Just your friendly neighborhood bison

We weren't allowed to be there without a teacher present, but they often forgot to lock the door, and way in the back, far away from the windows, back where no one could find me, there just so happened to be a shelf full of 'mystery books.' They had everything, from UFOs, cryptids, and mythology to ESP, folklore... and werewolves.

These weren't big tomes - it was a village school with only 120 students, ranging from 5 to 12 years old. They were paperbacks catered mostly to 3rd graders, and they had all the trappings that those kinds of books tend to have, being sensationalist, scatterbrained, and simplistic at the best of times, and downright misinformed at the worst.

I know now that hypertrichosis had little to nothing to do with werewolf mythology. Werewolves were largely born out of fear of your neighbor, fear that they might be hiding something - and hypertrichosis is not exactly easy to hide. The tell-tale signs of werewolves are monobrows that can be plucked, a furry back that can be covered up, and a tendency to disappear for long stretches of time, while livestock get killed by wild animals.

But of course I didn't know that back then. My folkloric studies, as a 3rd grader, consisted of Dragonology and looking at pictures in my aunt's "Mysteries of the Unknown" collection, that I was far too young to have the patience to read.

So when I read about people who were thought to be werewolves because of their appearance, I took it at face value.

I wish the story takes a fantastical turn here, and that I started drawing fur on myself or wearing fur to school. But I was a quiet creature. I already got chased around by bullies at recess - why I hid in the library in the first place - and I didn't need to add to that.

But I envied the people who had fur. At least they were targeted for something visible, I thought. They didn't have to wonder why people might throw rocks at them or call them animals or act like their touch was poisonous.

It was 40-50 pages of 16p font with grainy greyscale images, explaining very basic facts (and 'facts') about werewolf mythology. And I devoured it.

I think that specific werewolf depiction is one of the reasons I am what I am today. The horns, the mane, the bulk... I remember trying to draw it, but I could never make it look quite right. Probably because I was 8.

We weren't allowed to be there without a teacher present, but they often forgot to lock the door, and way in the back, far away from the windows, back where no one could find me, there just so happened to be a shelf full of 'mystery books.' They had everything, from UFOs, cryptids, and mythology to ESP, folklore... and werewolves.

These weren't big tomes - it was a village school with only 120 students, ranging from 5 to 12 years old. They were paperbacks catered mostly to 3rd graders, and they had all the trappings that those kinds of books tend to have, being sensationalist, scatterbrained, and simplistic at the best of times, and downright misinformed at the worst.

I know now that hypertrichosis had little to nothing to do with werewolf mythology. Werewolves were largely born out of fear of your neighbor, fear that they might be hiding something - and hypertrichosis is not exactly easy to hide. The tell-tale signs of werewolves are monobrows that can be plucked, a furry back that can be covered up, and a tendency to disappear for long stretches of time, while livestock get killed by wild animals.

But of course I didn't know that back then. My folkloric studies, as a 3rd grader, consisted of Dragonology and looking at pictures in my aunt's "Mysteries of the Unknown" collection, that I was far too young to have the patience to read.

So when I read about people who were thought to be werewolves because of their appearance, I took it at face value.

I wish the story takes a fantastical turn here, and that I started drawing fur on myself or wearing fur to school. But I was a quiet creature. I already got chased around by bullies at recess - why I hid in the library in the first place - and I didn't need to add to that.

But I envied the people who had fur. At least they were targeted for something visible, I thought. They didn't have to wonder why people might throw rocks at them or call them animals or act like their touch was poisonous.

It was 40-50 pages of 16p font with grainy greyscale images, explaining very basic facts (and 'facts') about werewolf mythology. And I devoured it.

I think that specific werewolf depiction is one of the reasons I am what I am today. The horns, the mane, the bulk... I remember trying to draw it, but I could never make it look quite right. Probably because I was 8.

