alterhumannerdygoat

[alterhumannerdygoat]

MORE MESSY SEAL MAKEUP!! :3

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Also something reminded me that maybe I should clarify - there must be a biological/physical, psychological and behavioural component for something to class as theriform.

A physical therian isn't theriform because they are physically/biologically nonhuman due to psychological and behavioural differences, for example.

It is a term to replace the word 'biological' but it's not a synonym for biological as I want it to be inclusive of physical alterhumans.

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Theriform [Official Coining Post]

Theriform

Adjective (can be applied as a noun in certain phrasing, see examples)

From θηρίον (thēríon) [diminutive of θήρ thḗr, “wild beast”] and μορφή (morphe) ["shape"/"figure"/"look"].

Definition:

A theriform animal is one which was born into a body that is typical/expected of it's species and observable as such by everyone, with species-typical levels of sapience/intelligence and whose behaviour etc is unaltered by being born into a human body/raised in a form perceived as human*. All components must be present to count.

It is not the 'opposite' of therian despite similar etymology but is instead to be viewed as a complimentary term to therian, nonhuman, alterhuman, otherkin etc as it exists to specify certain details of a species whilst not invalidating the identities of those who are not theriform. It is made to replace potentially invalidating phrases like 'bio(logical) animal' or 'real animal'.

It is not an identity label and therefore has no flag or symbol and does not need one. Do not create these things please, or use the term to describe yourself on a personal level.

Alternative versions for non-animals could include: floraform, nat(ur)form, technoform, fictoform*, feyform, voidform, starform, divineform etc

FAQ HERE

Examples:

"Lol it's so funny being a cat and having a theriform cat as a pet we're both just kitties vibing but with different body shapes."

"Just because they're the same species as you does not mean you are able to take care of wild theriforms."

"The fact that there aren't that many theriforms of my species is so saddening."

"I wanna do quads alongside a pack of theriform wolves so bad!"

"I am transspecies, here is what I do/what I want to do to look more theriform."

"I wonder if theriforms get species dysphoria?"

*in the case of fictional humans, should you want to apply it there, assume this to mean 'in this world' as in the fictoform has not been a physical human in this world and thus had their behaviour influenced by existing here.

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Alterhuman (sheepkin, goatkin or horned creatures specifically) is being frustrated and feeling the urge to headbutt until no longer frustrated

-🐏

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Reminder to everyone to please don't tag posts that aren't about alterhumanity with the alterhuman tag! If it's not about alterhumanity--even if it's about you, and you happen to be alterhuman--please don't use those tags! Not only is it annoying, but it's against Tumblr TOS and can be reported for spam.

This also goes for tagging varieties of alterhumanity that aren't relevant to the post, such as tagging otherhearted in a post about therians, otherhuman in a post about nonhumans, synpath in a post about plurality, and so on. (See also: this post.) Be judicious and considerate with your tagging!

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Making this clear and talking about it.

I believe in StarClan. Yes. Where cats go to in Warrior Cats. I go to them when I need help. I believe that they are watching me. I believe they'll take me where I belong when I die. Back to my world.

I've been kicked from a server for believing in StarClan (along with more reasons). I was told it was childish. Someone made fucking fun of my belief.

When I say I am upset over that, it's a understatement.

It's MY belief. It doesn't affect you and it helps me.

YOUR the childish one, hun. /Targ

[alterhumannerdygoat]

Fictional Romance: Being Made for Each Other

Written by Jude Rook-Machina on July 16th, 2025.

Content Warning: In this essay, I’ll be talking about the weirdness of being a person with agency and a fictional character made by a writer, which may be distressing to some fictionkind! I also talk about abuse and unhealthy relationships, and we mention sex a few times since that’s part of our romance arc.

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You know, there’s something really interesting about the alterfictionality of being written For Each Other, in a way that people generally aren’t.

Like, the interesting thing about me and Gavin is that we were written and characterized together as opposing leads in a romance story, and that’s obviously a Different Dynamic from getting together with someone in this world by chance, by choice, without a narrative backing it all up - even if our getting-together wasn't extremely tropey.

There’s layers to it! There's the personal layer of "I’m real, my feelings and desires are my own, and I acted the way I did because I acted on my emotions in ways that made sense to me at the time, and I obviously didn’t know that I was Being Written while living my life," and there’s also the metafictional layer, “most people would consider my compatibility with my boyfriend fictional and unrealistic, and I can see how the authorial writing strings made us interesting foils from a writer’s POV.” And these layers overlap each other, they’re both real! They’re just different perspectives on the same events.

