thunderpunching replied to your post:Ok, you know what I don’t understand? I have seen…
yeah this is a tumblr-specific trend that needs to stop, and it’s fueled by new otherkin being cut off from understanding how the communities started. They literally think it’s exclusively a matter of mental illness, for lack of knowing otherwise.
Yeah, it kinda makes me just want to leave the tumblr otherkin community because it has just become a toxic cesspool of trolls, misinformation, hate, and just all around nastiness. We are apparently pitting one section of the community against another and I don’t like it. I have no vice for psychological kin, I just wish that they would educate themselves on what otherkin actually is. It isn’t “just a strong connection” it isn’t “just a mentally ill thing” and for gosh sake it isn’t a mental illness in and of itself.
The trick is that many older otherkin aren’t doing anything to help, which is what I assume “elders” of a community would be interested in doing. They’ll complain until their teeth fall out about these darn tumblr kids who don’t know what otherkin is or how certain terms were formed, and then they’ll just make fun of them and alienate them to the point they don’t want to learn anything. It’s like being a teacher and pointing and laughing at the students who don’t understand the material. Part of why I have 0 automatic respect for any kin who call themselves an elder. Being online a long time doesn’t mean a thing by itself.
It doesn’t help that anti-sj blogs repeatedly deny how old otherkin communities are, even when you literally link pages and mailing lists from the freakin 90s. They spread the misinformation that nonhumanity began on tumblr, so even some younger kin will pick up on that and decide to re-define everything because they don’t bother to look for themselves. So the best you can really do in any case is link them to sources outside of tumblr, articles and essays to read at least. Showing them how far back the communities go usually opens their eyes a little bit.
^^^^ The best thing that we can do is to provide real information, resources, to keep educating.
