Sword Art Online, created by Reki Kawahara, directed by Tomohiko Itō, 2012.

I stand still under this newly purchased furied face — a lit-up black mirror stands in front. The body is invited into stillness until numbness takes over. The rate of the heart becomes perceptible, ticking louder while low-pitched. “As if dead” — said the voice that tickles the brain.

I give in a rounded 15 minutes in this position, now seated, that’s the time that I take to convince myself that Taiz— my fursona— can take over. I enjoy inducing these images of a somewhat slow first gen playstation 1 loading bar.
“This game is heavy, therefore takes time.” — at last, Taiz giggles.

Login credentials <Enter>

Choose location <Enter>

( a ritual of immersion )

<Enter>.

Video-game platforms and VR chats — for those with more sophisticated gadgets —
prompt the world that Cybernetics once dreamed of, one that Sword Art Online (2012),
like many other future-lead narratives, depicted as a form of LARPing that surpasses
itself: one that transforms role-playing into new logics of affecting what many tend to call
the first, or, the physical body’s emotions and identity-building processes.

Instagram Close Friends story by @carpatosmusic, screenshot by @meii_soh

Video games are often depicted as the main field for those interested in LARPing studies
through their direct association to play. While I believe there to no longer be possible to distinguish the I[1] that is actually at play — online, offline and beyond —, the topics of gamification of life through online capitalistic-driven platforms,[2] or the gamification of gaming itself, like for example Fortnite where players are encouraged to complete daily or seasonal tasks to unlock cosmetic rewards, turn gameplay into productive cycles. It is however in how the play affects, not only the body but identity altogether that I propose us to pause.

For those living in digitised societies, the process of online identity curation—not exclusive to social media— comes to mind, both as a generative form of social engagement and multi-identity split, avatar, etc. In such cases, the act of log-in parallels with the production of new internet-poetics of longing, an intersection that I find curiosity when looking into queer, trans*, or non-normative bodies such as the one of furry identities. Particularly to these bodies, longing is driven by the aftermath of a long session of play, or, in other words, for the search for accessible futures, and safety that anonymity itself provides. In such cases, it seems fair to say that socially driven internet practices might open new conditions for selfhood, recognition, and identity altogether. One where the surveillance of each other— user to user— is purposefully close to impossible.

However, the process of attaining selfhood online is often driven by complex desires to become recognisable — recognition that breeds a need for distinction. In furry, the staging of log-in perpetuates future staging of longing. To long is to log, and vice versa. An emotional experience that exists in both online and offline forms of furry where subjects usually describe logging-off as a cathartic returning to a space that does not serve their actual body’s mental and, or, physical needs.

I- I should say the whole time that the human side of the mind is just sort of off in the background – and then after a few minutes of being out there, human side comes back and is just like: well, I can’t stay out here all night. I have no choice but to go back. Of course[,] that’s depressing, it’s like I can’t stay out in the woods being me, I have to go back and remain in the human world.[3]

In this interplay of wording —log-in / longing —and feelings within digital space, becomes later embodied by offline. An embodiment that I propose as a surpassing of the platform itself, by using what it has taught us — to dissociate and become anew. This is not exclusive to video-games however, as social media platforms do in many ways resemble the rewarding categories of gaming and therefore are games themselves, all users are incentivised to curate, and therefore to dissociate, for the sake of being reward of others’ consumption of a laboured image of self.

The furry suit, in this sense, mirrors the act of entering one’s credentials: both invite play through transformation. Furry and avatars are linked by their capacity for disidentification. This is not to suggest that furries are derived from technology, but rather to acknowledge their shared conditions: interfaces through which the physical body encounters tools of becoming. To log oneself, as a furry, is to stage a soft death — to allow body, language, and at times voice to mutate into another syntax of being. It is a rehearsal of dying as play — a LARPing of death that does not end but multiplies.

This “soft death” exceeds world-building; it becomes ritual. A ritual that allows brain and body to believe that the so-called Beast that shouted in Neon Genesis Evangelion’s episode 26 — that buried multiplicity of self — might awaken. The internet’s induced dissociation becomes the needed password into alternative states of being within oppressive frameworks. Furry practices offer a poignant offline example of digital disidentification, using technology to kill a primary version of the self while forming part of what I call Deathnology: a speculative and embodied methodology of killing the first self as a means of recognition and reprogramming.

Disidentification, as José Esteban Muñoz describes, is a survival strategy — a process of remaking the self from within systems that were never built for one’s full existence. It is neither pure resistance nor assimilation, but a third space that reorients power and recognition.

Across digital mythologies, this is visible not only through gaming or furry practices but also in digital performers such as @pinkydoll, a black woman who, by embodying what many describe as really hot NPC on TikTok, uses gamification, repetition, fantasy, and algorithmic intimacy as tools of visibility and self-making. “Ice cream so good!” she repeats, while receiving pop-up digital gifts that materialise on her screen. Her gestures blur the line between human and avatar, collapsing the distance between body, capital, attention and her own devouring. When, in one of her streams, she briefly interrupts her performance to address her child — “Stop doing that! You are going to kill the dog!” — the illusion shatters. This rupture between fantasy and lived reality exposes how digital selfhood is racialised, gendered, and commodified “She’s not a good mother”, @kaysarahkay (reddit 2023), “At least she’s not using the kid for views 🤷‍♀️”.

