NOTE: This is the first post on this website where I am nearly exclusively talking about one person. As such I feel as though I need to make a decision regarding how I want to format the content of this project of mine moving forward, namely whether or not I refer to people by their pen or actual names. A lot of the people I want to talk about here are folks I know/knew personally so I want to use their actual names as a show of respect, however I feel most of the people who might be reading this website may not know these names or find it a strange choice because the people I’m writing about only ever posted under their pen names. With that said, I’m just going to use the pen names for their recognizability.
Athus Nadorian (1982 – 2011) was an artist. I’ve long mulled over how I wanted to open this post but I think just being as direct as possible works best. Athus was an artist, one who specialized in creating artwork of dragons. He was partners with Narse, also a notable artist, and was perhaps best known late in his life as one of the co-founders of Bad Dragon. Narse did most of the artwork in Bad Dragon’s early years but a lot of the toys were based on designs Athus had made. Varka certainly knew what he was doing by tapping what I’d argue was the furry fandom’s first “power couple” to springboard his business into the stratosphere.
Athus was a lot of things to a lot of people in the time he was with us, but to me he was an inspiration. I didn’t show up in the fandom as “Dracokon” until the very end of 2007 but prior to that I was certainly a lurker around these parts and in my inaugural post, Konned: An Origin Story, I mentioned how I’d spent some time in the web’s dragonkin communities and got to know people early on. Athus was also involved in these circles, though our paths did not cross at this time. I absolutely crossed paths with his art, though. He was tremendously talented even though he was just barely in his 20’s at the time. He had a way with a pen that at that moment in time was unmatched by virtually everyone else sharing their work with the world. You knew an Athus dragon when you saw it, his dragons had a style all their own and existed in their own little world. One that I so desperately wanted to live in myself.
I’d always kind of passively had a special affinity for dragons and the way Athus drew them in his pseudo-saurian style really did a lot in the way of pressing my buttons. I suck at drawing, but I was always great at writing; that was my talent. When I first started being “serious” about writing furry stories I wanted to be able to write things that were in text as detailed and appealing as what Athus was able to do with his pen. I was never really open about this facet of what drove me as an author but I do very vividly recall getting a random comment from someone on one of my stories that said (paraphrasing) “you’re the Athus of writing”. That was just one comment from the peanut gallery of people who came and went but out of everything anyone has ever said in my comments and shouts that one stuck with me for obvious reasons. It’s what I set out to do, and someone recognized that in me unprompted.
In 2008 I became the community administrator of Herpy, the website Varka owned prior to establishing Bad Dragon (full context: The Misunderstood Tale of Herpy). Athus had an account on Herpy. He posted exactly once. I made it a point to respond to him personally and welcomed him to the boards because he’d registered back in 2005 when the forums first opened and waited nearly half a decade to say anything. I wanted to foster a sort of camaraderie with him and have him around because he was someone I looked up to and in the brief period thus far where I’d been loosely on the fringes of Varka’s little inner circle I was close enough in proximity to Athus to occasionally talk to him. Otherwise, he was untouchable. As one of the most followed artists on sites like FurAffinity and whatnot anywhere he went he was followed by obsessives who were a lot less courteous than I was in regards to respecting his time and personal space.
I met Athus. Once. In 2009 I was a special guest at Further Confusion after 13 months of writing stories as “Dracokon”. My rise was meteoric, but if people “knew me” they only knew me by what I’d written. Not enough time had passed for me to open up about about practically anything, no one actually knew a single fucking thing about me. I was just some guy who was inexplicably popular and I vaguely remember my presence at that convention being interpreted weirdly by the other more established creators, those who’d spent years building up their followings and meticulously curating their works. And here I am, some asshole who’d written just three stories at that point but managed to turn a lot of heads by destroying the Most Popular page on SoFurry and I’ve got the same all-access special guest badge that they do.
