Interview with Sotalo: Part 1
Part of the "VR is Alive!" Artist Spotlight Series
For this interview we are fortunate to join Sotalo (he/him) in the Virtual Furry Museum to chat about how he created it for the furry community.
First, I just want to let you introduce yourself, including your pronouns, and what you want the audience to know about you.
My name is Sotalo (pronounced Sew-tuh-low)(he/him). I am a furry artist living in Sarasota County, Florida. I've been a closet furry for quite a while and I've loved cartoon animals my whole life, but I just started engaging with the fandom properly around right before COVID hit in March 2020. I've been following artists for many, many, many years before that.
Can you explain your name and your avatar and where they both come from?
Oh, sure. My name, Sotalo, is actually from Sarasota County, the county I was raised in for my entire life. Pretty much everywhere I've lived, I was never too far away from the beaches. I was just always within this county. I've been downtown so many times. I've been to St. Armand Circle so many times and restaurants here. I just wanted a name that kind of sounded nice and that became the basis of Sotalo.
For my alligator avatar, that's actually a really interesting story! I went to Ringling College of Art and Design for game art and design. We had, at the time, a traditional animation course in 2012. My instructor was Dominic Avant. He was the guy who did cleanup for Mushu on Mulan. One of the projects was we had to design an animal character. So, he had all these different animals in a hat and we all picked one. I picked alligator. Someone wanted to trade me for chicken. But no, I've had plenty of experiences with alligators. They looked really cool and I was drawing. I tried to make so many different drawings of an alligator, trying to make it look decent. Nothing worked until I just gave him a mohawk out of frustration. I was like, okay, that looks like something. Then I colored it, and he was green, and magenta, and it actually looked really good!
Tyler was a very friendly gator, and he was like a punk rocker. He was this little character I made for animation. It wasn't until eight years later that I realized I drew the person I wanted to be. And not the person that I was. I wanted to be more outgoing. I wanted to be more sociable. I wanted to be more friendly. Just more confident in myself. Tyler kind of represented all of that for me. So when I joined the fandom and needed a fursona, I adopted Tyler as my fursona. And since then, it's been pretty great!
Without talking to people and meeting them, you never would understand them. I don't know anyone in my life (IRL) who's trans. One of my first experiences here on this platform that I remember very clearly, very vividly, is meeting someone who was trans.
What was your introduction to and earliest memory of social VR like?
I had a friend who brought me in here, and he had to try quite a bit to pull me in. And I'm like, nah, nah, it's not my thing. I don't have a headset. And then he's saying, oh, no, you can do anything in here! I'm like, it sounds too good to be true. Then I came in on desktop mode. And it turns out a lot of the stuff he was saying was true. You can play games in here. You can watch movies in here. You can engage with all sorts of people in here! And at one point, we went to a room. One of the first few people that I saw in there was someone who was trans. And we had this whole conversation about how she feels, and what it's like to be trans. Then I asked her, if everyone called you by your correct pronoun, if everyone respected you for whatever you dressed, and if it was culturally appropriate, and no one would snicker or sneer, and there were no issues, would you still go through the hormone replacement therapy? And she said, "Yes, because every day I wake up and look in the mirror, I hate what I see." That was a real game changer for me! It made me realize there's so many people out there we just don't understand. Without talking to people and meeting them, you never would understand them. I don't know anyone in my life (IRL) who's trans. One of my first experiences here on this platform that I remember very clearly, very vividly, is meeting someone who was trans. Since then, I've made so many friends in the furry fandom, so many friends in the LGBT community.
Can you introduce to the audience who furries are and the proper way to refer to the furry community?
Well, sure. Furries. Well, everyone seems to have a different definition of those. But the one overarching theme is you like cartoon animals. Some people say you need to be involved in the community to actually be a furry. So, you wouldn't refer to people prior to the 1970s as furries. But there is something, and there are books written about this, called the "furry gene." And there's something in you that makes you a furry. I can't turn you into a furry against your will. It's not going to happen. There's something in you that says you look at an animal character and it's like, I like this. You look at a human character, any human character, and it's like, I don't like that. So referring to us, I mean, you can just use our names. If you want to refer to the community as a whole, you can say furries. But the fandom is varied and vast. It crosses many, many nations around the globe. It is much bigger than anyone can comprehend.
You mentioned fursona earlier. I'm curious what that is, as well as you mentioned the furry gene. How long did you know that you had the furry gene and what led you to discovering this about yourself?
So, the gene thing for me was the Berenstein bears. I was five years old. And for the very first time, we weren't prescribed the book. We were able to go in the library and choose whatever book we wanted to read. And I was looking at all these books. None of them looked interesting. A lot of them looked depressing and dark. There's a lot of really depressing authors out there who just write in the book and then sell it as fiction! And then I saw the Berenstein bears, which was bright and colorful and had a happy little family. And they go through all sorts of different slice-of-life issues. But what grabbed me is that they weren't humans. They were animals. And I read every single Berenstein bears book that the library had to make a pizza party at the end of the year. I read over one hundred and eighty Berenstein bears books. Yes, it was long. This was when I was five and I already knew that. When they made me read other books, I just wasn't interested. I wasn't interested in anything that didn't have an animal character in it. I'd watch it, I'd read it, but it was not that interesting.
So when a furry has a fursona, it's basically a persona, but furry. There's some variance on this, too. But for a lot of furries, we really strongly identify with this persona as it is ourself. This is the character with which we express who we really are with other people online. People who can afford it will make fursuits so they can get in character and actually be that character. For some people, it's just a cosplay. For other people, they really strongly feel it. There are other people, Therians, who actually believe they are an animal born in a human's body. So there's different levels. There's also people who basically have one just to engage with the fandom. It's as flimsy as it can possibly be. But what a fursona means to most furries is, it is themselves.
I’m curious: How have people of color, or furries of color, been in this community?
There were plenty of furries of color who were absolutely right there when it first started! For the very first furry convention, people on the staff were African Americans. The very first fursona was drawn by Ken Sample, with his Ken Coug'r character, and he was African American. And then going just a little bit later, FA United, which was a convention surrounding Fur Affinity, was actually started by Shy Matsi, who's African American, a furry living in New Jersey. Beyond that, there's fursuiters, there's artists, there's all sorts of different African Americans in the community. But it is a little bit difficult to see them because all we see is the colorful cartoon animal. We don't see their skin color. There are groups, different groups that African Americans join in. If you are looking for furs of color, you can definitely find them.
Part 2 of our interview with Sotalo is available to read here.