a raptor person named Max (he/they) and his weird animal Biscuit (it/its) | were-velociraptor | likes and follows from @mackerelgray | system sideblog @knifedog-machina
hhmmmhnhbm. can someone else who gets phantom limbs please explain exactly how they get it? like do you guys COMPLETELY feel them all the time? I’m kinda new to this but whenever walking around I keep having the sensation of my tail behind me but. more mentally than actually feeling it? it’s like I know it’s there but I can’t completely feel it. then usually when sitting it’s just. gone. (to be fair, if I had my tail while sitting it would be crushed and very uncomfortable… that thing is like my whole physical body weight/length.)
Hey there! Nonhuman phantom limbs are different for everyone - my limbs aren't the same as yours! - but I can say that your experience is very common. It's normal to have phantom limbs that waver in intensity and disappear on you. Having them 24/7 or feeling them as strongly as a solid body part are in no way required. You feel the concept of a tail sometimes? Congrats, that's still a phantom tail!
As someone who doesn't get phantom limbs by default, but can choose to conjure them up - think of phantom shifts like your mind's best guess of where your body parts are.
Your tail isn't physically attached to your spine, not in the way that your legs are attached to your hips, so your brain doesn't have the same amount of practice with knowing where it is. It's had many years of knowing exactly where your legs are in space from seeing, touching and moving with them - it's had far less time to figure out where your tail is, and knowing exactly where it is gets harder when you can't directly see, touch, or move with it!
If you want to make it feel more present, that is a skill you can improve! In my experience, it's a lot like a body scan meditation - you're bringing your attention to a part of your body and increasing your awareness of it.
I can't physically sense my wings to give my mind an anchor, so I practice picturing them attached to me in my mind's eye, in as much detail and as many senses as I want. I focus on how my feathers may look as they glide over each other, how they'd feel brushing up against my skin, the weight of them, the sense of where my wings are in space in relation to the rest of my body, the soft sound of my feathers ruffling, my own familiar scent. Focusing on it can help my brain feel its presence easier, and the practicing builds on itself over time.
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"
Once you stop defining your therianthropy in measures of dysphoria and focus on what brings you fulfillment as an animal, you start caring a lot less about where other people fall on the chosen kintype vs involuntary kintype axis. It opens you up to instead start caring about how people engage with their kintype, and what experiences it brings, which I think are far more valuable.
I've had a few folks ask me to do a Rainbow Raven sticker based on the therian flag/symbol, but decided to make it an entirely new design since the theta-delta didn't fit the raven template too well. This design was a little bit of a challenge, but I think the results are awesome!!
I've got stickers of this design too, if you want 'em!!
A matte sticker of a formline take on the therian symbol, aka the interlocked delta-theta symbols. Within the design are a combination of an
Highly unlikely to be of use but I want a card I can carry in my wallet that says “If I Die First In A Traumatic Survival Scenario I Want You To Know I’m Okay With You Cannibalizing Me, It’s Fine, Don’t Be Weird And Guilty About it”. And then on the back there could be like. A list of recipes n shit
To be clear, I don’t WANT to be cannibalized. It’s not my personal preference. It’s just that if I beef it out in the open somewhere and some poor starving fuck has to have a crisis of ethics over using the protein or dying in a hole, I’d want to some way to let them know my dead ass is rooting for them
Written by Max Biscuit-Machina on February 22nd, 2026.
(This used to be part of a reblog thread, but it's long-winded enough that I wanted to give it room to breathe. Check out Sora's blog though, he's got good thoughts!)
I recently read a post by my friend Sora (@through-lines) about the way alterhumanity is often mistaken for a synonym of nonhumanity - and ve made an excellent point!
A lot of alterhuman identities seem to be viewed through the lens of species identity and apparent proximity to nonhuman identity.
People understand that being nonhuman makes you alterhuman, because otherkin and therians are the most recognizable part of the community - it's the most obvious way someone can be different from normal humanity, by not being the same species.
Unfortunately, this means nonhumanity is seen as the standard for other alterhuman identities to measure up to - the closer to nonhumanity someone is, the more accepted they are as an alterhuman. Put another way: the closer to humanity someone is, the less accepted they are as an alterhuman.
This is a problem, because most alterhuman identities are not nonhuman - they don't involve being a different species! But they're all judged against nonhumanity as a benchmark. It's something we've griped about before.
It got me thinking: if I'm not using species identity as a standard, how would I define an alterhuman identity? What do we have in common as a community?
