#wolfgetsreal

[liongoatsnake]

A Reflection of the Movie, Wolf

A year ago today, Wolf, a movie about Jacob, a wolf trapped in a man's body who is sent to a clinic with others who have “species identity disorder” was first shown to the public.

 This document took nearly a year to make so we decided to just release it on the anniversary of this movie’s release. It covers our thoughts on the movie and its production and it is 31 pages long.

 Link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xoWFNWXjbciz8H9I7P8cniy3tNIgGxCe/view?usp=sharing

[alt--h]

Community initiative: #WolfGetsReal

On the 3rd of December, Wolf was released – a movie which features a protagonist with species dysphoria being committed to a mental asylum. It’s been getting bad reviews, but many critics mention one idea in particular: that this is a metaphor for mental illness or gender identity.

[image ID: snippets of reviews criticising Wolf as ‘social commentary’.]

The thing is, the director has explicitly stated that Wolf is inspired by real people with species dysphoria. She states nonhuman identity has an ‘obviously comical side to it’ and is a ‘growing syndrome’. She also confesses to deliberately not researching the subject.

Non-alterhuman transgender people are affected by the film’s messages too. But it’s critical to understand that we are the people this movie is about. We deserve to be seen as more than a metaphor for transgender issues – especially when so many of us are transgender ourselves. We also deserve to be seen as people capable of living happy lives, not pathologized for our experiences.

We're calling for society to recognize that people with species dysphoria are not an allegory. We're real, and we’re affected by these representations.

And you can help us make that happen. If you're a person with species dysphoria or an ally, we’re asking you to join us in sharing your feelings about the movie using the hashtag #WolfGetsReal. We’re interested in:

Opinions on the movie, its production, or the critical response to it

How species dysphoria affects you and how other people have treated you for it

Experiences with the mental health system and hospitalization as a nonhuman

How your species identity and gender identity intersect, if relevant

Anything else you think people need to see and know about!

We’ll be boosting and promoting content that uses the tag #WolfGetsReal anywhere we can. Anything from a full blown video essay to a single tweet is welcome. If you’ve got stuff to say but you’re nervous about putting yourself out there? Send us an ask, email us, or come discuss it on the discord or forum, and we’ll publish it on your behalf.

You can also help by:

Sharing your perspective in conversations about the movie in your social spaces

Leaving reviews for the movie on Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, and other review sites

Leaving comments on articles reviewing the movie (or even directly contact the journalists writing them!)

For better or for worse, nonhuman identity is entering public awareness. Other recent films like Wild Mountain Thyme show that this is not a fluke, but the beginning of a potential trend. But if we stand together and speak out, we can prevent these careless depictions and incredulous critical responses. It all starts with raising our voices and taking the narrative into our own hands.

Let’s get real.

[housetiger]

#WolfGetsReal

as an extranth, i don’t have to imagine a world where my alterhumanity is seen as a disorder. the treatment in Wolf has been compared to conversion therapy, and justifiably so! but i also wanted to point out the clear similarities to the mistreatment of plurals - we get it, and we should be building mutual support and understanding here.

medical abuse of transgender people is still unacceptably rampant. that said, these days, the prevailing medical opinion is that transition is the solution to gender dysphoria, and standards of care are about helping you get that. the prevailing medical opinion about plurality is that it needs to be eliminated, the standard of care is integration. this reality is much closer to that of Wolf’s. the clinic is depicted as unusually cruel, but ultimately in line with what doctors think about species dysphoria in that universe: it has to be ‘cured’.

i don’t have a big essay to write, i’m not that kinda guy, but i wanted to point this out to highlight that we’re all on the same team, here. singlet otherkin: be aware that this story is already truth for many of your fellow alterhumans. consider what you can learn from the plural self advocacy movement to prepare you for doing the same in the future. plurals: we know what this feels like. we should be supporting and advocating for nonhuman identity as much as we do ourselves.

solidarity!