Athus was at the Bad Dragon table. Everyone who started the company was there, actually. Varka was at the table and said hello to me first, then saw my badge before I could say anything and realized I was the guy he’d handed the keys to his former website over to. It was the first time either of us got to put a face to each other’s names and it was… awkward. If this meeting happened in the 2020’s I’d summarize it with “the vibes were off”. Narse was present at the convention but due to issues with social anxiety he wasn’t present in the dealer’s room. Raith was also kicking around, someone whom I did not know in the slightest who also did not know me. I think I made a great first impression by making an offhanded remark about how he resembled the assistant manager at the place I worked at at the time. But there was Athus, sitting in the back of the booth focused on a drawing he was making on one of those very cool (and expensive) Windows XP laptops that had the screen that folded all the way back and rotated around a center hinge so you could use it as a drawing tablet. He was working on a picture of a Charizard, spread eagle.
Sure, meeting Varka was great and all. I mean, I only managed the guy’s website or whatever and he was the owner of the fastest growing and most profitable furry company ever made after hardly a year in operation. I was there to meet Athus, though. I kind of didn’t want to go to Further Confusion because it was all the way in California and I didn’t want to fly across the country and deal with all that shit even if the convention was footing the bill for most of my expenses. I was thinking about responding to their invite with a short “thanks but no thanks” until a post was made on the official Bad Dragon blog announcing the presence of the entire team at the con. I realized this was my opportunity to finally meet the person who helped me find myself and shaped me as a writer. I’d exchanged emails with Athus sporadically over the years dating back to when I was still lurking dragonkin boards so we very loosely knew each other and I thought maybe now I’d be able to establish a proper friendship with him. Unlike a lot of the people clamoring to get into his social circle I did not have any ulterior motives or expectations. I just wanted to be able to call him a friend, that alone would’ve meant the world to me.
Athus “knew” me, but I don’t really think our status as acquaintances was strong enough to build anything off of. We spoke briefly, as he was busy and I had panels to host, but I told him I hoped that perhaps we’d be able to grab lunch during the con at some point and get to know each other. Varka had my phone number already, so to not put Athus on the spot and make things awkward I just told him that Varka had all my contact info and if he wanted to get a bite to just ask him for my number and shoot me a text. He didn’t, though our paths briefly crossed on the last day of the con so I jokingly poked him about it and we had a laugh but by that time I had to leave so we didn’t actually get to hang out. That was okay though because I knew at that moment in time the weight of the world was probably on his shoulders because he was involved with this rapidly rising company the likes of which no one had ever seen before in our shared neck of the woods. I got it. Maybe we’d be able to make it happen next time.
Except, there was no “next time”. That would be the first and last time I’d ever see him.
On the morning of October 11, 2011 Athus was involved in a vehicular accident that ended his life. I remember the phone call. I genuinely think it would be impossible for me to forget it. I got a call from Varka which was weird at the time because he and I weren’t exactly on speaking terms. There was friction over some stupid bullshit with Herpy getting hacked and defaced and the website was down for months when he told everyone it would’ve just been a couple of days. People were pissed off at me, at him, at everyone, and I was really sour about it. I assumed he was calling me to maybe hash things out and clear the air, so I answered. We did eventually bury the hatchet, but not before he shared with me the news that Athus was gone. He was only 29.
By that point in my life I’d dealt with loss from a number of avenues. My best friend’s brother committed suicide when we were in middle school and it affected both of us. I never got to know my paternal grandmother because she died of cancer when I was not even a year old; there’s photos of her holding me as a baby and it’s hard for me to look at them because I’d give anything to know her but I never will. I was there when my maternal grandmother died from complications with dementia and in her final moments she did not have a clue who I was, like the previous 20+ of our lives just never happened. All of these experiences hurt very profoundly in their own ways. But hearing that Athus had died cut me in a way that I’d never felt before.
Saying “he was my everything” is a weird and stalker-ish way of phrasing my feelings but it’s the closest I think I can come to putting it as succinctly as possible. We were young. All of us. I foolishly believed “there’d always be next time” because despite having dealt with loss before I’d never taken to heart the adage that tomorrow is never promised. That morning, tomorrow wasn’t promised to Athus.
