reject humanity, become dragon

please hear me out

expressing nonhumanity is (or at the very least can be) a very alternative, counter culture move. normative society limits people's self-expression, and one of the many things it prohibits is being animalistic. normative society puts humans on a pedestal and does everything it can to separate them from nature. being alterhuman is fundamentally going against that system by blurring those very lines it constructed

now, for involuntary alterhumans, expressing oneself is often a need, not a want

but there really are just mfs out there who choose to be unapologetically feral, not because they feel it in their core, necessarily, but because they want to

they actively aid the broader alterhuman community in propagating nonhuman self-expression and help us challenge the system, not because it's their only option, but because they saw it as an option and thought it was interesting enough to dedicate themselves to it

and that's so fucking punk!!!

we should be more thankful for our otherlinker, otherpaw, furry, and all our siblings in adjacent communities for popularizing our way of living, not because they needed to, but because they wanted to

https://www.reddit.com/r/Therian/comments/1vsrkrc/where_did_the_idea_that_therianthropy_is/

There's some kind of retrograde amnesia going on, it feels

i already said this in the replies on this tumblr but i think people are equating involuntary with integral. like if something is a choice it isn't important or personal or long lasting. or like voluntary animal identity is somehow far enough removed from involuntary animal identity that they're incomparable and the voluntary people don't belong. it's confusing.

people also seem to be saying stuff along the lines of "i have experienced unhappiness because for me it was involuntary, so i don't think other people for whom it is voluntary should be allowed in the club" which is just silly. i don't think it's reasonable to base our species identities on how bad we have it. things sucking has nothing to do with my species or whether i'm a therian.

NOTE: I am not a professional and my words may not apply to everyone. If your linktype is causing you harm and won’t go away even when you try to drop it, please try to talk to a professional if you can. Therapists are understanding people who can help you, be honest with them and they can help you to do what you need to move on.

Linking can be very helpful most of the time, and even fun! But sometimes a linktype might become a problem, they might cause you to think or act in a negative way and have adverse effects on your life. In this case it is best to drop the linktype.

Linktypes that do more harm than good should not be kept!

For some it may be as simple as saying “okay X is no longer my linktype.” and to walk away and leave it at that. If that is the case, that is wonderful, please do so! If you cannot simply do this, for any reason, you will need to examine you, your linktype and your relationship to your linktype. I have outlined a method of examining your linktype and a few methods which you may try in order to drop the link. 

Please exercise caution when attempting to drop a link. Make sure you have some way to continue forward, whether it’s a new coping mechanism, a support group, or a new linktype, or something else entirely. Again, if you are having difficulty, please talk to a professional therapist about these difficulties, be honest with them so that they can help you be the best person you can be for yourself!

Please think about how these actions may affect you and take caution. If you feel that you are at any point in danger of physical harm, please talk to a professional!

Examining the linktype:

Moving on from a linktype may mean you will need to take a good look at what made the linktype useful to you as well as what has caused the harm. Take some time to do this before attempting any further methods of dropping your link.

Take a piece of paper and draw three columns, one for positive things about your linktype, one for neutral things, and one for things you might consider to be bad or harmful. Take a good read through this.

If you see a common thread of negative traits, events, backstory, etc, are they things you can cast aside? Are they things you can safely ignore or rewrite out of the linktype and have them be more positive than negative?

Rewriting a character:

If dropping is not an option or is proving difficult for one reason or another, try taking your list and rewriting the character to be something you aspire to. Try to focus on keeping more positive traits.

If your character had a traumatic past or event happen to them, try to rewrite them in a way that either helps them to cope with this trauma in a healthy way and make positive changes to them, OR to rewrite the past or event to either disappear or change it to a positive thing instead.

If your character has a negative outlook on life, why is that? What caused them to think and act this way? What can you change that might give them a more positive attitude and change them to be more of a role model for you to look up to? You might even create an event that changes them for the better.

You can take anything of a character that may have been causing an issue for you and rewrite it into being a positive change. This may or may not work, depending on your personal attachment or ways of linking. 