Pinkydoll’s embodiment of the NPC becomes a form of digital disidentification — using the machinery of the algorithm to exceed it, and in doing so, re-scripting the ways recognition circulates around the racialised female body. For racialised and gendered bodies, recognition becomes both a site of survival and exhaustion — a double bind that Deathnology seeks to reprogram. Through her, intimacy detaches from the physical body and reconfigures as a tactic of endurance and authorship.

Shall we call it digital curation, identity planning, or resume it to dissociation? I cannot quite yet pin it. But I propose that these are modes of destabilising the walking, breathing body and its assigned identity. They amount to an algorithmic killing of a first form of existence, mediated by dissociation, into new modelling forces of recognition.

If avatars rehearse death through play, cinematic and animated mythologies have long prefigured this. The intersections of technology, death, and identity remind me of Revolutionary Girl Utena (1999), where technology operates as both stage and simulacrum. Within this technological world, bodies are made to conform — emotionally, interpersonally, within love. The stage itself is a machine of ideology, and must be unmade to expose the world it sustains. By the narrative’s end, the two main characters unveil the mechanism: the technological world is revealed as the primary one, while the “outside world” — a place where roads do not yet exist but where “you can always build new roads” — emerges as a site of potentiality. It is here that one may return to oneself, inhabiting a second, third, fourth body perhaps (?) that has escaped the facade.

The gesture of killing the first self runs throughout speculative narratives and performance. To dissolve or suspend tactility and tangibility of self — even momentarily — becomes political and affective training in disidentification. It allows the performer or subject to glimpse the mechanics of recognition: how identity is granted, maintained, or violently affirmed. The killing of the first self, in this sense, is not annihilation but opening — a passage through which another mode of being flickers.

My on-going research project on Deathnology is one that wishes to consider the furry as a practice of soft death — a temporary unmaking of the first body. To wear a suit, to adopt a persona, to move through another creature’s syntax, is one that pierces through acts of play into trans*alteration. The body becomes a membrane that can be inhabited otherwise. There is something deeply queer in that gesture: to die into another form, to love through disguise. Within this speculative field, furry becomes a practice that momentarily surpasses the internet — not as escape, but as fleeting transcendence, a rehearsal of disappearance that still takes place within it.

When Pinkydoll performs her NPC livestreams, saying “Ice cream so good,” she stages an automated body — a surface looped for consumption. But when interrupted by her child’s voice — “Stop doing that! You are going to kill the dog!” — the automation collapses. The loop stumbles and grounds the LARPing back into her lived body. The automation becomes self-aware, exposing the rupture between performance and life. Even as the physical body remains the site of feeling, the digital becomes a refracted skin — another surface that learns to breathe, to blush, to glitch.

Deathnology begins here: not under the pressure of defining separations between physical or digital, but within the unstable bouncing between embodiment and its refusal. The killing here is not an ending but a passage, a soft death that reveals another kind of living. In identity-dependent platforms where the formation of a personal hero or avatar is required, Death traces as spectral — a becoming-apparent through disappearance, a choreography of recognition reprogrammed. An alternatively lived-in software where something that may look just like a player’s death is in fact something else entirely. A proposal at last, that one might live many times within a single lifetime, and that technology is not merely a tool but a mirror reflecting our endless attempts at transformation.

Revolutionary Girl Utena: The Adolescence of Utena, directed by Kunihiko Ikuhara (Japan: J.C. Staff / Toei Company, 1999), video-still.

[1] Hideaki Anno, dir., “The Beast that Shouted ‘I’ at the Heart of the World,” Neon Genesis Evangelion, episode 26 (TV Tokyo, 1996).

[2] Here, I am reminded of the physical-to-online interdependence between users and digital bodies necessary to live and survive as in FarmVille, where engagement and reward systems are mediated by the capacity of a digital body to produce or grow. This relationship mirrors a form of digital labor, triggering a neurological compulsion for productivity, reward, and recognition. Similar dynamics unfold in competitive and open-world online environments such as League of Legends, Fortnite, Overwatch, Valorant, and GTA Online, where a user’s temporal investment and sense of achievement are tied to the growth, maintenance, and social validation of their virtual existence within networked economies.

[3] Courtney N. Plante, Stephen Reysen, Camielle Adams, Sharon E. Roberts, and Kathleen C. Gerbasi, Furscience: A Decade of Psychological Research on the Furry Fandom (Commerce, TX: International Anthropomorphic Research Project, 2023), 632.

Meii Soh is a performer, writer, and researcher working at the intersection of queer identity, non-human narratives, and speculative storytelling. Their practice explores shapeshifting as a survival strategy, tracing how identity—particularly in its fluid, trans*, and dissociative states—can glitch, dissolve, and reassemble through interspecies entanglements and technological interfaces. Soh holds a Master’s degree from the Dutch Art Institute and has recently presented work at Het Nieuwe Instituut, SEA Foundation, the Gothenburg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, and The Wrong Biennale, among others. Currently, Meii is developing written and material research around their self-developed concept Deathnology and furries as speculative offline identities that reprogram recognition.