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shadowfae · 3 years ago

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Yes. :/ It was actually in a discord server that I got fed up enough to actually consider leaving as a serious thing - one too many KFF blocked in fandom spaces, and then a discussion got started about KFF in the one discord that I actually usually feel safe talking about my experiences in and everyone went and dismissed the fact that they all but destroyed the fictionkin community. They also did a great show of ignoring that I was talking and everything that I said. I muted the server for a few days, haven't spoken in there since, and every interaction with the community's just been pissing me off more.

I'm not asking for flat out soulmate or twin flame connections here - that's a high standard and about as likely as asking for canonmates. I want the community I grew up in back, before it was utterly destroyed. Wishkin are nothing new. But the fact that we have virtually no spaces that I can find without KFF being the majority? That's new. I've been here for over seven years. They're not the same beast, not anymore.

You'd figure we'd find enough in the volume we're appealing to that it wouldn't feel like a damn minority and a half, but it does. So far I've seen about four or five in my notifications, and I'm genuinely surprised I got that much.

I'm not even really talking about the broader otherkin and alterhuman communities. I'm talking about fictionkin, because we can be pretty different - I can't name five fictionkin blogs off the top of my head that I genuinely respect. Not even like or consider myself friends with: respect, as in I have accepted that they are definitely vaguely on my wavelength and they know what they're talking about, and it's a similar enough experience to mine to call it the same name. I can name three, past that names start slipping me by.

When I got here, those first couple years, I could name at least twenty. Necrophagist and ranthimi, who shaped my understanding of what adult fictionkin look like and that I could be happy are both gone. They left ages ago. Fromfiction went down, came back briefly to bitch about psychological otherkin and decide that KFF were actually right all along, and then left. AlynnaFoxie is long, long gone. I don't even remember the last time I saw her. Page is still around, but doesn't consider himself otherkin or really any label other than folcinteric anymore, and honestly I understand that decision more and more with every day. Icarus blocked me after five years of friendship over fandom drama. Hallowedbone is still around, I think, but so inactive I'm genuinely not sure. Same with Luke. Gryphon left years ago not long after celebrating their 10th anniversary in the community. Vagabond-sun moved to Pillowfort, I think. Habit and I aren't on speaking terms, if he's still around, I don't know. Athyrium moved blogs so many times I have no idea if they're still active at all- last I can recall, they'd just gotten out of the hospital. Dana's long gone, I haven't spoken to her in at least two years, I don't know where she went. I'm lucky I still have contact with Jeshire, I know maybe a handful of people do.

And so many more that I'm forgetting. These were are once incredibly well-known names, and most of them were fictionkin. And these were just the 'community pillars' so to speak, to say nothing of your friends or those you found in the tags. They were the people everyone told you to follow, and then you found your friends by who interacted with their posts, and if you had issues, you asked one of them first and foremost. FromFiction - it was Felix at the time, although I think Felix is no longer a part of their system - was the one who talked me through my Ranisson awakening, before I realized how integral it was going to be.

There's a few folks who stand in their places now, who know what they're talking about, but it does not feel nearly as vast as it was. There feels like there's far, far less of us.

I know the community is bigger than this. Four hundred people regularly show up to Othercon, the tags are reasonably active, I was amazed by the twitter turnout when Grimes tried to pull shit on the community. And yet I still feel like there's maybe a handful of people that I know actually know what they're talking about. Not even friends, just people who exist in the community and can tell me three history facts and one trivia answer that you'd never expect about their kintypes.

I keep asking myself where the community went, and why nobody told me where we were moving to. That's what I'm mourning here, really. Wherever we went, I want to go there. I'll take being late to the party if it means it's still going when I get there.

Genuine question - I'm curious to know what you mean by most of what you hear now "isn't fictionkin." Do you mean it in the way that most people who say they are fickin are actually just kff/DA? Or do you mean it more in the respect that most of what fickin are describing as experiences don't line up with actually being fickin? If it is the latter, can you give an example of what you mean?- because I want to actually understand your viewpoint.

I've been in otherkin community for a while, but I'm coming to terms with being a baby fictionkin and want to understand more.

I'm gonna start off the bat by saying I barely know what the hell KFF are talking about with delusional attachments, because every description they have of it sounds like endelity and by extension psychological fictionkin to me. It also reeks of "the only way you can be fictionkin is if you're secretly A Crazy who needs to be locked up" and that absolutely does not sit right with me. Endels and psychological fictionkin are fine and amazing in my book, but it really sounds like this is something that cuts deep and disrespects them something major, and I can't say I approve of it.

