crooked but upright

sideblog. 30, lion and/or cave lion therian with other alterhumanity feelings. also pig and primate-hearted. nonhuman anthropologist.

[talons-n-scales]

cave lion from prehistoric planet compared to neolithic cave lion art

[manymorph]

For me, being a paleotherian is as much about what is missing as what I feel. I can't look up videos or photos of my species; we died over 100 million years ago. My memory of the earth is a ghost; it lingers in the forests and floodplains of modern day but is misaligned, a little to the left. It's an unscratchable itch. Something about this earth is incongruent with how I remember, how I feel it should be - as beautiful as it is. Like an old friend who comes back changed; you still love them dearly but the memories drift out of sync with who they have become.

There is no longer any objective truth to be found about my species' behavior; we can not be studied except through old bones that never tell the complete story. There is speculation, and I am grateful for every advance science makes, but it will never be the same as being able to go out and study the natural behavior of, say, a modern wolf. I am an endling raised by humanity and I don't even know what I don't know. A chick that never learned to be a bird.

I have my instincts, another ghost that I carry with me, but I know some of those are likely flavored by the life I live now. Every raw feeling I have, every flash of memory and instinct, I treat as a priceless treasure. It's all my kind has now. I am a creature out of time and place, alive again in a world so painfully close to and different from my own.

[canislupuslatrans]

This might be kind of a hot take but I feel like the community has shifted away from identifying as animals to identifying with animals. I'm not a big fan of how many folks don't understand their own species behavior or know a lot about their species, it has led to me feeling very isolated around other canines due to how many of them don't present their species behavior (or even understand a single thing about how packs or canine behavior even works)

This is just my own personal take, but it feels weird to try to socialize with most folks in the community because most of the time its seen as "taking it too far" when you actually act as your species. (coughcough wolves are not friendly social creatures to strangers and can actually be quite shy, and growling is not always a form of aggression, on a similar note a wagging tail isn't always a sign of friendliness either)

Now, this isn't to say that those who don't show behaviors like their species are "faking it" (because thats a whole load of shit), it just feels like the community has gotten a lot more anthropomorphized (or humanized) from when I first discovered it

[thetadelta]

My suspicion is that this is exactly why more and more people who don't seem to actually physically identify as their theriotype have been using labels like "holothere". A lot of mainstream "therian" content has gotten focused on activities/aesthetics that aren't inherent to therianthropy– like masks and quads– so people who have intense animal instincts and phantom shifts (which are very normal and common!) feel alienated and need to assert that, no, they're really an animal. Which has lead to terms like "physical therian" getting watered down and misused.

The TikTok "therian" culture seems like it's largely to blame for this, but it's also a side effect of people moving from forums to public social media platforms. It isn't really possible to post on social media about genuinely "weird" experiences without the risk of bad actors seeing it and harassing you, so people (intentionally or not) downplay or cute-ify their experiences to make them more palatable for a public audience. It's part of the same trend as people self-censoring swears when there isn't actually any evidence that that has any effect– there's been an increasing push toward toning down anything someone might find objectionable, to the point where I don't think most people realize they're doing it. And people doing that leads to outsiders seeing "therian" stuff and going "that looks like fun! I want to do that!" because there aren't any immediately available resources to explain to them that therianthropy isn't a roleplaying trend– which is how we've ended up with people on TikTok saying stuff like "therians don't really think they're animals".

People co-opting community terms, toning them down, and calling the original community "taking it too far" happened already with fictionkin, and it seems like therians are next. The best thing we can do is to just hold the line, correct misinformation, and keep being loudly authentic.

EDIT: And to be clear I am the number one encourager of having fun and being silly with your theriotype! I do it constantly! There's just a difference between that and having fun with the aesthetic of an animal you don't actually know much about. If you identify as something it's a baseline respect to yourself and to that animal to know basic facts about it. It's also a baseline level of respect to accept that others in the community will experience therianthropy differently than you.

[thetadelta]

Thinking about this more, and I feel like this is also the result of an overcorrection in response to the old grilling/fakeclaiming culture that used to define the therian community. People used to oppressively gatekeep therianthropy and most of us got sick of it, but because of that community history I think a lot of people now have the idea that encouraging someone to do more introspection or suggesting that they might be misattributing their experiences to the wrong animal/creature is "invalidating" someone's identity instead of a good-faith attempt to help them feel more self-actualized and confident.

