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.
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