i'm struggling a lot with this recently, could i get a basic definition of the most common terms in the otherkin/fictionkin community? how do i know what fits- how can i tell if im strongly relating or i Am this character/species? i'm not sure where to start ]: hope you're well! anything helps!
-oliver (18/6/22)
To be perfectly honest, you're likely to get different definition of many terms, potentially more than one variant, from each and every otherkin, therian, or fictionkin you ask, and the language does change from year to year. The cornerstones haven't shifted much though. Otherkin is a person who identifies on some level as other than human. It is derived from an older term, elvenkind, that referred to people who identified as, well, elven. Kintype is the type of other you are. Therians are those that consider themselves animal on some level, usually something of earth though there's some that identify as decidedly otherwordly animals who prefer the term therian because their other is a feral or wild animal, not a sapient species. Theriotype is thus the species of animal the person identifies as. And the fictives or fictionkin consider themselves as beings from fiction, sometimes specific persons. Beyond this, terms tend to muddy. The way to figure out whether you are, or simply identify "with" something is to really take a long hard look at yourself and at the thing you think you might be. That means flaws and all. We tend to romanticize what we identify with because we don't identify with things just because the archetype appeals to us, but because it in some way represents an ideal to us, something we want to be. If we look at ourselves and our own flaws (which is truthfully a very difficult thing, we are not used to that level of honesty with ourselves at all and our minds will rebel when we try to face ourselves truthfully and honestly) and try to figure out what we're avoiding to see in ourselves, what we're trying Not to see, and compare that to what we're trying Not to see in the thing we think we might be, we can start to make progress. It's really easy to try on a new hat, a new identity, to avoid being ourselves, to avoid seeing ourselves as who we are, and we are Naturally biased towards ourselves in a way that is genuinely unavoidable. To some extent we can't see ourselves truthfully because we can't not be both the observer and the observed, but it's worth it to try. Because if you don't like what you see, you can choose to change it, to work on it, to keep an eye out for it so that you can stop doing it, stop being it. When we're looking at the difference between identifying as and identifying with, a lot of the self work starts with "does this benefit me?" It's not the whole of the work, but it's a start.
