who are you really

my grand unifying theory of fairies is a theory about all of the things humans have typically historically found extremely compelling and infuriatingly impossible to grasp, basically. death is my best example. humans are very good thinkers and we have the ability to understand a lot of things, but as animals we have pretty limited perceptions of the world. the world exists in such a way that our ability to fully perceive it will never like... match up to Reality. does this make sense. we only have a limited number of senses and our cognition is limited as well. there is a ceiling of understanding for us an organisms. but we are thinkers and our survival has typically depended on analyzing and trying to understand the phenomena around us! so the things we cannot fully comprehend become these little planets that we orbit around psychologically.

when I say something is a fairy, what I mean is that fairy is a explanation for the psychological significance of something we as human beings can't really fathom. I made a list (non-exhaustive of course) of them last night but here are some if you missed it: death, grief, childhood/adolescence, the Self, romance/attraction of any sort, sex, reproduction, violence, natural disasters, illness/disease, trauma, alien encounters, missing persons cases, etc etc. Conrad wisely observed that the concept of "fairies" as I define them here is ITSELF a fairy. Which is both true and very satisfying to think about imo.

some of these things are like, arguably explicable (we can for example intellectually understand why a given illness happens,) but between that theoretical intellectual knowledge and the impact that it has on us to experience it, there is a gap. and that gap is a fairy!

humans typically come up with psychological scaffolding to explain fairies away such that we can comfortably pack them into a box in our heads and not be utterly existentially overwhelmed by them all of the time. this is why e.g. religion/spirituality is evolutionarily adaptive, I think.

I think that BECAUSE we cannot fully comprehend or explain these things, the only way we can communicate about them is to just say what encountering them feels like. and that! gap! is the fairy. the gap between the reality that we cannot comprehend, and the description of the experience of encountering it.

my theory is that a lot of the realities of existing as an alive organism are so inherently traumatic that comprehension, or even acceptance of our lack of comprehension, would be detrimental to our ability to stay alive in a day to day moment to moment way. one of the reasons I think this is because the people who think about this sort of thing a lot (me) tend to be VERY BAD at participating in expected human social structures, lmao. I think probably we all exist on a spectrum of Obsessed With Fairies and I am definitely on the very far end of it. some people are just obsessed with finding ways to describe the experience of grappling with the unknowable, or obsessed with finding models to communicate phenomena we do not have an immediate understanding of. that's why you get Thinkers, I think. philosophers and stuff.

the society I live in (and probably most of not all of you as well) is one that is particularly intent to deny the existence of or flatten/simplify fairies. I think this is bad for us because I think we need social support structures for grappling with these things because they're scary. things we cannot fully understand are scary. we need to admit that the fairies are real and be able to talk about them like they're important and not be treated like we are crazy and isolated socially for it.

there is probably some phrase or term for this in specific academic philosophy fields but I don't have access to that stuff so I made my own out of dirt and sticks.

It's fine to have fun with therianthropy. That's not what has me upset. What bothers me is that therianthropy has become a fandom where people are more concerned about posting cute edits and arguing about who is and isn't valid than they are actually discussing therianthropy itself.

Therianthropy is basically Furry 2.0 at this point. I miss the way the community used to be, because what it is now has little, if anything, to do with identifying as an animal.

I remember watching a 2010s quality video tutorial on how to do quadrobics like a hyena, with special attention to sloping the back and pacing accurate to hyena gait. There were recommendations on how to find videos of your theriotype walking and how to mimic that.

There were aesthetic boards with links to items you could buy or make yourself based on your theriotypes, like a wolf blanket, or an elk bracelet. Crafts like environment-friendly scent sprays and theta delta made with sticks could be found around the community.

Folks had their own websites and blogs for documenting their experiences. A new phantom shift here and a term for a unique identity there. A post about one experience could be turned into a discussion, and from there, a community, all centered around a unique and beautiful nonhuman experience.

It's not about cutting out quadrobics and gear, it's not about barring and gatekeeping voluntary identities, it's not about banishing the newer generations of kin folks that we once were. None of that. That's a part of what makes this community a community.

To me, it seems to be about community engagement. Whether that identity is physical, spiritual, voluntary, fluid, flickering, intense or not, just for fun, or otherwise. I feel like the root issue ends up being the lack of care or interest in others' identities, which is what pushes down personal posts that express what the community is about, and boosts solely generalized, non-content posts.

There is no reason to stop posting memes and silly posts, and no reason to attack them, either. That does nothing but contribute to the useless discourse in the therian community. That's where posts calling out an issue become the issue.