[vagabond-sun]

so. Wolf is, obviously, incredibly irresponsible in its message. but i think it’s important to turn attention to the other group spreading harmful rhetoric about us in all this too: the journalists reviewing it. bc while the movie is bombing, these people are putting their opinion that our existence is disordered or insulting to transgender people in front of a lot more heads.

i’ve collected what i think are the most egregious examples, and i encourage you to pick one or two of them and leave a comment on the article explaining that people with species dysphoria exist and are affected by this too:

Identifying as an animal takes on extra baggage in the thin, iffy parable Wolf - Mike D’Angelo for AV Club

Review: Wolf Is a Muddled Trans Allegory Anchored by Committed Performances - by Derek Smith for Slant Magazine

‘Wolf’ Film Review: Psychological Drama About Animal-Identifying Humans Gawks From a Distance - Robert Abele for The Wrap

Review: 'Wolf' bites off more than it can chew - Chris Hewitt for the Star Tribune

Review: In ‘Wolf,’ George MacKay and Lily-Rose Depp Embrace Their Animal Sides - Morgan Rojas for Cinemacy

WOLF is an acting exercise in search of a story - Gary M Kramer for MovieJawn

The movie ‘Wolf,’ about a guy who thinks he’s a wild animal, is as mixed up as its hero - Michael O’Sullivan for the Washington Post

i picked these ones because they seemed the most explicitly derisive plus they seem to have the biggest reach, but there are plenty more examples on the rotten tomatoes page which you could also turn your attention to.

i also want to emphasise being respectful in your response. address their points instead of firing off a pre-written message. validate the impact this has on orthohuman transgender people, because it is there, even if it’s secondary. don’t blame them for not knowing about this. the point is to build solidarity - most of them are already outraged that it unjustly portrays someone, and it’s simply a matter of notifying them that we are that someone too.

[therianomalocaris]

about the whole wolf (2021) situation, heres some thoughts i posted on twitter for the #WolfGetsReal campaign. i dont wanna repeat myself so yall get a screencap.

sorry for the typos, damn twitter and its lack of edit button.

image description under the cut!

[image description: a series of two tweets by me, twitter user TheBreeoche, posted under the hashtag Wolf Gets Real. the first one reads: “people with species dysphoria aren’t dangerous or scary. we’re real people living real life as non-humans, and portraying us the way wolf (2021) did is harmful and disrespectful in a number of ways. species dysphoric people aren’t yours to gawk at and sensationalize.“ the second one reads: “when i first criticized this movie’s trailer on tumblr, i assumed it was a trans allegory. turns out it's not! according to the director, it's explicitly about species dysphoria- something which she admits doing no research on. in case you’re wondering, yes! that’s actually worse 🙃”. end ID.]

[angstydevil]

#WolfGetsReal

In the movie Wolf (2021), writer/director Nathalie Biancheri imagines a world where people with species dysphoria are "cured" of their nonhuman identity and feral behaviors (such as knuckle-walking naked in the woods) through forced confinenent and barbaric therapeutic practices.

The majority of Wolf's runtime focuses on a inpatient facility for nonhumans (distastefully) called "the zoo", run by an abusive psychologist known as "the zookeeper". The "zookeeper" is an antagonist, but his brutal and coercive therapeutic practices "cure" nonhumans of their nonhumanity within the narrative of the film, glorifying abuse of nonhumans and mental illness patients.

As a nonhuman pluran who has been involuntarily institutionalized, Wolf horrifies me. Abuse is a rampant and regular part of real world mental health systems that should not be portrayed as comic, novel, or "successful". Nonhumans are a vulnerable group in psychiatric settings.

Wolf is harmful to nonhumans and anyone else at heightened risk of psychiatric abuse, particularly plurals and trans folx. This fetishistic and stigmatizing sensationalist clusterfuck should be condemned.

