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I've come across so many people who say "fictionkin are included in Otherkin" yet we're not treated as such by those same people.

The term "kinning" is used my fictionkin however is looked down upon by otherkin and when I've used it in a fictionkin post in an otherkin community, I get so much hate. I even had a post disabled for violating the guidelines in the official therian amino even though (at that point in time) there was no guidelines around the word kinning. Here is why it's an okay word to use.

A) kinning is a verb and verbs don't inherently imply that something is a choice as its the context that does. To give an example, if I choose to run that is a choice however if someone moves my legs and makes me run that is not a choice.

B) If kinning isn't an overall otherkin term, it's a fictionkin one and therefore is fine in that context.

The mere fact that it's at least a fictionkin term and I was shamed for it shows how fictionkin aren't treated as Otherkin.

Being treated as non Otherkin isn't isolated to one word. Posts I make about fictionkin in otherkin spaces often nitpicked however if I post the exact some post but change the words so it applies to non fictionkin Otherkin then it's not nitpicked.

I know that some fictionkin might not label themselves as Otherkin, however they cannot deny that fictionkin technically are under that umbrella. (choosing not to id as otherkin is valid).

Fictionkin are under the umbrella. I wish we were better respected, yes, and we’re not. I wish we had our own spaces that weren’t infiltrated and mocked twenty-four-fucking-seven. But using wishkin terms and helping them make a mockery of us is not helping.

You can’t ask for respect and use words meant to mock everyone else in the same sentence. The words “kinning”, “kins”, “kinnies”, and all of that other nonsense is frowned upon for a reason. This is a serious subculture, and those words came directly from people making fun of us. Let me explain this, so you won’t get lost in the shorthand.

When we say those words imply it’s a choice, the full extent of what we mean sums up to: “Being fictionkind is not a fun roleplay or a joke, this is serious, we are serious, we do not appreciate people walking in and telling us we need to grow up and stop playing pretend, we do not appreciate people assuming we do it for fun, we do not appreciate people coming in and using our terms to play pretend for fun and insisting they know more about our subculture than we do. We not appreciate people using our terms and our community to start cults and abuse actual members of our community, until we’re divided and trying to make anything coherent enough for more than a clique is downright impossible.”

This whole ‘kinnie’ / ‘kinning’ thing is wishkin, also called tumblrkin because tumblr made it a hell of a lot worse than it was. I’ve seen kinnie cults, okay? I had a nasty run-in with one a couple of years ago, and I am dead fucking serious when I say five people almost died because of it. Five people almost died, and I was one of them. And one guy almost had his life ruined and pressed for charges. Because one megalomaniac of a person realized he could control others by weaponizing his trauma and dressing it all up in fictionkind terms and social politics until he had us all ensnared. Because he didn’t start the scary shit until I thought we were practically family, and he was very good at justifying his actions and manipulating people into believing him.

That was the kind of person he was. And he’s far from the only one. I have seen so many damaging, downright terrifying cults come out of kinnies and their ilk it’s not even funny. And while you can make the argument that it’s the people, not the tools, I’ll tell you something.

This community - or at least, what’s left of the actual fictionkind community - has sworn up and down for years that your journey of introspection and questioning is a solo fucking journey. You don’t let your canonmates dictate your experiences. You stand your ground if you get grilled. Every few months posts go ‘round explaining what cults are, resources to help people get out of them, and the fact that everyone knows everyone and largely, actual fictionkind on tumblr tend to be in their late 20s early 30s. That shit isn’t tolerated.

Kinnies took our terms and our experiences, twisted them into a mockery, and used them for a power trip. They didn’t ask, they didn’t try to learn better, they didn’t do anything but dig their heels in and insist it’s all okay. It’s not. It makes a mockery of me, it makes a mockery of everyone like me, it destroyed and is still destroying one of the few places I feel safe to exist in. And oh, I don’t get to feel safe in that anymore, because I’m constantly looking over my shoulder wondering if this’ll get taken away, too.

Kinnies took the fictionkind community and gutted it. It’s no wonder we aren’t respected as much as we used to. Kinnies made it damn well clear that we can’t be respected, because unless you’re fictionkind and been in the community a while, you can’t fucking tell a real fictionkind from a kinnie. I don’t blame them for painting us all from the same brush. I only wish that one day, all the kinnies fucking leave or we manage to drive them out, and we can go back to being respected.

