Otherkin Challenge, Day 23 Revisted
This is about folk who identify as characters and not about fictional species.
Ten years ago, if you asked me what my opinion on fictionkin was, I would say it was absolute utter fucking bullshit, and I wanted nothing to do with it. I wouldn’t go around shouting that it was bullshit, I just was 100% adverse to speaking about it.
Today, I have no problem with the concept , probably because I have met people I respect who identify as fictionkin. But… I have zero grasp of the concept. It is just as alien and confusing to me as I imagine identifying as an animal may be to some. (Yes, both groups may feels some similar things like a disconnect / dysphoria / social isolation / etc. but by and large an honest person would admit they are not at all the same.)
I think me trying to compare my experience of being an animal, to try to understand being fictionkin by seeing it as I do therianthropy is backwards and useless as all hell. What I read from serious fictionkin is not relatable unless it’s about interactions between us and non-kin/ non-therians.
For therianthropy, a past life is not enough. Animality is in the here and now. Reincarnation/ oops wrong soul is just an attempt to explain a source, just like multiverse theory.
So what I am really trying to understand is how it is possible to identify as someone who isn’t quite yourself, in the here and now. Unless a remembered past life is the only prerequisite to being fictionkin and that is how therianthropy differs? Which would explain ny utter confusion.
I don’t care about multiverse theory at all or other psychological theories.
In terms of experiences, of living, is it in the here and now? Some fictionkin say they’re nothing like their past self, so wouldn’t that just be a past life?
Anyway. Yeah
I’m not trying to challenge it I would just really like to understand without making inaccurate comparisons.Honestly, as someone who used to label my animality and identification
as therian before I discovered I was by definition fictionkin… I don’t honestly
see that much of a difference between therians and fictionkin. Yeah. there are
some folks of either label group those experienced don’t really have a lot in
common, but then again even within label groups that can happen. Discovering the
word fictionkin technically fit me (or the other fictionkin in our system),
didn’t stop us from experiencing animality.
My experiences (and the others who are technically fit the definition of fictionkin)
are still animalistic and we still identify as being an animal. Discovering our
species, etc in a piece of modern fictionkin didn’t change anything relating to
our state of being and identity.Maybe that is why I don’t understand when therians think
they are the only ones who have animality and that state of being in the here
and now. (Not that you think only therians are that way, but we have met
therians who think that way.)Also, past life memories does not make someone fictionkin
nor do all fictionkin experience their identity/ state of being in just past
life memories.– Miushra