[antonballdeluxe]

almost vomiting while watching the trailer for wolf...lol just psychiatric abuse things

[a-dragons-journal]

Yeah, I’ve... been thinking this but didn’t want to say it. Realistically, I don’t think the #WolfGetsReal hashtag will get any more attention from anyone who’s not in the nonhuman communities than the movie itself did, but I don’t want to take the risk.

Also, this may be a little selfish on my part, but it’s... frankly exhausting to go into the otherkin tag and have literally every other post be about this movie (at best complaining, and at worst outright catastrophizing it). It’s exhausting to go into a community space and be overwhelmed by posts about a big scary thing and how bad it could (could) be for the community, especially when yeah, I do honestly think it’s catastrophizing a bit, even as I understand where people are coming from.

I hadn’t thought of it before this post, but I think this -

Now, I know where this idea came from: back earlier this year when Grimes put ‘otherkin’ in her twitter bio and changed her birthdate to that of a nuclear bomb, the otherkin community flooded the twitter tags with introductions and 101s and threads on how cool the community is. It worked quite well, I think, and it’s clear this is more of that.

We were forced into the spotlight, so we forced the spotlight to be about us, and not the misinformation.

- is an excellent point. If we really want to combat any negative impact this movie might have, then maybe we should do this again - make a point of talking in whatever tags are relevant about our experiences, about real species dysphoria and what it’s like and how we deal with it and why it isn’t whatever demon the movie made out of it, about real nonhumanity, about Otherkin 101, etc. etc. That might be a more productive response than what’s currently happening, in my opinion - and it’s less compassion-fatiguing.

But, that’s just my opinion, and like I said, I don’t honestly think the #WolfGetsReal tag is going to bring any more attention to us than the movie is, though I’ve certainly been wrong before.

Right so... #WolfGetsReal, huh?

I mean, none of this has really sat well to me. I'm not a therianthrope myself, but theriomythic arguably applies to me, and I am more animalistic than I let on. Species dysphoria is the one thing that affects me directly, and very little of it is social: without physical transition, which is scientifically impossible, there is no treatment nor cure for the symptoms I have.

I haven't watched Wolf (2021), owing largely to my general disinterest in movies. It's rare I do watch films, and I'm certainly not going to waste two hours of my time watching a movie I'm guaranteed not to like. Everything I've heard about it so far says that it sucks, it's a shitty B-list movie, and has pretty well no artistic value.

Alt+H decided to call a community initiative to drown the movie's tags talking about actual species dysphoria, owing to an interview with the director where she admitted she went out of her way not to do any research.

Now, I'm not defending the director here, because that's a stupid move in general. But I am gonna come outright and say that I don't think this community initiative is a good idea. Actually, let me make that slightly plainer: I think it's a stupid, ill-thought-out idea at best, and an actively dangerous one at worst.

This is a B-list movie, with zero famous actors, that very few people are going to watch. Of those few people, most if not all of them are going to either a) think it's a werewolf movie spliced with an ableist mental facility movie, or b) think it's a bad allegory for queer struggles.

Literally nobody but us is going to go "hm let's be ableist towards the delusional with ~species dysphoria~ :)" because we're not in the spotlight outside of when we're brought up linked to transphobia. We are very occasionally that weird guy in an internet story you heard about once, and that's only if you're on the internet a lot.

Now, I know where this idea came from: back earlier this year when Grimes put 'otherkin' in her twitter bio and changed her birthdate to that of a nuclear bomb, the otherkin community flooded the twitter tags with introductions and 101s and threads on how cool the community is. It worked quite well, I think, and it's clear this is more of that.

We were forced into the spotlight, so we forced the spotlight to be about us, and not the misinformation. Grimes has a depressingly large following, we didn't have a choice.

This... isn't that. The only reason anyone would watch this movie is if they're bored of Sundance films. Hells, it's even released right around two very anticipated Spiderman trailers. It's a movie destined to be overlooked, a box office flop, and forgotten.

