Ob.liv.i.on @lycan-dreams - Tumblr Blog

I honestly find it a bit of a red herring to search for childhood memories to corroborate your current identity. Most kids played dog when they were young, most kids have found themselves fascinated by a certain animal, most kids have preferred one animal over another, etcetera, etcetera.

All those experiences can have affected or informed the person you are today, and they can be an important part of a full narrative, but they are not what make you a therian today. What makes you a therian is not something that happened years or decades ago. What makes your identity a solid part of you is what you experience right now.

All too often on therian forums I’ve seen introduction posts that go over past experiences which are largely irrelevant to your current questioning process. Your theriotype is what you are right now. The validity of your identity should not be judged based on the number of times you pretended to be it in kindergarten. Your theriotype should be determined based on your current experiences.

Looking back on your childhood and trying to piece together how your identity formed should always be secondary to what you are going through right now. It pains me how many forums will treat childhood memories as ‘evidence’ that an identity is valid, or how they will even treat newcomers as downright suspicious or ‘fake’ if their identity is based solely on current feelings.

It’s also all too easy to draw lines between current identity and childhood experiences, and to craft a subjective narrative that objectively isn’t really there. Like, I could very easily create connection between obsessively watching the animated Robin Hood movie → Pretending to be a carnivore → Looking up furry art as a preteen → Stumbling onto anthro hyenas → Subconsciously tying anthro hyenas to my identity. But creating these narratives feels so artificial and doesn’t actually do anything to describe my current identity.

Feeling pressured into validating your identity with childhood memories is a red herring, distracting you from the current experiences that your identity is actually based on.

antler-ears

Having cameo shifts is wild because you'll be very used to your regular shifts weaving their way throughout your every day experience and then BAM something completely different

lycan-dreams

For sure! I've had sabertooth tiger shifts before and they were just...out of nowhere? Then haven't really come back.

antler-ears

Exactly!! They come and go so strangely- Ursa in the replies mentioned watching documentaries and oh gosh, heaven forbid I watch an animal centric documentary because I'll be shifting that critter for the next day and a half

lycan-dreams

I can relate to that 100%!

#talon barks

antler-ears

Having cameo shifts is wild because you'll be very used to your regular shifts weaving their way throughout your every day experience and then BAM something completely different

lycan-dreams

For sure! I've had sabertooth tiger shifts before and they were just...out of nowhere? Then haven't really come back.

#talon barks

wolfsheart-blog

Wolf by Ken Jenkins Photography.

#kin

burningmine-deactivated20230217

Tiger Mountain, May 2020

#home

who-is-page

Otherkin comic I did during OtherCon and never got around to posting!

♠️ Art Twitter - Personal Twitter - Ko-Fi ♠️

#this is so awesome #info

te5seract

peaceful morning, upright & lookout by Andy Kennelly

#kith

normal-horoscopes

i am literally terrified now but, what are snapewives?

A GROUP OF PEOPLE WHO BELIEVED THAT JK ROWLING WAS ACTUALLY A PROPHET CHANNELING THE DIVINE WILL OF AN ARCHETYPICAL BEING NAMED SEVERUS SNAPE

normal-horoscopes

THEY WERE A PRECUSOR TO THEOLOGICAL OTHERKIN

demon-xuan

Caretaker, you’re usually pretty good with this, but I genuinely want to know where you learned this. I will freely admit I don’t know much about the Snapewives, that was a part of fandom history I never cared to research, but I do research otherkin history quite a bit, and if the Snapewives had anything to do with the otherkin and fictionkin communities, I’m pretty sure I would know about it.

In the interest of researching a link that I’m rather certain never actually existed, I’d like to know where you got that information.

The modern otherkin and fictionkin communites were started by mailing lists in the ‘70s by a couple of groups known as The Elf Queen’s Daughters and the Silver Elves, as documented best by Orion Scribner. The Snapewives, which came later in the early/mid 2000s, would have happened during the LJ era of otherkin, which was already in full swing and had been for thirty years.

So I genuinely don’t know how the Snapewives could have had anything to do with it, considering otherkin as we know the community had already been around for a few decades.

If you’ve got sources, I’d love to have them, so I can update the historians I know about it.

who-is-page

And in addition to that, “theological otherkin” isn’t a term utilized by either religious studies academics referring to aspects of the otherkin community, nor by alterhuman groups referring to themelves, either– it’s, for lack of a better way to put it, an entirely redundant term given that spiritual otherkin who are part of established/organized religions and who view their otherkinity through such a lens are often inherently theological (and are usually not so separate from the rest of the spiritual otherkin community in how they are otherkin to need such a separate, defining term). It’s also a misleading term, given it implies that otherkin utilize their otherkinity more as a belief system than an identity, something which is entirely false.

Given that the Snapewives didn’t come around until early/mid 2000s, there is absolutely no way that they were a precursor to the otherkin who view theology through an alterhuman lens. The Snapewives aren’t even considered alterhuman-adjacent; a human channeling what would be another human, wizard or otherwise, would be well outside of definitions and realms of otherkinity; but even if they were, the discussions going on in the early were community on alt.horror.werewolves after it’s creation in late 1992 and popularity up until the early 2000′s easily proves that that timeline in no way matches up. And this isn’t even touching on the dozens of smaller, more niche otherkin communities that most likely tackled similar topics on occasions, and that also existed prior to the Snapewives.

The only parts of the community that I, personally, can think of as formally establishing themselves at around the early/mid 2000′s when this would be happening would be, ironically, psychological otherkin– but, that implies that they never existed at all in the community, which also isn’t true; it’s more to say that the arguments of “is otherkin only a spiritual identity or is it not” particularly became controversial at around this time– and fictionkin as we know it today. But, once again, the otherkin community traces its roots back to what we could easily define as fictionkin or very, very much fictionkin adjacent roots, so, that still doesn’t really work. And neither of those parts of the otherkin community have had any sort of significant, nor documented, after-affects from the Snapewives, either way.

For as complete a document as we have on the otherkin community’s historical timeline, I would second the recommendation of Mx. Scribner’s unabridged Otherkin Timeline. It’s 109 pages long and documents the history of the otherkin community from 1972 to 2011. [link]

#info