#Not quite as significant as the Dirk Strider kin moment

[attackradish]

Second Kin Moment

In which for a solid half hour after I woke up, I continued to believe I was General Han Solo and that I’d ordered some ships to launch too early. I was worrying if they actually were too early and I had to go fix that or if I’d misunderstood the situation twice and had ordered them correctly through coincidence.

[agerefandom]

Okay, this is just a silly over-sharing personal post about my experience of kinning and how that feels for me! If I’m going to talk about it on here, I figure I should introduce my… unique experience of it. 

Note: this is a vulnerable post for me, so please don’t make fun of me for my experiences or fandoms! Asking questions is totally okay, and corrections are welcome, but please be patient and give me the benefit of the doubt that I’m doing my best! Also, content warning for passing mentions of depression, insomnia, hallucinations, and flashbacks. The whole thing is a bit of a mental trip, so if you’re prone to unreality problems, I don’t recommend reading this! 

Right! So, what is kinning, or being otherkin or fictionkin?

That’s a really complicated question! The community has expanded a lot in the last few years, and to be honest, the words have kinda lost their meaning. (Some people from the old communities are mad about that, and honestly... I get it.)

I’m not otherkin, so I’m not going to talk about it too much, but it’s the longer-established community (although I’m pretty sure that people have been kinning characters, people, animals, and concepts since the beginning of humans, hit me up for historical examples if you’d like).

Basically, being otherkin is when you identify as something other than human! People have lots of explanations for why this happens: reincarnation, spiritual connections. Others see it as connected to their neurodivergence, and others don’t feel the need to justify their identity as otherkin!

Being fictionkin is really blowing up on the internet right now, and it’s when you identify as a fictional character (ie. Sherlock Holmes). It’s a nebulous concept, and some people are now using ‘kinning’ as a way to say that they just relate to a character, or they find a part of themself expressed in a character. Others identify fully with the character, or have memories from what they believe is a past life or alternate universe where they were that character.

I’m not gonna say that one definition of ‘kinning’ is right and others are wrong, because language is made to evolve, and my own experience is so complicated that I hardly know which side my own experiences fall on! But it’s important to know that both communities exist, and it’s currently hard to tell what a person means by having a character on their ‘kinlist’ (list of characters/things they kin).

My story with kinning, under the ‘read more’. 

When I was a kid, it took me a long time to figure out that other people don’t experience media the same way that I do. They don’t feel sharp pain in their leg when someone on-screen hurts a leg, for example.  

I have over-active empathy: I can tell when someone on the train is feeling anxious, because I start feeling my heart racing. I share this quirk with my mother, who’s a lot better at regulating it. It might be an autism thing, it might be a spiritual thing, lots of people have given theories. But it’s a thing that I experience, and that’s all that matters for the moment.

As one consequence of this hyperempathy, ever since I was a child, I have a tendency to ‘pick up’ characters: the lines between myself and them blur while I watch a movie or read a book, and then I can’t quite unblur those lines when I’m done.

(I jumped off the garage roof when I was six, insisting I was Peter Parker. I sprained an ankle and was banned from Spider-Man content until I was eleven.)

I don’t pick up characters as often anymore: I can go anywhere from four months to two years without the lines of my selfhood getting blurry. When I was a young teen, though, it felt like my head was just full of people who wanted different things, and I couldn’t tell which of them were me, which of them were my parents, and which of them were fictional.

Thank god high school is over.

Anyways, ‘picking up’ characters has always been a struggle for me. It challenges my fashion choices, my favourite activities, my gender identity, and sometimes even my taste in food. It lasts for two weeks to six months, and then I subside back into my ‘natural’ state (which was rapidly changing in my teen years, adding to my confusion).

It made me feel really crazy, because none of my friends had this experience, and I’d never heard anyone else talking about it!

It turns out there is a term for this, it’s called ‘fictionflickers.’ It’s a term for a wide range of experiences, but one of the things it covers is briefly switching to the viewpoint of a fictional character, or a temporary ‘taking on’ of a character. Exactly what I experience! It’s temporary, and kin-adjacent, but it doesn’t technically fall under the umbrella of being fictionkin or otherkin, which are more fixed identities (although some people would argue that).

I am so happy to have a word for this. It makes me feel validated, and like I can actually talk to people about it. And it helps me to deal with it without fear, knowing that I’m not alone in the experience.

But then there’s another category of characters, which only showed up when I read a series called All For The Game (or The Foxhole Court) at age 18.

