Yeah, I noticed. I found out uh, four minutes before LT reared his ugly head and went after Page here on tumblr. (Reminder to block and report him, while you’re at it.)

I really don’t want to be a dick and say it isn’t good enough (the wording isn’t formal, it’s not a real announcement and just a tweet, ~ooo let us know if we’re interacting with anyone ‘sus’~ instead of an actual statement), but honestly? My standards are a bit high, it’s about damn time they made a statement.

I’m not happy with the “conversation” we had. I was all but ignored, and so was Sun. VS went straight for Noel’s sharpness and insisted we were somehow breaking boundaries (what boundaries?? Only theory I have is 'boundary to not be questioned or criticized’ which is kind of pathetic) and refused to engage further with those of us trying to play it civil.

I said absolutely nothing that wouldn’t have been brought up in their discord before their initiative was even drafted. My tone wasn’t accusatory, if anything it was “and how was this missed? Please don’t miss it next time!” and I ended off on a rather optimistic note? So I genuinely can’t see what I might have been at fault for. I’m open to someone pointing out what I might have fucked up, solely because I want to not have to write off the entire organization as a loss, but I can’t see it.

But what irks me the most, and I didn’t find this out until almost six hours ago, is that Alt+H has a very firm stance on “if you support factkin, you are banned from our discord”. That’s enough to make a statement about on its own, but they required significant pressure before they were forced to make a statement about bestialists, and it wasn’t a great one either. One of these is actively harming all involved communities. The other is a weird philosophical debate that’s fun to have every now and then but otherwise hasn’t been an issue in at least four years.

I’m glad Alt+H made a statement. I really am. Took them long enough. But I’m not happy with how they handled any of this, and if immediately folding under any sort of critique and playing the victim is how their spokesperson is going to handle any sort of negative talk about them, well.

Let’s just say I’m glad they at least made a statement, and I personally think there’s room for improvement from here on out.

I haven’t updated literally any of my blog pages since before the porn ban, none of my current tags are on my old tags page. :p Which I also haven’t bothered putting up on my blog so it’s totally fine you didn’t know.

You’ve got a point there - maybe ‘on community works’? Since I don’t really have a tag for surveys and zines and the like either, the closest thing I’ve got is my ‘on archives’ tag which would be a child tag of whatever this is. I’ll sleep on it and see.

Thanks, nonny!

It’s not a nuisance at all, but you’ve definitely got the wrong person for this, I don’t source anything unless there’s a gun to my head. :p Go ask Poppy aestherians, he’s psych ‘kin and between him and HoC liongoatsnake, there will be sources aplenty.

Firstly, I find it mildly comedic but genuinely sad that Alt+H gave everyone less than two hours to voice thoughts. You give no less than 48, especially if you’re an organization. Some people are asleep, my dude. I don’t follow Alt+H because ultimately I don’t care, but… what are they doing.

As for whether it being a bad allegory for trans stuff is a bad thing… I’m trans, and honestly? You’re betting that the inner part of the Venn diagram of “people who have seen this movie” and “people who intend on only being mildly ableist to otherkin over species dypshoria” is going to be a significant problem here.

People just aren’t gonna see the movie, and they certainly aren’t going to decide the entire otherkin community is just idiot trans people any more than they were already going to. Either you understand that movies around mental health are very rarely done in good faith, or the conversation’s over before it started.

Either it’s just a bad movie and dismissed at that; or it’s a bad movie with controversy over the internet’s punching bag. I’ll take the former every single time.

Got my days all fucked up and had to run off so my brother could open presents (it’s his birthday), but aight, time to write post.

I’m glad you’re seeing other perspectives, and I’m glad I could provoke your mind a little!

KFF are probably psychological, because it’s an entirely normal part of being a young teenager. I don’t know enough about how they actually think to guess how much of it is actual spirituality, so you’d have to ask them.

I definitely don’t agree that plurality is as rare as you say, or that it needs to be traumatic: I wasn’t born plural, nor do I have any sort of trauma that most traumagenic models of plurality would insist upon. I’m just out here vibing with three fish and a dragon and various theories on what the psychology behind it is. Running theory is that we just had the ‘capable of plurality’ bool set to true, since brains are still very much a black box program that never generates their code the same way twice.