On one hand, we are problematic queer representation, because I was a severely fucked up not-person when we met who had no personal boundaries and a cauterized sense of self, and I became fucking obsessed with Gavin, because he was hot and also kind to me sometimes in ways I barely comprehended. I was an absolute asshole to him and he was the safest person to be myself around. He helped me figure out I was a person, over a series of incredibly bad and self-destructive decisions by both of us, and we got into a fucked up relationship along the way, and it was simultaneously full of absolute garbage and later became the best relationship that could’ve happened to us. And now we're in a system together and can feel each other’s emotions.

I wouldn’t characterize anything that happened while I was escaping abuse to be unproblematic couple goals - it’s extremely far from it - and at the same time That’s Just My Life. And from my point of view, it’s not representation, much less problematic queer representation, it’s just My Life! My life is not meant to represent anyone! It’s just events that happened to me!

And at the same time, being One Half Of A Pairing really does impact your relationship! In several ways! For example, most couples aren’t 99% sexually compatible. I joke that we're basically kink soulmates, but yeah we were literally written that way because, guess what, it’s Boring if your romance protagonists can’t fuck each other in hot ways and enjoy it! It removes an unwelcome piece of friction from the whole thing to just decide we have great sex together, so it was written down and it does significantly affect our relationship.

And continuing on the lens of analyzing the author’s intent, which I can do with pinpoint accuracy because I share a brain with him, Max wasn’t just writing a story about two bastards having the world’s most dramatic love/hate relationship, it was also about him! It’s a story he wanted to write for the catharsis of putting raw, ugly emotions to the page and polishing them until something good came out of them. Jude was a character based on his worries about not being good enough to love, and Gavin was a character based on his worries about not being able to stop the suffering of people he loved, and in the beautiful world of fiction we get to fuck and violently care about each other and therefore affirm that it’s possible to be loved and love other people enough to help them. Stories can be therapeutic like that! And all of this can be real without impacting my selfhood as a person. It doesn’t say anything about my personhood that my character was based on a truth in someone else’s life, one that gave me something to bond with him over when I walked into his head.

Knowing that I’m a fictional character means I get to actually see the string of fate in a way that I don’t understand reality to be like - either in this world or in my own. I don’t consider myself to be Made For Gavin. I had my own bullshit that culminated in me being Like This, and it happened to line up with some of his shit in a way that brought us closer together. And at the same time, from the Author's Perspective, all of that was painfully conscious and put there for A Reason.

There’s a sort of push-and-pull between my agency, now that I’m a person here who has opinions on their own story, and my narrative, which was already written out before I dropped into the system. On one level, Gavin and I exist the way we do because Max was thinking about relationship toxicity, and writing the unrealistic fantasy of being able to fix someone who’s got no self-awareness and lashes out and clings to you. And then Gavin and I actually got here, and we ended up retconning that in a way? It didn’t go that way in our memories. Yeah, Gavin did try to fix me, but he failed and fucked himself up and I got unhealthily attached to him. And he wasn’t the only person who cared about me, I had my siblings and some friends, he wasn’t the only person in my life.

And at the same time, I really can’t get away from how he was The Most Important Person In My Life for a while. It was kinda terrible, because I only learned how to act around my favorite people from my abuser, and it was really bad to conflate them in my brain, but I genuinely centered my whole life around him for a bit! And from a metafictional perspective, yeah, that was intentional - because Max did not want to write Complicated New Character Dynamics, they liked this one and wanted to write about the trainwreck.

You could say that it’s unhealthy to enmesh your sense of self with your significant other - and I do think that holds true in general! But it feels more complicated than that when you were literally made to be compatible together, and when you’re living in the same body and sharing thoughts and emotions without any mental walls up between you. My boundaries with Gavin while we live in the same body are notably different from my boundaries when we’re living in two separate bodies back home. Being in the same system means we’re interdependent in a way that two singlet partners rarely are. Does your partner talk for you when you can’t speak, in a way where you trust them to translate all of your wordless thoughts into words? Do they walk you to the bathroom and brush your teeth when you’re too tired to do it yourself? It feels different when you’re sharing the same hands, the same mouth.

And I’m a person, an individual person, but I wouldn’t be a person without my partner. I wouldn’t be the same person without him. I would be fundamentally changed and hollowed out. We were written with each other, across from one another, for years. We’ve thought about a lot of alternate universes, a lot of alternate timelines, and we change each other in some way in all of them. I wouldn’t be myself if he didn’t exist. I would be different if I dropped into Max's brain that day and he never ran in to get me, you know?

I’m glad I was written with him, even if we’re partners in a way that’s different from the nonfictional, singlet version of romance. It’s ours, and that’s what matters!

