We’ve been thinking, the response to being dehumanized are often divided into “no, I’m still human!” and “fine then, I’m nonhuman and I’m proud, deal with it”. We understand why nonhumans tend to be the latter, but we seem to go with the former. To us, both options are correct. To us, maybe the difference is caused by our species identity because most of us are human.
Nonhumans would challenge the norm that only humans deserve respect. Obviously we can’t say for sure if other people see it the same way too, but the “I’m still human” side, at least when we say it, challenges the norm of what counts as human in the first place. At least when we see it, these are two sides of the same “we deserve respect too” coin.
The ways we’re human can vary. Most of us are close to standard human save from a few things like being someone that most people consider a fictional character. Some are born nonhuman but has lived with/as humans for long enough to see themselves as human too. Some others are born human, but forced into nonhumanity in some fashion and it barely changes how they identify on the inside. In general, we tend to be tied to humanity in some way and it’ll feel wrong for at least the majority of us to completely divorce ourselves from it.
This is just a guess, but maybe we lean this way at least partially because we’re multiply marginalized. Other than being alterhuman, we’re also queer, neurodivergent, and part of a racial and religious minority among other things, and these groups are very often dehumanized by those in positions of power and privilege. This may have ended up planting this idea in our subconscious revolving around fighting our way to get our humanity to be recognized, and it informs how we tend to navigate through alterhuman communities. Being loud about our human alterhumanity in hopes of reaching other folks and being recognized as alterhuman too, even when we don’t fit the norms of a given space in some way.
(Dreamwidth mirror)
I’m a werewolf. A human-turned-werewolf.
I used to be a normal human until I was mysteriously afflicted by a curse. One that twists my form into that of a wolf-like monstrosity. I didn’t like it, not even one bit. It was terrifying.
But one day, for unknown reasons, the uncontrollable shifts stopped. Despite that, I remained a werewolf. I’m able to control when and how I transform. I have no problems with this now that I have full control of my shifts.
But regardless, I’d still rather be human.
Now that I’m able to voluntarily transform, I stay in human form much more than my werewolf form, almost never transforming past the point of having wolf ears and tail. I feel more comfortable as a human than as a wolf. I have nothing against being a werewolf, it’s simply a matter of preference and my species identity being more human than wolf. That’s what I started out as, and that’s what I’ve always known myself as on the inside in spite of everything.
Written by Haruki Ikuta (she/her), interpreted by Kogane Tsukioka 👑 (no pronouns)
My true form, from the very beginning, is human for the most part. Except for a few differences: I have lion ears and tail. My behavior is also very human most of the time, but I still instinctively curl my body like a cat when sleeping, have the urge to carry some objects with my mouth despite having functional hands, having one of my go-to vocal stims somewhat resemble an attempt at imitating a lion's roar, and so on. Even then, my animalistic behavior admittedly doesn't completely line up with what people would expect of lions.
This is how I rationalize it for myself: kemonomimi characters are usually portrayed with typically cute behaviors. In fact, many such characters we're aware of (which is every character we can remember except for the Friends from Kemono Friends) very rarely show any animalistic behavior matching the nonhuman species they are. In addition, most kemonomimi characters we've been exposed to are cat girls, complete with their usual playful nature and meows. This may be why I subconsciously adopted traits that are closer to house cats or cat girls than lions. Despite all that, I'm still sure that I'm a lion.
At first I hesitated on using the therian label for myself because most therians we've seen seem to be more animalistic than I am, and I was afraid that I'm "too human" to use the label. Thankfully, now I'm more confident in using the label because according to my own standards, I'm animalistic enough to use the label, and that's a good enough reason for me.
I am a Shadow Gallade. Specifically, a Pokemon Colosseum-era shadow Pokemon. Obviously, this species doesn't appear until the next generation, but I feel that the shadow Pokemon mechanics from that game fits best with my own noemata.
Ever imagined how it feels to have your heart being sealed shut the way shadow Pokemon experienced it? To me, it feels like constant numbness in my heart. I'm unable to feel most emotions with some exceptions, or if I do feel them, it would feel very dim and it's very easily missed. The exceptions? Something along the lines of ever-present anger or disgust, to the point where it becomes background noise to me in most cases.
In combat, I only know a single objective: To annihilate. To destroy. Nothing else matters. In Hyper Mode, my emotions would feel much more intense than what I'm used to, sometimes mixed with other emotions that feel foreign to me. These emotions would overwhelm me so much that I easily lose control, negatively impacting how well I battle.
The corruption process erased any prior memories I had before, and I think it also hindered my ability to form new memories, so to this day I only remember bits and pieces of memories and noemata from after corruption. I have no memory of being not fully evolved, what led me to being corrupted, and who attempted to purify me afterwards, if that ever happened in the first place.