While I really dislike bad-faith discourse, which is most of tumblr tbh, I do enjoy genuine debates of just bouncing ideas off each other. Worst thing that happens is that you have a few new arguments to chew on and analyze. So if you want to come back and talk a bit, I’m game.

Thanks for checking in!

If it’s otherkin, it’s just simply right, and it has to do with me. If it’s plural, it’s simply right, is not me talking, and if I question either of those things I get playfully insulted. If it’s daydreaming, I can’t actually hear my systemmates unless I ask for them by name since daydreaming is its own weird thing.

That being said I have accidentally daydreamed their memories and eventually one of them will awkwardly point out that no, that happened. And then I’m like “aw fuck”.

I have a lot of theories on my daydreaming and how it relates to everything else, since daydreaming a thing too much can accidentally make it integral when I don’t mean to, so I need to be careful. Hence why I get confused so often about what’s daydreaming and what’s real, and why I really try to never daydream about my kintypes, because it can change things and I don’t want it to.

That being said Al just flat-out admitted he sometimes shoves his trauma into my daydreams so he can let me know without actually having to talk about it, because my daydreaming very much goes the route of ‘angst with a happy ending’ and it helps him see it in a better light and it works something like therapy so I mean. That happens, I guess.

You kind of just learn to differentiate through practice? In the beginning I absolutely had no way of telling and that’s why I angsted so much about whether I was plural or just making it up at the start, and then eventually Goni just gave up, stole most of the front, demanded fish for dinner, and insulted me several times. Daydeams don’t do that, so. :p

Honestly, I didn’t even know it was still circling around! Thank you so much for sharing it, and I’m really glad everyone liked it!

I know next year I absolutely want to get more writing out there, not only of my own experiences but also of all but growing up in the community here on tumblr - and nothing is stopping me from the occasional political ramble.

Still, thank you so, so much!!

English Second Language. Other countries might use different terms, but that’s the Canadian way of putting it normally.

You are very close to being on the money, and for that, I am proud of you, nonnie.

Those terms are both fake and predate the KFF community as we know them: they were very popular and began with the copingkin community, which was the reason copinglinking got made as a term (and then none of them used it.)

The idea was, if you were a fictional character to cope or just to roleplay / faceclaim but wanted to be addressed as though you were them, then you were copingkin. We tried explaining that it wasn’t fictionkin to do that, it didn’t really work.

So the idea went, ‘selfhood’ was the character that was closest to an actual fictotype, it was your number-one-coping-kin, no doubles allowed, if anyone disagreed with your personal ship choices you are apparently allowed to suicide bait them for months on end, label them on your blacklist as your abuser, yadda yadda yadda.

ID was just below selfhood in terms of it, usually also no doubles allowed (unless they were heavily AU’d), disagreeing with your ship choices was a trigger and would always cause you to crytype and send death threats (and to note, this wasn’t the shaky-hands-crytype that happens with a physical disability, this was all performative bullshit), you get the idea.

Followed by primary, secondary, and tertiary. Primary was hit or miss on whether doubles were allowed, but secondary / tertiary, by that point, any characters on the kinlist were pretty solidly either: a) the icon was pretty and the character is Aesthetic, b) a faceclaim and relatable character, or c) one of your friends’ 'kins’ was that character’s bestie so you have to match.

They’re not fictionkin terms. They never were, and most fictionkin have utterly hated them as long as they’ve existed, because they were and are in use by those who make a mockery of us, and don’t care to do better, and woefully misrepresent what we are.

So that’s how that went.

You know, that was a major argument in 2015, about six months before ‘kinning’ showed up and made us all realize we had other issues to deal with. :p

Nobody sees anything wrong with it now, it’s just shorthand and largely accepted, but if someone does give you grief I’d just go “and you’ve been under a rock for six years, gotcha” and then promptly make fun of them. But that’s just me.

You might even find the posts about it if you go real far back in my blog. They aren’t tagged very well though, so you find ‘em you should link me to them so I can make fun of myself for being 15 and therefore embarrassing. ;)

Yeeeeees but also no.

There’s two things that otherkin gets used for primarily, and a lot of people don’t realize the word semantically means two things that really ought not to be confused. I think my questioning guide (needs a rewrite, ew) still has them partially confused, I learned better sometime in the last three years. Happens to the best of us.

