-assured and cared deeply for them (sorry if you’ve heard that one before).

Something happened when I wrote that scene. Or maybe two things. The first, was that it made me overwhelmingly horny. The second, was that two distinct parts of me made contact for the first time. It took me a while to realise that overwhelming horniness was no stranger to my head or my body, and in rediscovering that part of me I had opened a door that I’d hammered shut many years ago.

Years before then, around the time I was 18 I arrived at an understanding of myself. From the central framework of my psyche, there are three diverging nodes of my personality. I am not plural, these three nodes all overlap at the centre but they are distinct enough from each other that I can comprehend their differences. There’s the jovial and kind social side of me. The assertive and hedonistic side of me. And then there was an undefinable, reclusive sense of a ‘true’ me that would silently watch the other two and reflect. Through these three pieces of myself I came to understand the variety of moods and behaviours I showed throughout my life.

The more I understood of myself, the more these presences took on shape and form. Shortly after the Covid pandemic hit, whilst I was playing Divinity: Original Sin 2 with some friends I had been dabbling in art and was idly thinking about how it would be nice to have a mascot to draw and help encourage my drawing progress.

I was only distracted from the game for a moment but it took about half a second for Fumble’s design to spawn in my head, it was like I knew him already. The jovial and kind social part of me; the part I began to associate with my gender. A small lion, masc-leaning but instead of a mane he had a red mohawk.

Becoming a Covid furry came with no internal judgement, it happened because it felt right to do so, and so I did. I was a part of my local Smash Bros scene and many of my friends there were furries as well. I’d had a few close internet friends over the years who were also furries, and I always knew I had furry energy but never before had reason to engage with the community.

What I did not realise at the time was that this decision was the next falling domino on the path to total self-acceptance.

It took less than two months for me to start on Samel’s Summer from that point in 2020. But I know there’s at least one keen-eyed reader who I have spoken to privately about some of these things before who (prior to the site remake) noticed that my SoFurry account was created in 2018, two years before this self-discovery.

Apatapa was always a part of me, and when things were tough he would call out, both to protect me and distract me from hard times. I did not know what to do about him, or his desires which only seemed to disgust me. Like so much unpacked trauma, he was just a source of shame I fearfully tried to avoid.

Covid gave me the space and time to work on it. I knew I was in need of healing, but the depths of that were uncharted at that point. My sexuality was rotten and degrading, there were things that happened to me in my youth which I thought would forever poison the well of my sexual desires. Thanks to the isolation the pandemic brought, I was able to retreat and toss the whole damn thing out to start anew.

I’d never been ashamed of my homosexuality, when I say my sexuality was rotten I mean that all of the nuances and detail of it served to hurt me instead of please me. My relationship to anything I could have found pleasure in was one of self-torture and guilt, this I projected outward if others (especially those I did not trust deeply) put their own sexual urges before me.

So how does one rebuild their sexuality into a source of joy and pleasure?

For me, I intentionally wrote very specific porn. I learned to let my cock lead my thoughts, which was harder than it may sound. Some people seem to have this skill by default, meanwhile I had to puzzle out that desires are actually something you don’t need to be ashamed of.

I found out how to arrow in on my own interests and let my arousal point the way. Every time I found something encouraging, I worked it into a story just to feel it out and embrace anything that felt good and right.

Sexual expression had never come easy to me, the few sexual encounters I had had at that point in my life I would describe as ‘grating’. At first I felt as though I was groping out towards the unknown. Nail by nail I pulled the planks off of that door, until the moment it swung open and Apatapa grabbed me by the throat.

It all came from within, the framework to enjoy my body was right there and had been all along. When I saw a therapist for a time in mid 2020, her most essential guidance for me was to reconnect my mind and my body. My body was a wasted thing, vestigial and unimportant in how I viewed myself and my life. In my early teenage years I had learned that comfort only truly existed in my head where I had complete control over the things that touched me.