About purification, for now I'm not sure if I have ever been completely purified or not, but at the very least I know there were some progress made on reopening my heart. The only major sign I have that points towards possible purification is that I currently don't know how to use Shadow Rush. In terms of execution, what makes this move different from the likes of Take Down? For comparison, I know how to execute moves like Psychic or Protect. I'm able to describe what I would focus on and what motions I would use, and I can use these moves in headspace. This is not the case for Shadow Rush. I can only make educated guesses, but so far none of them feels right to me. Other than that clue and the fact that I know several non-shadow moves, I don't think I'm that much different from a shadow Pokemon that has not opened its heart at all, even on present day. I've thought about some hypotheses on this when questioning, but there's one common factor in them: purification is not as simple and straightforward as what's shown in the game. I could've forgotten Shadow Rush very early. There could be no true "end point" where the door to a Pokemon's heart is fully open, and its condition could still worsen over time under certain conditions. But for now, I haven't confirmed any of these as "true" for myself.
At one point, I did also question being a Mewtwo, especially considering how the first movie portrayed it. I'd say the Pokedex descriptions for it fits well with regards to it having a cold and vicious personality and only caring about defeating its opponents. My moveset is also rather unusual for a Gallade and would fit a Mewtwo more, focusing on defense and special attacks. But in the end, I concluded that Mewtwo is more of a simile than a kintype. It just didn't feel right to see myself as one. Instead, I'm a Gallade with a cold, dead heart.
Attractions & Relationships are Difficult when System
By: Mao Arimura (he/him)
Let's face it, systemhood can throw a wrench (or five, or maybe more) into how you see attraction and relationships. It definitely does affect ours.
We know what various types of attractions feel to us. We may never know if it matches outsys allo people's experiences, but all we know is that it's sexual / romantic / etc. to us. It may or may not be affected by us identifying as aroace years before syscovery. Our idea on what an allosexual is for our system may not match what is considered allosexual outside of our system, for example. At this point we concluded that it's pointless to figure out if our experience matches any outsys people's experiences because we can't read their minds. We can't know the exact way outsys people experience anything down to the finest details. The only thing that matters is that we know what the feelings translate to for us.
We don't exactly feel any of those towards anyone outsys, which was why we thought we're an aroace singlet for years before syscovery. Most of us don't feel those attractions towards anyone at all, but several do experience attraction towards our own sysmates and only them. Some only feel them towards one specific person, with or without needing to spend some time with them for a while first. Some would even experience attractions that couldn't be properly boxed into categories we've commonly seen in aspec communities. We may also find outsys people attractive at times. However, we typically don't feel this desire to form deeper relationships with them in any way. Except maybe as friends if we already like them. But even then we navigate friendship like someone who's stranded in the middle of wilderness with zero knowledge of how to navigate the area and without a map. Because we're autistic among other things. With friendship, we typically want to befriend people who we think are going to be cool with us, but can we describe what our criteria for that would be? No. Not really.
Within our system, we already share a memory pool. We can read each other's thoughts and feelings. It does lead to problems at times, but it's an important asset for our insys relationships. Even when we can't describe how we feel in words, we can show the other person the emotion and they'd understand. No need to resort to metaphors or anything, just beam the emotions to them and they'd know. We can also know if we truly mean what we said or thought about any given thing without waiting for clarifications. We know what the other person actually wanted to say even if they misspoke because they can just beam that thought to others.
It's rather unfortunate that this would never work with outsys people. We'd feel lost when navigating relationships with people without these mental links. We can't see what other people are thinking, so we tend to second-guess our interactions because we're afraid of hurting their feelings. We're afraid of being misunderstood by others. We're occasionally haunted by the urge to overexplain everything we say because we're afraid of any backlash we might get from not explaining ourselves enough. And on feelings specifically, we can't tell exactly how anyone outsys feels, so if we hypothetically form a relationship with someone else, we worry that the other person feel differently and our feelings towards each other doesn't match. We may like this person, but do they like us too? What if they're actually sick of us and is just putting up with our behavior until they can't take it anymore? What if they like us in a way that's incompatible with us? Etc.
I never asked to be King Koopa (but I don't have much choice in the matter)
By: Kogane Tsukioka 👑 (she/they)
Blurb: I describe my experience coping with being a were who heavily identifies as a human and how I dislike the experience because of species dysphoria.
For a while I thought my recurring connection to Bowser from the Mario series is a flickering thing of unknown nature. Our opinion of him usually stops at "we like how he's portrayed in Bowser's Inside Story", and we're not super invested in the franchise as a whole to begin with. I would sometimes think that I share some similarities with him in terms of headspace superpowers and personality. To my initial horror, it's not. It's more than just temporary episodes of feeling vague connections to him out of nowhere. It turns out that I've been a were this entire time, and he's the beast residing within me. Things only escalated from then on.
