Story time: "Super Kids" and my furry awakening

This was originally an informal Cohost post reminiscing about some wish fulfillment stories I wrote as a kid, and some creative decisions that were funny in hindsight.

The most obvious part of my furry awakening was just the fact that I grew up as a Sonic fan. I had a Sonic OC, it evolved into a fursona. Many such cases. I'm famously also someone who grew up reading Archie Sonic, and, like. We all know what the art in that series was like in the early '00s. Something I don't comment on as much is the influence of the American Tail movies - particularly Fievel Goes West, which was my favorite movie when I was like 4 or 5. This influenced my earliest writing in some funny ways, as did other things that I retrospectively see as part of my furry awakening.

Throughout elementary school and into middle school, I'd write these silly little wish fulfillment stories about my friends and I getting superpowers and having a secret base and becoming a team of heroes and all that, creatively titled "Super Kids" in their first incarnation before being replaced with the "cooler-sounding" but completely meaningless title "Team Omni" in middle school. (To help picture this better: I never really gave us superhero costumes or aliases, we were just kids with superpowers fighting in our street clothes.) This also branched off into my first sprite comic, "Game Over," which was really just an excuse to have the superhero versions of myself and my best friend go on adventures with video game characters. My earlier stories also frequently devolved into excuses to have myself interact with random fictional characters I liked, though, including ones from An American Tail.

When I was like 7, my earliest "Super Kids" stories involved Fievel and Tanya from the American Tail movies being my adopted siblings, and they were on the Super Kids team along with some of my friends from school. But they were still little talking mice. Like Stuart Little. I wrote myself into a Stuart Little type situation. I even came up with an idea for like this little lunch box-sized house thing for the mice to hang out in on commutes, which could be hung off of the back of a school bus or car seat. One of the villains I imagined the team going up against was even Cat R. Waul, the cat with the top hat and the monocle who was the villain in Fievel Goes West. I had at least one story where I saved the mice from being eaten by him.

Eventually these elements would be phased out of my stories as I got older and lost interest in the American Tail series, though the very bad comics I drew in fifth grade would include a much funnier element of my furry awakening.

See, in fifth grade I became obsessed with American Dragon: Jake Long. I thought being able to turn into a dragon was the coolest thing in the world. I wanted that to be a power depicted in my stories, so I just ripped it off wholesale. Initially, I actually gave this power to the fictionalized version of my real life dog Daisy, who I'd begun inserting into my stories with a sci-fi gadget collar that allowed her to talk. So now I had a couple stories where my dog gained the ability to turn into a dragon (which was basically just a recolor of Jake Long's dragon form) and go on adventures with me and my friends and fight bad guys.

But I very quickly got jealous of this fictionalized version of my own dog, because I realized that I wanted to be able to turn into a dragon more than anything else in the world. (There was at least one day where I almost convinced myself that I was going to start growing scales, and also that my other friends were showing signs of developing their respective superpowers as well, as if my little stories had altered the very fabric of the universe.) So what I did was I invented a supervillain named "Quickswitch," whose thing was that he threw a boomerang that could switch peoples' superpowers. So I had a little story where he attacked the mayor's office, and Daisy and I showed up to save the day and he switched our powers. My dog got the generic flight and super strength I had given myself, and I got the ability to turn into a dragon.

And then I immediately killed off Quickswitch so that he could never switch our powers back.

If memory serves, my dragon form looked something like this:

Anyway, there's definitely an alternate timeline out there where my fursona is either a mouse or a dragon.