Because to a point, we were. The Queen Elf’s Daughters and the Silver Elves - both theriomythic, and some downright Tolkein fictionkind! - started the whole otherkin scenario as we know it. They’re credited for kickstarting this wonderful, wild place. I’ve spoken to members of the Silver Elves. I’ve researched them, I found them on academic websites (I have so many academic papers on my extended drives, it’s not even funny), I’ve started learning how they differ from everyone else because they kind of fucked off elsewhere and I won’t deny, for lack of a better term, I want to know what we’d be like if we were never found by the greater world.

I’m sick of kinnies. I’m sick of people saying “oh I’m kinning this” when they mean they have a passing interest in having a faceclaim. I’m sick of asking “And how many centuries deep are your wounds, and do you still howl at the moon?” and instead of getting “Eight, and I never did, but here’s my recreation of a recipe I had six hundred years ago using ingredients I have when 95% of them were unique to my world, have a taste and I’ll tell you how we got this dish,” I get “Hahaha it’s not that serious, shouldn’t you be in a psych ward?”.

I want to have proper ass discussions. I want to discuss where faceclaims are important, how roleplay actually affects your identity, how transhumanism has changed over history, how the internet has aided or failed us. I want to see where the divide of copinglinking and otherkin is, where it’s important, where it’s not. I want the words “I’m fictionkind” to fall from my lips without fear.

You are not helping. You are using incorrect terminology that’s most often used to mock, divide, and destroy us (and by us I mean fictionkind), and you’re telling me it’s okay because... Why, exactly? Because you can ignore nuance and the fact most fictionkind fucking hate those terms because you personally think it’s okay? Because you’re one person and your voice is somehow louder than the hundreds who mock us? Because I’m supposed to actually know that it’s friendly fire, coming from a stranger, when you’re still stabbing me? If it walks like a duck and quacks like one, it’s a fucking duck, and someone telling me it’s okay to use the knives of the enemy the exact same way sounds an awful lot like an enemy themself.

Another "founding group" that was favorable towards fictional species was Alt.Fan.Dragons (Alfandra), in which dragons from Pern were accepted as members.

So if it feels inescapable and like evidence of it is everywhere, whether at times or always, that might just because you're in a Western country where you're surrounded by Christians who believe that, fundamentally, in their worldview. And also they talk and make art about it all the time and run the vast majority of news outlets. And spent over a thousand years burning any art or texts that disagreed with them. Etc. etc.

If you're gonna come to as drastic and painful a conclusion as that, at least take the time first to make sure you're not working with biased evidence (surrounded by too many people and cultural products that believe original sin is real)

how often do we find human remains / burials attributable to a peaceful death of old age, or at least to disease / wild animals? and attributable to human violence, i.e. with traces of weapon impacts?

I personally am much more convinced and compelled by newer theories that, if any piece of technology made us human, it was not the weapon - it was the carrier bag, the story, and/or fire. (But not fire with the primary purpose of violence, mind you - fire with the primary purpose of heat and food and sanitation)

Here's a quote on this from one of my absolute favorite thinkers and writers, Ursula K. Le Guin:

If you haven't got something to put it in, food will escape you- even something as uncombative and unresourceful as an oat. You put as many as you can into your stomach while they are handy, that being the primary container; but what about tomorrow morning when you wake up and it's cold and raining and wouldn't it be good to have just a few handfuls of oats to chew on and give little Oom to make her shut up, but how do you get more than one stomachful and one handful home? So you get up and go to the damned soggy oat patch in the rain, and wouldn't it be a good thing if you had something to put Baby Oo Oo in so that you could pick the oats with both hands? A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient. The first cultural device was probably a recipient. . . . Many theorizers feel that the earliest cultural inventions must have been a container to hold gathered products and some kind of sling or net carrier. So says Elizabeth Fisher in Women's Creation (McGraw-Hill, 1975). But no, this cannot be. Where is that wonderful, big, long, hard thing, a bone, I believe, that the Ape Man first bashed somebody with in the movie and then, grunting with ecstasy at having achieved the first proper murder, flung up into the sky...? I don't know. I don 't even care. I'm not telling that story. We've heard it, we've all heard all about all the sticks and spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things, but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained. That is a new story. That is news... It sometimes seems that that story is approaching its end. Lest there be no more telling of stories at all , some of us out here in the wild oats, amid the alien corn, think we'd better start telling another one, which maybe people can go on with when the old one's fin- ished. Maybe. The trouble is , we've all let ourselves become part of the killer story, and so we may get finished along with it. Hence it is with a certain feeling of urgency that I seek the nature, subject, words of the other story, the untold one, the life story.