I banished the tiger because his pain was unbearable, I abandoned my body as a survival tactic without ever considering the cost of such a thing. It worked, I survived, but I don’t think I truly learned to live. I learned how to pilot this fleshsack to carry me forward, but I did not trust that it was a thing that I could ever enjoy.

I’d never before felt comfortable staring into the pits of my sexuality, but when I let the tiger out he taught me a lot about enjoying pits. I’d always had a nose for the scent of masculine bodies, I chalked it up to some funny idiosyncrasy and maybe it is but it’s also more than just that. When I started to write musk into Samel’s Summer it was like I became someone else. I don’t know how many times I got off on it, I actually have very little recollection of those days.

What I do remember is this:

I would wake up feeling harder than I’d ever been before. I would write filth and make a mess, maybe multiple, before I got out of bed. I’d go about my day feeling like at any second I’d want to throw myself before my laptop and make progress on the story, with each writing session culminating in an orgasm. When I settled into bed, I would write late into the night and get myself off again before sleep, then I’d have intensely sexual dreams and wake up the next day already slick and eager to do it all over again.

I ended up in a similar cycle when I wrote An Unexpected Guest at the end of 2020, and to this day when I am in the throes of a story I may find myself in a similar cycle. But the first time it happened with Samel’s Summer it was the most bewildering thing I’d ever experienced. Where was the shame? Where was the guilt? I’d thrown away days jerking off and writing a stupid story that I never even finished! It was like I just didn’t care to experience those feelings.

I would find them again later when the tiger had less of a hold on me. But for once I felt able to challenge them instead of suffering and I started to unpick those knots of feelings.

Why did I feel that way? Oh.

Because such and such happened. Because someone I respected said this and that. Because one time I wanted something it had been a shameful experience. Because I’d been made to experience aberrant things which are so painful to comprehend that the world squeezes those memories shut back inside the one who endured them, who then must sever themselves from their body just to shamble numbly forward to a day where it can be reconciled.

It was staggering to realise I was one of the luckier ones whose experiences can be described as “not thaaaat bad, relatively speaking.” I can’t fathom how it must be for those who had it worse.

On and on the feelings bubbled up from my memories, it was not an easy time for me but I took so much joy in finally processing these experiences.

The process of rebuilding my entire sexuality took most of 2020. To date, that is still the most active period of my smut writing and I’m unsure I’ll ever reach such fiendish devotion to writing porn again, but that’s alright. Maybe you only get one year in your lifetime to dedicate to writing kinky gay porn as a form of therapy, I’m glad I got to enjoy mine to its fullest.

And so the tiger was free. An actual part of me that was no longer chained to the recesses of my mind and suddenly the way I existed in the world was different. I’d always been a pretty passive person who had no idea how to assert himself, I was no longer that. I found I had a backbone and ever since I have been learning what it means and looks like to stand up for myself.

This budding sense of real confidence would only unfurl and grow within me over the coming years as I rebuilt the bridge between mind and body.

I learned to love myself in a way I never thought possible.

In 2023, I cut my long hair down to a mohawk which I dyed red to match my sonas. I remember when I first stared at myself in a mirror and nearly sobbed tears of joy at seeing myself embody things that I felt internally. It was the first non-sexual moment of bodily euphoria I’d ever felt, and there’s been many since as I embraced all that this vessel for physical feeling can feel.

The most astounding thing of all though, was the proof I see in how better connected my mind and body are. When I’m tapped into the horny, it surges through me in ways it never did before. Prior to 2020 I was a bit of a dry wanker, now when I have sex or jerk off I leak a lot of pre. There’s other things like that, I think even my fine motor control has improved and surely more changes I haven’t even grasped.

So that accounts for Fumble and Apatapa. My gender and my sexuality, the lion and tiger from Unison, the erotic poem in my gallery. Two of the personality nodes that compose me.

But there was still one other. An unnamed jaguar I dared to consider the ‘true me’. A feral creature that stalked my head and puppeted my body, yet I knew it far better than the others. It was the one my consciousness hid with when I had no need for gender or sexuality. The one I entrusted to care for my deepest thoughts, the one almost nobody else had seen.

