Otherkin and identity politics

[Junkenstein]

Seriously though, you have a good point, and I'll do some research and see if I can find anything to back it up.

You're probably right the first time. I have a tendency to look for reasons for horror when it's usually just obvious.

QG

There's a strong chance that they're acting out in a way that demands sympathy because they are suffering from mild to moderate mental illnesses that they can't get a good handle on, but know that they need some kind of extra attention to get through it.

That would also fit and is a lot simpler. It seems that most of these folk are in the US. Mental health care being the priority that it is for you guys would explain this to a degree too. We'll probably have to wait for a mass killing event before it's really studied in any kind of detail.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I mean, an increase in dissociative and dysphoric disorders, as well as mood disorders and OCD, seems like a pretty predictable consequence of living in a militarized surveillance society with enormous income and status disparities. "Keeping up with the Joneses" is no longer a reality for most of the US population; instead it's "trying not to become homeless".

[LMNO]

I wanted to be a werewolf when I was a kid.  It was a form of escapism, because being a kid sucks a lot of the time.  I had a pretty vivid imagination, and at times I could almost feel feral and canine.

So I can see where these things start, and I can see that without having Tomorrow People experiences, it would be very easy to build a reality in one's head that doesn't match the Universe in any meaningful way.






Postscript - I never became a werewolf, but I did manage to get the body hair.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

"Fuck you I'm a winged rabbit" actually doesn't seem like that unreasonable of a response by someone who is coming of age right now. Hey, kid, time for you to go be an adult in a world with no jobs, where education is out of reach for you, and the likelihood that you'll do better than your parents is LOLOLOLOL.

ENJOY YOUR BASEMENT APARTMENT WITH SIX OTHER ADULTS.

FUCK YOU I'M A DRAGON LALALALALALA

[Cramulus]

One of the central ideas in VALIS, (by Phillip K Dick) is that maybe the universe isn't actually rational. If so, going crazy might be a perfectly rational response to it.

I'm not sure that he had Deku Kin in mind when he wrote that, but food for thought

[Q. G. Pennyworth]

Another fun layer: it's entirely possible that for some of these folks it's a maladaptive coping mechanism for white guilt!

[The Good Reverend Roger]

I have settled into a rantworthy opinion on otherkin.

To follow when I get done with all the shit I have to deal with.

[Pergamos]

I just want to grab them by the shoulders and shake them and say "You poor dear! You poor dear, don't you get it? It doesn't matter if you're a D-Cell Energizer stuck in a human body! You're still not special. It does not make you special. You're just like everybody else that you hate and that you can't wait to set yourself apart from, that you so desperately wish to be recognized as anything else that you'll just make things up. Make things up, even, that have already been made up by other people! You don't have to be special. You're a bag of meat with chemicals toiling around inside of it making you think that you're a rare wheel of cheese or some shit. Don't you see how delightfully weird that is already? How the very same carbon that was the scale of a Utah raptor a few million years ago is now a hairless ape talking to other hairless apes on what amounts a light emitting box made out of information about how it doesn't feel so much like an ape as it does a firefly? DON'T YOU GET THAT?"

Nail. Head.

It strikes me that their driving force is to divide themselves from humanity. Rather than the specialness originating in themselves, they want others to recognize and respect their specialness from the outside. Seems like a backwards way of doing things.

I wonder whether the otherkin phenomenon extends further back in time than just the past 30 years. Were there medieval otherkin? Paleolithic otherkin? If so, what was their role? Were they mocked or did they become their villages shaman?

Or is this just a product of children with too much time, money, and entitlement on their hands.

People with the souls of animals is a concept that has been around for a long time, not so much people with the souls of fictional characters.

[Placid Dingo]

The person I spoke to in NY about otherkin 'coopting' the language of transgender said 'if I was an orange I wouldnt just empathise with other oranges. I'd empathise with apples too.' iow, she was talkiga bout the validity of different groups understanding that other people can feel the same thing in different scenarios (as I understood it).

The 'toddler/flying dog' can't do human work thing is a troll or bullshit though. That's like saying as a transgendered person identifying as female, you can't get someone pregnant. Your identity doesn't make your bodies original limitations any different.

[McGrupp]

I just want to grab them by the shoulders and shake them and say "You poor dear! You poor dear, don't you get it? It doesn't matter if you're a D-Cell Energizer stuck in a human body! You're still not special. It does not make you special. You're just like everybody else that you hate and that you can't wait to set yourself apart from, that you so desperately wish to be recognized as anything else that you'll just make things up. Make things up, even, that have already been made up by other people! You don't have to be special. You're a bag of meat with chemicals toiling around inside of it making you think that you're a rare wheel of cheese or some shit. Don't you see how delightfully weird that is already? How the very same carbon that was the scale of a Utah raptor a few million years ago is now a hairless ape talking to other hairless apes on what amounts a light emitting box made out of information about how it doesn't feel so much like an ape as it does a firefly? DON'T YOU GET THAT?"

Nail. Head.

It strikes me that their driving force is to divide themselves from humanity. Rather than the specialness originating in themselves, they want others to recognize and respect their specialness from the outside. Seems like a backwards way of doing things.

I wonder whether the otherkin phenomenon extends further back in time than just the past 30 years. Were there medieval otherkin? Paleolithic otherkin? If so, what was their role? Were they mocked or did they become their villages shaman?

Or is this just a product of children with too much time, money, and entitlement on their hands.

People with the souls of animals is a concept that has been around for a long time, not so much people with the souls of fictional characters.

That's true. I find it interesting that my gut reaction is to assign more validity to someone stating that they have the soul of an animal than someone claiming that a FFVII character resides within them. Likewise if someone claims a bond to something from mythology versus something on television. Not that I give much validity to either of them.

It occurs to me that this really makes no sense and that both are equally strange claims to make. As though having the proper pedigree for your identity mattered.

It's like the difference between someone stating "I can do magickal things. I learned this art from an ancient sumerian tome." versus "I can do magickal things. I learned this art from the L-M volume of the Encyclopedia Brittanica."  Both claims will be mocked, but one seems likely to be more widely mocked than the other. Strange.