Hello and welcome to myr blog. I am The Strange One, The Devouring Divine, It Who Suffers, or you may simply call me Cryptid, a nonhuman with many identities (that you may find beneath the cut).
I am a traumaendo system and alternate between me/I, we/us, and wi/mus first person pronouns. I am also disabled and neurodivergent, which informs how I interact.
genderqueer × he/she/it × lesbian
This is a sideblog so all interactions will come from @mintkissgirl.
a maned wolf who takes a morbid pleasure in complete solitude.
Making these moodboards for my shifts and kintypes has actually been helping me feel more connected to my nonhumanity! It's been making me really happy and euphoric :3
This feels.. niche to talk about within the alterhuman community but I've been feeling very connected to my life as a Dalish elf. In a way I haven't in years. It's strangely nostalgic. Getting flashbacks back to the same moment, over and over again.
I'm sitting on a rock next to the Silver Falls, my bow sitting next to me. The Breach still pulsates green in the sky and wind sings through the trees above me. I can hear demons screeching somewhere else in the Graves.
I've been noticing something... The older I get, the further away my alterhumanity feels. The more I acclimate to being "human".
I am a deity. I am a shapeshifter. I am a Not!Them and a wooden doll. I am a selkie and a fox. I am a not deer and a draconic. I am a song and so many concepts it hurts. I am a Watcher and I am a Dalish elf.
I am all of these things, both past and present, and identify with even more yet it feels almost out of reach. I really only feel connected with a type, a shape, when I interact with particular media or something I strongly associate with them.
I want to connect more with my alterhumanity, feel that same joy and freedom I used to feel, but I don't know how. The shackles of human adulthood weigh me down and I have precious little energy for much else.
I.. want to be home again. Feel my fur again. Feel my antlers upon my head again. Feel my wings wrap around me again. Smell the ocean air (despite being miles away) again.
I want to be able to remember. Remember chasing stars between lives with my mate. Remember The Emerald Graves and the crack in the sky. Remember the echoing expanses of flickering, yellow liminality. Remember chasing wind between trees.
How do y'all stay so connected to your alterhumanity? How do you retain your freedom and.. conform to the pressures of society? How do you do it?
Tonight was the first time i have ever truly and completely felt connected to my selkie side.
For the first time in years, my country was directly in the path of a total lunar eclipse, which isn’t particularly rare, but what does make it rare is the fact that the sky was actually clear, and we were able to see the whole thing.
i went down to the beach with my family and fiddled around with my phone trying to take an image (did not work unfortunately) before eventually giving up and just watching the eclipse right before totality. Because the moon was full, the tide nearby was at its peak and i could hear it crashing onto the rocks. I then had the sudden urge to go down and stand in the water, so naturally i ran across the grass and carefully climbed down the wet rocks and slipped a couple times before making it to the water and looking up at the moon.
because i’m part human and was raised in a human environment, i was never taught any real selkie songs. no melodies or words come to me naturally, but i knew that it didn’t really matter to the moon and sea what i sung, and so i sang some of my favourite songs that i hold a lot of sentiment towards. I started off quiet at first because it wasn’t something i did often, but then as the waves surged harder and the moon glowed orange i think it urged me to sing properly, and then i looked down and i saw bioluminescence.
i ran to get my family and brought them down to the water, and as the full moon shone red-orange above and the wind blew against my wet skin and my clothes became soaked and the cold water settled in my bones and the stars of the sea twinkled on my skin, i sang to the sea and i sang to the moon and i danced and danced until i felt sick and couldn’t dance anymore, and then i played with my siblings in the water and showed my mother how the washed up seagrass glowed when you shook it hard enough and for the first time ever, i think this is what it truly truly means to be a selkie. I’ve always wanted to perform in the full moon rites that my kind traditionally partake in to celebrate their existence and their creator, but i’d never really had the chance to until now.
There won’t be another blood moon like this until in two years time, and even then i doubt it’ll be the same, because tonight was so special and so incredibly meaningful to me that i doubt i’ll ever experience something like it again. These are the kinds of things that make me really believe that magic exists, and you just have to know how to find it.
tomorrow i will most likely be even sicker and i will be utterly and completely miserable, but it was all worth it for that half hour in the glittering water with the red moon above. I’ve finally started to truly connect with my selkie side, and i hope that i can do my own little rites every full moon.
I think the main reason for the low median age in the therian community is just that you have way too many immediate concerns to deal with when you're >25. So much is happening in/around our community right now that I want to be involved with, but unfortunately I have work, groceries, vet appointments, dishes, bank statements, laundry, old friends I need to schedule hangouts with, upcoming birthdays and family events, and the news that I need to keep up with. And after all that, I don't really have energy left over for heavy community discussions. If I don't wanna lose my mind, I need to spend my free time watching my shows, reading my books, and creating art.
It's.. interesting. I don't usually experience this shift, despite it being an Integral part of who I am and how I understand myself. I am a selkie but it's not an identity that usually affects me. Yet recently I've been feeling.. so much sorrow. I miss my pelt and it pains me not to know where it is, where it wound up. It's all I've been thinking about recently. Where my pelt might be. How I can regain my freedom of shape. This shape is so exhausting. I just want to answer the call of the waves. To return home.
