From Fiction: Metaphysical Fictionkin

Essays, information, and advice, for and about metaphysical fictionkin.. Fictionkin.org Fictional since 2006. Asks Always open

[fromfiction]

Important Links and Frequently Asked Questions

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What does someone mean when they say “I kin that character?”

Basic questioning guide

Questioning a Specific Source

On "Doubles"

Soulbonds vs RP muses

"Problematic" Kintypes

Visit our website Fictionkin.Org for easy to navigate access to a variety of arcticles on fictionkin and soulbonding topics

[fromfiction]

Sometimes humans say careless things that make you feel really, really bad about yourself as an alterhuman.

[fromfiction]

Talking about kin awakenings always feels very vulnerable. It feels like it leaves me open to being having my identity and understanding of my metaphysical existence picked apart by outsiders. I especially tend to avoid it when it's a "popular" source media, or one very in the public eye. Even though I've been in the community since 2006, any time I have a new awakening, I feel like "everyone's going to think I'm a poser" even though I know that's not true.

Well, I've been asked to talk about my most recent awakening. So I will.

Sometimes you can interact with a piece of media for a long time before you have a kintype awakening. Sometimes, I think, you just don't have the life experience, or metaphysical awareness, or understanding of yourself, to awaken yet.

I've played the Pokemon games since Pokemon Red and Blue on the gameboy. They have been a constant presence in my life since I was about 13 years old.

I used to joke with my partner that next lifetime, we'd be reincarnated in the Pokemon universe. We've had that joke together for years. It had been a 'joke' because it was something I'd always felt familiar with. Always felt a pull towards. But never quite connected with.

Last year, May 2025, I realized that I had already lived through Pokemon.

And it made a lot of sense, all of a sudden, why it never connected when I was 13, or 25. Why it took more than two decades of keeping Pokemon in my heart to find the answer of how it was a part of me.

On May 15th, I was thinking about something else. A different kintype. I was in a bit of a frenzy about it. Tuxedo Mask. (This is another kintype I keep to myself and don't talk about widely due to the sheer presense of it in pop culture). I was thinking about how he was a jewel thief, and how frustrated I was that this is downplayed, and written out of the anime.

I was thinking, feverishly, about stealing, and thievery, and crime, and how much I love it.

I was posting about it in fact.

And then I took a break, and I went to sit down.

And the old Team Rocket motto, the one from the games, not the TV show, popped into my head. And all of a sudden I felt so awake that I felt dizzy.

All of a sudden it just descended on my all it once.

I was Giovanni.

I knew it with a sudden unshakableness of being. But I was still hesitant to accept it. I took a few days. I let it settle. I turned it over. I slept on it.

It didn't go away.

It still hasn't gone away.

At this point I know it's not going to.

[gooplesswolf]

I will never EVER fakeclaim someone, but do you guys remember 2020-2023 when everyone was in their Therian craze and we were like “Okay, this is a serious belief and if you’re faking it you’ll be belittling us a lot” and now everyone’s like “I thought I was a Therian when I was a kid! Isn’t that so cringe?” “We all played animals as a kid, isn’t Therian just another word for that?” “I’m so glad that Therians don’t exist anymore”

It’s so exhausting being unashamedly nonhuman

[the-bar-sinister]

since I’m curious I wanted to know your thoughts on people self shipping with your kintypes. I kin characters too and personally am indifferent but I know some people hate it. Sorry if this is too invasive and please don’t feel pressured to answer, I’m legit just curious.

Haha... well, it's funny that you ask me, because I'm kind of hyper romantic and I often get a little crush on people who visibly self ship with my kintypes, do art of their s/i with me, etc 😆😅 I'm pretty sure this is not a common reaction. But i get a soft little thrill out of people who feel tenderly about my kintypes, and who want to be close to them.

Honestly I think its valid to feel any way about people self shipping with your kintypes - love it, hate it, indifferent, however you feel, it's okay. The only thing that's wrong is if you harass or antagonize or bother people over their self ships. My policy is always that your kintype doesn't give you the right to dictate what other people do in fandom. Same goes for fictives.

[the-bar-sinister]

Kinfeels will really have you crying at three lines of dialogue in a game for 8 year olds.

[hyprdeath]

computer how to deal with fictionkin yearning how to get rid of The Yearning. computer are you listening. computer What To Do

[canitity]

“Why’d you do that?” Please remember that I am using what I’ve seen in humans to mimic them

[fromfiction]

i do apologize in advance because this has probably been asked before, but would you have any advice on how to make your home feel more like.... home?

Granted I'm a fictive, so that probably has something to do with it-- but nothing ever really feels like it's mine 😅

Speaking as a fellow fictive, the first thing you need to do is negotiate- with your fellow system members/host, whoever you need to talk to- your way into being allowed to make an impact on your shared environment.

To feel like a home is your home, you have to add something to it. Pick out the shower curtain, or the bedsheets; buy decor or knickknacks and other things that you want in your space. Make decisions about what you have in the fridge.

