Swiftie Shenanigans

Transspecies swiftie with a Taylor Swift art account 🌻 i use it/its and "animal" 💌 agreetobefree2 💌 est. 12.13.21 💌

[olderthannetfic]

I saw that anon ask about how "kinning" became a thing bc our community got ripped apart, so i wanted to give some more history on otherkin.

Back in the 70's, there was a group of people who identified as elves from lotr. They were called the elf queens daughters and considered everyone who wasn't an elf "other kind". Flash forward to the 90's. On alt.horror.werewolves the 'were' community starts forming, containing not just people who identified as wolves (werewolves) but a plethora of other animals (such as weretigers, werebears, weredholes, etc). Anyone identifying as a terrestrial animal was welcome into the therian community, and they had now come up with a name, therianthropy. On other forums similar things were happening in parallel, draconians (dragons) found each other, unicorns found each other. For people identifying as anything non human, the otherkind community was there. After a bit the d fell off and it became otherkin. These four communities found each other and started mixing a bit, existing under the 'alterhuman' umbrella. I don't know when (im a therian so i stayed mainly in those places) but at some point people identifying as fictional people (fiction kin) and as plants (phylanthropes i think) also found their way to the community. They were probably there from the beginning too.

Alterhumans turned out to quite frequently already be existing in places that were not the mainstream, such as fandom. Many are neurodivergent/queer/mentally ill/whathaveyou. Already on the fringes, and quite frequently only out on the internet. So when fandom went mainstream (around game of thrones i think, but it had probably been an ongoing change for a while) suddenly there was a lot of new folks adjacent to our spaces. At first they mainly just made any and all harassment more frequent (i believe anti-otherkin trolls where the ones to coin 'kinning' but i could be wrong about that) but soon enough they had spread our terms (twisted out of shape) to the newcomers in fandom. Suddenly being kin no longer meant that you on the deepest level felt that you were this thing (in all ways except physical, to quote one of our 'celebrities'). Suddenly, it just meant that you liked a character. Suddenly it was a thing only teens do. Suddenly, our community all but disappeared. Because now we no longer had our language, and we couldn't find each other. You just found people who would harass and bully you if you "seriously think you're a squirrel". We are almost as separated from each other as we were before the internet allowed us to find one another.

This probably got kinda long but i feel like people need to know what happened to us and our community. Now, there are forums and such out there. There are still a few places left. But on the grand scale of things the loss of our language has caused us to be dispersed.

I do wanna share a cool story about finding others irl tho. I am not out and i never will be. At uni i was having lunch with some friends, and one person from the year under. I cant remember what we were talking about but suddenly he pointed to my shirt (that had wolves on it) and said something along the lines of "we're both wolves/animals". He then tapped his nose and said "i know my own kind". I will never forget that, haha. I have no clue how he knew bc i think im pretty good at hiding it. But i knew he was, bc his Facebook profile didn't lead to much doubt. It never mentioned our terms/words, but it might just as well have.

Sorry if this got long. I hope i have spread some information on where "kinning" came from, aka trolls that destroyed a more than three decade old community.

--

[thornsent]

yknow what actually, with how people treat them as it becomes more and more "mainstream", I kind of do think alterhumans are oppressed

[thornsent]

saw a vid of a girl upset bc her younger sister confided in her she's a therian + wants to wear a tail to school and she's shooting her down bc she doesn't want to get bullied

the comments are. horrific. but I think the worst one is someone admitting they bullied their younger sister. they claimed that their sister told them she was a therian and they "fixed" her by bullying her, calling her crazy/mentally ill, and telling her there was something wrong with her until she stopped talking about it anymore

and I just. that's identical to how so many people I know were treated coming out as trans, but because it's something "weird" it's ok? nevermind that this has a long history way before the internet, or that a lot of alterhumans in general are trans and/or neurodivergent and actually literally mentally ill often due to severe trauma it truly just feels like a socially acceptable way to continue oppressing the "weirdest and most freakish" parts of marginalized communities

[arctic-whatever]

I don’t think anyone talks about how incredibly lonely it can be sometimes to be alterhuman. Sure, there’s online spaces, meet-ups, forums and groups, but outside of that? You’re inevitably going to have at least one small period of your life where no-one around you feels the way you do and you have no idea why. Maybe you’re a child who’s never heard the words ‘therian’ or ‘otherkin’. Maybe you’re deep in the antikin community, lashing out at joy with hate and fear. Maybe there’s something else keeping you seperate.

Whatever the reason, that part of life is… almost unbearably isolated. You feel different, different in a way you can barely put words to. Different in a way you often see others institutionalised for in books and movies. Different in the way you hear your thoughts, speak your words and experience your feelings. And more often than not, you don’t know why.

Why you? Why were you chosen to shoulder the burden of being so different? What made any benevolent creator (or lack thereof) reach down and plant such joy in your heart, and such pain also?

Your hands are not your own as they grip foreign objects of an alien world; cutlery, pencils, jewellery. Are you even meant to have hands? Sometimes your fingers ache with the knowledge they were never meant to exist in any meaningful capacity. Your heart beats too fast, too slow, too… human.