Side note, if you do rewrite a character please do not go into fandom spaces and claim it is canon. It is more than okay to write stories or make art that shows these rewritten things (see villain redemption fanfiction especially), but be aware that some people may point out that it is a bit out of character or not canon (depending on the changes you made). Don’t let fandom ruin things for you, but also do not try to make fandom cater to you.

Replacing the link:

If you cannot drop the link or rewrite the link, perhaps you can replace the link.

What are some characters or things that have similar traits but does not have the specific negative traits that are causing problems for you? Try and find some characters or things with enough similarities that it does not feel too strange to you to swap the two as links.

You may also want to see if you can find a character or thing that has similar positive traits AND more (or specific) traits to help with erasing or coping with any harm a previous link may have caused.

You might try linking something of the same species, from the same fandom, or something with similar powers or backstory. Whatever works the best for you!

Linking an OC:

It might be best to replace a harmful link with an OC that encompasses all the traits you want or need in order to cope with whatever you need. Linking with an OC is extremely valid and also a great way to fully control what you’re linking with.

Create an OC that is much like you, but can do the things you want or need it to do. That might be anything form being able to fight off bad thoughts, to loving and knowing how to cook really tasty healthy foods. The best part of linking an OC is that they can be completely anything you want or need them to be! That makes them a great way to replace or drop a linktype that might be causing you harm!

Demihuman is a label that's been coined very recently and quickly gained momentum, and you'd probably think that it's right up my alley.

The official definition from the coining post is...

beings that are part human and part nonhuman, beings that inherently include both humanity and nonhumanity, identities that fluctuate on the axis of nonhumanity, and more

And that's a perfectly good definition. I have no qualms with it. It's well-written and makes sense.

But I am strongly attached to the nonhuman label already. I am nonhuman, and I am also, in several ways, human. This is already and has always been part of the label of nonhuman. I've seen it narrowed with time and sloppiness: it's gone from "anybody who is any part not-human in any way" to being a synonym for, depending on who you ask and what terminology they prefer: therian, holotherian, physical nonhuman, physical shifter, and/or exclusive nonhuman. All of those things do fall under the umbrella of nonhumanity, but none of them own it. Nobody owns it. Nobody has any right to exclude anybody else from it. It is a gatekeeper-free term which is as broad as possible on purpose.

I'm not going to let go of it. There are human nonhumans who use it, there are humans-plus who use it, we've got every combination of human and otherwise here already and we all belong here. I am fully nonhuman and I am fully human. I have been here for some years and I feel protective over it, not in that I own it—I certainly do not, and my willingness to defend it should not be taken as ownership—but in that I strongly believe nobody can or should own it. I am not ready to concede it to being narrowed to a fine point that excludes many of us from our own terminology.

This is largely the opposite of what others complain about, I think. The usual complaint is that there are all these new people who don't Get It and are doing it wrong and aren't being serious about the meaning, and now it's all watered down and meaningless. I'm bothered that people are casually and imprecisely using it to mean very specific, exclusive things. I'm not happy that large parts of the community are being erased.

My concern is that demihuman is going to be applied forcibly to those of us who aren't exclusive nonhumans to try to kick us out of our own label and into another. I don't want that. Just categorically, I do not want labels applied to me or words put in my mouth. That the term demihuman exists is totally fine, and I think it fulfills a certain niche very well. But I do wonder if this won't happen with time, considering that there are those moving the boundaries who feel that they mainly or only relate to other exclusive nonhumans and do not want to share a label with humans, and they aren't that many but they are very loud. I don't want to surrender my current label to a group that sometimes includes some strong misanthropic elements. I belong here. If it didn't fit me well, I'd already have coined the demihuman label myself.

A key issue I've seen with a lot of terms getting coined over the years, and especially in the past few years, is that they seem to be coined just to have a word, not because there's a specific need for it. Sure, there are experiences unique to being both human and nonhuman, but it's not like we need a separate sub-community to discuss those experiences; existing nonhuman spaces still work just fine for that. So why do we need a separate label for ourselves beyond "both human and nonhuman"?