#on experiences

[shadowfae]

Experience: I enter the otherkin community as an angelkin. I understand the identity more and more, eventually specifying to fallen angelkin. I awaken a fictotype so strongly I can no longer deny it. This combined with the dissolution of the community and a plural de-integration means I no longer actively identify as angelkin. Eventually I meet a canonmate who's a god. I dedicate myself to this god. Eventually the nature of my dedication puts me back into an angelic role for that god. Well then.

[shadowfae]

Odd question for you guys... would you say that otherlinking, otherheartedness and otherkin are points on a spectrum, or do they more represent distinct states of being with little overlap?

It’s more like a Venn diagram of different experiences that sometimes overlap, because identity is big and messy and hard to categorize. I wouldn’t call it a spectrum, because if it were, most people would think of it as a line from human to not and then assign how valid you are based on that, which isn’t at all what anyone wants anyone else to think.

They’re all different experiences, and it’s impossible to know exactly where someone else without being them. It’s like... Okay, let’s take colours. We all point at a firetruck and we all go “Yeah that’s red”. But most colourblind folks see something that the rest of us would go “That’s a bad desaturated yellow”. It’s impossible to know if your red and my red are the same perceived colour - we’re all seeing the same wavelength, but are we both seeing the exact same shade? Probably not, and we’ll never find that out without surgery to swap our eyes entirely, which nobody does for obvious reasons.

We’ve all agreed that ‘yeah, this frequency is red’ and then since we’re not able to see the actual wavelength, just the result, we more or less have to agree on whether or not things are red. Sometimes the disagreement in perception is completely obvious: remember The Dress? (I saw it as light blue and desaturated gold, personally). Nobody could agree on what colour it was. But we were all seeing the same frequencies.

So thus, we agree that this is the definition of otherkin, this is what we experience and we all agree it fits. Most of the time. Some of us fit into both ‘linking and ‘kin. Some of us fall on the gray area. Some of us are seeing silver instead of grey, and interpret that as ‘hearted.

It is absolutely impossible to say they don’t overlap, because there is no way to prove anything. This is subjective territory. But it’s also inadequate to say they’re all points on a line, that otherkin is a stronger version of otherlinking or that ‘hearted is actually fundamentally a part of either one. They’re different things, mostly, with different underlying causes... mostly.

We can’t prove anything in any direction. So we lay down definitions, grill others on how they came to that conclusion when we’re not sure, and we hope like hell when someone says they’re X, they understand the agreed-upon definition of X and are of the opinion they fit it. When they don’t, it’s the “Do you have a cactus? No, I have the asked-for item. Excellent, give it to me. [hands over cactus]” meme from The Good Place, and nobody’s happy.

[shadowfae]

Could you elaborate on the internalized misogyny/autistic/ADHD component of that recent post? It sounds really interesting, and I'd like to know more about how those things correlate to gender (and species?) identity.

Okay so basically that was a really summarized version of saying:

We can agree that being AFAB and desperately wanting to be a boy is a sign of being a trans man. I can’t speak for being AMAB and desperately wanting to be a girl, because I’m not AMAB, so ask someone else about that.

However, being AFAB and desperately wanting to be a boy is 50/50 a sign of “I want to be a boy because I am a boy” versus “I want to be a boy because I hate being a girl, because girls are treated badly and I want respect”

So being AFAB and desperately wanting to be a boy is either a) trans stuff or b) internalized misogyny

So thus the parallel goes, if wanting to be a different gender is a sign of being trans, shouldn’t it mean that wanting to be a different species is a sign of being alterhuman?

Yeah, absolutely! But also, you have to remember a few things.

One of the many reasons of the changeling myth was folks not recognizing autism / ADHD, because psychology wasn’t that great at the time, and small child suddenly acting Fay and Weird (knows words they shouldn’t, asks weird questions, gets really fixated) is not unlike ‘autism / ADHD mommies’ saying “autism / ADHD stole my sweet normal child!!”