Fire is literally the reason our brains are larger than any other species of ape's, because harnessing fire meant we spent radically less energy spent on digestion - and those excess resources instead changed the evolution of the human brain.

Also fire is probably the reason we're not fully covered in hair anymore, evolutionarily - because we evolved in equatorial Africa, where not wearing a fur coat everywhere was an evolutionary advantage due to, you know, the temperature of it all. Once we could make our own heat to survive the cold nights and winters, less insulation was a huge evolutionary advance in equatorial regions especially

Wherever humans have gone in the world, they have carried with them two things, language and fire. As they traveled through tropical forests they hoarded the precious embers of old fires and sheltered them from downpours. When they settled the barren Arctic, they took with them the memory of fire, and recreated it in stoneware vessels filled with animal fat. Darwin himself considered these the two most significant achievements of humanity. It is, of course, impossible to imagine a human society that does not have language, but—given the right climate and an adequacy of raw wild food—could there be a primitive tribe that survives without cooking? In fact, no such people have ever been found. Nor will they be, according to a provocative theory by Harvard biologist Richard Wrangham, who believes that fire is needed to fuel the organ that makes possible all the other products of culture, language included: the human brain. Every animal on earth is constrained by its energy budget; the calories obtained from food will stretch only so far. And for most human beings, most of the time, these calories are burned not at the gym, but invisibly, in powering the heart, the digestive system and especially the brain, in the silent work of moving molecules around within and among its 100 billion cells. A human body at rest devotes roughly one-fifth of its energy to the brain, regardless of whether it is thinking anything useful, or even thinking at all. Thus, the unprecedented increase in brain size that hominids embarked on around 1.8 million years ago had to be paid for with added calories either taken in or diverted from some other function in the body. Many anthropologists think the key breakthrough was adding meat to the diet. But Wrangham and his Harvard colleague Rachel Carmody think that’s only a part of what was going on in evolution at the time. What matters, they say, is not just how many calories you can put into your mouth, but what happens to the food once it gets there. How much useful energy does it provide, after subtracting the calories spent in chewing, swallowing and digesting? The real breakthrough, they argue, was cooking.

-via Smithsonian Magazine, June 2013. Emphasis mine. In the time since this article was published, what was considered a "provocative theory" in 2013 has become a matter of increasing scientific evidence and scientific consensus.

Richard Wrangham lays out his theory as a whole in his 2010 book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human.

For more current summaries on the history of fire, and scientific and archeological evidence for its role in human evolution:

Evolutionary fire ecology: An historical account and future directions. August 2023. BioScience, volume 73, issue 8, pages 602–608. Permalink: https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biad059, paywall-free.

The discovery of fire by humans: a long and convoluted process. By J. A. J. Gowlett. June 2016. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, volume 371, issue 1696, epage 20150164. Permalink: doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0164, paywall free.

Or, less scholarly:

Current archeological evidence suggests that humans are, if anything, defined by the hearthfire.

By cooking. By our ability to keep ourselves warm. By our ability to provide for ourselves and each other. By humanity's millennia-long quest to beat back the ravages of starvation and hunger.

Ask them how long ago we looked at wolves and saw friends. Ask them when we first tilled the soil and planted seeds so we could grow things on purpose. Ask them how long ago we began to travel simply to explore the world around us.

i actually made a post alluding to this, but something about the mspec lesbian discourse that always interested me was how often i saw systems being pro mspec lesbian compared to singlets, who were more frequently against them. more specifically — it interested me to see how many systems (ours included) heavily benefited from the label due to the complexities of attraction and gender that comes with being plural, and how many singlets just never considered this to be a possibility.

This!

And those things - plurality and nonhumanity - can overlap in unusual ways.

"Mspec lesbian" is actually a fairly good catch-all for how our system ends up on the scale! But personally, I'm a dragon. I'm aroace and have non-human and non-normative transition goals. I'm also the "core" of the system, or one of them. People don't expect a non-human headmate to be one of the ones born here, or to have such strong feelings about transitioning.

I've changed this body to be more masculinised (top surgery, some T) because that aligns with my nonhuman feelings. But there are also a fair number of humans and humanoids who are also heavy fronters. If I continued to change the body in the few limited ways that I can (I really want blue skin, for example), I'd be making them uncomfortable.

