Theriotypes: Vancouver Coastal Sea Wolf, Lion, and possibly a Seal
Age: 30
Other information below cut
I'm a (diagnosed) DID system, and use I/we pronouns interchangeably. Any tags that follow the -WORD format are alters tagging their own posts, feel free to send a message to us individually, but know that if you missed the front, it may be a while until you see them again!
We're also a therian (though that's probably obvious). We might be some flavor of physical therian, but we don't know much information about labels. Our therian realization was in 2013, but we've always identified as some flavor of animal even prior to learning the word; because of this, we don't call 2013 our 'awakening'
The name with a combination of letters and numbers is our radio collar ID! Feel free to refer to us as DC-2096X or 2096X if you want, we prefer it for this account! (if this makes you uncomfortable though, Brine is also acceptable)
We are almost always some degree of shifted, often with both mentality and phantom limbs. In person, we almost always wear some form of gear (both in private and public), and will growl and snap when upset. We have done these animal-like behaviors since we were extremely young, and will likely do this until we die, because it's what comes naturally! We don't mask, therianthropy or alters, and we don't plan to ever start!
We have prey drive and are territorial! This shouldn't affect anything online, but it seems worth mentioning.
Tags you might see:
#-WORD = This is an alter tagging something they wrote/reblogged
#yips and yaps = this is a post we wrote ourself
#howling back = reply to an ask!
#inside out = species affirming things, body mods, etc
some obvious tags also: #quadrobics #gear #enrichment #our art
[ID: an illustration in greyscale of 5 wolves and 3 crows cuddling around a floating plume of fire. The background is snowy with mountains and a starry sky. Text at the top reads āwe do not need to be cool, the world is cold enough.ā End.]
Maybe might color this eventually, but I like how it is now enough to share.
Being a ranger I spend a lot of time alone in the wilderness for hours in the company of one of four co workers.
One such worker for the purpose of this post we shall refer to as Dave.
Dave is a very quiet man. He confesses that if conversation happens too quickly and for too long he gets tired so we often work in silence. He's very polite and good natured but it's obvious that he would happily live and work alone for the rest of his life given the option.
He's very much in the previous generation of ranger, a practical man in his fourties or fifties happy to be kept physically busy for a day and then be sent home with some pay. I had to show him how to use a work issued smart phone.
Meanwhile the rest of the team is made up of the current generation of rangers; openly nurodivergent queer women in their twenties or thirties who work this job because it's the only setting where we can vaguely look sane.
So Dave sticks out a bit. It's really nice when he opens up though because he's an impulsive individual when left to his own devices and has plenty of stories to tell if the mood takes him. I really like working with Dave.
Anyway, one day we've got a job that takes a three hour hike to get to and early on the topic of deer comes up.
I hadn't realised this was the first time we had discussed deer, but blatantly it was. Dave's entire demeanour changes, there's a bit of passion in his voice, but it's also hushed as if he's talking about something sacred.
"Deer are my favourite animal." He says.
I'm also eager to hear Dave talk about himself, so I encourage him to say more.
"I'd love to be a deer myself."
And more
"If a genie offered me the opportunity to become a deer I'd take it. I wouldn't even stop to ask what the price was."
And more
"Sometimes I feel like I'm a deer having a dream about being a human.*
And there I am, a long time commuter to the therian/otherkin community keeping up the encouraging face of someone being politely interested, knowing that this man is straight up a therian with no frame of reference.
And I decided that I wouldn't push the subject outside of the bounds of what Dave is comfortable with, I wouldn't try to teach him the terms "Therian" or "Otherkin" but absolutely I would talk with this man as if he's a deer.