As well, a lot of autistic / ADHD / other neuroatypical folks feel nonhuman simply because they don’t get Western societal conventions.

Now, I’m not saying that being otherkin psychologically because your neuroatypicality makes you feel nonhuman is wrong. I am absolutely not, and I welcome those people wholeheartedly. We need their voices.

But what I’m basically saying is that as thus AFABness + wanting to be a boy is 50/50 trans stuff versus misogyny, thus it also goes wanting to be nonhuman could very well be 50/50 alterhumanity versus neuroatypicality.

That’s how that thought process goes. I can’t say for absolute certain, I don’t have a degree in psychiatry, but it seems like it wouldn’t be all that surprising if that were the case.

Now, a lot of people really like to say “hurr durr being otherkin has nothing to do with being trans don’t compare them!!!”. Unfortunately to those people who really dislike the concept intersectionality, I am both. And I will note when they’re similar.

The main hypothesis for why so many otherkin and alterhumans are queer is because if you’re questioning your species identity, it kind of makes sense you’d also question your sexuality / gender, as you really can’t view those in the exact same lens as a normal human because well, you’re not.

Being trans and being otherkin, from the inside, do feel pretty similar. I’m ignoring society here - transphobia and kin-hatred are very, very different on a societal level, and nobody is comparing that - but from the inside, when it’s just me? Yeah, they’re two aspects of basically the same thing.

So if they present on the inside rather similar, then lines of thinking would also be similar, just swap the language and you’ve got a pretty good idea. They’re both of identifying as something different than you physically are. They both tend to come with dysphoria and/or euphoria. There is a level of transition there, up to the person in question. So it’s not surprising to me at all if things line up between them. We can agree wanting to be a different gender is a sign of being trans, so of course it follows the same for species.

Why wouldn’t it?

[shadowfae]

There's gotta be people who lie in the middle ground between otherkin and copinglinkers, right?

This just reminds me of the "can people choose to be trans" discourse and personally I've never found the value in trying to find a clean dividing line between people who "choose" to be trans and people who "are" trans, like obviously some people feel dysphoria much more than others and it's important to recognize that, but that doesn't mean theres some "how miserable would you be if you were forced to be cis" test that can decide who is a Valid Trans Person or not. It feels to me like it might be the same with the broader otherkin spectrum, but admittedly I don't know much about the community?

That said, the otherkin community has been really cool and like, when I go digging in early internet history I often find beautifully preserved histories and narratives from otherkin blogs about communities and sites that people frequented. And that's something I'm forever grateful for. I'm glad that there are still folks out there who pass on that history and find value in those communities.

Okay so I waited until I’d officially gotten out of bed (yes, everything I’ve done today was on my phone in bed) to answer this properly.

The thing that I’ve never much mentioned in my place of this argument - and I feel that if I’m going to, I should have a few personal essays to publish first in order to make my point clearly - is that at least for me, my kintypes and my linktypes feel so different there is absolutely no way I could mistake them for each other.

That’s why I’m not calling whatever’s going on with the Xweetok stuff a linktype, because there’s no choice there, it’s just me getting hit in the face with Xweetok animality and trying to figure out what it all means.

My kintypes are intrinsic to my personality. If you leave me alone for a bit, or put me somewhere where I feel totally, completely safe, I go so feral it’s not even funny. I growl. I hiss. My ears, tail(s), and wings do all my body language for me. I walk as digitigrade as a human is capable of. I settle into the mentality of an animal, except for when I slide into dignity and divinity, or when you hand me a piece of technology and then I’m as gruff as a pirate and humming to lyrics nobody else can hear.

My linktypes? Something happens. Panic, anger, fear, terror. I am [insert linktype here], here is what it is correct for me to do, here is what I will do, I navigate my way out of it with grace, I handle it as my linktypes would. Things hurt and I settle into their skin, if only for a little while. When their skin is hard to settle it, I simply change it. Being Kiyoteru was a way for me to understand my own sexual awakening when I’d never been safe enough to recognize my own animality, until I fused it with Luteia kinfeels into the world’s worst coping mechanism (don’t do that, kids) and did some things I’m very much not proud of.

