Otherkin / Fictionkin / Therians - Weirdos LARPing as animals, mythological creatures, and fictional characters

If you're going to be an alien that's the only one of your kind, you could at least be kind of cool.

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Or have superpowers.

 
Are they a Valkyrie-kin or something? Sounds like a Valkyrie, except the rotting flesh. Unless they mean the rotting flesh of dead warriors? What is this? Why is this happening? I need an adult.

Macha-kin? I dunno. Sounds like some kinda death god.

Funny thing about the Otherkin derplords is that transhumanism is absolutely a thing, but nowhere near the way they think it is. It's a futurist concept, and usually deals with things like digital immortality and the transference of consciousness, but with genetic manipulation, shit, anything is possible. Wanna be a wolf? Grow a lupid sleeve in a vat and download your mind into it. Just remember to spring for the opposable thumbs and human vocal cords packages so you're not completely fucked over when you do. Eclipse Phase is a really well done exploration of transhumanism in a role-playing game, but it's not hard to find good transhuman SF stories (Scalzi's Old Man's War series is a good place to start).

So on the whole, wanting to be more than human is a surprisingly human thing. Hell, we've been trying to transcend humanity since the goddamn berserkers. In another hundred years, who knows? That computer-kin might actually be able to upload their consciousness directly into the cloud.

But by and large most of these otherkin are delusional weirdos with advanced cases of speshul snowflake syndrome.
 
Last week, I re-read Cursed From Birth, a collection from among the last writing and correspondence of William S. Burroughs, Jr. (son of the famous Beat writer). Having read this thread and a few relating to the transgendered, I noticed a few passages that I hadn't paid much attention to before. What follows is a rambling post juxtaposing Burroughs, Jr. (Billy) and our otherkin friends.

Billy was an alcoholic and drug addict, and he eventually needed a liver transplant to stay alive. The transplant came from a woman named Virginia. His pre-existing suffering, the physical pain and disgust he lived with after the transplant, and the effects of the steroids he was taking to prevent the rejection of the transplant liver brought to surface some of the same behavior we see in the otherkin illustrated in this thread. Many others have pointed out that "headmates" and basic otherkin identity can serve as coping mechanisms. Billy's case was no different. He just used the physical fact of another person's flesh in his body as the starting point.

Cursed From Birth p. 118 said:
A twenty-four-year-old woman came to the hospital with a tumor on her carotid artery and died of a stroke. Or mostly died, anyway. Part of her is still alive and sharing my body. I am part woman and that can't be all bad. I brush my teeth more regularly and music makes me want to dance more than it used to.

He briefly used this presence as a motivation to improve his life.

p. 119 said:
As for rejection, there was very little difficulty. I immediately began to feel and say that Virginia and I had grown very attached to each other and were working out compromises. I could smoke and cuss if I let her brush my teeth—she took control of my left hand. I thought of it as a marriage of sorts. These were the beginnings of something so strange the doctors didn't want to discuss it.

Unfortunately, he continued to abuse alcohol and other drugs. He also became suicidal, and seeking some escape from that possible route, briefly considered that he was transgendered, contemplating sex reassignment surgery.

p. 127 said:
Brand-new option—All I need is approximately $10,000 to become a woman. There's a transsexual on television—she fathered three children—used to carry hand grenades in Vietnam. (I think I'd make a lovely lady.) The only transsexual I ever met had a lost look in her eyes (like an old-fashioned stereopticon). Really lost. And she had a confused-looking boyfriend. I got the impression she felt she had made a mistake. She was poor, dressed in tatters. My problem is that when people don't like me, I'm crushed, so I think I'd even give up my balls for sure approval.

This parallels a lot of what we see in these communities.

In a later letter to his father, Billy stated that he had a "problem" and called it schizophrenia—commonly confused with dissociative identity disorder (formerly multiple personality disorder). He went on to identify "three persons who compose my fractured I." Billy seems to be coping with dissociation from himself ("Billy the Writer"), tries to single out aspects of these personalities who cause his drug problems ("Zorba"), and, as with others, fills the third person in as the one who motivates real-world, survival actions ("the Fox on Ice").

p. 182 said:
(I) Me, now, Billy the Writer, who Allen [Ginsberg] in intro. to Speed described as, "Shadowy impersonal observer watching environment movies." Yes. And (II) Zorba the Schmuck, full of love and enthusiasm, but crippled in the giving of love. Zorba is the guy who wants to be stoned all the time. [...]

(III) is the Fox on Ice, who jumped into me from the I Ching, where the Fox is pictured as just that, a fox, an old fox on ice who is totally alert and aware of any impending dangers (i.e. the ice giving way). Billy the Writer receives signed orders from the Fox. They are taken as absolute statements—you pay attention or you fucking die.[...]

So this is the basic picture; I could go on for hours with the subtleties, like mirrors in a barber shop. Each of these three entities is a complete and complex individual, each with an entire lifestyle, attitudes, and story to tell.

