Janaina Medeiros
JBB: An Artblog!
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Today's Document
almost home
ē„ę„ / Permanent Vacation
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
Jules of Nature
Origami Around
DEAR READER
Aqua Utopiaļ½ęµ·ć®åŗć§čØę¶ćē“”ć
tumblr dot com
romaā
ellievsbear
Keni
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Cosmic Funnies
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
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@pumastuffs
āHalf formed in the wrong shapeā
Lately Iāve been focusing more on personal artwork pertaining to my emotions and experience as an alterhuman. Though I write from time to time, I find it much more natural to depict these emotions in visual form rather than with words.
Lady helping me at DPS asked if the picture was okay, and I had to resist the urge to tell her that my human form is always weird to see. Opted for the olā āall license pictures never turn out goodā statement instead.
I dreamed our community was actually somewhat hierarchical and we had a rank above greymuzzle, which was called "grandkin," and it was anyone over the age of 80
My new painting!
Portrait "Amethyst"
oil on canvas 100x80 cm
Normalize bunting as a love language
Lions will often greet each other with this head bunting behavior when returning to a pride after a hunt.
I love doing this to my mom, I feel so happy!
And my kitten does this to me, I do this to him; the harmony.
BuntingĀ is a form ofĀ animal behavior, often found inĀ felids, in which the animal butts or rubs its head against other things, including people. Bunting as a behaviour can be viewed as a variation ofĀ scent rubbing.
[Image IDs: Two photos of felines affectionately bonking heads. The first photo is of a male and female lion, the second is of two domestic cats. End ID]
Am I a Therian? [A Greymuzzle's Insight]
"Am I a Therian?" you ask with a quizzical expression.
"I like bathing in the sun. I hate taking baths. I'm highly active at 3am," you explain, and so you conclude, "I must be a cat therian!"
Why?
Don't humans also like sitting in warm sunlight? Don't some humans hate the sensation of baths? Aren't some humans more active at night than at day?
Aren't those normal human behaviors?
"I like to howl, bark, and growl! I like to dig in the dirt and play tug-a-war!" you shout excitedly, and so you conclude, "I must be a dog therian!"
Why?
Don't humans also like to be vocal; shouting, hollering, and yelping? Don't some humans love digging in the dirt to see what's beneath? Do you not see the kids playing tug-a-war? Aren't those normal human behaviors?
"But..." you pause and you think. You finally state, "I feel a call to Nature. I feel at home among the trees, when my bare feet touch the Earth. I feel a pain in my heart when looking at my body, like it doesn't feel right. Surely that means I'm a Therian."
Why?
Aren't there humans who feel a call to Nature? Who live by themselves in the woods? Aren't there humans who also feel like something is missing with themselves?
Aren't those normal human behaviors?
"Then how do I know if I'm a Therian?"
Why... are you asking me?
You clearly know yourself better than I do. You have already given so many reasons as to why you must be a Therian, right? So why ask me what you are?
"Cause you're a Therian, too, aren't you?" you ask.
"I am," comes the answer.
"So then tell me," you urge with impatience. "Am I a Therian?"
"I can not tell you," comes another answer. "Because I do not know. I do not know your identity. I do not know what bristles beneath your skin or echoes in your heart."
There are no set rules to define someone who is a Therian. There is no checklist to go through to determine who is a Therian. There are no guidelines to follow under to know who is a Therian.
"Are you an animal?" comes the question. "Are you, in any sense or form, an animal?"
You pause. And you think.
You already know the answer.
"I am an animal."
Then congratulations.
You're a Therian.
iām always daydreaming about my future home and how i would decorate it but mostly iām excited about building a healthy home with someone i love
Monument Valley, Utah by Radek Skrzypczak
i will always be a fan of people describing themselves however they want, do not take this as me shitting on any label in any way.
i do think that it is very telling how i see a lot of folks saying that they have "outgrown" the therian label and taken up holothere instead, saying that it feels more real and legitimate.
something about it wigs me out. and i think that it has to do with perceived seriousness and a bid for legitimacy. linguistic shift is normal and expected, it's not like this is really avoidable. but the difference between holothere and therian is not the same as therianthropy vs. therianism.
therianthropy vs. therianism is really just people using the wrong term. it's not intentional. it's what happens when "therianthrope" has been shortened so much that the original tenses and forms of the word are just forgotten. it's an arguably pretty normal linguistical shift. im a little annoyed by it, mind you. "therianthrope" and "therianthropy" are some kickass words that I think should be used more. but i can't really be shocked or even upset that it's happened.
holothere is different. while the coining of the word + the way many use it can be very genuine, there is undoubtedly a growing population that uses it because of its perceived to be more serious than therian. it's adopted as a way to been seen as a more legitimate identity. and i can't really be mad at that, either. to say that therian has lost some of its.... idk.... power? due to it being picked up by certain demographics is not wrong. like there is nothing in the reasoning or the desire that is bad or wrong with any of this.
but it does make me a bit squemish, I think? Because it introduces therianthropy as something lesser within the community. You have an internal conflict with legitimacy, here. And it's based off the label you use. In the past, the community has negotiated legitimacy through grilling. And I am not calling for a return to grilling, I don't think it was a great thing, but... it is something I'm noticing.
How we are changing the way we assert our identity's seriousness is now based off of the initial words we use, as opposed to the understanding of that word.