Being Yukari was an answer to dysphoria and social ostracization that served me for quite a long time, and that I no longer need, because I am slightly more comfortable in my own skin. It was a matter of personality and aeslinking: she was a moon-girl who liked warm tea on snowy days and pretty poetry and rabbits. I never had her connection to rabbits, they’re just pets to me, but when I needed it I could pretend to be near a bunny the way she probably was bunnyhearted, and I could be a moon-girl until the sun came up for me.

My kintypes are deeper than that. Ranisson and Pale do seem a matter of personality, being as they are the closest to human, except for all the places where their experiences built them from the ground up. As Pale I was a Devil without his powers that didn’t quite know it enough to stop reaching for more power. As Ranisson, I was a girl in a war that was going to end with everyone I cared about dead, and I almost didn’t care, because we’d all be in the hivemind and I’d never be alone again.

Kiyoteru and Yukari were not that way. They were blank canvases that I could change as I needed to, for the purposes of saving me from myself. Even if they’d had actual stories, even if they were more than pretty faces and aesthetics, I would have made them do as I pleased to get me through.

From the inside, linktypes and kintypes seem so fundamentally different to me that I honestly find it hard to see a middle ground there. I’m not everyone, for some there absolutely is a middle. For some, they really can just ignore their own nonhumanity and walk away unscathed. There will always be a gray area, a fringe case or seven, a middle ground where nobody can define where it stops. And I’m not going to be the one to lay down what that middle ground is, because it is antithetical to my entire existence and experience, and it’s something I will never understand for my own.

I insist that everyone be clear about the terms that fit them to the best of their ability because I don’t like being lied to, especially after I’ve placed my trust in people to tell the truth. I don’t trust a salesman, but I’ll try any answer on StackOverflow once. You give me an answer on SO to a complex problem that fucks up my computer, I’m going to be pissed. You lie to me knowingly about your nonhuman/fictional identity in our tags, I’m going to be pissed.

If people say “this is an identity and I don’t know how voluntary it is” I go “yeah okay fair enough.” If they say they’re one or the other, I say the same. If they say they’re one and their experiences match the other, I’ll point that out. If they proceed to insult me and tell me I’m a gatekeeper, I am going to be pissed.

And then if they proceed to throw death threats in my face, I will be furious. I think I have every right to be in that case, and I have no use for those who would side with that sort of person. That’s all anyone’s been asking. Be where you are but be honest about your experiences, and we’ll find a place for you. Even if you say “I’m a linker, but I feel better in this space for otherkin, are we cool with me being here?” the answer will be yes, and then we’ll probably bring you our questions about your experiences. That’s what we do. We ask about others’ experiences and we nitpick how they work because they’re fascinating.

We preserve our history because we have to know where we come from. We have to know we’re not alone. I don’t understand why anyone wouldn’t want to read the history of the community they’re from. Now maybe it’s that I have no ties to my own heritage by blood, and those who do aren’t so interested, but if anything happened to our history I don’t know what I’d do. We need it to say no, if we’re crazy it’s not for this, that this is truly what we are, that we are not the first to have walked this path, and that those who came before us survived to tell the tale.

I am what I am. Everyone else is what they are. So long as people say that, then I have no issues with anyone about it.

[shadowfae]

That poke sapien info really intrigues me. Could you tell us more about it? Ive always wondered how most humans would tend to steer clear from pokemon as a source of food, are there any other major differences between poke sapiens and homo sapiens?

I’ve written about it a bit before, but I’ve gained probably thirty followers this week and last, and my tags about my own experiences are... disorganized at best. ^^; So I have no issues talking about it again!