I didn’t handle the loss well, and I know I lashed out at people and said things that to this day I deeply regret.
But life goes on. It has to. I wrote a story in Athus’ honor and dedicated it to him and then I took a break from writing for the entire rest of the year and well into 2012. Between 2012 and my eventual departure from the fandom at the very end of 2017 I think I maybe wrote six or less finished stories when between 2007 and 2011 I’d put out nearly a dozen. I was done, the muse was gone. I felt lost and aimless and I started doing very rash and dangerous things. The sexual assault I mentioned on the About page of this website happened during this time. I pulled back hard on everything I used to write that made me who I was because I just did not know what the fuck I was doing anymore. The majority of the shadiest people I met in my stint within the fandom happened in the immediate fallout of this event and I just sort of let it all happen.
My time in the limelight had waned by the end of 2011 and I wasn’t the big draw that I once was. A lot of artists and influential people within the furry fandom got together to make dedications to Athus… and I was left out. I was not part of any of them. At the time this all happened it was a sobering reminder that no, I wasn’t actually anybody at all. I was a commodity, a flavor of the week. Varka offloaded his website onto me so he could make millions and I’d be left holding the bag. That’s why it was “weird” when I met him in person at Further Confusion; because nothing felt genuine to me. I was not someone who had any staying power and I was not meant to be among the elite little crowd of people who pulled all the strings in the furry fandom. Fine. I didn’t care about any of that. What I cared about was that my friend just died and every step of his memorial and everything else was gatekept to the point where only a certain group of people were allowed to show grief and receive support and condolences from everyone. I was not in that group. My heart was broken. I was grieving, suffering, silently and in the dark.
The name of this journal is “I Have Complicated Feelings About Athus Nadorian”, so you might be asking where said “complicated feelings” are because up to this point I’ve mostly just itemized out our regretfully brief friendship and my reaction to his passing. The aforementioned “complicated feelings” didn’t come until after he died.
If you dig up Athus’ oldest works that are still extant online you’ll notice that before he bought the domain athusworks.com he had a different website in the copyright text of his art, dolphinparadise.net. Hitting that website today will display the cryptic message “That, which is.” something the website has said for nearly 20 years now. It’s been dead a long time. When the site was online it seemed to be a place for hosting art for random people who belonged to an otherwise unremarkable community, but Athus’ gallery wasn’t on the dolphinparadise.net homepage. Look closer, his was on a subdomain: dolphindreams.dolphinparadise.net. “Dolphin Dream’s” [sic] was something of an open secret that was hosted on the same server as the main site and was a repository of cetacean anatomical and mating reference material from veterinary and zoological publications.
Does that sound familiar to you at all? “Anatomical and mating reference material from veterinary and zoological publications”? Dolphin Dream’s was for cetaceans what Herpy was for reptiles. They had their own gallery of photos and art as well as a message board where users could talk all about their deep sea fantasies. But, there was no actual real life zoophilia content hosted on the website (as far as I can tell). Again… just like Herpy. I would imagine that a website such as this would attract all the same kinds of people who joined Herpy, just with a different affinity. They would come with all the habits and troubles that I had to sort out when I was the admin of that website, too. (For clarification, I was never a member of Dolphin Dream’s, the website lived and died before I was aware of its existence.)
Athus maintained a gallery on this website and actively promoted it wherever he shared his art. He also had an account on Herpy, which I mentioned earlier. I think you can see the dots I am connecting here; Athus was a zoophile. That is not conjecture, that is a fact that I have corroborated myself with sources I trust. There is a video that gets passed around in certain circles of a marine trainer performing oral sex on a male dolphin. That video was filmed by Dolph and the man in the video is Drakkor and the video was filmed at the Connyland marine park where they had access to the animals. They and others ran an entire bestiality ring out of that park and if you would like to know more about that here is a comprehensive write-up from Walfteam (co-founder of Crush Yiff Destroy) that gets into the details.