Personally, as someone who wrote and thought about one alternate universe fanfic for the better part of a decade, that’s an alterhuman thing for me! I call myself fictionhearted because of that. And I say I’m fictionhearted because I figured out how significant this work was to me while being in alterhuman spaces, and I can talk about it as an alterhuman without fearing judgement over "being too invested in fanfiction" when writing it for 5+ years became a major part of my life, part of who I am and how I think about myself.
(There's different issues within the alterhuman community with judgement, of course, along the usual lines of "you're too weird to belong here!" or "you're too normal to belong here!" - but it's a community I care about, enough that I'm willing to dig in my heels and stand my ground instead of agreeing that I don't belong.)
I think alterhumanity serves its purpose as an umbrella term for many different identity-based subcommunities, all united under a common banner of being considered abnormal.
Someone can be nonhuman and call themselves alterhuman for it. Someone else can be sharing a body with other people and call themselves alterhuman for it. Someone else can be a dedicated furry and call themselves alterhuman for it. Someone else can be a fictional character and call themselves alterhuman for it. Someone else can love a video game so much they spend all their free time talking about it and call themselves alterhuman for it. Someone else can choose to embody a narrative archetype and call themselves alterhuman for it. Someone else can feel homesick for a city they’ve never lived in and call themselves alterhuman for it.
(And the list goes on! I’m not listing every possible way to be alterhuman, I just want to shout out different ways to be alterhuman that aren’t related to species identity.)
These are all different identities, they’re different ways of seeing oneself and moving through the world, but they’re all considered weird in a way that means being wrong.
According to the status quo, being nonhuman or fictional or plural means you’re insane and need to be locked up for your own good. Being a furry means you’re some kind of gross sexual deviant. Being too invested a video game means you’re childish and embarrassing. Being an archetype means you’re one-dimensional, pretentious, and out of touch with reality. Being deeply connected to a place you’ve never been means you’re exoticizing it and wrong about your feelings.
And all of this prejudice tends to be justified as a normal reaction to your behavior, like being too weird automatically means you’re laughable, dangerous, untrustworthy, incompetent, disgusting, or all of the above.
I think sharing this common sense of marginalization, not being taken seriously by mainstream society - not being considered a “normal human being” for one reason or another, and finding community with others who don’t fit in - is enough to call yourself and your experiences alterhuman.
I’m not really sure how to sum this up in a single-sentence definition? But I think it’s a more comprehensive framework for the alterhuman experience than seeing it as The Community For Nonhumans (Plus All Those Stragglers, I Guess).
!! A lot of good food for thought about defining "alterhuman"! I hope you don't mind me springing off of this a bit.
It's not an easy thing to write up a concise definition, especially with a term that has a very complex history.
Alterhumanity being equated to nonhumanity (and maybe nonhuman-adjacence) is a multifaceted issue, and I suspect the biggest issue comes down to the nature of social media, but if there's one thing I can add WRT to defining alterhuman:
People dislike ambiguity. They like drawing connections and forming boundaries.
There are definitely commonalities to be found between "by default" alterhuman groups, but…most of those commonalities can also be shared by groups that are considered orthohuman by default. The hard part is justifying why X groups are alterhuman (by default) while Y groups aren't (by default). People will fish for that justification themselves, and when the face of alterhumanity is nonhumanity and species, that becomes the easiest place to draw the line.
I think alterhuman is a wonderful umbrella term that unites groups with shared history and overlapping demographics. I'm also tempted to say that shared history and demographic is probably the strongest, least ambiguous commonality for all the groups under alterhumanity. That kinda necessarily centers the otherkin community, though, and I think most folks want to avoid having any one community centered in the definition. Still, I feel like you could spin that in a way that doesn't assume nonhuman/nonhuman-adjacent experiences for every other identity...
Max: I don't mind at all, that's why I gave you the shoutout! :>
It's soooo so hard to come up with a Simple, Snappy Definition for... I'd argue almost any identity-based group? Because people really are complicated! People don't fit into neat little boxes! There honestly isn't a clean, solid line that Separates alterhumanity and orthohumanity ("normal" humanity, opposite of alterhumanity, for anyone who doesn't know the word!) buuuut people don't like ambiguity!
It's a really frustrating puzzle? Coming up with a dictionary definition and judging individuals by whether they pass the Dictionary Test is always going to exclude someone who falls into both boxes, or neither box, but they'd benefit from having community and support from people who understand them!
like personally, I'd rather take someone like that in good faith and give them space to be their complex, contradictory, complicated self instead of closing the gates and telling them to leave because, whoops, you're too ABC and not XYZ enough, come back when you can cut off part of yourself to fit in with our Weird People Club :P
I think you're right about the community history aspect! The well-established Alterhuman Subcommunities definitely have shared history and overlapping demographics - like, I'm a therian, I'm fictionhearted, I share a system with people, and that all intersects! Systems have a lot of nonhuman and fictional headmates! Otherheartedness was coined to describe a distinct experience in a community with nonhumans! And archetropy and hearthomes are relatively newer terms, but they were made by alterhumans to describe their experiences, so they're also considered alterhuman.
