User:Hawthorn
I'm a lapine fur, strigine feathery, and brony from England. I first encountered the Furry fandom via one of its offshoots, the Feathery fandom, when I discovered Avians.net whilst at university in 2002.
My character, Hawthorn, is named after the tree (Crataegus monogyna). The name was originally chosen for my owl character, because it sounds like something an owl would say.
Furry[edit]
I've been what could be described as Furry for at least a decade before I heard of the fandom. When I watched The Animals of Farthing Wood, or read Watership Down or Duncton Wood in the early 1990s, I wasn't just watching animals - I was wondering what it would be like to be one of those animals.
A few years later the book series Animorphs was published, and once again, my focus was drawn to the character Tobias, a human stuck in the body of a red-tailed hawk. I started writing fanfiction for it at this point, and moved onto writing my own stories, all with that same theme of animality. I researched birds a lot, and became quite a capable bird-spotter as a result.
In 2002, at university, I found Avians.net, a place for bird characters to chat, and was quite thrilled to be able to play out my fantasy of being an animal. I adopted the persona of Hawthorn the owl. At this time, I was still unaware of the Furry fandom, and when I did learn of it, it was initially a little too sexed-up and raucous for my liking.
At this point I was more into realistic characters; my focus had always been on the nonmorphic, and I found anthros to be a little silly, fantastical, and human.
The story universe Winds of Change, invented by Jon Sleeper, changed my views in 2003. It's about the whole world's population being changed into anthro animals, and it simply blew me away. Here was a world I wanted to live in. I started writing again, churning out WoC fanfics (really they're stories in a shared universe, but it was pure fannishness driving me) by the dozen, none of which saw the light of day because I suck at finishing stories. This also got me interested in the transformation (TF) community, and into anthro animals. My eventual anthro rabbit form was inspired by my WoC stories.
I also encountered the Watership Down fandom around this time, and got involved in that, adopting a nonmorphic rabbit persona for myself. I kept the name Hawthorn because it was perfectly appropriate for this.
| See the article about Hawthorn (United Kingdom). | 
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