I could talk more about this. as I said before, this is not an attempt to convince anyone to stop using holothere. I know it has a lot of differences to it and it's deeper to most people. I'm not going to sit here and try to combat this very natural shift in behavior. This is just something I've noticed in the way people talk about the term. It's 7:51 am, I have a final exam at 8:00. So I will be going now. But I would love to hear if anyone has more thoughts on this. I will probably come back around and amend some of what I've said here, I've only been thinking about this topic specifically for like. 15 mins. Give me a day and I'll figure out how to say this a better way.
Personally my biggest issue with the holothere thing is that it's based largely on misinformationā people appear to be using it because they think that experiences like intense phantom and mental shifts mean they're a physical therian, which is emphatically not the case. I think the very vague definition of holothere ("nonhuman in every way") is partially to blame for this, because newcomers to the community with intense experiences read that and go "of course that's me, I'm not human at all", but the "every way" explicitly incudes the belief that one's physical body is literally nonhuman. Physical identity isn't "I feel limbs that aren't there" or "I conceptualize myself as nonhuman" (which are standard therian experiences), it's "I literally have a nonhuman body right now".
Physical identity has recently usurped spiritual identity as the "most real" in people's mental hierarchy, so there's a social pressure to say you have a physical identity even if you don'tā and it's easy to use phantom shifts to justify that if you're coming from TikTok and don't know that most therians have them, or if you feel like you won't be taken seriously otherwise. It's watered down both therian and holothere/physical therian as terms because the difference between them has been reduced to Vibes when there is actually a very specific distinction (the "physical" part is literal).
As I've said before, the current situation with therianthropy is very reminiscent of what happened with fictionkin in the 2010's, and if things go the same way (which they likely will, online trends die out but communities persevere even if they get fragmented) we are not going to lose the legitimacy of "therian" as a term, and we should be fighting to make sure it stays a serious, well-defined wordā not abandoning it because we're worried about being associated with roleplayers on TikTok. We will always be associated with roleplayers and furries by outsiders, if it was avoidable we'd have figured out how by now.
Oh the other thing I wanted to say about this is that stuff like "linguistic shift is normal" only applies if the people in question are the ones responsible for the change! Currently what's happening is that the word therian is being appropriated by people outside the community, which is entirely different from if therians themselves suddenly decided to water down their own term.
"Language changes" was actually one of the biggest arguments KFFers used to justify their appropriation of the word "otherkin", and I'm not about to let people think that ceding a decades-old community to a social media trend is a reasonable and justified thing to do.
The language is ours, it only changes if we want it to.
āWho is this body for?ā
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 handsā¦
Finally got around to finishing this painting. I feel like Iām getting closer to how I want my art to look and feel š¾
[Image description: Painting of a coastal wolf curled loosely in on themself and looking over their fore legs which end in human hands. The canine is bordered by twining branches. End description.]
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
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 therianthropyā like masks and quadsā 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 effectā 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 trendā 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.
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 gatekeepingā 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!
Decided to go ahead and create an interest form to see if this project is even possible. Please reblog, especially if you are interested
What is the project? It is an idea to create a published book anthology of alterhuman short stories, poetry, etc. I will also be looking for artists for page illustrations and covers
This is not a guarantee you will get in or that the project is currently launching, it is simply to gather interest to see if the project ca
CW for hunting, consuming meat, animal death I do not typically eat meat from restaurants, fast food, or grocery stores. I procure the meat my family and I eats through taking the animal myself.
There are several reasons for this, the first being that I am physically able to hunt and I don't ever take this for granted.
2. Hunting is honest and practical. You either read the situation correctly and succeed or you don't, and you leave with nothing to show for it. However, a single successful deer hunt can feed myself and my family for months and for a fraction of the cost. It is more economical for me, thanks to the fact that I have access to relatively nearby public lands where I can hunt small game like rabbits and hares, and deer during their respective seasons.
3. I am directly accountable for the kill, there is no distance between me and the reality of what taking an animal's life means. There is no insulation from the reality of how the meat got to my hands and no distance to make consuming it easier, and certainly no outsourcing the uncomfortable parts. I see the animal, I make a decision, and I am responsible for the outcome. Because of that weight, I waste nothing and am deeply interested in conservation.
4. The animal I hunt lived a completely wild life engaging in natural behavior, natural diet, and natural social existence up until the end. That stands in stark contrast to the conditions most commercially raised animals experience, even in relatively humane operations.
5. it gives me a complete skill set. Reading terrain, tracking, patience, fieldcraft, marksmanship, and eventually processing the animal. The grocery store removes all of that. I am just left with the end product and removed from everything that produced it.
6. Providing for my pack is a responsibility I choose to take seriously. I go out, I apply real skills, I face genuine uncertainty, I succeed, and then the people I love most eat because of what I did. Hunting benefits those that matter most.
7. There is coherence. Given my wolf identity, hunting my own food aligns with my values, my actions, and my sense of self. What I believe, what I do, and who I am all point in the same direction while hunting.
I think alot of therians have a tendency to go to extremes in their gear and get stuck in cycles of wanting either permanent body mods or external accessories. Every so often, I like to do henna tattoos on my front and hind paws, just to show others what I can see, without it crossing the lines into being completely obvious. I like the more abstract styles of the paw prints, it feels more fluid and unkempt- similar to myself.
Name-dropped Lupaās Field Guide to Work Friend the other day because I mentioned that I only have one valuable book in my collection, and I couldnāt say āyeah, I spent $200 on a bookā and not say what it was.
THERIAN TIPS [REALLY WORK!]
1. Clean up litter from your local parks, creeks, and roadsides
The earth is our home. Help out where you can to keep her clean and livable for critters now and forever. And as always LEAVE NO TRACE
