So yeah, breaking news: I’m a bird on the internet.

Ref Sheet

Adalbert’s actually relatively plain, aesthetically speaking: if you ignore the clothes, he’s just an ocean of red feathers (barring hands, beak, and feet that don’t get any). I didn’t have a particular species in mind when designing him, especially since eagles don’t normally come in this color1. There is a bit of a story behind this particular bird becoming my fursona, though; he wasn’t designed for this purpose until I put what happened to be my outfit back then on him and declared him to be2 (even adopting his name as a pseudonym of sorts).

Being me in every way but physically, of course, means he shares most of my personality and interests (strategy games, puzzles, classical music, linguistics).

The outfit is just the clothes I had on when I designed him back in 2018. The outer jacket is one I obtained from a visit to Oxford University earlier that year—there’s a logo on the real thing, but I removed it to simplify the design. I added the inner jacket later, when I got a similar jacket from MIT with my pseudonym embroidered on the sleeve; the one Adalbert wears has a ⊥IW logo on it in place of MIT’s.

As the color and name choice suggest, Adalbert is actually based off the eagle on the coat of arms of the German state of Brandenburg; he has designs separate from his capacity as my fursona that reflect this further. I was much more of a history and/or Paradox grand strategy nut back then; I was toying at the time with the concept of drawing comics about my campaigns, inspired by a few others who had done the same. I settled on Polandball3 since it had a lower art skill barrier4, and started sketching one out. Though I’d lose interest in drawing out the whole campaign some fifty years in—I didn’t have that much time on my hands, after all—I had already played around with my art enough to feel comfortable embedding “fun” things into the panels. Most notably, I slowly started drawing the animal charges on several coats of arms as anthropomorphic versions interacting in a separate space from the countries themselves; why I chose to do so (and how I found out about the furry community in the first place a couple of years prior) is not a discussion for this summary.

Once I tired of drawing countries as spheres, though, I started developing the animals as characters in their own right, perhaps wanting to tell a historical allegory through the lens of this narrative, perhaps just acting out another game of EU4. Only time will tell. Either way, since the game I made them for had me playing as Brandenburg, obviously the red eagle got preferential treatment. For now, this edition of Adalbert exists mostly as concept art, since shortly thereafter I started using him as my de facto representation on the internet.

  1. If you pressed me for an actual eagle species I’d go with the Spanish imperial, for no particular reason at all… OK, one particular reason, exercise left to the reader. ↩

  2. If I had to make something else my fursona my design would be very explicitly a Steller’s sea eagle. ↩

  3. Links to the reddit because it’s the place for Polandball comics, but I was just there to browse. ↩

  4. The mouse-drawn aesthetic is part of the style. Eventually you get better at circle-drawing, which are pretty important for drawing basically anything living. ↩