Think of this as an adaptation of this post I wrote a while ago.
(Dysphoric voice) I don't wanna look at the last page... I know it's great for our standards quality-wise but it's also painful to look at because of my dysphoria...
That aside, I really like Haruki 🌈's way of drawing stuff! Page 4 ended up being more detailed than we intended because she got carried away, but either way, the point still stands!
(we honestly don't know how to write image descriptions for this. More complicated than what we’re used to writing IDs for. If you want to write them for us then feel free! We can also help with the names because we know people may struggle with identifying our fictives.)
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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.
ooh yeah we'd love to know more about the practices you can speak on! mostly like, how you think it compares to and differs from other ancestor-possession traditions, who is allowed to take part (laypeople or just priests), if it's a common thing or a minority thing? -@endogenesis-evangelion
(CW for the many photos and mentions of sharp objects piercing people's mouths if you decide to look into it, and in the first link we're including here)
👑: ok, we’re not familiar enough with other similar traditions but I’ll talk about other stuff we know about tatung (secondhand because we don’t practice it or personally know anyone who does, but we’ve seen some articles and stuff plus we don't really want to publicly disclose our background any deeper in relation to the rituals or the ethnic groups). This seems to be the most complete news article we're aware of, and it includes the experiences of a Dayak tatung. Article is entirely in Indonesian though.
Tatung are people chosen to become vessels for the gods or ancestors of important figures in the local culture. These spirits would "borrow" their bodies to ward off evil spirits and cure illnesses, but the most well-known ritual would be the body-piercing. They would be paraded on the streets while doing these on Cap Go Meh (15th day of the Chinese New Year) or at least 1-2 days before that, sitting on a type of portable throne throughout the whole ritual.
The tatung wouldn't feel pain at those moments because they would be unconscious when they're being possessed. Sometimes they would report not being wounded by it, though injuries and deaths could still happen at times.
It was brought to West Kalimantan by Chinese settlers a long time ago and some cultural interactions between their Taoist practices and the locals' cultural practices resulted in the tatung rituals we know today. Despite this, it doesn't seem to be practiced as widely in China anymore. It's also not widely practiced in Indonesia as a whole, but it’s a famous attraction in Singkawang, West Kalimantan. It’s practiced by the local Chinese Indonesians and Dayaks, with some differences in beliefs between the two groups. One difference is mentioned in the linked article. For the Dayaks, the piercing is just for show. But for the Chinese-Indonesians, mouth-piercing stops the spirit from escaping the body prematurely. We've also seen mentions of the local Malays participating too, but for now we don't know much about their side yet.
Not everyone can practice it. One can become a tatung via tutoring, but for people like the one talking about his experiences in the linked article, it's a lineage thing, and most new tatung are chosen this way. To put it simply, one must be chosen by the spirits to become a tatung. Refusing the call would negatively affect the life of the chosen one. In addition to that, you'd need to handle paperwork to be properly acknowledged as one by the community. But regardless of how they become one, they still need to prepare themselves as much as possible to prevent any unwanted incidents.
Just found this paper too! It's also in Indonesian but it has a lot of detail on this cultural practice. Admittedly we haven't finished going through this in its entirety so what's in here might be different from what we found in the other sources we've came across (which are web articles on news sites). But either way, glad we came across a paper!
Hopefully this infodump of a post is understandable, a lot of Indonesian-English translation was involved in this LMAO
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Median subsys culture is why are there suddenly so many different versions of me showing up in headspace together, who’s on the driver’s seat, who’s saying all of this right now, nobody knows
Alternatively, imagine a single video game character with multiple different outfits. Those outfits would be represented by a sprite or model of said character wearing those respective outfits. Now imagine those files all being alive and they get to meet each other.
👑: Saw someone at the howlcon server say that (paraphrased) “most people don’t care if you’re openly x” heavily depends on your location and which marginalized identity you’re talking about, and our first thought was “oh god, we thought we’re alone in thinking that it’s not as universal as most people seem to think, glad someone else said it out loud”.
Before this we asked ourselves if that sentiment was hard to swallow because of our pessimism + paranoia & whatever or because we’re from the global south and (we assume) most people who say that are from the global north
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.
