Roundup: September 2026 Midway Menagerie - "Identity and the Self"

Here is the list of submissions for the September 2026 edition of Midway Menagerie, a furry blogging carnival. September's theme was "Identity and the Self".

• Orchid's response details the various fursonas that they have adopted over the years and the role that each played in exploring their gender, as well as the way that the furry community has given them friendship and self-confidence.
  • "I mentioned this previously at the start, but I never had a proper place/medium to be myself and to express how I've always wanted to. Now I do and because of my friends and these events I attend, I've learned a lot more about myself and am more sure of my gender stuff going on. I wear a lot more graphic clothing with art and designs on them, I wear a kandi bracelet that I made with one of my furry friends, I wear a skull dog mask at events, I dress in punk/alternative clothing sometimes, and just enjoy life a lot more than I used to."
• Atom's "Sonas" explores their two fursonas: Atom, their truesona who has accompanied them since high school, and Lydian, a confident and outgoing stage persona.
  • "I have a lot of anxiety. I stew in decisions a lot and it was a lot worse back then. So sometimes I would think, "what would Atom do?" What would somefur with my same values but more confidence (and less sleep deprivation) do. And sometimes that made it a whole lot more obvious what to do."
• Lark, in "'Other' is the point", explains that although "othering" is frequently a force of oppression, it embraces the ability of objectifying language to communicate the ways its gender transcends masculinity and femininity.
  • "I think part of what draws me to furry is the dehumanizing nature of it. I've talked before about how my connection to this community isn't really about being an animal person, but I do appreciate feeling less alone sitting with these feelings. While not universal, wanting to live in the body of your fursona is such a common experience here that I feel solidarity with the community."
• Raven's "Menagerie, Part II" evaluates the characteristics of their fursona, Riven, and how Riven expresses some traits that Raven aspires to have while being a distinct character rather than a perfect self-reflection.
  • "The thing I love about being in this community is how diverse the spectrum of fursonas can be - not just in species and color, obviously, but in detail, design, and backstory. There are those who design characters to represent themselves, sure, but for each of those there are just as many characters created to be cool, or unusual, or just plain funny. Each of these - each blue dog, each sentient pool toy, each drone (both in the aviation sense and... otherwise) - is a piece of art made by one person as part of this massive collage of culture we share. It's kind of magical."
• Melody, writing "Ten Furries in a Meat Mech", takes the opportunity to introduce each of her headmates and their fursonas, including the complex relationships they have formed with each other and how they all work together as a system.
  • "Between people being willingly open to talk about queer issues, neurodivergencies, and plurality specifically, it created an open space for me to understand myself. The act of creating fursonas for my headmates both gave me a creative outlet I had been craving for a long time, and helped me to differentiate and understand the parts of myself."
• Ån's "IDENTITY" is a multimedia autobiographical work. Honestly, words can't appropriately convey how it feels to read, I strongly recommend you take a quiet half-hour and boot it up yourself.
  • "Later that night I float backwards in the pool. The con has reserved the entire pool deck and there are fursuiters in the water. A scene DJ is blaring a happy hardcore remix of the Hampster Dance, and there's that weird sped-up Roger Miller sample, an echo of the fox movie of my childhood, bouncing down the tunnel of the internet and off the hotel walls and into the desert sky. The stupidest possible golden record."
• In my submission, "Contemplating Therianthropy", I explore my relationship with humanity and recount a number of memories in which imagining myself as or being referred to as another species brought me comfort.
  • "I have a distinct memory of standing in my family's backyard late one night watching the trees sway in the cold autumn wind and envisioning myself as a hawk, hunkering down in the branches. At some point, I snapped out of my daydream and realized that this fantasy could never be realized. I was stuck in my human body and no one was coming to rescue me from dreary reality."
• In "on furry identity and posthumanism", anchovie shares the history behind hir fursonas Kuri, anchovie, and Node. shi reflects on their evolution as it relates to hir exploration of hir own identity, and shares hir thoughts on furry as posthumanism.
  • "in this sense, the act of creating a fursona is innately posthumanist to me. just as in real life, we want others to perceive us as we choose to represent ourselves - not as whatever they happen to latch onto first. i'm foremost a Furry and a Maker and a Designer, not an Asian-American human woman. i want to be judged on my personality, actions, and contributions to my community. a fursona immediately breaks a lot of assumptions about me as a human and substitutes them with those of another species. we can't escape our humanity - these substitute assumptions are still deeply rooted in our species' biased perception of our fellow earthly cohabitants, as previously stated. but it's still an expansion of one's worldview; a blend of human and nonhuman attributes that encourages us to think of our world as an interconnected sum of cross-influence rather than a collection of silos."

October's theme is "Furry Dreams", hosted by anchovie. The call for submissions page may be found here. Please consider submitting a response, we'd love to hear your thoughts!

Thank you to all contributors for participating! See you next time.

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