So tell me: if we don't actually have a spotlight, why the hell are we making one? In the twitter tag of #WolfGetsReal, I've seen not one but two bestialist / animal abusers trying to overtake the narrative and link therianthropy to bestiality. Right now, the therianthrope community is having a nightmare time trying to kick them out.

You're telling me we should go viral with zero cohesiveness, focusing on therianthropy, and give them the chance to irreparably link therianthropy to bestiality? Because of a shitty B-list movie that otherwise would fade into obscurity?

No. No, this is a bad idea. If we want to go viral, this is a terrible way to do it. Don't get me wrong here, talking about species dysphoria and writing up posts and essays and 101s is great. But doing it specifically to go viral, when we have some major predators already frothing at the mouth to steal the mic for their malicious and substantially evil purposes?

It's ill-thought-out at best, and I cannot approve. There's literally no upside to this. The director wouldn't listen to us at best (if that were possible, it would have been done already), we do not have any power we can actually use, any spotlight we make right now on this issue will be immediately hijacked (and we have currently zero plan to mitigate that major issue), and making a spotlight of us being made fun of isn't something we can turn around.

There's no upside to doing this. If we want to talk about species dysphoria, let's focus on that, not bring emphasis to a movie that should fade forgotten into obscurity.

I know Alt+H also noted that between this and Wild Mountain Thyme, it seems the beginning of a trend. But WMT was taken almost universally by people who aren't us as a metaphor, and had a total of zero impact on the community. If we let this pass us by the same way, it will also have zero impact. And right now, I'll take no attention over almost-guaranteed-to-be-bad attention.

So that's my thoughts on that.

[who-is-page]

Some scattered thoughts on Wolf (2021)

So some pals and I did a watch party of the legendary (affectionately derogatory) movie, Wolf. Here are some of my thoughts on it, and on things I've heard about it/said myself in the past.

To start things off, I went into Wolf expecting it to be how I saw most people in the WolfGetsReal Alt+H campaign described it as-- a movie that explicitly supported the psychopathologizing of nonhuman identities and species dysphoria, and which portrayed nonhumanity and adjacent experiences as something to be "cured." Something that got species dysphoria so wrong as to be downright offensive, and which insulted people who experience it every step of the way.

What I got was...not that. What I got was actually, in some ways, the opposite of that.

Wolf (2021) has a main character who sees himself as a wolf, but a cast of other nonhuman characters too-- a panda, a jumping spider, a German shepherd, a grizzly bear, a duck, and a squirrel, among others. These characters are all hospitalized in what's clearly meant to be an inpatient treatment facility, where none of them are allowed to leave (and supposedly the last guy who did escape DIED oooo, much spooky, very believable).

The "treatments" we see these characters go through at the hands of the two staff members working at the facility are downright inhumane and almost identical to a lot of the anti-otherkin rhetoric we saw in the mid-2010's, especially the ones that got into the territory of anti-kin theoretically abusing their own children were they ever to identify as otherkin. But these "treatments" are never glorified or portrayed as anything other than horrific and deeply unethical. The staff of the facility are clear-cut villains, no questions about it. There's absolutely zero sympathetic emphasis on them. (Even the mother-daughter relationship the female psychologist has with one of the patients is pretty blatantly abusive, if you ask me.)

And the portrayal of species dysphoria by the actors was, when not cringy from the director clearly over-exaggerating certain things (like the duck kid constantly quacking), genuinely relatable and heartfelt. Hearing the main character talk about how his body felt wrong was like looking in a mirror. He was easily echoing not only things I've verbatim heard others say about their mind-body mismatch, but that I myself have thought. Watching characters slink around on all fours, indulge in wearing gear, and engage in even stereotypical behaviors of their animals--such as the over-excitable dog character asking for headpats and immediately running up to the wolf MC with "we're family! Let's be friends!" type conversation upon their first informal meeting--was relatable and even sometimes familiar in a surprising amount of scenes they occurred in. Honestly, it was kind of nice to see those experiences showcased at all.