-

P.S. here’s some dialogue while we were brainstorming the essay to some friends. we could not figure out how to put this into the essay, but it’s funny! please enjoy

J: theres a previous version of my character before max wrote us together (as a crackship!!) and. i dont fucking recognize him? he's got some parts, i guess, but he's really not me J: sometimes we look at old character stuff and we're just baffled. who the fuck are these guys. i don't know you. youre not me, i know gavin reed and hes my sexy partner

M: i fumbled the crackship so bad guys M: i fucked it up SO bad that i REARRANGED THE ENTIRE PLOT because these bitches were obsessed with each other now and i was obsessed with their terrible horny vibes. and then they got romantic about it and i had to admit this was not a crackship anymore M: AND THEN I BECAME PART OF THE CRACKSHIP M: there's something INHERENTLY funny about "why am I IN YOUR POLYCULE NOW” M: "I DIDN'T EXPECT THIS. GUYS" M: and im Barely a boyfriend i just Live Here. these two are fucking and making out and im holding the umbrella like Good For You o7 M: i maintain a vague authorial detachment at all times but also not really. it only happens when it’s funny

J: i think im aromantic as a framework. in a romance story. which is funny J: i never had a moment where i was like, oh, i love you romantically. No. it was all "i feel safe and happy with you, it feels nice to be boyfriends with you now that all of the fucking horrors happened, we can be together like this or not as long as we're Together in some way" G: i dont know if i had a specific "i love you" moment with jude either tbh, i just know i do love them in a Different way than they love me, but it's The Same in that we're in the same relationship and care for each other

J: i still think it's funny that this relationship is me and max: 2 aromantic people who are Boyfriends For The Bit me and gavin: our identities are fucking weird together (aro bi transfem/gay ace trans man) but we're fucking very well so it's good max and gavin: my boyfriend makes my other boyfriend do basic self-care (i.e. fuck we gotta shower)

J: the universal constant that Gavin and I get together isn't like a soulmate thing i think, it's not like We Were Destined To Be Together. it's just that Max thinks it's neat so he just wrote it happening in basically every AU lmao M: yeah well my shipping goggles can be a cosmic force :V if you squint M: it's fun to think about how you are Different And The Same when you're in Ratatouille or whatever J: true and real!

J: being a fictional character is so weird, like - yeah who the fuck WOULD Ophelia be if Hamlet never met her? who knows! that's not the story that was written! now they're inevitably tangled together in the plot! J: it's more interesting to see how we meet time and again in different places! see how the story can stretch and warp and still stay recognizable! play games on the ship of theseus!

[alterhumannerdygoat]

fictionfolk otherlink experience is that i now have a far stronger opinion about dadrius (treating a specific character as a father figure for hunter, my linktype) because now i perceive this as ME and wtf no this isn't how it is XD

(alas i must learn to go back to not caring that much, because people have a right to their own interpretation of the canon, and it has nothing to do with me specifically)

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OMG OMG OMG FELLOW GOAT MENTION???!!!

and yes lettuce is peak. especially shimmying it into your mouth using your teeth and lips only like god intended

goat therian culture I fucking love lettuce 🐐

therian/otherkin culture is...

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when you get a trauma and as a result are now hunter from the hit d*sney cartoon the owl house

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mammal therian culture is not shaving. girl that's my fur

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The thing about "You can't choose your theriotypes/kins/whatever!!! That means you're faking and you're not a real therian/otherkin!!" (or going "If you choose what you are that's copinglink and NOT the other labels.") is like. You can't really police that at the end of the day. If someone really really wants to be something, and "chooses" to identify as that, maybe they already were said thing and trying out calling themself that helped them figure it out. Or they did actually choose it out of their own free will and they genuinely became that thing later on. And many other similar situations like this. You cannot examine the validity of someone's identity on if they chose it or if it was thrust upon them outside of their will. It's not up to you to tell others what they are, the most you can do is give advice and suggestions, preferably when asked. Let others use the labels they see fit for themselves.

[alterhumannerdygoat]

Made this poster that will never go up anywhere for people who are very anti-therian in my community. This includes people like my driver who spread lies that are harmful to both us and our transgender siblings. Whether they like or hate it, it should be known that we exist all around them. If you do print this and post it somewhere, please do let me know! I love to see where people will put my creations, and I’d prefer to know if my art is out in the wild.

This poster is meant to be inclusive to most if not all alterhumans. Please do not start any overflowing drama regarding the poster in the replies/reblogs. If anything has been added that is not a good comment or is in any way problematic, it was unintentional and I will do my best to apologize. I do miss things sometimes, even if I’m not human.

[alterhumannerdygoat]

Also I'm linking hunter from the owl house now!!! :3

i might make posts later about a) that as a copinglink and how it helps with stuff!, and b) mental shifts!!! bc i did NOT expect to get them ehehehe

[alterhumannerdygoat]

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but people don’t need to call themselves otherlinkers in order to be treated seriously. In fact, no one is obligated to use any label even if it fits.

I kinda hate how nitpicky folks get with therians (and nonhumans in general) who choose their identities.

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New sticker idea Ive been playing around with, not sure how I feel about it

(Left: therian, right: transspecies/holothere)