(Bold emphasis mine.) He finishes this letter: "P.P.S. There is a fourth. It is Virginia. Aaak!" The last we see of this in Cursed From Birth is Billy's signature of "Zorba the Schmuck" on a subsequent letter, without further mention in the letter itself of these entities.

I'm on the fence about professionally-diagnosed dissociative identity disorder From my perspective, it seems to follow a spectrum between involuntary and voluntary, with a lot of self-diagnosis and "headmates," in my opinion, as manifestations toward the latter end. I see the voluntary side as a literary exercise, much as I view Freudian analysis and tarot: it's a way to impose one's experiences onto a given framework. To that end, I think Billy, a writer himself, was practicing just this. His father, an accomplished crazy guy in his own right, thought it was brought on by the prednisone, but acknowledged that valid insights can come from such experiences.

Burroughs Sr. (p. 185) said:
Remember that the most bizarre hallucinations combined with quite valid insights can result from simple vitamin deficiency. The answer is vitamins and not shrinks who tend to question the validity of the experience rather than the source. [...] Sharing of identity is quite common and also harmless. For example I frequently feel the presence of Mote [Billy's grandfather], feel his face in mine hear his voice. This is not at all alarming. Nixon certainly gets around like all heavily exposed images. Remember that you are not your body any more than a pilot is the plane.

People naturally question and play with their identities, exploring them as interfaces with the world and with themselves. One difference between Billy (and his father) and the examples others have pointed out is that Billy is in this respect not a hostile enforcer of other people's perception. This in spite of Billy's increasingly violent mood swings (thanks, particularly, to the steroids). I can empathize both with Billy's difficulties—and the sad conditions of his death—and with the environments and issues these otherkin are trying to cope with.

I try not to draw a line anywhere that says "experience A is valid, while experience B is invalid," but I think a lot of the people we see on Tumblr and elsewhere don't want to compromise with the harsh reality that not everyone will entertain their perceptions, nor will everyone respect them, nor will everyone alter their ingrained language so that "pronouns" might as well be replaced with proper nouns. Here's hoping that things work out for them.
 
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I was poking around in the otherkin part of tumblr and I just thought the tags were amusing. It's like they're saying "My stupid made-up bullshit is totes legits u guise but your stupid made-up bullshit is a dirty dang twoll!"

I mean, if you can be plant-kin and rock-kin and forest-kin, why not any other sort of kin that can have an animus spirit associated with it?

But down that path lies madness.
 
Lemme introduce you to Starbolt... just Starbolt.

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  • Informative
Reactions: GREEDY FIREMAN
To be fair to that person, they're probably just roleplaying, and are not really an otherkin. There's a huge RP community in Champions Online that only got larger when City of Heroes shut down. That looks like a bog-standard shitty-roleplayer character background if I've ever seen one (and let me tell you, I've seen a few).

That said, a lot of the CoH and CO roleplayers are pretty weird themselves.
 
  • Agree
Reactions: plautistic
To be fair to that person, they're probably just roleplaying, and are not really an otherkin. There's a huge RP community in Champions Online that only got larger when City of Heroes shut down. That looks like a bog-standard shitty-roleplayer character background if I've ever seen one (and let me tell you, I've seen a few).

That said, a lot of the CoH and CO roleplayers are pretty weird themselves.

Not too sure to be honest, since she screamed at the guy in the screen shot when he pulled her in to PvP (since these people liked to gum up the PvP area and annoy the people there to actually fight. Outside the actual area of course, to not get slaughtered by irate PvPers and the like) that she'll destroy him when she gets bigger. She described it sort of like how her dragon OC would grow with age and squash/burn him or something.

Plus, there's roleplaying, and then there's saying "speak human".
 
Still sounds like shitty roleplaying to me. It's not impossible that they're an otherkin, but there are dumb shitty roleplayers in those games that refuse to break character for any reason, or mix IC and OOC chatter (IE, more shitty roleplaying). Regardless, they're still, shall we say, not a well-adjusted person, I'm quite sure.
 
  • Agree
Reactions: sonichuis44
To be fair I don't really have a problem with otherkin. Put on your fox ears and yiff it up for all I care. The only things I take issue with them insisting they are somehow oppressed, trans-something ("species dysphoria" is a favourite term I've heard) or have "phantom tails/ears/wings" or other made up shit to justify any criticism of them being "ableist". Plus [noun]self pronouns. A lot of otherkin will ramble on all day about things being white-male-centric, but they forget that their precious flowerself/bunself/pickleself pronouns don't work when translated in to most non-English languages.

But, at the end of the day, if you go through the profiles of these otherkin characters, most of them are 10-14. When I was 10 years old I was utterly convinced that I was, in fact, a werewolf. It's mostly the product of an overactive imagination and 98% of them will grow out of it.
 
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