And it's a bit magical really. He's an impulsive individual so I have to talk him out of some risky choices every so often and "this is why deer like you keep getting stuck in fences" has become this magical phrase that allows him to step down from a mistake with a bit of a smile on his face.
dropping the therian label because it has become "too watered down!!!" only perpetuates the issue by suggesting that any other identity is more valid/serious but ok
Currently reading The Story of Birds by Steve Brusatte and before reading in order, I skipped ahead to the chapter on Terror Birds, Pelagornithids and Dodo Birds out of sheer bias. (Local terror bird wants to read about his kind, whoās shocked?)
I got to the end of the chapter yesterday, and Iām still feeling as somber as Brusatte about what became of dodo birds. It really irks me that colonialism was the main contributor to their extinction, then learning that Western scholars tried to disprove the existence of dodo birds for a while.
I can see how massive oversight was a factor, at least in context to the event of their extinction. Expecting colonizers to recognize how harmful their behavior was is like expecting money to grow on trees. Extinction wasnāt a thought that passed their mind as they documented how delicious the bird was and how many of them they hunted. They also had sailors and a menagerie of mammals (mainly dogs) to feed, a class of animals that dodo birds were not yet exposed to. So again, these results arenāt surprising. With the exception of the colonizer(s) themselves, all life is treated as expendable in the act of colonization.
However, for those who came later down the line and did understand this possibility, it was short-sighted to dumb down the existence of dodo birds and dismiss any possibility of colonialists bringing about their extinction, let alone doubt their existence at all. On one hand, I understand that suspension of belief was applied because of things like bestiaries. On the other hand, conquest is historically why some other species or subspecies of animals have gone extinct such as atlas bears, barbary lions and quaggas. This is not unheard of. Anything over accountability, I swear.
I have legit cried over the loss of Stellerās sea cow. It was first documented by Georg Wilhelm Steller in 1741 and by 1768 it was extinct. The largest sirenian to ever live (about 25 feet long and estimated to weigh 8-10 TONS) and it was hunted to extinction less than 30 years after the western world became aware of it.
Itās believed that when it was discovered it was already endangered due to the climate changing what from it what evolved in but Russian fur traders exploiting the natural resources in the area sealed its fate. They were specifically targeted for their blubber and these hunters bragged about how easy they were to hunt because they lived in the shallows, were physically unable to submerge, and moved very slowly. After they killed one its mate or family would remain nearby making them easy targets as well. The fur traders also targeted sea otters and as the otter population declined the urchin population grew and decimated the kelp the sea cows lived on.
Given that the species was already struggling thereās no guarantee that if it had been left alone it would still be around today but the fact that it took less than 3 decades of hunting to completely eliminate a species that had lived there for millions of years is a tragedy. Iām so sorry beautiful beasts, you truly were stellar.
First and foremost, thank you for sharing this. I wasnāt aware of this myself, so I learned something new today.
It breaks my heart. On one hand, Earthās climate and the evolution of its ecosystems were shifting drastically, so at least their vulnerability made sense for the time. On the other hand, encroachment and exploitation expedited their extinction: something could have been avoidable with a better conscience and regard for oneās environment. Every offense was a chain reaction that shifted the ecosystem significantly.
I think the cases that hurt me the most were that of atlas bears and barbary lions. Their populations dwindled, mostly through overhunting. Captivity for the sake of entertainment, such as gladiatorial games involving live animals, was another contributing factor in the case of wild barbary lions. They shouldnāt have met either ends, and yet, they did. Itās sickening to think about.
If you donāt mind, do you know of some places where I can read up on Stellerās sea cows? If not that, thatās okay. I can wait and search once Iām off the clock.
no pressure to draw us at all, but thought we'd offer up our wolf body for the sketching
Absolutely friend :3 hereās a doodle!
I canāt promise that all of the doodles I do will be this complex, itās purely based on my time/creative energy and Iām using this as a bit of an exercise to get back into drawing regularly. But this was fun! Iām excited to get onto the next ones ;3c
Just reminiscing a bit. TL;DR: I love you modern teenage therians & otherkin, and also if anyone was on Chicken Smoothie circa 2008-2012 please say hi!