I do mostly mean that KFF describe themselves as fictionkin when they're distinctly describing something else. I think what was the best explanation I found of them is a type of role play you usually do as a youngish teenager (note the space between role and play here), where you project your identity onto a role, stereotype, or character in order to feel out what you are, and discard it the moment it's unnecessary.

I did that as a young teenager, had a whole shtick about making a dragonwolf pack with some friends out on a camping trip, wrote myself as a self-insert into lots of stories feeling it all out. But while it was both introspectional and shallow, it was not otherkin to do that, it was not even close. It was a natural part of growing up in a human body, that everyone does, that is a part of being aware that you have an identity and not everyone is exactly the same as you.

It's fine to do that, but it isn't otherkin - it may be argued to be a form of otherlinking, but I would argue it isn't even that, because linktypes go down to the bone just as often as kintypes do, and the form of role play that KFF seems to be most certainly isn't that.

Now, there are folks who chose linktypes and later find that they can't put it down again. Technically, I did that with my Ranisson kintype, got myself tangled up in a hivemind and then decided I didn't want to leave it, even after it left me. Like a transformation potion - you choose once, and never again. You put yourself on the path, and you never get to come off it again.

That's valid, and a form of otherkin, and not what I'm talking about.

I am absolutely talking about the implication that being a bad person by having it as a kintype makes you someone who should be jailed, regardless of your current actions. I am talking about the implication that by not being sanitized and pretty and perfect and flawless that you're inherently lesser. I am talking about the fact that I don't get to talk about being a Devil, that I don't get to tell y'all about the deeply fucked-up and horrific relationship I had with the Princess that affects me to this day in ways that profoundly change the way I think; that I can't let South or Goni talk about their experiences because the current fictionkin community would run away screaming.

Goni's got an essay in the works hesitantly titled "10 Things to Learn as a Pisces Saint Apprentice" and he wants to make it halfway poetry about the trauma he faced growing up. About being a living bioweapon, torn between flower and fish, about being isolated and forced to kill anyone who comes near you without any choice in the matter on your own.

He doesn't get to talk about the kind of person it made him. Because gods fucking forbid his coping mechanisms and recovery be messy.

South hasn't decided to write any essays so far. He likes to keep people guessing. But his story's not a kind one, and the two best things he can say about his life is that he was free, for a little while, and his sister who he loves more than godhood once pulled him out of the grave to keep fighting. He's known gods better than anyone but me has.

He's one mortal shapechanger with a taste for blood and the seething desire to prove himself. He doesn't get to, because he's too honest. Because he scares people. Because everyone shies away from violence and sex when it's not dressed up in candy-cane frills.

For their sake, if not for mine, I wish I could believe the community wants to hear about that, wants to talk about that. But no. No, we don't get to. Because none of us were heroes. We were, are, villains and antagonists and monsters all.

We don't want to pretend that things were and are less brutal than they are, less serious, less deserving of respect. But in order to exist and talk about ourselves, we have to tame ourselves down and make it sound nicer.

While typing this out, you almost got South offhandedly talking about one of his many, many atrocities. I cut that out, because I doubt folks have the stomach for the vivid picture of gore he paints. That's the problem. That nothing we are is appropriate for the spaces that I grew up in, that was acceptable and encouraged before.

I see spirits who wouldn't know our brands of magic if they were hit in the face with them, and can't describe it other than feeling a little lightheaded. I see people who say they lived through war, but don't seem to understand the feeling of raw loss at being dragged out of the grave after a failed mission to know you were the only survivor. People who say they get feeling ghostly and psychopompous, but don't understand or appreciate decay that isn't pretty and sanitized and are perfectly happy to get into arguments every week over petty nonsense for the adrenaline rush.

I really, really wish I could say that I see these people and can accept that there's more going on that I'm not seeing. But when all I can see for miles is pretty and sanitized talk about being a little lightheaded and that means you're not human, it's not hard to come to the conclusion that either I am seriously out of the loop, or we're not talking about the same thing at all.

I'm still trying to figure out which one it is. I don't want to say "everyone has to talk about their deep pains and feelings", but I don't think "so nobody should and it's somehow traumadumping to be anything other than pretty and perfect material to consume without thinking about" is an acceptable alternative.

I don't know. I wish I did.

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