Yong Soo Repeats Himself A Lot, or, Why You Should Really Stop Using “Identifies As 20 Anime Characters” As A Basis Of Disbelief.
We all know it. Kiddos hopping on the otherkind bandwagon these days have a pattern. IDs, comfort characters, kinning, don’t kin ___ if you’re ___, crytyping over doubles, and a laundry list of their favorite anime girls as fictotypes are signal enough to click away. They all seem to follow a fashion statement, similar to how BYF pages and lists of privileges show other social justice activism bloggers who is who and what they stand for, and to give a sense of rank among each other depending on who can discourse the loudest with the most arbitrary guidelines. Kin got roped into it somewhere along the way and, unfortunately, they’re not letting it go any time soon.
One of the most telling signs of these kinnaboos (c’mon, it kinda works), is their kin lists. If a new anime or American cartoon comes out, dozens of them will add the cutest characters to their lists as kintypes within the week. The edgier ones will latch onto the antagonists. Sometimes sooner. Remember Pokemon Go? Remember the people who “awoke” as the team leaders before there were little more than silhouettes revealed? Pepperidge Farm fucking remembers. The drama that follows them is constant. You can only kin with certain acceptable characters, or you’re an abuser. You can only kin with characters exactly like you, or you’re fake. You can’t kin with anyone coded a different race, even if they aren’t human beings at all, or you’re a racist. Some go so far as to say that adults can’t be kin, period, that it’s only for children and teenagers. And we top it off with their strange notion that neurotypicals aren’t kin at all, or are rarely so.
To a fictionkind person who has witnessed all this after the (relative) sanity of the origins and transformations of our community, it’s like being blindsided. None of this behavior makes sense. None of these people have anything in common with us except for the words we use. They’re disrespectful, argumentative, patronizing, unapologetically immature, and prefer to be ignorant to the majority of the community they’re claiming to be a part of. Confronting them with facts gets you little more than “kin can mean whatever I want it to mean”. I don’t think I need to elaborate much more than that.
But I need to remind my fellow grumpy greys and elders, that we can’t be throwing legitimate fictionkind under the bus because of the behavior above.
I don’t know how many people actually read my /about, but I’ve been dealing with narrowed eyes and indirect mockery since I first realized that draconity wasn’t the only part of me. It ruined a relationship I had with another dragonkin, and I lost friends and a welcoming forum. The rise of tumblrkin is just a log on the coals for me, and people like me.
Back in the early days, before fictionkin/d was the lingo, there were more of us out there being open about our journeys through the ups and downs of polykin identity. It was still something primarily kept between circles of mutual friends, and we were by no means a significant force to gain much notoriety. But we were there, like it or not. And while I’ve lost contact with a lot of my early “kinmates”, if you will, some of us are still around, observing and interacting.
I’m not a fan of grilling, as addressed in another post. But I am a fan of asking questions. I’m also not as wound up as I might appear. As long as someone is being honest with themselves and putting in some effort to make sense of their experiences, I really don’t give a damn about them being able to “prove” their identity to me, or anyone else. Are you a dragon? Fantastic. An angel and a hero and a talking gemstone? Neat, tell me all about it. A Pikachu? Adorable, rock on. Have you been reincarnated 15 times for no reason that you can understand? That’s rough, buddy.
It’s a mark of insecurity and unwarranted self-righteousness to step on others in order to elevate yourself in the eyes of your peers. That’s a fact. And no matter what species you are, you’re guilty of it if you sneer at people with more complex and confusing personalities than you’re comfortable with. The world is a big place, and even if you level the playing field down to our human psychology, the diversity of identity is literally endless. Someone with 10 kintypes that they know to be true to the best of their ability has a place in that diversity, same as someone who is a wolf and only a wolf and will always be a wolf.
From the outside looking in, we’re all batshit insane, and that’s important to remember. Taking petty jabs at people who have strange sources, or too many, is not going to make you look better among anyone who matters. And if we all disappeared, you would be the targets of choice just the same. If someone’s kin list was a bunch of animals, they’d be no different except in how they’re arbitrarily ranked by others based on biases and personal beliefs.
I won’t apologize for the strange mess of a form that my soul has taken over time. If you look at my fictotypes as separate entities, as merely characters that someone made up, then of course it makes no sense. Removing them from the context of my Self, and the reality outside of the often flawed canon media, is why it doesn’t make sense to you. Can I explain, if grilled, how I can go from someone like Fred Weasley to a dragon? Yeah, if you really want me to. If you stick around with this blog long enough you’ll see a lot of my word vomit musings on why I think this shit is happening at all. And I’m still learning more all the time.
And that’s because I want to. It’s my business to reveal as much as I want. I’ve done my time “earning” respect from other nonhumans. I’ve been around a while, even if I spent a lot of that time lurking and observing, and my experience is no less. The work I’ve done to understand myself through questioning, doubting, and exchanging memories and thoughts with others (friends, family, and strangers) isn’t erased because the conclusions I’ve come to are a bit outlandish. I’m very aware they are – why do you think I bother?
Tumblrkin copy others to piggyback off their legitimacy. Nothing is sacred to them. Logically speaking, of course they would copy people like me. Without the deeper understanding of what this is like, we just seem like anime and fantasy nerds who get to run around LARPing all day and have no responsibilities or personalities. I can’t control that, my partners can’t control that, our friends can’t control that. None of us can. They’ll need to grow out of the phase before it’ll stop.
Who and what I am is inseparable from my religion. Common courtesy demands that while you’re under no obligation to believe in it, you accept it, swallow your tongue, and leave it alone as long as it does no harm to you or others. And sorry, but it being slightly more difficult to refute tunblrkin nonsense does not count as harm. You being embarrassed because something is silly to you doesn’t count either, and you have full responsibility over your own emotional responses.
It’s not my job to make my identity, my spiritual nature, and the actions of my deity palatable to you. If you can prove that your identity is real and mine is not, then please do so. Burden of proof goes both ways when one makes a counter claim by implication. And to be honest, we’re all animals and whatever else in humansuits – we lost the right to claim “logical fallacies” as soon as we established that.