2010's (and even 00's) style community is still around, you just have to actually seek it out! Forums, webrings, dreamwidth, and private chatrooms are all still around. Even the content in the tags on tumblr honestly isn't that different from the way it was 10 years ago other than containing infinitely fewer anti-otherkin posts. Before tiktok therians it was KFF, and before that it was teen werewolves. There are always going to be highly visible communities that use the aesthetic of alterhumanity for things it doesn't quite mean, but that doesn't mean the meanings of things like therianthropy are actually changing– and, importantly, people get introduced to the community via those phenomena and eventually find the "core" community and learn about us. I've seen so so many people say they came to tumblr or discord from tiktok and are excited to learn about community history.

please repost to other sites, I wanna get responses to be as diverse as I can !!

Nice that we're getting two Friday the Thirteenths in a row this year.

For clarity's sake, I can't possibly cover every identity label that exists, so I'm going to say "alter/nonhuman" and as long as you are Something Other Than Baseline Human, this means you, even if you don't normally use those terms for yourself. This is not because I'm trying to apply those labels to you, just that I need something that fits in the poll.

If you are not alter/nonhuman, DO NOT take this poll, there is no "I'm orthohuman" button and that's intentional!

It also makes the line between respect and belief much easier to navigate for me. I know that the most I can ask of someone is respect for my self-image, and that asking them to believe me with something like this is too much. It would require a major upheaval to a lot of people’s worldviews to believe me! It could be dangerous for some people to believe that I’m a divine entity with knowledge about the inner workings of the universe! I don’t think I even want most people to believe me! There’s certain people I want to believe me, and there’s people within that I trust to believe me. But ultimately… I’m able to recognize that making such a weighty claim without any evidence or precedent is not going to be believed by most people and shouldn’t be believed by most people.

The otherkin + alterhuman communities are ones I trust more to believe me, because I believe the communities have been putting a lot of work into how absurd and weighty claims like this should be interacted with. There’s a lot of work that goes into trying to make these communities safe, and I feel safe expressing myself in this community— both for myself and for the people I’m talking to. I don’t feel like I’m putting myself at risk of ostracization or being dismissed as crazy, and I don’t feel like I’m putting the people I talk to in an awkward position of whether or not to believe me, and I feel like there’s not a very high risk of people getting weird about it.

All this to say, there’s been some very weighty claims being thrown around in otherkin + alterhuman communities lately, ones that cannot be backed up by any verifiable evidence. And it seems like we are pushing towards a culture of belief in regards to these claims rather than a culture of respect. If you claim something very weighty that is unable to be backed up by evidence, I will respect that claim. I might not believe it, though, and if you make those claims in public you have to be okay with that. You can’t dismiss people who don’t believe you as ignorant or stupid or as attacking you.

Please note: This post uses "people" as a species-neutral term. It is addressed to the broader nonhuman community and is not intended to "reality check" endels, physical therians, transspecies folks, etc. You guys can ignore the bits that don't apply to you, but please still read this.

This one is going to be hard for a lot of people in this community to hear, but the longer I've been alive the more convinced I've become that misanthropy always stems from unprocessed self-hatred and insecurity.

There is a tendency among therians and otherkin, especially anyone newly-awakened, to see humans as somehow worse, lesser, or even evil as a form of self-affirmation, and it eats away at those people from the inside. It's part of a common phenomenon where people with marginalized identities cope by turning the out-group (in this case humans) into an unrelatable enemy that oppresses them by simply existing. In every case, that type of outlook is unrealistic, unsustainable, and results in further feelings of alienation, rejection, and self-pity– as well as retaliatory antagonism from people in the privileged group who would otherwise be supportive. All it does is make everyone miserable and create an ever-growing rift between people who could be creating community together.

The way this behavior presents in nonhuman spaces is generalized misanthropy. Statements like "humans could never understand us", "my boss forced his horrible human culture onto me today", "of course [x] is terrible, humans made it", and the ever-present "I hate humans".

Unlike in other marginalized groups, however, with alterhumans this out-group bashing presents an additional problem: we were born into human-shaped bodies and live human-shaped lives. It is impossible to say "I hate humans" without also saying "I hate my body and my life". Saying "I hate humans" is, unambiguously, a form of self-rejection. Holding on to misanthropy is what keeps therians and otherkin feeling miserable about themselves.

Humans are just another species of animal, and they're one you will need to learn to like in order to be happy unless you plan to fend for yourself in the woods your whole life.

No matter whether or not you see yourself as human, humans are your peers, your family, and your community. They make the clothes you wear, grow the food you eat, and built the home you live in. Every book and movie, every song and painting, every craft supply and hiking trail and recipe you love was created by and for humans, or at minimum required human technology to create. You cannot escape that, and trying to reject everything around you because you hate your body will make you increasingly isolated, depressed, and angry.

Species dysphoria is a bitch, but it doesn't have to define you. You will grow into your human-shaped life, even if it doesn't feel like it right now. You will find ways of acting human you enjoy, and meet humans you love more than you ever thought was possible. You will sing and dance with them, build community with them, and in doing so will learn to love the human parts of yourself. You will learn that humans are just another animal, and no animal is inherently bad.