(Spoiler alert ahead in this paragraph, but also, getting to watch the main character escape from that place successfully with a finishing line to his wildcat pseudo-girlfriend, who was begging him to stay and asking how would he survive out there in the Real Wild World and etc, with "it's not about surviving, it's about surviving as me," also absolutely struck a chord in me, as both a nonhuman and a survivor of abuse myself--and I think that really showcased how, at least for the main character, his nonhumanity was never something to be "cured" but was just an undeniable part of who he was all along.)

The movie was definitely only 2.5 out of 5 star material, don't get me wrong. The pacing was janky, it's filled with plotholes that require a suspension of disbelief long enough to cross the Atlantic with, several of my friends pointed out that it's rife with ableist undertones (including the idea that animality is connected to trauma), and both the villain's one-dimensional-ness and the open ending were things that I know eyebrows have been raised over. And these are only the problems I caught with it on a half-drunken first-watch while shouting at the screen with friends, mind you.

It's not a great movie-- hell, I don't even think most people would call it a good movie. But it's not the earth-shatteringly awful film I originally assumed from online backlash, either. The idea that any of us thought this was going to have a larger effect on therian and otherkin communities is, honestly, laughable. It's a nobody of a movie and I can't help but groan at myself for ever thinking it was possibly anything more than that. I regret taking people's assertions about this film at face value without watching it myself first, in all honesty. There's no way this film could find any sort of even theoretical cult following outside of niche movie buff alterhuman circles, and even then. The movie takes itself decently seriously but anyone who watches it probably won't.

So take this ramble as you will, but that's pretty solidly my perspective on Wolf (2021): overall a "meh" film with plenty to criticize, but I enjoyed watching it and it did have its moments. I think a lot of the claims made about it were over-exaggerated, but I also recognize that people are allowed to have their opinions. I'd honestly say check it out and judge it for yourselves.

One last thing: If you're easily disturbed by what's clearly psychological and physical abuse and conversion therapy, then absolutely don't watch this movie. But if that doesn't squick you out too much, I'd highly recommend watching it with a bunch of other nonhumans and alterhumans; get a bit of a virtual Howl going on and throw some popcorn at it while laughing with friends.

[a-dragons-journal]

wait alt+h is controversial??? what happened?

It's not super controversial, and some of the criticism is fair and some of it is not in my opinion, but without really getting into the weeds about it (read: off the top of my head, without getting deep enough that I have to actually go look stuff up to verify my memories):

there was a whole debacle about some of the people running Alt+H starting donation fundraisers to fund their species transition goals (tattoos, etc.). People got real pissy about this for some reason. (As my phrasing might imply, this is imo possibly the dumbest reasons people dislike them.)

Alt+H for a while there had a bad habit of tending to frame themselves as representatives and advocates for the community despite not actually taking a whole lot in the way of feedback. They have, to be fair, tried to deny and disperse this impression in more recent times, but that honestly doesn't stop their actual actions from coming off that way imo.

There's something of a history of poorly-planned projects backfiring (see: the #WolfGetsReal initiative and the staff team's subsequent response to criticism about it, parts of which you can see if you go to that tag on my blog if you want) or just never going through to completion.

I have never personally been to their discord server, so this is hearsay, but from what I've heard about it, it's a very, uh, specific kind of environment that quite a few people do not get along with (not necessarily bad, just like - word blacklists a mile long that are rigidly enforced, that kind of culture), which has led to some people having a bad taste in their mouth associated with Alt+H because of cultural clashes (whether you consider that fair or not is up to you, I guess).

Stuff like that. It's not a huge deal - they're not like Therian Guide or anything, and I actually don't consider them a bad organization or group of people overall - but they're just controversial enough that people definitely have Opinions about them and someone who's going to be mistaken for talking about them when they're not intending to be deserves a heads-up before they get misinterpreted.

[alt--h]

Hey all.