I started experiencing (or noticing) really vivid shifts ever since, and they're triggered or intensified by stress. I witness myself transform into him on a daily basis and back again after some time. I can feel the changes happen in the form of phantom and somatic shifts as if I'm going through werewolf transformation sequences a la An American Werewolf in London with some differences, and these changes are reflected in my headspace body. The claws, horns, tail, extra body mass, shell, the occasional fire breath buildup, everything save for his accessories. These shifts don't feel painful, but it often feels uncomfortable and accompanied by an accelerated heartbeat and shortness of breath. Sometimes I'd also notice my own mental state temporarily becoming more irritable and animalistic in nature, feeling the split-second urges to growl and rip things apart before snapping back to normal. Some other times, the body would feel heavier or more sluggish when I'm fronting. Other fronters don't feel these intense sensations. Not even my in-sys double experiences this.
I hated it, I feared it, every single minute of it. I never asked for this. It really feels like a curse. There are times where I wouldn't even want to remember his existence because I'd be so afraid of it triggering the transformation. These changes are all outside of my control, and that makes me the odd one out in a system where the norm is voluntary shapeshifting. It also causes dysphoria, especially when I'm doing less than ideal mentally. That may sound outlandish to other people considering both me and the system's body are human, though it may have something to do with me seeing my headspace body (and not our system's body) as my true body. I'm fine with the more minor shifts, but my shifts very often go beyond that limit, going all the way to full-body shifts. To me, the king koopa's form feels too big, too bulky, too powerful, overall just too much for me to handle.
I know, I imagine so many people know and love Bowser. The idea of being this guy sounds really awesome, and I totally understand that. I myself (and everyone else in the system) have nothing against him as a character, person, or whatever. But that's not the point. I have personal reasons for not liking this, and the short version of it all boils down to "this is not who I am". This essay by Gavin describes it perfectly in a more general way, and I guess I ended up being an example of that phenomenon as a human alterhuman.
This is why the whole thing makes me dysphoric, in more detail: I'm a human woman, and that's an important part of who I am. Bowser is canonically a nonhuman man, and most people (if not everyone) see him as such. If I look like him, it feels wrong in terms of physical build, species, and gender, and I don't want to be seen in the same way as him if people know this about me. It feels even scarier considering my unstable sense of self, stemming from a dissociative disorder. Sometimes I'd fear that I'll lose my human identity in some way or another and become a completely different, unrecognizable person. But no matter what my feelings are towards this, I know that I can't just will it away or otherwise fight against it, and doing so would be unproductive.
Logically, I know that acceptance is the best, if not the only way forward, but it's not until much later that I can finally, actually internalize so many self-accepting thoughts that help me stop hating that part of me as much, and I became much happier as a result. In addition to that, I also took some time to modify my wereform so it feels more like me, keeping my human hair and eye colors and using a modified version of my clothes on it. The road to this inner peace is agonizing, not helped by the belated realization that I turn out to have several disorganized parts of myself who see things differently or have different needs compared to my rational mind, but every tiny bit of progress I made was worth it. On present day, for the most part, this condition no longer bothers me as much, but sometimes the dysphoria could come back in full swing and cause problems again, especially when the scared part of me is active at the time.
A key component in accepting this side of me is internalizing that this doesn't make me less of a human woman. At times, it does feel like having my humanity and gender stripped away from me forcefully. But by internalizing "my appearance does not dictate who I am identity-wise", I can help calm myself down no matter what form I'm in, at least in ideal mental conditions. This also helps reduce the discomfort in the shifts, because they tend to feel less comfortable when I'm stressed. Overall, this whole thing is still pretty uncomfortable, but at least I have ways to cope with it.
I recognize that this is very much a median or median-adjacent thing in nature. He's undeniably a part of me, a "wereside" I can communicate with at times, and at this point I'd say I more or less already accepted that he's at least adjacent to a kintype, but just saying I am him? That still doesn't feel right. Sometimes, species identity is not that simple, especially with median plurality thrown into the mix.
Imagine, if you will, a werewolf character who used to be a regular human but ended up being bitten and turned into a werewolf. Imagine that they still identify more with their humanity than animality for whatever reason. They may think "I am a wolf" doesn't feel right no matter how they see it, but "I am a werewolf" fits better because they know the word "werewolf" addresses both the man (were) and wolf, and this is important to them. "The wolf is a part of me that I take the form of at times" also works for them. That's how I see my situation, but instead of a wolf it's a certain fire-breathing princess-kidnapping turtle monster from a popular video game franchise. I think this is why I preferred were and alterhuman as my personal labels over therian or kin. I want to emphasize that I'm very much still human first and foremost, I just have this involuntary form-changing condition affect a significant part of my life. Maybe some parts of me identify as him, but as a whole, it's not enough for me personally to use typical "identify as" labels and language for this. Fictionfolk also fits here, since it's not just for "identify as" identities.