There’s a topic I’ve realized I haven’t discussed here, so I figure it’s time to write something about it. As usual, due to the length of this essay, the bulk of it is under the cut.

I’ve seen a lot of posts going around by people exploring nonhuman past lives, especially those which aren’t possible here/now (i.e., angels, dragons, etc.), and describing any memories they have in very human terms. Things like walking down streets, gathering in gardens or libraries, standing before a judge in court during a trial. I think this is the result of a lack of awareness of a phenomenon we all deal with, but which is rarely (if ever) discussed directly.

Every memory you have, from the broadest strokes to the finest detail, is filtered through the perception and understanding we have here/now. We’re experiencing three-dimensional space, with a (relatively) constant and linear flow of time, seeing the world by way of reflected light and hearing things by way of vibrations in the air around us. Unfortunately, because those things are the only way we’ve experienced reality in this lifetime, we are literally incapable of properly modeling other forms of reality in our minds. It’s a limitation of being here/now, and having the kinds of experiences we do.

A (slightly extended) example: It’s pretty common to be taught about nets of polyhedra in school these days. As a refresher for those who haven’t dealt with the concept in a while: Polyhedra (singular “polyhedron”) is a three-dimensional figure made up of flat planes joined at some angle. One of the most common polyhedra is the cube. Six flat faces, joined at right angles. A net of a polyhedron is a way of “unfolding” the faces of a polyhedron into a two-dimensional shape. That two-dimensional shape can then be folded through the third dimension to recreate the original polyhedron.

Nets aren’t limited to unfolding three-dimensional objects, however. Theoretically, you can create a one dimensional net of a two dimensional polygon (it’ll just be a line, but it counts). More significantly for this discussion, though, you can create three-dimensional nets of four-dimensional shapes. Some of you may be familiar with the concept of a hypercube (sometimes called a tesseract). In the same way that a cube can be thought of as being made of squares arranged in three dimensions, a hypercube can be thought of as being made of three-dimensional cubes arranged in four dimensions. (There are multiple ways of representing a hypercube in three dimensions, but all of them are by necessity inaccurate.) Now, I’d like you to take a moment, and try to imagine a proper four-dimensional hypercube, and how it unfolds into a three-dimensional net. Then try to imagine that three-dimensional net folding back into a four-dimensional hypercube.

It is, quite simply, impossible to do accurately. Our brains are simply incapable of truly visualizing four-dimensional space, and the way objects behave in four dimensions, because we’re limited to experiencing only three of them. Similarly, it is impossible to truly comprehend how reality functions outside of here/now, because we’re limited to experiencing only here/now. Brains are amazing things, however, and will try their hardest to fill in the gaps with something, even if that something is inaccurate.

When it comes to remembering nonhuman incarnations, this means that our brains will grab whatever feels closest to what you’re unable to understand, and use that to fill in the gap, regardless of if it actually fits or not. As a result, those kinds of memories are inherently unreliable, since they’re (in many ways) just our brain’s best guess about what actually happened.

I’ve taken to referring to this problem as “the lens of human perception”, since it occurs due to filtering things through the understanding we can have by perceiving the world the way humans do. Like any imperfect lens, it leads to our view of things being distorted, and because of the way brains work, we generally aren’t even aware that the distortion has occurred. And so we redefine things in terms of here/now without even realizing we’re redefining our own experiences.

Being aware of the lens of human perception can be helpful, however. It lets you consider the context of your memories, and figure out where the gaps in your understanding are getting filled in. You can then make an effort to explore those gaps, and refine your understanding to get a clearer picture of how things actually were. It’s difficult sometimes, and takes some work to do effectively, but it can be worlds better than getting caught up in misunderstandings about your own experiences.

Honestly I think it's a thing I miss from old blogs where a lot of what was shared was mostly active experiences, aka, idk "I have a prey drive. I went on a mountain retreat with friends and processed rabbits we caught. This was a deeply spiritual experience and gratifying to my carnivore instincts" instead of "I confirmed marten because otter was 9% wrong on Vibes and I think my DNA is not human because I feel bad in my body. Here are 12 words I coined for my very specific precise experience of it." or other things that are more... Describing oneself without ever stepping outside of your own identity to actually experience things.

Maybe this makes no sense. I just think a lot of what the Tumblr nonhuman community amounts to rn is kinda paradoxical and ridiculous, especially with therians, because it's just a bunch of over thinking and no acting. Like no wonder you feel dysphoric about being an animal you've spent the last fucking 10h spiraling in your own head about deeply human concepts watching a deeply human screen. Tear apart a pomegranate with your teeth you'll feel better. Jesus. Put some enrichment in that beast.