When I first stumbled upon therianthropy back in 2006, I quickly realized that there wasn't a place for me in the communities whose essays and information I was excitedly reading. It had been so freeing and exhilarating to know that I wasn't alone in how I am, but all the therian forums were for adults, and I was a teenager. I probably could have joined the "adult" forums and talked to grown-up animals instead of just lurking, but I didn't feel comfortable talking to strange adults (this was back when we actually taught kids to not disclose personal info online!), and the people on therian forums didn't feel like my peers anyway. So many of their conversations just sounded like dry philosophy, or referenced "adult" things I didn't relate to. I resigned myself to just reading what people wrote, and being a lonely teenager with nobody to talk to.
My first time really talking to other nonhumans was on the forum for a digital pet website called Chicken Smoothie. It was barely even a browser game at the time, just a cozy little forum with a pet adoption feature, and the users were a few hundred teens and preteens chatting and making art. But, in probably late 2008 or early 2009, someone started an otherkin thread and I finally found my peers. We spent hours a day swapping information we'd read, figuring out what people were, and just having fun. There was no gatekeeping or unfriendly grilling or essay-writing, and no sanctimonious adults to tell us we weren't being "serious" enough about nonhumanity. WeĀ wereĀ serious, but in the way kids are serious, before society makes them afraid to be authentic and silly. Conversations about spirituality and phantom shifts were interspersed with people roleplaying and making animal sounds, and we enjoyed both just as much. It was a space for all of us to act openly nonhuman around other people for the first time, and we did it like teenagers. We chatted through text and made art for each other because that's all the internet reallyĀ wasĀ at the time, but if it had been possible (and socially acceptable) to take and share photos and videos of us acting like ourselves we would absolutely have been doing that, too. I can't even begin to imagine how much fun we'd have had with access to modern social media, when just talking to each other about who we were was already so fulfilling.
I don't know how many of the people I was friends with still call themselves therians, otherkin, or vampires. It's likely some of them were just roleplaying and left those things in the past. But I'm still here over 15 years later, so I know I was far from the only one genuinely expressing who I was. It doesn't matter to me whether those people I was a nonhuman kid with "grew out of it" or not, because that sense of joy and community was real. There wasn't a space for nonhuman teens online, so we carved one out ourselves.
Modern teens don't have to search so hard to find their community. When I look at the therian and otherkin tags on tumblr today, and when I see videos of teens on tiktok wearing homemade masks and running in the grass, what I see is a bunch of young people doing the exact same things I was doing on a forum in 2009. The infrastructure of the internet has made it hard to find and share accurate information the way we used to so there's a lot more misinformation, but the joy of teenagers learning they're not alone is still the same. There are so many high schoolers out there talking about shifts and posting silly animal sounds the same way I did, and that makes me really happy.
Maybe some of them are roleplaying and will stop calling themselves therians or otherkin in a few years, but that doesn't actually matter. There are people out there exploring nonhumanity for the very first time, and the joy is real.
As a note, if anyone ever sees us using the wrong word, please clarify / tell us
We learned most of the terms when we were like... 16. In 2013-2014. So its been a while, and we honestly just dont even recognize most of the words we see.
Vivterms? Cladotherian? Holothere? I dont know any of those and i haven't been able to find an explanation of them that makes much sense.
Not too sure about vivterms and holothere but I can explain cladotherian!
Clado means clade, as in a genetic grouping of species that contains one common ancestor and all of its descendants. Cladotherians donāt identify as one specific species but instead as a group of related species. Itās not like having multiple kintypes, itās more so identifying as the essence of a group of animals instead of one specific animal.
Iām a pseudosuchia cladotherian, the group pseudosuchia is an ancient lineage that contains: the ancestors of modern crocodiles, animals that morphologically resembled crocodiles but arenāt true crocodiles, and modern day true crocodiles, caimans, gharials, and alligators. So basically if it looks like anything remotely resembling a croc itās me lol
Cladogram made by Gabriel Ugueto on Twitter: https://x.com/SerpenIllus?s=20
So for example a canidae cladotherian would identify as the essence of all canines! So wolves, foxes, coyotes, jackals, dholes, African wild dogs, maned wolves, and all domestic breeds of dog.
