@ghostish - Tumblr Blog

blog was originally made for a headmate that is now dormant, so it’s currently a collective sideblog for aesthetics.

header. body is 18. main is @echidnana.

blog is not trigger tagged, which means untagged blood, religion, and unreality. if that sounds like it’ll bother you, please don’t follow.

girlytips

abyssofburningmemories

#no id #logan

mangacapsaicin

katsuhiro otomo & takumi nagayasu’s the legend of mother sarah || 大友克洋とながやす巧の『沙流羅』

mindblownie

eternalwormdevouringconneticut

[ID: A compilation of nine images. The first is of a deer in green on black. The secons is a green skull with a yellow background on white. The third is of a white glowing figure in an overgrown forest. The fourth is a black silhouette rising against a yellow background with a tree. The fifth is a painting of a lone, red faced child in front of a green home. The sixth is of bare trees in yellow skies. The seventh is of grassy hills. The ninth is a body covered in grass. The final image is a quote reading, “his gilded blood. Beneath my feet were the bones of a thousand years. I thought: I cannot bear this world a moment longer. Then, child, make another.”/End ID.]

yan-wo

In the late 30s, photographer Josef Breitenbach and botanist René Devaux managed to take photographs of the molecules of odours.

heavensghost

home

the-wolf-and-moon

NGC 6357, Stardust Cathedral

the-wolf-and-moon

Hind’s Nebula

space-pics

Flame Nebula by NASA Hubble

latragedia7-deactivated20220727

A cover for Hustle and Drone’s single "Stranger" by Julia Soboleva

lionfloss

by gianifdp

a-dragons-journal

A handful of things I just want to say and forgive me if it sounds like I’m vagueposting anyone in specific I’ve just seen these things said in a number of places by a number of different people today and I honestly cannot find a good singular post to respond to with all of them in one place:

1) If your response to people not liking “kinning for fun” is “stop policing how other people understand their identity,” you have fundamentally misunderstood the problem. The entire problem is that it’s NOT their identity, and they’re explicitly stating that. Policing how other people understand their identity would be telling them that if they have more than [x] number of kintypes they’re not serious about it, or if they “don’t take it seriously enough” they’re not ~really~ ‘kin, not “hey if you’re explicitly saying you don’t actually identify as the thing in any way, why are you using the word that means you identify as the thing in some way”. (And don’t get me wrong - the former definitely exists, but it’s not what the KFF argument is about. That’s a separate argument entirely (and it is shitty and gatekeepy to arbitrarily decide that someone who is telling you they actually do identify as something actually doesn’t do it seriously enough for you) and I am a little tired of people conflating the two, honestly.)

2) “people find out they’re otherkin through roleplay a lot, so “kinning for fun” in that sense is okay and valid” - the former statement is true, but it doesn’t actually support the latter imo. Roleplay is great, and people absolutely explore identity using it a lot - but that doesn’t mean it’s the same thing as identity. Someone playing a character of a different gender in D&D might be a step in them figuring out they’re trans, and it may even be a sign that they’re trans, but it doesn’t inherently make them trans and it would be kind of insulting (and just. objectively incorrect) to call it “transing”, y’feel?

3) One of the biggest differences between, like, queer exclusionism and syscourse versus this whole thing (since I keep seeing this comparison occasionally), even ignoring the whole “nowhere is anyone telling KFF they’re wrong about their own experiences, just that the actual word they’re using is Not It” aspect, is that exclusionism is driving people out of spaces and communities they’ve historically been a part of. As far as I am aware, and please correct me if I am wrong here, otherkinity has always and exclusively been about being your kintype - people who just relate to a thing have, as far as I have ever seen in all my reading, never been a part of it. It’s not people suddenly being shoved out of a community they’ve historically been a part of, it’s outsiders trying to shoehorn themselves into words that were never meant to describe their experiences and getting mad when they’re told “hey, that’s not what that actually means.” (At risk of a controversial comparison here, it’s not m-spec lesbians suddenly being pushed out of the word “lesbian” because they don’t fit an increasingly narrowing label even though they were historically a part of it, it’s white people trying to insist that they’re “smudging” and that the spirits they’re interacting with are their “totem animals” even when they’re being repeatedly told by Native people that no, you have misunderstood what those words mean, stop misusing them that way, please use these other words that actually mean what you are describing instead. Obviously with a little less weight courtesy of the history tied in with cultural appropriation, but like - you get my point.)