Recently another wave of posts has cropped up complaining about therian-centrism and more specifically canine-centrism in the alterhuman community, and while this can be a real problem, I feel like a lot of posts complaining about it are... kind of missing the mark, to be honest.
Therian-centrism in the alterhuman community, and canine-centrism within that, is sometimes a real problem. You'll see posts marked as "for alterhumans" that are clearly actually just for therians, or community resources that seem to assume everyone viewing them will have paws and fur, or things like that. This can be genuinely grating, and kind of alienating for those getting subtly (or unsubtly) pushed out of our own words, and it absolutely is something to push back against.
But... a lot of the posts I'm seeing complaining about "therian-centrism" or "canine-centrism" are just complaining about there being a lot of posts about canine therian experiences. Fellas, that is not therian-centrism or canine-centrism. That's literally just people talking about their experiences. A lot of people in the community are canine therians, therefore a lot of experience posts are going to be about canine therian experiences. They're not excluding anyone or erasing anyone by just... existing and talking about their own experiences. I feel like we need to be careful, when talking about the real problem of community spaces and resources forgetting to account for experiences outside of the most common, to not start talking like people with those common experiences are wrong to discuss those experiences at all. Yes, it can sometimes be a little annoying to have so much of the otherkin or alterhuman or whatever community tag (or whatever space) be irrelevant to you - but those spaces are for those people too, and low-key implying that canine therians should shut up and stop talking about their experiences just because there's a lot of them is wrong and bad for the community. The annoyance is unfortunately just something you're gonna have to live with. Some experiences are always going to be more common than others, and thus you're going to hear about them more. There's nothing wrong with that, it just is.
In short,
Things that ARE therian-centrism/canine-centrism/whatever:
Community resources marked as "alterhuman" that only actually provide resources for therians and don't even acknowledge that alterhumans who aren't nonhuman exist
Surveys and polls marked as "alterhuman" that only contain questions relevant to therians, without a "N/A" option and without similar questions relevant only to other alterhuman identities and not therians
People misdefining "alterhuman" as "identifying as something nonhuman/an animal" and thus excluding everyone else
Resources like species dysphoria alleviation suggestion posts that are marketed as "for therians" but contain only suggestions clearly aimed at canines
People crosstagging their therian/canine specific posts with a bunch of irrelevant alterhuman tags (otherhearted, hearthome, archetrope, etc.) "for reach"
Things that ARE NOT therian-centrism/canine-centrism/whatever:
The alterhuman, otherkin, and therian tags having a lot of posts by therians/canines about their own experiences
Surveys and polls marked as "alterhuman" having questions relevant to only therians while still having an equal number of questions focused on only otherhearted people, only those with hearthomes, only archetropers, etc.
Resources specifically aimed at therians/canines existing
I think this is very informative and I appreciate the explanations.
I’m kinda iffy about like, removing ‘alterhuman’ tags from my posts bc… the experiences I have ARE alterhuman experiences, but I can understand. Maybe I’ll remove it from posts directly about me and my identity and leave it on general ones? But idk yet.
I haven’t seen a lot of this discourse yet but I’ve seen like one post. As a canine alterhuman (and a wolf one at that), it’s the same old thing of folks complaining about seeing ‘popular’ or ‘common’ ‘types (and lord knows I’m used to seeing it about wolves 💔💔)
I personally enjoy seeing and supporting rarer ‘types, but it doesn’t mean everyone should stop talking about their own experiences, no. That’s inherently harmful. Why are we silencing parts of our own community? Does this not just create future problems? And folks are free to post what they’d like on the internet (and even if it’s something bad, they’re also free to reap the consequences, but no one is harming anyone here by just innocently speaking about their personal experiences)
Look, if you annoyed with it, block the tags/content you don’t wanna see. That’s your prerogative. But trying to dictate what folks can/can’t do on their blog to match YOUR tastes is very… self-centered, I fear. Like huh???
When it comes to community resources we should be inclusive, yes. It is a problem I see and it makes me roll my eyes. If it is a sub community just for a certain ‘type, even if among many of your types, you’re a canine, don’t post about it in like, a community for birds or reptiles, y’know? Use common sense.
It’s also weird as a wolf seeing like, broadly ‘canine’ posts and it only applies to domestic ‘types. Like buddy there are so many wild canines, y’know? But that’s a discussion for a different day.
My point is: be inclusive when you mean to be inclusive. If it’s your experience?? Go nuts, go wild, have fun, be you, speak your truth.
Oh, I maybe should have been clearer - by "marked as alterhuman" I didn't mean in the alterhuman tags/marked as being part of alterhumanity. I meant, like, a resource list titled "Alterhuman Resources" or a survey titled "Alterhuman Demographics Survey" - something that's very clearly supposed to be for all alterhumans, that then is only actually inclusive of therians when you get past the title. The alterhuman tag (and other such public spaces) is for all alterhumans, absolutely.