The whole questioning process seems to have fallen by the wayside in a lot of places, so you get people who, for example, feel a canine-shaped tail or a connection to werewolves and immediately go "I'm a wolf!" without considering other options, and nobody encourages them to question that assumption because they're worried about coming across as gatekeeping– even though that person would be happier and more secure in their identity if they took the time to introspect and learn about other animals before settling on something.

"You can be whatever you want forever" is a mostly true statement, but self-discovery is a long and personal process, and I absolutely believe that other people asking you (polite, good-faith) questions like "so why do you think you're X and not Y?" is a helpful bordering on necessary part of that process. Helping people figure out what they are used to be half of what we socialized about in the community! It's how we shared experiences and bonded and welcomed people! But I feel like now, asking questions like "you seem to act a lot like a dog, so what lead you to identify as a wolf and not another type of canid?" is often seen as rude or as an attempt to invalidate that person's identity. And it shouldn't be! Answering questions like that is how other people learn about what therianthropy is like for you, and if you're secure in your identity being asked these things won't make you feel defensive or invalidated, they'll make you excited to talk about your experiences with others. "I express my wolf theriotype in a doglike way because I was raised by humans like dogs are" is a perfectly valid and interesting answer to that question, for example.

Too much questioning is bad, but so is too little questioning. I would love to see more introspection posts by newer, questioning community members. Seeing and helping other people do self-discovery used to be my favorite part of being here!

[cloverwood]

NEW ZINE!!!!

for oceaniccourt's alterhuman minizine jam! i didn't rly follow a specific prompt i was kinda just immediately brain blasted with this concept but I suppose it can fall under a (partial) description of my fairy identity. In this case specifically about how it formed slowly over millennia, alongside life on earth.

I may leave it there in regards to breaking down the meaning of the zine, I was considering delving deeper into it and I may return to do so at a future date (esp if ppl are interested). But because this can kinda have multiple meanings on top of that I'm happy to let it speak for itself for now. But it was nice exploring this part of myself without flinching, as I find i've been struggling to accept this side of my identity.

I don't have a printable version unfortunately as I had to glue come pages together bc of some structural accidents but if ppl are interested i may be able to cobble one together with the individual scans. Also this is 100% traditional collage I used images and text from some old national geographics, some nat geo kids and some misc home and garden mags. I tried to find image credits where i could in the nat geos which are at the end!

enjoy and thank u for reading!

[sealfaring]

I was raised by a bear therian

Well, my dad never said himself that he's a bear therian, but even without the word "therian" being used, his experience as one was undeniable and incredibly clear to me. He spent much of my childhood talking about his dreams of Alaska, how the land there felt like home to him more than anywhere else on Earth. So much so that when the military asked him if he was willing to move North into Alaska, he immediately jumped at the opportunity and spent several years of his life living in Fairbanks back when the weather was still frigid and sometimes volatile. He camped in the wilderness regularly and would tell me stories of caribou surrounding his tent in the mornings, large grizzlies wandering through the rivers, and scraggly wolves with summer pelts trotting across the land. His job handling search and recovery cases at the time encouraged this lifestyle, especially in winter when people would go missing on the roads or crash their bush planes in the woods and he had to find the deceased and bring them back to civilization. Funny enough, he confessed to having a search and recovery team come and look for him at one point after he got carried away and stayed out in the forest for a little too long, deciding to ride the river near him a few miles away just as a "fun idea" and scared my mother into thinking he died out there.

I wasn't alive yet when my dad lived in Alaska though. I had my dad shortly after he had left, and I saw how much he missed it even at a young age. I honestly visited the state so often with him that you'd assume I had family there, but to him, maybe the Northern animals were family. I complained about it back then since I'd be wearing puffy coats and winter accessories in the middle of summer when everyone else was going to Hawaii or Mexico, but I saw how happy he was whenever he'd have a wild caught salmon for dinner or get to walk close to a glacier. When he'd see icebergs in the water from boat tours he'd be sitting entirely outside on the deck during or, most importantly, the day he finally got a chance to visit Admiralty Island (better known as "Fortress of the Bear"). It had always been his dream to go and as he sat there at ease in the tall grass fields watching the giant brown bears graze the fields a mile away. He had a look on his face as if he was meant to be there forever, that he was never supposed to leave. It was hard to not gain a fondness for the place with how much he loved it, and my dad would even tell my sister and I that the remote wilderness of Alaska is where he wants his ashes to one day be placed. Inevitably, I'll be going back again one day to the "final frontier" for him to finally be able to stay there forever like he wanted.