@cutthroat-crimson

Oh god yeah. People were dying. I mean, some people died in my source, too, but nowhere near as many as in my canon. Not to mention the torture, bigotry, wars, famine, fascism, xenophobia, panopticon, gladiator battles...

There's good stuff too. My kid has learned to walk, over in that other life. My wife's getting her second or third phd. It's been so long since the fate of the universe was at stake, I've been able to get involved with Earth-based philanthropy. The mutants rights movement is making progress.

And I just remembered my source doesn't even have a mutants rights movement, they're just left in the dust because the writers thought it was unimportant to the plot lmfao.

I'm ashamed to admit I stayed away from Earth politics until my late 20s because I "didn't wanna interfere." Only made milquetoast "we should all try to get along" statements to the media. Like, the most powerful weapon in the universe is fused to me, I could become a dictator if I wanted to, I gotta be careful.

But lately I've been getting more involved in advocating for mutants rights (at the behest of Gwen who's been involved with the movement for years). We're at a stage where mutants have legal protection against hiring discrimination in most fields, which is more than they had when I was a kid. The first mutants I met were 1) homeless addicts, 2) making money at a seedy back alley wrestling show, and 3) literally working at a freak show

The joys of having a parallel life is that I can't tell you how things will work out, only how they've worked out so far. And so far? Not great. For some reason it's hard to convince the general public that a guy who looks like a giant alligator isn't out to hurt you, especially when people like him have often had to resort to theft and robbery just to survive :')

- Public social media is not a safe place to share details of triggers and traumas. Especially if you are a minor.

-Tumblr is not a secure place to store system information. Keep a document on another website in case anything happens to your account.

- It's okay to keep things private, even if the nature of the system community on Tumblr might make you feel pressured to share everything.

- It's okay to not know everything, we are 3 years in and still making mistakes and new discoveries.

If you have 2+ theriotypes, answer with what is your main / stronger theriotype right now, in the moment.

For adults only please, I want data from my fellow adults. And care to reblog for reach?

My twisted self-esteem quietly hints to me that there are more open-and-proud carnivores because very few want to be proud of being what is considered prey, and therefore those with pronounced herbivore theriotypes often sit in the closet. Even orthohumans (most of the time) answer the "what animal would you be" question with some cool carnivore.

also, we really think other people need to think about this a bit more deeply than they probably are

So.

Don't you think it's a little weird that people have this sort of purity test for the definition of "therianthropy" where they try to restrict it to extant living animals?

As if maybe it has to be based on some kind of ancestral or genetic memory. Or, if it's spiritual, then it has to be spirits of things that are living, or at least, have once lived.

Because, wolves? They aren't anywhere on the human evolutionary tree. You cannot go back far enough into prehistory, into the ancestry of humans, and find wolves.

And this goes for absolutely every extant lifeform today, including primates. We're all descendant from a common ancestor, but we are not ancestors of each other.

So, that means, whatever's going on with therianthropy, it's not genetic. At least, not in the sense that we have some kind of biologically based memories, or mix up of instincts like that.

Now, humans are neurodiverse and extremely complex. And, really, so is a lot of other life. Life is a complex system that shows many, many countless instances of chaotic fibrillation and development.

It's not inconceivable, as an example of one possible explanation, that sometimes someone is born and develops in such a way that their own personal drives, instincts, and sense of identity better match another animal, just by chance. By an act of chaos (in the chaos theory sense of the word).

So, if you're going to base your understanding of therianthropy off of anything scientific, you have to recognize this. Otherwise, there's nothing scientific about your model of therianthropy.

And just what is it, exactly, that makes that more possible than someone also growing up to be a dragon? Nothing.

Of course, there are also spiritual explanations for this.

But there are so many different spiritualities out there, who is to say that one model is more accurate and true than all the others?

And, the line between a mythical creature and a spirit is a really super blurry one, that changes depending on your own religion.

So, when someone says that they're a dragon therian, the only counter argument that can really be made is something along the lines of "that's not what the word was supposed to mean when it was coined."