Community history does tie back into nonhumanity at the middle though, and... agh, I don't know, having a default face for alterhumanity feels to me like it defeats the point of having the term? It was coined in the first place because people were frustrated about otherkin being used as an umbrella term! So we don't want alterhumanity to dissolve into being Nonhuman-Lite again, that's the opposite of what it's for!
Oh, I wholeheartedly agree that trying to create and enforce any strict boundary around what is or isn't "alterhuman" is very Not Good. Maybe the question is better phrased like...what's the overarching theme here? Fuzzy edges and all, what's the basis that unites us? What's the basis we use when we advocate for (or argue against) the inclusion of other labels under the umbrella? What about our "abnormalities" set us apart from the "abnormalities" of being queer, neurodivergent, chronically ill, and so on?
It's always gonna be arbitrary to a certain extent. That's just the nature of the beast. But without the context of shared history and community overlap (or that people were shoving most of these identities under "otherkin"), a lot of the labels originally included under alterhumanity seem pretty disparate, and it kinda requires you to take for granted that we group these different identities and experiences together Just Because. Which goes back to people struggling with ambiguity and wanting to find patterns. It's extremely arbitrary and not super intuitive to newbies, and that makes it hard to accept as a full answer.
That does get me wondering if there's something we can do to help build tolerance towards that level of arbitrariness. Not that it really answers the question of "what is alterhumanity?", but I guess a recursive "you're alterhuman if you relate to alterhumans (and want to call yourself alterhuman)" gets the job done well enough lol. In that case, it's more a matter of raising awareness for less-visible alterhuman experiences.
Definitely gonna be chewing on this one tonight, haha.
Max: Yeah, I like the way you phrased it, with the overarching themes! Like, what's some common ground we can build solidarity around, instead of alienating folks who don't match a narrow band of expectations?
I don't want alterhumanity to be an exclusive club, I want allyship and a mutual respect for our similarities and differences - I don't know what it's like to have a hearthome, and my friend with a hearthome doesn't know what it's like to have a raptor living in their brain, but we can be ourselves with each other! We can listen to each other's experiences and learn from each other and share space and resources! And I think that's valuable to have in a world where neither of us can safely mention that stuff at work.
I think building a tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty is really important in a community where your identity as alterhuman is basically self-determined?
Like, I can tell you that I'm alterhuman right now, and you can't verify that based on the way I look or sound or act - the only thing you have to go off is my word. You just have to take me at my word, that I'm using this label because it tells you something about me, because I saw myself reflected in it, because I feel like I belong here.
I'm not entirely sure where to start with improving General Community Tolerance to Arbitrary Borders, but I can talk about where I'm coming from on that topic. I'm saying all this stuff now about accepting outliers and acknowledging different experiences, but I've fretted a lot about my identity. "Am I actually X?" or "Do I really deserve to call myself Y?"
And for me, what it came down to was the fear of being wrong. I was scared of confidently saying that I am something, only to realize sometime later that I made a mistake, or I changed, and losing that label would mean losing the community and support that came with it.
And that fear feels pretty justified on Tumblr! There's always someone being accused of "betraying" their community by dropping a label, or using a word "for attention," or not being a "real" member of the community for any number of reasons. It's reasonable to see All That and feel paralyzed with dread about Using The Wrong Word, and then start worrying about where exactly you're supposed to draw the line between Belonging Here or not.
I think my main suggestion for uprooting the need for clearly outlining the borders of the alterhuman map is like... encouraging exploration? Being curious about people you don't understand, giving them room to question themselves, being kind when correcting them if they make a mistake. Telling them there's room at the table, if they want to take a seat.
I've been wanting to write about how our individual experience of being Asian-American has affected our plurality, but it's a surprisingly difficult topic - I think in large part because being Asian in the US has long been about invisibility, to the point that we've become habituated to ignoring our own Asianness. And Asian-American experiences are so diverse (especially when it comes to colorism, fluency, and citizen status - our experiences, being pale East Asian, US-born, and fluent in English are quite different from the experiences of a darker-skinned immigrant still learning English) that it feels fraught to write about our own experiences, out of concern that they'd be taken as Representation Of All Asian-American Experiences. But I do definitely think it has affected us, even if we can't name every way it has yet.