I bring up this video because it is watermarked with text reading “Private video for Brian Dyer”. That’s Athus. Not only did Athus know all of these people he knew them well enough that when they decided to roll tape on one of their many romps with the Connyland dolphins they recorded a special video just for him, but they watermarked it with his legal name. That’s kind of a fucked up thing to do because it highlights the power and value of good blackmail, something that I definitely want to get further into on this website just not right now because that’s not the focus of this journal. I don’t actually know how this video got out into the wider internet because I’m assuming Athus didn’t just randomly post it somewhere himself.
So Athus had a bestiality video filmed for his personal use. He also had an account on BeastForum back when that place was around. Case closed, right?
Not exactly. This is the part that I’m not really sure I should be getting into because I haven’t seen it documented anywhere and part of me feels like I’m dragging the reputation not just of the deceased, but someone whom I really truly cared about and looked up to. I heard through a reliable source, a mutual friend of the departed, that Athus himself participated in these kinds of acts in the real world. I will refrain from going into the specifics, but it didn’t happen often and I suppose it’s something you could chock up to simple curiosity or experimentation. I have no reason to believe the person I was speaking to would lie to me about something like that and I trust what they chose to confide in me. Knowing everything I’d known up to that point about Athus’ presence on Dolphin Dream’s and the video that was watermarked with his name… it just sort of sounds plausible.
I guess you never really truly know someone.
Years after Athus passed, when I was nearing my own exit from the fandom, I finally met Narse. I never had before since the one time I got to see everyone in person (at Further Confusion) he was absent due to mental health matters. Varka and I stopped by his house in Phoenix, Arizona. A big grand place just outside the city, a home bigger than any of the ones I remember seeing in the country club across the way from the town I grew up in. No doubt it was purchased with the fortune he made as co-founder and primary artist for Bad Dragon. And it was just his. He was alone. Narse and I chatted a bit and he showed me around the place. Part of me wondered if he even knew who I was and all the awful things I’d said about him years prior. Narse had an impressive collection of video games, many of his most valuable and rare pieces were displayed in one of the original store displays I remember seeing in places like Sears and Montomery Ward when I was much younger. He owned several arcade cabinets and I noted that one of them had Bubbles installed in it which was a game I was fond of. Narse was surprised, he said I was the first person to even know what that game was. He liked it too.
In that moment I felt like the biggest piece of shit on the planet. If there was a just God he should’ve struck me dead the minute this man invited me into his home and shared with me all of these facets of his personality. I was nothing but an asshole to this person whose only crime was a lapse of judgment at the wrong place and time, and in this moment it was nothing. It was just us.
I think fate led me to meeting Narse long after what happened had happened. In doing so I learned the final lesson I needed and finally completed the last step in the stages of grief: acceptance.
I departed from the furry fandom not long thereafter. It was time for me to go. In the years that followed I sought help for my emotional issues and the baggage I carried from my experiences during this era of my life. I learned to let go of a lot of things and downsized my entire collection of mementos by either selling or giving away the ones of value and destroying the rest. I’ve often revisited Athus in my thoughts and I’ve replayed so many things over and over again in my mind. What if I called him that morning? If I held him up for not even five minutes maybe he’d be here today. The issue with thinking like that is it achieves nothing. You cannot change the past; the past is a foreign country you’ve expatriated from and you can never, ever return. Forward is the only option and sometimes you have to keep moving in that direction with one less person close to you.
When I was much younger I thought Athus walked on water, but the reality of things is that he was flawed too. Just like every one of us. Not a day has gone by these past 14 years where I haven’t missed him, and I hope that when the day comes where God calls me home I can finally see him again. I know we will have a lot of catching up to do.
As I once said at the end of a now-deleted and long lost vlog I shared on the one year anniversary of his passing, “save a seat for me up there”. I miss you Athus. Everyone says “hi”.
Until next time.