There has to be a point at which a community is allowed to go “hey, you’re not allowed to try and force the word we created to describe a specific phenomenon to include a hundred other things that have very little in common with that specific phenomenon, or it becomes impossible for us to actually talk about our own experiences clearly because suddenly words mean borderline nothing.” I am all about inclusion, but words have to mean something or why do we have them at all? There are at this point literally dozens of other words for the things “kinning for fun” is supposed to mean - there are not other words for actually being nonhuman, which is the entire reason we created these words to begin with. If you want an umbrella term to cover all these things, that’s what “alterhuman” is for - we seriously do not need to be trying to force “otherkin” to be the umbrella term “alterhuman” was always supposed to be.

scarsmood-deactivated20240624

(Hopeless rambling)

So heres my curiosity at this point. We know theres a sizeable barrier for new otherkin. What do we do to help them? I’m getting a lot of people who are new but feel invalid and struggle to grasp their identity.

I think you have a good point and really sitting down and mapping it out even if we did make otherkin the umbrella term it wont stop this invalid feeling. Im not even sure how much itd fix. Because it just doesn’t solve this cultural rift between the new and old age otherkin people. Theres a sizeable demographic that ID as kff because the otherkin community is to cut throat for them.

Im just not sure what’s left to do. Im not sure what we can do. I made this blog to help try and counter some of the stiffness otherkinity has with it. So people feel more included.

Are we just in silent agreement to say fuck em? If they cant figure it out well thats how it goes? Even though half my friends are people who almost gave up on it? Like this isnt a small population that struggles understanding and adjusting to our culture. I’m struggling to find a solution. I dunno. I’m just going to keep this in the back of my mind until i find something that works.

a-dragons-journal

Honestly? I feel like making the community more welcoming to newbies and more welcoming to “weird” identities does not in any way need to be tied to validating KFF as a “valid” definition of otherkin. It’s absolutely something that needs to be worked on, we’re in complete agreement on that, it’s just a question of how exactly.

Gatekeeping is absolutely a problem. People get gatekept for all sorts of reasons in various parts of the community:

Fictionkin whose fictotypes are too popular, or too memey, or too weird, or too troll-ish

People who have too many kintypes

People who don’t know all the right language (and maybe don’t care to learn it, or just can’t remember it all) - this can range from stuff like using “kintypes” instead of “kins” to specific scripts of how you awakened that are the standard for “valid”, depending where you look

People who don’t want to do a ton of introspection and serious writing, and just want to live as their kintype in the moment and have fun with it

Objectkin, conceptkin, phytanthropes

People who chose their kintypes or have some element of voluntarity to their otherkinity, or who can’t figure out whether it’s “voluntary” or “involuntary” because the line between those things is blurry for them

People for whom the line between “identify as” and “identify with/relate to” is blurry and hard to define, and who therefore can’t figure out which they fall into and if they’re “identify-as enough” to “count”

People who aren’t immediately sure of their kintype(s) and spend a long time questioning

People who knew “too fast” and didn’t spend “enough” time questioning

Etc., etc.

We can make the push to be more accepting and inclusive of these things without making the push all the way to accepting people who don’t actually identify as their “kins” at all, in any way, in my opinion. We can de-prioritize “seriousness” as our community has defined it - questioning for [x] amount of time, in [y] specific manner; using the “correct” language instead of figuring out how to put things in your own words even if they’re not the typical ones; doing a certain amount of serious writing; etc. We can push acknowledging and welcoming all kintypes, whether or not we specifically understand them. We can start encouraging solidarity with other nonhumans (and fictionkin) over nitpicking things like voluntarity and origin and whatnot. We can make introduction pages that don’t list out a thousand terms and make it sound like you need to memorize all of them and figure out exactly which nitpicked box you fit into best to belong - in fact, that might be a worthy project for me to start right now, honestly.

None of that requires ceding ground to the idea that “otherkin” needs to expand beyond the borders of the identify-as term it’s always been. In fact, in my experience over the last five years, we’ve already been moving that direction on pretty much all those points - we’ve definitely got a ways to go yet, and some spaces are definitely lagging behind, as it were, but we are already moving that way, and the momentum is only picking up. There’s hope yet for that.