Now, I do want to say that I am not and never have been a geneticist. My theories here are based upon the perspective of an Absol who worked with Rangers in Almia and Explorers in the parts of Almia that humans couldn’t access. (I had a Shadows of Almia / Mystery Dungeon crossover canon.) So this is in hindsight, putting things together and guessing my best. All of the memories and noemata I’m working off of are field knowledge, not through textbooks, so.

Humans in the Pokemon world were, as one would expect, a form of Pokemon themselves. Actual canon supports this, and notes that humans can and will just marry Pokemon sometimes. It’s kind of taboo for everyone involved, but an Alakazam is just a weird evolving person as far as humans go, so you can see the mentality here.

The first reason I know that humans there aren’t like humans here is because their faces are different. Their faces are... more like ball-jointed doll faces? Bigger eyes, smaller noses, teeth are more herbivorous. If you saw one wandering around in our world, you would know for a damn fact at first sight that such a person is not human. It would probably set off uncanny valley like nothing else.

The second is that hair colours were very varied, I mean, /gestures at canon/. If a Pokemon could have it for a fur and marking combo, so could a human. Add hair gel, which they really liked for some reason, and boom you have canon. Human fashion was just weird but I suppose when you’ve got a socialist utopia, funny hair is something you end up with.

The third would be that time I saw a Ranger gored almost to death, so I got a pretty good look of their innards. Being an Absol, and thus largely a carnivore (I could and did eat fruit sometimes, but largely I hunted smaller Pokemon), I was reasonably well-acquainted with what the innards of a Pokemon are supposed to look like. Well, that poor Ranger had two stomachs, a very extensive gut, and blood vaguely maroon coloured. Lots of blood. They lived, if you’re wondering, and I pulled off a Dark Pulse that I didn’t expect I had the energy for, and things turned out all right.

As far as I know - I got a good look, not a great look - my best guess is that they lost a bit of lung capacity to make room. While humans did have body diversity, it wasn’t as extreme as we do. They looked a lot more similar to each other than humans here have the capability for. Best guess, they’re not very good at being isolated, so completely different grab-bags of traits didn’t really evolve all that much.

They had magic abilities like Pokemon did, they just sucked ass at using them. Again best guess, probably because they didn’t want to admit they were Pokemon. The humans I met who were, for lack of a better term, therianthropes, also tended to be very in tune with their magic. I would say Normal / Psychic typing? Considering Normal-type basically means no type, it wouldn’t surprise me. Their psychic abilities were okay when trained, but they were still shitty at it. It’s a pity, they would’ve died less if they could actually pull off a damn Psychic every now and again.

I never met any child of a human/Pokemon relationship, but I have heard of them happening. Just really, really rare, and typically frowned upon so it didn’t happen anywhere near me to the best of my knowledge.

But, in the context of the fictionkin community, it means that overall a human from my canon would have a wildly different understanding of what ‘human’ means. I know they weren’t homo-sapiens-human because I saw one gutted and looked back and went “hey wait that’s not the species I currently am”. But a human from my world? Well, unless they went into medical science, they might not be aware that Poke-sapiens-human isn’t homo-sapiens-human. They absolutely would not be able to breed between the two I don’t think, absolutely not, but would they know they were fundamentally different down to their DNA?

See, the Pokemon ‘kin community is small and bad and I know like, three other people in it who aren’t wishkin; and that’s a Lucario, a Mewtwo, and an Espeon. I briefly knew an Umbreon who was uncomfortably similar to my partner from my canon (they left social media and said they’d be back if they were still ‘kin after all, I wish them well), I knew a Furret for quite a few years (we parted on horrible terms, I’m upset about it but wish them well, too), and I may or may not know a Mightyena, still questioning on his end.

So it’s not like I can ask anyone! Because nobody I know from the Pokemon community was human there either! But if any humans from there are following me, hey! Tell me about your experiences! Do you know if you were homo sapiens or Poke sapiens! If you were Poke sapiens what’s that feel like!! Tell me!! I wanna know!!