I remember saying something when I was 15, my highschool friends and I had just discovered furries as a new cult of internet weirdos who were just oh so fun to make fun of. When teasingly discussing the differences of others, as teenagers so wont to do, I said something along the lines of “I just don’t get it, like even otherkins I can understand but not this.”

‘This’ being the sexual expression of people far more confident, attuned to themselves and fun than I was at that point in my life. I’ve turned my words over in my head a hundred times. “Otherkins I can understand.” A statement that pulled at core childhood memories of following cats around the neighbourhood and wondering how it could be that I wasn’t just like them.

These strange creatures that knew me as I did not know myself.

One of my first important internet friends told me years before I became a furry that I think like a cat, another statement that got lodged forever in my thoughts. Fumble and Apatapa, lion and tiger? Their designs as felines were never a coincidence. Before they crystallised in my mind, at the heart of my being I was already a black cat.

A silent thing that sneaks, watches and listens. A sharp thing, a soft thing, a biting thing, a purring thing. A hunter. A comfortable thing to be found dozing in sunspots. Something unknowable by darkness, save its reflective eyes. A thing of whimsical superstition, a thing of mundane simplicity. A thing that was me as I knew myself without ever trying.

The understanding that I was therian predates all of my knowledge of the word.

When talking on my identity I have often said “I do not wish to become, I wish to always have been.” This was a guardrail I had put up in my mind around longing for a life I would never have. When considering this guardrail last year, I took it down.

Why hesitate in the face of becoming? Because it would be too hard to change? Because I had things now that I would miss if I were otherwise? Because I knew I would suffer to wish for a world where becoming was a possibility? Physically, that last one was true, but I have now mastered my physicality. I am comfortable in it, I know what I am and I love myself for it deeply.

No matter my outlook, I will cherish myself as I am always. Through freeing Apatapa, I allowed the jaguar to learn from him too. And so the jaguar grew more present within me as well. Its door was never hammered shut as the tiger’s was, but it no longer wished to stay reclusive behind it. There was an unnerving amount of pride in allowing others to see that part of me, no shame remained.

I could simply be without needing to justify my existence.

At the top of this post I mentioned feeling unsure how to change my internet presences. These profiles are symbols that represent deeper reflections of myself, the symbolic acts of overwriting, combining or whatever other changes I could make just never felt right to me. It had to be something more. Something earnest.

It took some time for me to work it out and once I did it’s taken longer to solve some administrative tasks and excuses that I did not have the energy to deal with until now. But I’m glad I waited. I’m glad I let these thoughts mature and grow, because something happened in the interim.

I started another run of Divinity: Origina- Wait. Something else. I mean, it is amusingly also true that I started playing Divinity again as another fursona was coalescing but also, those three personality nodes learned how better to relate to one another and I uncovered a path forward that felt more right than anything else.

Whisker.

That which emerged from the intersecting parts of me. That which represents me as I feel in all facets. My truth, gender and sexuality bundled into a form I feel no qualms about presenting to any onlooker.

To me this feels like the conclusion of the journey of self-discovery that began the moment Fumble appeared in my head. It’s taken almost six years for me to reach this point, and I know that as I now close the book on a chapter in my life I am only setting out on another journey. This time I am excited for what’s ahead instead of shaping the journey around correcting the things I saw when looking back.

Since beginning to write smut so much in my life has changed and I credit the decision to make porn as one of the most influential changes in my life.

I met and married my partner, he was one of the first new people in my life I was able to share the tiger with. I finally got a proper job and learned much about adulting. We have cats! I’ve met people who shifted the course of my life, and I keep growing.

So many of these things I attribute directly to discovering and growing my confidence through writing freak porn for perverts on the internet.

I feel settled within myself. I’ve learned to love this body and all the pleasures it can bring me. Fumble and Apatapa will always be with me, you may even see art of them in the future, but I no longer need to project fragments of myself.

It took me 30 years, but the truest form of me is now ready to show the world all that I am.