I’ve been doing some research for an upcoming article about the history and origin of fictionkin and otherkin, and I thought I’d share some of the stuff I’ve been digging through.
These posts are a semi random sample of old usenet postings regarding the otherkin community, and date from 1998-2004.
As you can see, the otherkin community was already esstablished as of 1998, and hosting physical meetups. At the time the community seems to have been dispersed through various groups, including fae, elves, vampires, weres, etc. The first all encompassing group started up in 1999.
What is usenet?
Usenet is one of the oldest computer network communications systems still in widespread use. It was conceived in 1979 and publicly established in 1980 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University, over a decade before the World Wide Web was developed and the general public received access to the Internet.
The articles that users post to Usenet are organized into topical categories called newsgroups, which are themselves logically organized into hierarchies of subjects.
I’ve captioned all the images with their urls, but here’s a handy list of them for people who don’t want to make extra clicks.
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!search/otherkin/alt.config/Ebd4SEc0kbo/TgjpN0QTCgMJ
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!search/otherkin/alt.horror.werewolves/JngkKpqY9wE/v8IiX-jeDpoJ
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!search/otherkin/rec.arts.comics.elfquest/rjdAJFWZ3XQ/e56Yr-Kr8sQJ
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!search/otherkin/alt.fan.dragons/PFVGSTSa4-I/iz5KQ3_Fg9IJ
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!search/otherkin/alt.vampyres/Hks6mNO5TKs/-KfNHMr23uAJ
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!search/otherkin/alt.horror.werewolves/x2BsVuH5Yxs/_HI2PMOk9T8J