And that's a bullshit argument, because not only does language evolve, it should evolve when it needs to. And this is a case of it needing to. (Assuming this is a case of it evolving in the first place, because we don't trust claims that therianthropy was meant to only include extant animals when it was coined by people who identified as werecreatures, a mythical type of being [and a totally legit thing we're not criticizing], and the past is also so easily rewritten.) Whatever the history of the word, there are mythical and fictional people and beings today that need the word "therian" to describe themselves, and in this era of discrimination and crushing oppression of so, so many people, it's fucking awful to try to take that away from them.

Anyway, so, dragons.

Dragons are neat because we were not invented by just some guy.

We're a catch-all umbrella category of a myriad of both mythical and extant living organisms. (Komodo dragons, bearded dragons, and leafy sea dragons are dragons.) Some of us are fictional, some of us are mythical, some of us are extant species of animal, and some of us are plants.

There is no one myth that you can point to and say, "that's where all dragons came from". And there is no singular characteristic that a dragon must have in order to be a dragon. Not flight. Not even breathing fire. Not even scales.

And we're ancient. We grew up with humanity and humanity grew up with us. We are embedded in their psyches and cultures as far back as the earliest pieces of art that have been dug up (or damn near it), even if the word "dragon" isn't nearly that old. The seeds of our memetic identities were there in creatures with horns and wings and long tails and monstrous moods carved in stone and bone and horn, all along.

(scientifically speaking, we probably don't predate dogs, but it is possible. there's no way of proving it one way or the other)

It should be absolutely no surprise that a child of humans wakes up periodically and goes, "Oh, I'm a dragon, actually."

It has historic precedence, after all. Like, even royalty does it occasionally (though, that might be a slightly different thing).

Daemonism is a practice. The concept of it can be used by anyone: alterhuman or not, plural or not. It can be pure playfulness. It can be imaginary, and that's okay! That's a beautiful experience in its own respect!

There's no universal daemian experience because we accept and embrace that our minds, and our experiences, are ours alone.

The community isn't built on a shared experience – just a shared idea which we all create unique versions of.

Some people stick closer to the basic idea we started with. Some just take what they like from it and throw out the rest. Some only take vague inspiration from it. Some people adapt it more than others, sometimes due to being neurodivergent, plural, and/or alterhuman.

It's still daemonism because daemonism isn't defined by us all "doing the same thing" or "having the same experience".

Daemonism is, for the most part, defined by a person deciding that they want to call what they are doing or experiencing daemonism.

And a large part of that is often in connection to the community, whether directly or in a peripheral way, by taking inspiration from the practice, making use of the community's writings, and so on.

This is why I think daemonism is often misunderstood in an alterhuman context. Daemonism is not an experience, it's not an identity – it's just an idea we each take and make our own. And that's what it should be. That's the beauty of it!

Anyone could be a daemian if they want to. There's no requirements. A lot of people get started with daemonism purely because it sounds fun! A lot of people start with only their imagination, and many people remain so.

For others, it might become something else in time, or they might discover there was something underlying their imaginings all along. It's no more or less a practice of daemonism, either way.

A lot of alterhuman concepts don't apply to daemonism because of this. Fact is, there's plenty of daemians who are orthohumans too, and plenty of people who specifically see their daemonism as an orthohuman practice.

I see it get included under the alterhuman umbrella a lot, and I feel like it gives the wrong first impression to come at it from that angle by default.

Really, it's more comparable with being a furry. For some people, it is a deep, impactful, life-altering experience, and the people who feel that way are a vital part of the community. But equally, for some it is an exercise in whimsy, playfulness, or creativity – and those people are no less members of the community for it.

We're not united by being plural, or having thoughtforms, or being alterhuman. We're united by being a bunch of people who were inspired by some books (or a film or TV show) to play around with the idea of daemons, and ended up sticking with it for one reason or another.