When he wasn't in Alaska, he was at home with me in Colorado taking me on adventures in the Rocky mountains. He was an avid fish lover, always packing salmon, halibut, or a tuna sandwich. I don't think he ate much else when I was a kid, and before my fish allergy developed, that was pretty much my diet too. I think he honestly was disappointed when I wasn't able to eat fish anymore, lamenting on the fact that I never got to have another Alaskan salmon or try a smoked fish. Every time his back would get itchy, he'd scratch it by using the corner between the doorway and the wall, very reminiscent of a bear using a tree to get some unreachable spot which I laughed about to which he'd shrug and say "it's an instinct I guess". Dessert always had to have honey in it, but if honey wasn't available, it had to be something with pumpkin or berries. Pumpkin pie, berry pie, and pumpkin ice cream were his favorites and his birthday dinners usually involved one of the three instead of cake. He often watched bear documentaries with me too, namely one I remember about someone who was the "Grizzly Man" who lived mostly in the wild and met his end to the very bears he spent his life around and I also remember him enjoying Never Cry Wolf, a 1983 film set in Alaska's remote North as well. It inspired him to apply for the ticket lottery every year for over a decade to try and win a trip to Katmai to see the bears during the salmon run, which he inconveniently won when he was literally already in Alaska and about to head back home. Needless to say, his irritated groans and pouts weren't forgotten on the plane back to Colorado.

My mom was mostly absent from my life in the sense that she played no healthy or genuine part in raising me despite being under the same roof due to her relentless addictions, so I do feel as if my childhood was mostly defined by being my dad's "bear cub". He loved animals and taught me to respect them and nature tremendously, and his "abnormal" behaviors became something I now recognize as something I resonate with as a grown otter therian. I sometimes wonder if he raised me into otterhood and if I would still be a therian without his influence, or if my otterhood is something of a "family trait" given that my older sister strikes me as a bird therian in many ways too, but I find it amusing to consider that there are so many animalistic individuals in my family who could fall under the alterhuman umbrella, and yet have never uttered the word "therian" in their lives. I'm curious how many other people in the world are just like me and simply never wanted to label it or explore it deeper, or worse, how many people have had it shunned into the depths of themselves to be forgotten about? I for one am grateful that I can call myself nonhuman and live a life understanding why I am the way that I am, even if I'm unsure of the source.

[questions-within-questions]

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.

[permanenteclipse]

Yknow nonhumanity can be mundane too. Not all nonhuman instinct euphoria is like "seeing wild prey somewhere deep in the forest put me in a hawk mindset" sometimes it's like "snatching the good table at the library quicker than the 20 other people waiting for it put me in a hawk mindset"

[oleksiignievyshev]

My new portrait “Curly Lioness” from the Therians series.

oil on canvas 100x80 cm

Thank you for the inspiration!

[p-atrox]

getting whisker shifts is wild. doesn't happen very often but when it does it's always a cool sensation.

[lylethelion]

Twitching and swaying my foot/leg like a cat tail

[oleksiignievyshev]

My new painting "Tora"

Oil on canvas

80x100 cm

Thank you for your support!

[p-atrox]

WAIT, a fellow cave lion (and/or lion) therian?! I thought I was the only one haha! Glad I was wrong :)

!!! hello fellow cave lion!! i've seen a decent amount of other lions here but i don't think i've ever seen another cave lion either, now there's at least two of us! :0

[grasslandschant]

i need to be patrolling my territory (walking around the block) more

[tigerwires]

oh how i long to feel the thrill of the hunt

[tigerwires]

[seawolfed]

“Who is this body for?”

Species dysphoria feels like waking up in a body built to the wrong blueprint - these hands moving at the ends of your arms like strange, overarticulated tools.

Every gesture feels slightly off-balance, every touch too sharp or too precise, as if the world expects you to navigate it with instruments you were never meant to wield. Each time the feeling hits it always comes back to these hands…

Finally got around to finishing this painting. I feel like I’m getting closer to how I want my art to look and feel 🐾

[inatcats]

Southern Lion (Panthera leo ssp. melanochaita)

Observed by microbin_, CC BY-NC