A vulpes cladotherian would identify as the essence of all foxes, red fox, grey fox, fennec, arctic, etc instead of just a specific species of fox.
Cladotherianthropy can be as broad as identifying as something like animalia; so literally all animals, or it can be as narrow as something like dugonginae; which only contains two species: the dugong and Stellarās sea cow (RIP š).
This isnāt the case for every cladotherian but the reason I personally chose the cladotherian label instead of just a specific species like kaprosuchus or a Nile crocodile is because I donāt really feel like just one species. My shifts are pretty varied but they all feel croc so I think the cladotherian label works best for me š
I hope this makes sense, if you have any questions feel free to ask :D
ooh, okay, so it's not Only Clades, but any group that's larger than a specific species, sounds like?
i think i understand it if i think about it as a sort of... 'i am fox' if you identify as a vulpus cladotherian, but if it's also 'i am specifically all of these' i feel a bit confused. like, is it the standard to check all of them individually and make sure? cause in larger groups like canidae or kingdoms, i feel like that would be really difficult to check every individual one and confirm them. so is that kind of, not as much of a thing for this? or is that a different word entirely..?
Yeah basically that! Itās just a broader way of identifying as a group of animals that share similar traits and morphology without getting deep into the nitty gritty of narrowing down a species, like āI am just fox, not red fox or arctic fox, just fox in generalā.
From my experience and from talking to other cladotherians the way most people land in the cladotherian label is they can narrow down their shifts and feelings to a group of animals but they canāt really pin all of their experiences to one species, like all of their therianness feels too similar to say āoh I just have multiple kintypesā but it doesnāt feel specific enough to just be one species. For cladotherians making sure your shifts align with every species in the clade isnāt really emphasized that much, like you might have some species in that clade that are just donāt align with what you feel at all but if your therian experiences align with most of the species in the group Iād say itās safe to say youāre a cladotherian. The general idea is that all of these animals in this group are related by some traits/behavior/morphology and itās like youāre identifying with that overall vibe instead of the behavior and appearance of one specific species.
Back when I first joined the community in 2017 there was definitely more pressure to really introspect and not to claim kintypes without really really really thinking about it and it was even encouraged to have other members of the community āgrillā you and make sure you really were that species. But a lot of people started to see that as gatekeepy so over the years the general vibe has shifted more towards āhey if thatās how you feel dude itās your body and your experience so who am I to tell you you arenāt thinking enough about itā.
For my first few years in the community I actually used to identify as a hyena and that felt right for a little while but due to the āreally think about it and make sureā mindset over time calling myself a hyena began to feel more like a square peg round hole situation. So for a few years I really tried feeling out and writing down my shifts and what situations brought me true species euphoria and after doing that for a bit I found my experience aligned much more with big ass aquatic reptiles rather than any mammalian predator so I started exploring crocodilian species.
For a bit it seemed like the Nile crocodile was the closest thing that matched but then some shifts really couldnāt be attributed to Nile crocodiles, they felt like something more like caiman or alligator but then when I looked at those species they werenāt a perfect fit either. I also had shifts that felt more terrestrial and like active pursuit hunting instead of ambush hunting but these shifts were still very crocy (I think these shifts were what led me to label myself as a mammalian predator in the first place since most predatory mammals are active terrestrial hunters). So then I started looking into ancient croc species and their cousins to see if I could find something that encompassed all my experiences and the closest I got were the long legged terrestrial pseudosuchians like kaprosuchus and postosuchus. I kept going from species to species and for a little while I thought that spinosaurus fit all my shifts despite it not being a croc at all but that label didnāt really feel right either.