Your friends and family don’t understand. They can’t. They’ve never felt the call of the camphor-laden breeze, never lost themselves to the wild, frenetic energy of the night. They’re human. Your spirit extends beyond yourself, in impossible limbs that they will never yearn for. Your soul will not be contained within this flesh prison, it never could be, all whilst theirs rests comfortably at home.

There’s no words for this feeling, not in any book, nor television show. There’s no representation except for in the monstrous. There’s no celebrity that openly talks about it. There’s no dictionary that explains it. You’re different, alone, and entirely certain that you are the only person on earth to be a facsimile of a person; not a person at all.

And then you find the therian community. And you realise they’d been there all along, hidden from the mainstream conversation, away from the late-night talk shows and trivia competition questions.

And you wonder, in what cruel world could such unbearable loneliness continue to be allowed to persist when the answer existed in the background all along? Who let your heart break over and over, just to reveal it broke for nothing so painful at all? Who let you scream hoarsely into the void, begging for answers, all while the answers sat so close by?

How could any of this be fair?

[arctic-whatever]

I don’t think anyone talks about how incredibly lonely it can be sometimes to be alterhuman. Sure, there’s online spaces, meet-ups, forums and groups, but outside of that? You’re inevitably going to have at least one small period of your life where no-one around you feels the way you do and you have no idea why. Maybe you’re a child who’s never heard the words ‘therian’ or ‘otherkin’. Maybe you’re deep in the antikin community, lashing out at joy with hate and fear. Maybe there’s something else keeping you seperate.

Whatever the reason, that part of life is… almost unbearably isolated. You feel different, different in a way you can barely put words to. Different in a way you often see others institutionalised for in books and movies. Different in the way you hear your thoughts, speak your words and experience your feelings. And more often than not, you don’t know why.

Why you? Why were you chosen to shoulder the burden of being so different? What made any benevolent creator (or lack thereof) reach down and plant such joy in your heart, and such pain also?

Your hands are not your own as they grip foreign objects of an alien world; cutlery, pencils, jewellery. Are you even meant to have hands? Sometimes your fingers ache with the knowledge they were never meant to exist in any meaningful capacity. Your heart beats too fast, too slow, too… human.

Your friends and family don’t understand. They can’t. They’ve never felt the call of the camphor-laden breeze, never lost themselves to the wild, frenetic energy of the night. They’re human. Your spirit extends beyond yourself, in impossible limbs that they will never yearn for. Your soul will not be contained within this flesh prison, it never could be, all whilst theirs rests comfortably at home.

There’s no words for this feeling, not in any book, nor television show. There’s no representation except for in the monstrous. There’s no celebrity that openly talks about it. There’s no dictionary that explains it. You’re different, alone, and entirely certain that you are the only person on earth to be a facsimile of a person; not a person at all.

And then you find the therian community. And you realise they’d been there all along, hidden from the mainstream conversation, away from the late-night talk shows and trivia competition questions.

And you wonder, in what cruel world could such unbearable loneliness continue to be allowed to persist when the answer existed in the background all along? Who let your heart break over and over, just to reveal it broke for nothing so painful at all? Who let you scream hoarsely into the void, begging for answers, all while the answers sat so close by?

How could any of this be fair?

[athenaisrequiems]

I feel the emotion that life conjures up and the songs I write get me closer to my feelings and realising who I am. It’s a natural process.

[athenaisrequiems]

I feel the emotion that life conjures up and the songs I write get me closer to my feelings and realising who I am. It’s a natural process.

[athenaisrequiems]

I feel the emotion that life conjures up and the songs I write get me closer to my feelings and realising who I am. It’s a natural process.

[junojasper2]

”✨things to do when your a therian🐾” type of videos/posts lowkey piss me off. It’s always “draw your theriotype! Make therian masks! Jump over things! Build a den!” Not that there’s anything wrong with doing these things obviously but they’re so annoying to me because they just say literally the exact same things every time, the exact same, basic, stereotypical “tiktok therian” activities. And I doubt that any alterhumans who are bored will see these posts and think “oh!! I’ve never thought of that! How fun and exciting, I’ll go do these activities now!”

Anyways, if you have any “things for therians to do” suggestions I’d love to see them in reblogs

[gaynfl-moved]

the male loneliness epidemic could be solved the same way the women loneliness epidemic could be solved - gay sex.

[thecollectibles]

Art by Adriano Bugnotto

[cruelsummmer]

" [...] the best things that have ever been mine... finally actually are."

[ursidae-arctoidea]

Im really happy that bioterms are catching on.

Here is a more official bioterms post.

Bioterms relay how someone wants their body to be referred to.

Ex: Someone with wolf bioterms may want their hands and feet referred to as their paws, their haired referred to as their fur, their mouth and nose to be referred to as their snout, their clothes referred to as their pelt, etc.

Bioterms can be put in bios like pronouns.

Ex: Toby he/they (raven bioterms)

[rabbitrah]

Me thinking why a whale (big) would eat krill (small) and then I remembered rice (yum)

[porterr-robinson]

v.2

[usedtobehmc]

If I ever don’t reblog this, you can assume I’m dead. It’s just pure, sound-design gold.

The cuts, the slow ramp-ups, how it matches his dance moves.

MWAH.

[swiftlydolphin]

I can hear haunted in the background and I swore it was playing

[cannibalchicken]

Woah , my garage dog has arrived ,

[aibaaina]

And I will hold onto you