#mor yaps

I hate 2 say it but being a part of a “weird” subculture does not meaningfully inoculate you against a conservative moralizing impulse. You gotta unlearn that. Saying “cringe is dead” is not enough, you have to actually be okay with things that discomfort, perplex and/or disgust you.

Just wanna say that "go find offline community" in terms of both nonhumanity and other largely-to-semi-online spaces is only helpful in so far as whatever offline community 1) exists in your area 2) you have the means of transporting yourself to wherever meetings are held 3) meetings are accessible or are committed to becoming accessible and 4) whomever runs/frequents the meetings isn't diametrically opposed to your existence or worldview in a way that is alienating or dangerous. If your solution to any of these is "well then you should run offline meetings yourself" then you have to accept that you will be cutting out individuals who are incapable of doing that for any reason, and they will naturally rely on online spaces instead. Offline community is obviously great and should be encouraged, but I see borderline contempt from ppl who think others take the online world "too seriously" as if it isn't the only option for some.

ENOUGH about the otherpaw thing. There are terfs in the tags. Let’s all address that instead.

This probably deserves a proper long form essay but I think everyone would have a much easier time of it if we all started seeing nonhumanity (and, I think alterhumanity broadly, though this is less my area) not as some sort of specifically defined hard-edged identity capable of categorization as a platonic ideal and more of just….a mode of meaning making for clusters of experiences and thought processes. Like we get close when we describe feelings of nonhumanity as byproducts of disability, neurodivergence and etc but we should commit. I’m not a therian because “therian” is a neat box that exists metaphysically I can be put into, but because it communicates the way I have made sense of my existence and the way I interact with the world.

I have previously talked about how I dislike the (unintentional) distillation of animals to archetypes, and I’m definitely against anthropomorphizing animals across the board, but equally wrong is the paradigm that animals are completely hapless, thoughtless creatures driven by nothing but instinct and the barest of basic needs. Animal intelligence is a lot more complicated than “animals are exactly like humans in their thought processes and emotions” or “animals have zero interiority.”

I will probably have more on this later but I think there is something to be said for the way depictions of anthropomorphized archetypical versions of animals in therian and otherkin spaces perpetuates misinformation. The dog as an icon of loyalty, the deer as a symbol of innocence, etc. The actual animal is obscured under artificial meaning-making until they become a consumable facsimile. Dogs buy this, deer buy that. Here’s a picture of an animal in distress captioned “meeeee :3”