Either way, I liked big macs then significantly more than I do now. Yum.

[shadowfae]

I think i saw something about it being kinda hard for some psych or just non-past-life otherkin/therians/fictionkin to understand how a past life can be a kintype, since it's a past thing? from how i understand it, it seems to be a case of having imprinted on that life, or finding that it felt right to be that person/creature so much that it became an integral part of who you are, that you just can't separate yourself from even in a new life. Dunno if that helps anyone or if anyone wants to add to it because there's definetly other thoughts about this out there.

For me, it’s more like it never left me. I’m 20, and it all happened thirty years ago. I still am that person. Different face, different name, but it’s still me.

Good to have others’ views on it, too!

[shadowfae]

3. How did you discover (and confirm) your hearttype?

I have two hearttypes, shadowhearted and faehearted, and they were actually the first identities I figured out! To no one’s surprise, they make up my url, because when I first started this blog, I thought I was ‘kin of both of those things, and was still trying to figure out the rest of my identity.

For being shadowhearted, my best guess on discovery is that I always felt like I was made of shadow. How much of that was unrecognized Absol and Luteia emotions, I don’t know, but I went my entire childhood wanting to be and voraciously projecting on anything that was shadow-aligned in element, looking for something I couldn’t name. 

You could strip away every part of me and leave me bare, and I would still be with shadow. I can be gentle and gracious and helpful, and I will still be with shadow. It’s so intrinsic to who I am and how I was built that while I can’t say I am a shadow, I can say that the nebulous concept of it is what the rest of me was built on. I read Cat Valente’s A Monstrous Manifesto and wept, I still have it memorized, because it struck me right in the shadowhearted feels. None of them were me to a T, but they were family, they were friends, they were known to me, and I could see bits of myself in them. I’m not any one cut and dry monster, but I’m a monster, because I was built on shadow.

For being faehearted, I spent way too much time reading Fairy Dust and the Quest for the Egg (did you know it’s a trilogy??? I didn’t!!!) and wanting to be a part of that. I didn’t really recognize the shape my wings took, but I could feel them, I knew faeries were always going to be the gateway to understanding myself, even as a small child. So when asked “Well you’re more than just shadows, and you don’t like winter shadowy places and go Nope!, why’s that? Why do you feel at home in the green, if you’re shadow?” my answer was “Well I think it’s because faeries are a lot like me? I think I’m fae?” and it settled better than anything else in my life ever had, but wasn’t an exact match.

Even with my kintypes fully aware to me, part of me still goes back to the fae. I mistook it for my Ranisson kintype and had to sort that whole shtick out and it wasn’t fun. It literally wasn’t until I met a trollkin at Othercon last year who was trollkin because their surname was literally “Valley Champion” in the local language because one of their ancestors was a troll who had championed that valley where they lived and I was like “Hey dumbass! You’re not quite Fair and will never walk away from them because you’re fucking Celtic!” and that answered that, I think. (I’m Irish and Scottish on my father’s side. My mother’s a lot of different types of European, my dad is English, Scottish, and Irish. His mother was half Scottish half Irish, and his father’s mother was the same; so if we go by amount of heritage, those two have the most, and it looks like they won out.)

I’ve always known that if as Luteia I hadn’t been a demon, I would’ve been Fair, and just being made of Kcalb’s magic doesn’t make me any less tilt-your-head-and-squint-and-you’re-Fair. And I can’t say I don’t know if I’m only faehearted because the summer’s brief romance that is my humanity is trying to claw its way back to its roots, or if it’s only thanks to Luteia, or if it’s a mixture of the two or something else entirely.

But I’m pretty sure it’s my heritage yelling at me. I’m also pretty sure I won’t find out until I take a trip to Ireland and Scotland and see the hollow hills for myself. I’ll find out if I sit upon the moors and weep because I found my way home. It’s a while off yet, but I’ll do it. I may not have all the answers yet, but I know how to find them, and that’s reassuring enough.