Otherkin on one hand, means “a kintype that is not a theriotype or a fictotype, and also isn’t theriomythic”. So your vampires and plants and aliens.

It also stands in as “literally everyone in the otherkin, fictionkin, theriomythic, and therianthrope communities” as an umbrella term, because nobody wants to write all that out every single time. Elitist therians really hate this one because how dare you lump them in with the evil fluffy fictionkin, mostly.

So you got a fair few folks who disavowed the therian community because either they’re cool with fictionkin, feel therians are insufferable, or the one that makes me angriest: because bestialists in the therian community keep trying to take it over and they gave up and left instead of trying to fight back what just won’t stop poisoning the place.

(For the record, I don’t equate therianthropy with bestiality. But bestialist therians really want you to, and they’re a poison to us all.)

You’ll also have the reverse, but usually over experiences instead of community issues: this is why fictherian got made (Daski made the term to describe deir experiences, and there’s been some good essays by others as well. Apologies for initially miattributing that, Java class and NaNoWriMo have me all fucked up rn). Fictionkin who are animals and feel like they’re more fictional therians, and don’t fit with the once-typical* character-focused idea of fictionkin.

*because there isn’t much a fictionkin community left. Don’t get me on my soapbox, I’ll get all angry about it again.

That’s also where I vaguely fit in with my Absol fictotype; I had a life and a job and stuff, but it’s less noemata and story and relationship focused, it’s more bodily and raw experience and instincts. I’m character enough to not be able to fully relate, I’m animal enough not to fit in with character fictionkin on that front.

You’ll get that kind of stuff every now and then, but there’s no real big push about it.

So tl;dr, there’s some exchange based on community atmosphere and experience, so when you could go either way, folks will have reasons for picking one or the other and it’s no big deal for the most part. The problem with misusing terminology is usually less “are you using the Most Right word for what you’re talking about” and more “are you secretly KFF”.

So you can fuck up and use otherkin terminology for what’s technically therianthropy and you won’t get many glares, but imply you could be KFF and you’ll get side-eyed. It’s a whole linguistic thing.

YOU

COME OFF ANON RIGHT NOW

Youtube recommended me one of Mumbo’s videos on redstone and I was like “yeah okay I can listen to that while I program” and then I started watching Hermitcraft because of his ‘terrorize Grian with a new base’ video, and then Third Life happened, and then season eight of Hermitcraft, and then Last Life, well… Let’s just say I actively watch Mumbo, Grian, and Scar; and then I hermitcraft watch Pearl, Impulse, Zedaph, and Tango. Might drop Impulse/Pearl for Etho though.

I’m LocketShoru on AO3, if you’re wondering who that asshole who wrote 25k of Scarian porn was. But if the LL finale doesn’t give me Ethubs or Scarian I may well just riot where I stand. (It’s been delayed a few days likely because Scar just spent a week in the hospital, he’s home now so sometime this week!)

South, meanwhile, is glaring at that animatic trying to figure it out because he’s reading Grian as himself (with yellow!Grian as Spectre!him and red!Grian as classic!him) and Scar as Hades Alone in the same way Ella Enchanted is a Cinderella story.

Anyway come off anon and talk to us because Third Life SMP is good, everyone should watch it, and I’d be happy to soundboard your questioning if you need someone to do that!

Paratype is the misc identity, and it also functions as the ‘this is a thing because of another identity’.

On one hand, it means a Xweetok is my paratype, because that sure fucks and I don’t know how but it’s definitely me in some way. On the other hand, ivy and plants are a paratype, because they were a kintype of mine while I was Luteia, but no longer.

South is trying to figure out if Grian from this specific Third Life animatic is a paratype of his or a kintype or whathaveyou, because it’s effectively a retelling of a very important part of his life. He isn’t Grian, but Grian is him, so he’s still trying to understand that mess.

Paratype is what you use when you’re not really sure what else to call it, honestly. If that doesn’t help, uhhhh, you should be asking Poppy, he coined it. :p

If someone tried to humanize me, it would be very much like dehumanizing a human. I am not human. Humans are far lesser than I am, and that isn’t their fault, but I am not one of them.

It would just hurt my fellow beasts more.

-South