I was torn, how can I feel like an African crocodile in a watering hole while also feeling like a swamp puppy in the Everglades while also feeling like a running dog with a crocs face while also feeling like a saltwater crocodile in the ocean while also feeling like a bipedal bitey monster? Then I discovered what cladotherians were and it just clicked! I wish I could explain it better than that but then I would have to give you like years worth of shifty notes lol
So yeah cladotherianthropy for me is more so saying that āI am kind of the vibe of all these related species and not one in particularā. In the future if they ever discover a prehistoric croc-like reptile that fits all my shifts then I may drop the cladotherian label and identify as that species but until then Iām just the essence of crocs :D
i was on therian forums back in 2013-2015, and haven't been on since, so i'm definitely more used to the concept of 'of course i'm being grilled on this' being the default in therian locations, haha.
but your explanation makes sense, i appreciate the length of it honestly! took some time to let it sink in so i could be sure i read and understood everything, and your explanation of your experience and how you ended up at this result makes so much sense, with it being some sort of 'i am exactly as much this as this, and i am so much more these things than i am Human'. that's a lot easier for my brain to wrap itself around
As a note, if anyone ever sees us using the wrong word, please clarify / tell us
We learned most of the terms when we were like... 16. In 2013-2014. So its been a while, and we honestly just dont even recognize most of the words we see.
Vivterms? Cladotherian? Holothere? I dont know any of those and i haven't been able to find an explanation of them that makes much sense.
Not too sure about vivterms and holothere but I can explain cladotherian!
Clado means clade, as in a genetic grouping of species that contains one common ancestor and all of its descendants. Cladotherians donāt identify as one specific species but instead as a group of related species. Itās not like having multiple kintypes, itās more so identifying as the essence of a group of animals instead of one specific animal.
Iām a pseudosuchia cladotherian, the group pseudosuchia is an ancient lineage that contains: the ancestors of modern crocodiles, animals that morphologically resembled crocodiles but arenāt true crocodiles, and modern day true crocodiles, caimans, gharials, and alligators. So basically if it looks like anything remotely resembling a croc itās me lol
Cladogram made by Gabriel Ugueto on Twitter: https://x.com/SerpenIllus?s=20
So for example a canidae cladotherian would identify as the essence of all canines! So wolves, foxes, coyotes, jackals, dholes, African wild dogs, maned wolves, and all domestic breeds of dog.
A vulpes cladotherian would identify as the essence of all foxes, red fox, grey fox, fennec, arctic, etc instead of just a specific species of fox.
Cladotherianthropy can be as broad as identifying as something like animalia; so literally all animals, or it can be as narrow as something like dugonginae; which only contains two species: the dugong and Stellarās sea cow (RIP š).
This isnāt the case for every cladotherian but the reason I personally chose the cladotherian label instead of just a specific species like kaprosuchus or a Nile crocodile is because I donāt really feel like just one species. My shifts are pretty varied but they all feel croc so I think the cladotherian label works best for me š
I hope this makes sense, if you have any questions feel free to ask :D
ooh, okay, so it's not Only Clades, but any group that's larger than a specific species, sounds like?
i think i understand it if i think about it as a sort of... 'i am fox' if you identify as a vulpus cladotherian, but if it's also 'i am specifically all of these' i feel a bit confused. like, is it the standard to check all of them individually and make sure? cause in larger groups like canidae or kingdoms, i feel like that would be really difficult to check every individual one and confirm them. so is that kind of, not as much of a thing for this? or is that a different word entirely..?
Being transgender and/or nonhuman is a perpetual state of body horror.
I know what I am, what i look like, but i look down, i see my hands. It's missing its claws. I'm missing my fangs. I'm missing my armor, my fur, my everything. My body is wrong, my flesh is wrong. Where is it? Where is my body?
Every time I see my flesh I remember that im imprisoned.
But when I look away I can feel all the parts that are missing from this flesh suit.