There’s a character in this series named Andrew Minyard. Immediately, I knew he was ‘mine’ (in a way I often connect to characters that become fictionflickers). His name leapt out at me from the page, I could feel his actions in my body more strongly than the other characters, it almost felt like I could predict his actions.

Anyways, bad things happen to that character. Well, bad things happen to most characters in that series. But Andrew’s plotline hit me hard, twisting my empathy into one big bundle of terribleness. I had nightmares for months, always in his body, and all throughout it, there was this terrible feeling that I was forgetting something.

I put it down to being a really bad fictionflicker (although I didn’t have the term yet, I called it ‘picking up characters,’ and I knew it was a reoccurring experience). But it was weird: there was no real shift in my personality or tastes, aside from a severe drop in mood because of the nightmares and insomnia. It wasn’t like a fictionflicker at all, aside from the fact that I couldn’t get this character out of my head.

Eventually, the nightmares started bleeding over into my days in the form of vivid flashbacks and… I stopped fighting what I’d been too scared to admit to myself. They were memories. They weren’t my memories, they were Andrew’s memories, but they were in my head, and I was dealing with the consequences.

Everything got easier when I recognized that. It felt right to process them as memories, rather than hallucinations, which I had been thinking of them as. This change in thinking made a huge difference, although I couldn’t tell you why, and the nightmares finally stopped.

But still, what were someone else’s memories doing in my head? Surely that was weirder than hallucinations?

And that’s when I found the kin community, and threw myself in headfirst.

Memories are one of the key differences between ‘I relate to a character’ kinning and ‘I am this character’ kinning. There are tons of other people with character-memories!!! I’ve quizzed dozens of (very patient and kind) people who share this experience, and heard dozens of theories about why it happens.

I don’t really have a personal theory, to be honest. It’s weird, and it’s happening, and I’m still not quite sure what to do about it, if anything. Mostly, I just try and be more open about it, when I can be. It’s still such a strange and unusual experience, and I get nervous explaining it to people, but it helps to talk about it. Especially when memories or new characters are bothering me, and I need help to separate myself from them.

Sometimes the line between ‘fictionflicker’ and ‘kinning’ is hard for me to find. The vivid thoughts and cravings that come with my fictionflickers occasionally cross into memories, and it’s really only time that will tell whether a character is a permanent part of me, or a temporary identification.

Anyways, here’s a list of my permanent kins, and my more recent or significant fictionflickers! I would never tell anyone about these without all the context you just read, but I think you can understand me well enough not to judge them too harshly now. 

Here’s the picrew I used to make most of the images! 

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Kins (and memories)

Andrew Minyard (Foxhole Court: mainly childhood memories: no memories of the book era, some pre-novel Palmetto memories)

Dirk Strider (Homestuck: non-game universe: caregiver splinter in a mess of a headspace with lots of folks around)

Holden Caulfield (Catcher In The Rye: hospital memories, and not much else)

Spiral (Magnus Archives: pre-Michael era, blurry memories, how it felt to be a labyrinth)

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Fictionflickers (age 16-22, not in chronological order)

Bill Cipher (Gravity Falls: two months: had some very confusing times thinking I had one eye. Enjoyed the music taste.)

Wade Wilson (Marvel: twelve months: helped me get all the voices in line when I was a teen. Also, made me feel better about the eczema that used to cover my face and shoulders. A reoccurring fictionflicker every few years.)

Mae Borowski (Night In The Woods: one month: on the line of kin and fictionflicker. I miss her mother terribly. Doesn’t mix well with my fear of heights, since I want to climb everything. I get weird dreams as Mae, but I often get weird dreams.)

Alexander Hamilton (Hamilton: six months: worst fictionflicker ever, I didn’t sleep a solid night for months but I did get straight As and met the Prime Minister. Long story.)

Rick Sanchez (Rick and Morty: two months: absolutely terrible person to have in your head. I wrote some songs, stayed up late, and dressed defensively feminine. I usually refuse to admit that I have memories from a version of him, because I’m not putting that name on my proper kinlist.)

Kevin (Welcome To Night Vale: ?one month?: another kin/fictionflicker blurry line. He makes my mouth hurt when I listen to his episodes. He was bringing up my Spiral memories before The Magnus Archives ever came out.)

Courfeyrac (Les Miserables: four months: brilliant era. Had so much energy. Joined a political group on campus, made donuts for people, and generally had a good time. Dated too many of my friends, though.)