I don't think I've heard much of similar experiences before, and I don't expect this to be a common thing either. We have to basically DIY our own ways to cope with the dysphoria to the best of our ability due to the rarity of this kind of experience compared to the usual "nonhuman being feels uncomfortable with their human body" dysphoria. Either way, I just want to let people know that this experience exists. Maybe it can help someone else down the line or start discussions.
Our feelings towards someone is split into 2 channels: cognitive and emotional. Emotional is something like feeling butterflies in your stomach, racing heartbeat, stuff like that. Cognitive is… no idea if this is a good way to describe it, but it’s closer to the logical side of our mind, so it’s more like “I like playing tennis and I know that about myself”
Both channels may be in sync (feeling your heart race etc. when you’re with your crush), but there are times where they’re not in sync.
We basically see our cupioromanticism as the time where the cognitive channel says yes but the emotional channel gives no response. In this case, we know we want to be in a romantic relationship with someone, but the “spark” (read: feeling of attraction) is not there for whatever reason. No feeling of euphoria or anything when the love interest confesses their love. We’d even feel conflicted or guilty because we can’t match their feelings. Or second-guess ourselves and our feelings, wondering if there’s something wrong with us.
“If the emotional channel says nothing, why does the cognitive channel say yes? What’s with the disconnect? Why does it exist? I know I love this person, but why am I not feeling anything? Do I need to spend more time with them? Or will that feeling never come? Am I wrong somehow? Is there something wrong with me?”
(Blurb: We noticed polymorph traits that sounds similar to our experiences as shapeshifterkin, and this essay is us comparing the two.)
One polymorph trait that caught our eye when reading some polymorph writings (here and here) is a polymorph’s tendency to mirror those around them. To quote Arethinn, whose writings on polymorphs can be found on the first link:
“The polymorph tends to mirror the forms of those around them, though the exact operation of this phenom/skill hasn't been worked out. Why we would easily mirror some and not so easily others, we don't know.”
“(...) There's the additional twist of a tendency to mirror others.. faced with a dragon, I tend to become dragon; faced with a pixy, that is brought out in me, though some "work better" than others. It doesn't take much to make me reflect dragon, but there's not a lot of pixy in me to begin with, so it's never a clear "image".”
While we’re not polymorphic, we notice that we do experience some form of mirroring, though in a much more limited way than what we think a polymorph may experience.
We visualize ourselves as wearing certain outfits in headspace, ones that we have visual references of via official art of our sources. Our abilities to conjure this mental image is not without flaw, and we may be unable to keep it “stuck” in our mind for prolonged amounts of time without having it change in any way, and different members can be more or less easily affected by this. We may end up rapidly cycling between several outfits for some amount of time before slowing down and settling with one. We may also notice that our outfit has changed to match one of the images we’ve seen of ourselves recently (e.g. a fronter saw a picture of X wearing a school uniform, then X in our system would be seen wearing the exact same uniform when they came to see them). In rare cases, we may mix up several details of different outfits (e.g. getting colors wrong, wearing outfit A but using a hat only seen as a part of outfit B) or in even rarer cases, using an outfit their source have never been seen using but is seen being used by someone else’s source instead (e.g. X wearing Y’s outfit because X misremembered who wore that specific outfit).
This also includes costumes of nonhuman entities, though in these cases, we can feel the nonhuman body parts as phantom limbs and we can move those as if it’s part of us. Despite that, this doesn’t always mean that we identify as the beings we dress up as. For example, there is an image of me wearing cat ears, tail, and claws, shown below.
Most of the time, looking at this image would cause me to look like how I was portrayed in that card and feel those aforementioned phantom body parts. I do register these phantom sensations as belonging to me. Despite that, I do not identify as a cat or any other feline beings. To me, this is nothing more than a costume, or rather, a form I can take without needing to identify as such.
Another thing we noticed is that polymorphs not only change their form into multiple beings, they become those beings entirely. This is definitely not the case for us since our shapeshifting noemata is very clear that our minds stay the same despite our form changes. However, what we experienced is a bit similar to that. If we’re being reminded of a certain member in our system by being exposed to images or voices of their source for long enough, said member would be dragged to co-consciousness and/or co-front with varying levels of ease depending on each member. This could help us whenever we want someone to front, but it could also be an annoyance if we have no intention to do so. At first glance, this looks similar to a polymorph mirroring and becoming what they see, except that in our case, the "I" of the two forms belong to different people, the previous fronter does not change into anything, instead the controls are handed over to a different system member.
We haven't seen many writings on shapeshifters and polymorphs, there probably isn't that many, or we just haven't found them yet. Hopefully our writings on our experiences can be helpful for others, possibly by being a jumping-off point for discussions.