Off of the top of my head, our parents (who are immigrants) always had a strongly pragmatic cast to how they approached the world. Extremely resourceful folks, saw objects for what they could do rather than what they were "supposed" to do and could jury-rig anything to their needs. They didn't believe in letting their feelings get in the way of doing what needed to be done (or so they liked to claim) and what needed to be done was defined by what concrete value it brought to the family, not some kind of abstract morality divorced from reality. (Or so they liked to claim.) They thought constantly in collective - what was good for the family, not just our nuclear unit but the extended group, the way people's actions reflected on said family, etc.
Make no mistake: our parents sucked in a lot of ways that left scars. But they did teach us a lot of things, some good, some that can't be neatly classified as good or bad. When I look, I can see traces of it running everywhere through our plurality. Our willingness to jury-rig and modify parts of our own functioning. Our focus on concrete advice on living plural. The relative ease with which we accept ideas like "people in systems can be both individuals and parts of a whole - singlets, too, are individuals who are parts of their communities." On a more fraught level: a tendency to stifle our feelings and efface ourselves for the good of the group. Being perhaps a little too comfortable with being unseen. Difficulty distinguishing looking okay from being okay. Generational trauma that manifests, among other ways, as a fear of scarcity and a complicated relationship with food. A need to Achieve Something and Be Successful. Things that kept us outwardly functional, even through incredibly trying circumstances, while also eroding our deeper well-being.
And also, for us, US-born to immigrant parents who were our main connection to our culture, who we are purposefully no longer in contact with - there is a perpetual sense of… not simply loss, but having been severed from a greater whole. When we cut away what was killing us, a lot of good went with it too. Something that was always with us, unnoticed in the background, until it was gone. Even those of us who don't quite see themselves as Asian can sense its absence. We look after each other, try to create our own little culture with its own little traditions within, but it can't ever be a replacement.
Oh, and of course, there's the topic of race and internal identity. Sure have a lot of feelings (and frustrations) about the ways people handle that subject, considering none of us Look Asian internally and a number of us don't even feel personally connected to Asian identity. But I won't get into it here. Not on the (lunar) new year. Inauspicious, you see.
Being a therian makes is especially hard to understand fatphobia. Like. If you are a fat animal you are winning. You did it. You are successful and healthy and have energy reserves to survive future hardship. Why on earth would anyone not want body fat, why would you get rid of your body's health insurance on purpose
the problem with projecting Biscuit into our surroundings is that I can't actually control what it decides to do with this power. it's sitting peacefully on the foot of the bed until it figures out we're awake enough to actually be hungry, and now it's jumped down to try and eat my slippers, or at least stick its snout in them, because if it takes up enough mental load then I will get up and feed it :V
One of the things that made my drawings of myself more affirming was making the decision to draw myself at an accurate weight. I'm a chonker. I was the weight of the average wolf for a specific window of time, but that's not the most up-to-date. The former is easier to find references for, but the most current feels more like myself. So the more I've drawn myself heavier, the more I've been able to refine the look.
Idk this is a ramble, but I guess my point is that bodies come in all different shapes and it can feel good to unshackle yourself if you weren't the """standard""" fitness of a creature.
personally i think dromaeosaurids would love humans. yes little beast we are also social pack hunters cmon lets go catch small rodents together and then snuggle in my bed afterwards
we gather here today to hear about what that weird animal in my brain is doing
first off we're currently sick with a sore throat and this means Biscuit is not up for much. it's attached enough to my bodily state that it also feels gross.
it has decided to show this by flopping dramatically to the floor when I asked what it wanted to do. bribes of imaginary projected sausage are not making it more energetic. it's forlornly looking at the sausage 6 inches away from its mouth, Too Weak To Move to get it. very tragic. extremely sad
It’s almost exactly a year after my initial “moment of realization”, and I noticed that my own form changes have gradually become less bothersome, more manageable. It’s much easier for me to view this in a more neutral or even positive light compared to the previous months where doing so is much harder. At this point I can genuinely accept that my other form is still me.
But my species identity is still human. Not even “100% human + 100% nonhuman”, just “100% human”.
Technically I’m a were, but in a “human that turns nonhuman at times” way. My nonhuman form doesn’t affect my species identity, how I feel on the inside. Deep down I still feel human, despite my constantly-resurfacing nonhuman traits. My nonhuman form no longer feels like a prison for the most part, but it still doesn’t have much to do with my species identity.
hey same hat! if someone can be nonhuman in a human body, you can be human in a nonhuman body - and I do this sometimes, voluntarily, when I step into being a raptor to be projected out into the world while my sysmates front! I'm still human, I move my raptor body very differently from my raptor (which is a nonhuman animal), I nod and talk and emote like an anthropomorphized prehistoric bird, because that's basically what I am at that time!