Many of said headmates are also fem-aligned in some way, and have a range of feelings on our top surgery and the inroads we've made into transition. For those of us who have some attachment to girl/womanhood but lean more towards multigender, lesboy, mspec, etc., or for those with less mammalian body plans, it's fine and even welcomed. But for the more human-fem-aligned of us, it creates a strange experience where even though we're afab and can pass as a woman, we still feel dysphoric about the body. We're not laying claim to the transfeminine experience, but there's something there that simply calling us transmasc doesn't cover.

Because of all this, we present as fairly androgynous. We can't have the body reflect all of our genders and identities, or even strongly reflect one of them without causing dysphoria for others, so we settle on something in between that we can dress up as we like. We've noticed a lot of other systems have similar presentations; we've known a handful whose headmates all align strongly enough to one binary gender that they could transition, and a handful who stuck with the body's agab, but the majority of other systems we've met in person have cultivated an ambiguous look for this reason.

For a while we were pursuing a more binary-aligned masculine transition path. We stopped doing that when we decided we wanted to try and have a different main fronter.

Honestly, a lot of the problems with Queer Discourse on this site can be boiled down to 1) refusing to believe other people when they tell you about their lives, and 2) believing that anyone with an identity you don't understand is labeling themselves that way to harm you.

"You say you're transfem, but I think you're a filthy liar who's faking your gender for influence and credibility. I think you're actually a fake transfem who's sneaking into our community and stealing our resources while making a disgusting mockery of our oppression. You have no idea what you're talking about, you can't possibly understand the real transfem experience! You live in a trans man's body, it's impossible for you to be transfem!"

There's a lot that we could say in response to this argument, some outpouring of real life experience and trauma and hardship to prove that it's not a joke being played for laughs, but we don't need to bare our souls to angry strangers on the internet looking for a fight.

My main question is just - what kind of incredible power and benefit do you assume anyone would get by pretending to be transfeminine? Why do you think that someone would go through the trouble of pretending to be transgender to prey upon a community of defenseless women?

We have never really transitioned in any “significant” way. Medical transition is forbidden where we live and social transitioning is impossible at our current living condition, so we live our life as if we’re a cis woman who wears unisex clothes and binds once in a while. We do know Transgender 101 from the internet but because of this background, we often still feel that we’re not “trans enough” for several reasons. Even our trans members feel this way at times.

Our system has cis people and trans people on both sides of the binary, nonbinary people, you name it. Sometimes our gender identity is inseparable from our alterhumanity, often in weird ways (for example, cistransfem werebeast girls. One in particular relates to a ton of transfem experiences even though her gender has always matched the body). Some other times, we just know, for whatever reason, that we’re cis or trans without taking our body into account. We typically only transition in our headspace if we choose to do so, because even something as simple as purchasing a binder or a packer is difficult to do here.

Our cis guys acknowledge that they face basically the same problems as an average transmasc person, but they themselves don’t transition in headspace so they don’t feel that they’re trans. They’ve always been the same gender, they just ended up in the “wrong” body.

I hope this was a misclick because if it's not I feel bad for the "lil babies only" system out there

welcome back hetalia china

Oh the world is ending and you need to know about this one specific thing? Yeah I have a guy for that but he doesn't feel like fronting right now

Sorry what's happening rn is this the bad guy? Yeah I just switched in idk what's going on

I know you're dating one alter but we're currently co-con with another alter who hates you so idk how I'm feeling rn

I have had people try to gatekeep me from my species because of my assumed gender. Reptiles are seen as "gross" and "ugly" by many, which apparently makes us masculine by default. Which, wow, that's a whole can of wyrms by itself, isn't it? I always thought they were beautiful, but my mother thought they were ugly, and she didn't like me having toys or posters of things she thought were ugly.

During the few years when I identified as a cat, I noticed that I was much more likely to be given cat-related species affirmation than I ever was to be given reptile-related affirmation. Because cats are cute, and so people were comfortable comparing me to a cat. People don't want to compare someone seen as female to a reptile.

I had on a badge which I'd made myself, depicting my fursona at the time (a raccoon-dragon). It wasn't commonplace at the time to have your pronouns on your badge, so I had to explain to someone that my fursona was a male dragon.

And I remember the response just being, "Why?"

I didn't know how to answer that. I think I just said "Because I want it to be?"

But it just struck me how odd it was. To be in a situation where "I'm a different species from my body" was a perfectly normal thing to say, but "I'm a different gender from my body" was bizarre. Nobody asked me what made me pick raccoon-dragon, even though that's not a typical fursona; but why would you want to be a boy dragon?