The thing is, and this can be very frustrating, if you don't have any impact on your environment, it will always feel like it belongs to someone else.

[memories-of-forgotten-years]

[thetadelta]

Teenage therianthropy in the 2000's

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, not just lurking, 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. We were 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 really was at the time, but if 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 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.

[duckwithdeviousintent]

I wanna refresh my alterhuman knowledge, if you see this please feel free to yap and/or rant/vent about your alterhuman identity to me, I am accepting of all identities so please don’t be scared of judgement if you wanna share

[interstellarsystem]

Berserker/Absolute Shifts and Plurality

We've been seeing talk about berserker shifts on here lately and it's got us thinking. For those who don't know--berserker shifts are, in a way, a type of mental shift where you feel so much like your identitype that your mindset is entirely changed into theirs and your regular human brain rationale has been changed to match. We prefer "absolute" instead of "berserker" so we'll use that for the rest of this post.

Anyway, it's mainly used in older therian and otherkin spaces (with some criticism that's not relevant to this post)... but we've seen fictionfolk describe their experiences with that whole mindset shift as well recently, which wasn't something we thought about being a possibility before now.

Which led us to thinking... Is this a thing headmates like fictives and extranths get? I mean, if it's experienced at least once then it's a thing that can happen of course, so yes! But it's not really talked about from what we see--especially not in those terms. It's a vulnerable state to be in so it'd be understandable why it's rare to find talk of... But in our experience, it absolutely happens! It feels almost in the same sort of way that an emotional flashback might, with some added intensity and usually less traumatic origins. Maybe that's what other plurals use, if they even have a word for it?

Sometimes--though not often--we wake up in the morning and get completely disoriented because we feel like we're not where we're meant to be and our body is wrong, in a way deeper than regular dysphoria. A fictive will wake up in the front and for a little while, feel completely as if they were in their source and get very confused as to whose house they're in and why they're wearing the clothes they are. How did they get here? Where's their family? Their friends or partner(s)? Maybe they'll freak out that our body is different and wonder what happened to it, maybe they'll get up and move to get ready for work before realising that's not a thing we do. It happens in different ways but I think we would call those absolute shifts now that we've thought about it. More animalistic headmates of ours have had similar stuff on occasion but they're much more rare so we can't really speak too heavily on those.

It's most common when we just wake up but it happens at other times too. Shrapnel for example has had what he calls "memory flashbacks" where he'll remember a tiny bit about his life as Bakugo Katsuki, then for a few seconds after, he just feels like he's 100% his fictive identity and gets a bit concerned as to why he doesn't recognise his surroundings. He snaps out of it pretty quick but he's our main example and guy who experiences them.

We've known that shifting is not an exclusive thing to otherkin for ages. I mean hell, we see fictives and fictionkin as basically the same thing aside from origin (in most cases) and extranths and otherkin get the same sort of thing in our mind too. We don't see a huge reason to draw a big divide between them for us. And we know our headmates get phantom shifts and mental shifts of their identities all the time... But I guess we just never thought to attribute those flashback states to what is essentially an absolute shift.

We didn't really think we ever experienced one of those shifts until we leaned that yes, fictionfolk can get them and those things do pretty much count. Interesting to think about, and interesting to wonder if there's any other plurals out there who can relate.

[the-bar-sinister]

sinister, ive been recently realising i might be plural, but its kind of complicated because im fictionkin, so it just feels like all my headmates are just........ versions of vriska? like its like all of my headmates are vriskas. i was wondering how you experienced being plural and also fictionkin and if you had any advice on kinda dealing with the mix of both?

Plurality is a spectrum, and that spectrum often intersects with Fictionkinity when you're kin. This is honestly, pretty common. We've met a few systems who have more than one version of the same character as headmates.

Also, being familiar with the source material, 'a bunch of versions of this one homestuck character' is not an unexpected result when you're homestuck kin, tbh.

My advice if it's stressing you out would be to look into plurality spectrum terms and see what fits your system - facets, median, etc.

Our system has a Vriska, an Aranea, and a Mindfang who's a composite of Vriska and Aranea acting as a fusion!

Please feel free to follow up if you have more questions/are looking for more specific advice ^^

[director-yomi-hellsmile]

I wonder when people are gonna stop being nasty to fictionkin maybe

[tevallen]

im going to barf

[fromfiction]

hello, I'm a new copinglink.. I'm still a little confused and i have to ask this because i don't know where else to find the answer

If the creator of the fictional character i link to doesn't allow shipping do i have to follow the same boundaries?? What if i get a romantic partner? Am i just not allowed to have anything romantic as long as im still a copinglink?

You never have to listen to a creator who says they "don't allow" shipping. Ever.

That's not a boundary that a creator can reasonably make. That's an attempt at tyranny.

Fandom is not about what the creator wants, it's about fandom.

If the creator doesn't want to see shipping of their characters they can block the tags like everyone else.