Otherkin and identity politics

[Q. G. Pennyworth]

Adult babies bother me a lot more than otherkin, to be honest. If you're going to waste your time and energy playing make believe I should hope the very least you can manage is time travelling hermaphrodite dragon-kin, not sitting around in your own shit because you can't stand the thought that you already had your fucking turn being a baby.

[Cardinal Pizza Deliverance.]

Adult babies bother me a lot more than otherkin, to be honest. If you're going to waste your time and energy playing make believe I should hope the very least you can manage is time travelling hermaphrodite dragon-kin, not sitting around in your own shit because you can't stand the thought that you already had your fucking turn being a baby.

I have to agree.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Adult babies bother me a lot more than otherkin, to be honest. If you're going to waste your time and energy playing make believe I should hope the very least you can manage is time travelling hermaphrodite dragon-kin, not sitting around in your own shit because you can't stand the thought that you already had your fucking turn being a baby.

I agree.

But nothing says I can't hate everyone.

[Eater of Clowns]

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?"

[The Good Reverend Roger]

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?"

I tried to say this at some board or another, only I said:

"If you aren't happy with a perfectly good human body, you would not be happy no matter what you were."

[Eater of Clowns]

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?"

I tried to say this at some board or another, only I said:

"If you aren't happy with a perfectly good human body, you would not be happy no matter what you were."

Yup. I've got no doubt that there's a discussion to be had about the legitimacy of these identities. It just isn't the discussion that the people who have them think it is.

[Cardinal Pizza Deliverance.]

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?"

I tried to say this at some board or another, only I said:

"If you aren't happy with a perfectly good human body, you would not be happy no matter what you were."

These are both true things as well.

[tyrannosaurus vex]

HELP ME

I'M A MAGIC HALF-FAIRY, HALF-UNICORN

STUCK IN THE BODY

OF AN AVERAGE-LOOKING, MODERATELY INTELLIGENT HOMINID WITH DECENT FUTURE PROSPECTS, BUT THE SOMEWHAT PERPLEXING NOTION THAT THINGS COULD BE BETTER IN THE WORLD, AND THE OVERWHELMING URGE

TO DANCE

[Pæs]

[Cain]

"It feels like being a cat".

Serious post when I'm not sleep deprived.

[Pergamos]

HELPFUL HINT: If someone tells you they're a merkin, it doesn't mean what you think it does.

I don't think the merkin understands what cisgendered means since the "front" is apparently a cisfemale and the two alternates are cismales, you can't have a cisfemale and a cismale in the same body, somebody has to be trans.

[P3nT4gR4m]

On one hand - do whatever the fuck thou wilt.

On the other hand - if it's getting you down, get fucking over it.

Some people seem to just need angst and will invent any excuse.

Personally I hate angst. It's a wanky, buzzkill feeling which I make a point of avoiding. People who overindulge are wanky, buzzkill people who I can't bring myself to give a flying fuck about.

[Triple Zero]

I bet they could be cured, with helminth therapy.

Well, except for the helminthkin. It might only reinforce their ideas.

[Junkenstein]

I think this is a good place to mention I suffer from Dissociative Timestream Disorder. I'm actually not the same EoC that joined this forum nearly five years ago. In fact, I'm not the same EoC that started this sentence.

I do not exist as a constant entity in the real world. Who you know, and who many of you have met, as EoC, is unmade entirely and then remade exactly a billion times a nanosecond.

It's frustrating, as a person with DTD, seeing such temporalist privilege being touted on even an enlightened a space as PD. You don't know what it's like to cease to exist an incomprehensible number of times, without even measurable evidence that it's happening.

4/5, loss of one point for failure to reference quantum mechanics.

[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.