It's been a little under three weeks since we launched the #WolfGetsReal campaign. And after many varied responses to it, we had some reflecting to do. Thank you to everyone who responded with constructive feedback, whether in support or criticism. Every piece of good faith feedback was taken on board and heard, and helped inform our response here. These are the conclusions we've come to.

I think one of our biggest takeaways is that social media is not something our team is equipped to manage. In an environment where saying or not saying the right thing in the right way can get your whole message mis-read, and where companies profit from anger driving engagement with their platforms, none of our team members are equipped to handle that work. We have tried in the past to bring on specific social media management, but it hasn't worked out so far. Which leads us to the next point:

We're just not a big enough team with enough energy to keep up with what we've built up for ourselves. We had bigger visions, but quite frankly they just haven't practically worked out. Our skeleton crew of 6 disabled systems/people, all with busy lives, is not big enough to keep up with what we used to. We try recruiting new volunteers, but have yet to see many applicants when we do.

We also can't help but feel like there's a number of bad faith critics who responded to us not with constructive criticism, but attacks. This is part of a bigger problem of only ever recieving feedback as a group when we do something "wrong," but never getting engagement on the projects we do start that people share and seem to like -- and even ask for. One criticism asked why we don't do writing or discussion prompts like the 30 Day Otherkin Challenge, and I think people forget that we once did this. Years ago, we tried doing this and almost never got engagement. It ended up being more stress and effort to run than it was worth, because absolutely nobody participated. Similarly, our Wikipedia editing initiative was outright mocked for "failing" when ... that relies on y'all. If it failed (and it did not) then it would be because the community did not respond to the call.

We did get helpful feedback during this, the first of which was an anonymous modmail message letting us know more about why there were suddenly issues around zoophiles being brought up on one of our staff member's posts (that was not made as a whole staff response). Once it was explained that a handful of animal abusers were particularly vocal in some communities we weren't really aware of, we responded quickly on Twitter. I think the criticism of us being suspicious in not having spoken up yet was levied at us in bad faith, when it had never been asked of us before now. When it has come up in the past on our server, we have addressed it the same way. For instance:

We were also told that perhaps if we aren't on social media enough to manage it, don't do a hashtag campaign. And you know what? Fair! Lesson learned. We could sit here dissecting all the things we did right and wrong with this (and have in the staff room), but frankly with this being our main lesson I don't think it would be productive to future projects. The one thing we acknowledge is that we could have collected more public feedback for longer on how to do this. Some of us wanted to push this in part because we have a history of dragging things on unnecessarily long by asking for too much feedback, so we overshot. Oops. We will adjust.

But what we plan to do from here will first and foremost be looking for a platform off Tumblr. Our general ability to handle managing a social media presence aside, Tumblr has been a uniquely toxic environment for us. We'll be keeping our Twitter for the purposes of networking and announcements only. Where we'll go is uncertain, though our Discord, forums, and website will all remain right where they are.

We're also dissolving the LTD. It's been $200/yr almost entirely out of staff pocket for various business expenses, and it's giving us a corporate feeling that we don't really want and might be holding us back at this point. This will involve shutting down the patreon as well - the remaining $40ish in the account will go toward site hosting until it runs out. Along with this, we will be narrowing and re-focusing our scope to work on pamphlets and very ground-floor advocacy work like we were initially. The Wikipedia editing initiative will also continue as usual.

This has been stressful for us. It's also been a big learning experience. Ultimately, we feel pretty confident that we'll do better things going forward (and do better by our own mental health at that). If you'd like to continue to follow along with what we're doing, and you haven't already, do consider joining the Discord or the forum. That's also where you can go if you've got feedback about this post - we won't be responding to things on Tumblr. You don't have to have been verified on the server to use the modmail, if you'd like. You can also reach out to us by email at staff@alt-h.net

~ Aster (The Flock)

[vagabond-sun]

i said it on twitter and i’ll say it again here: the fact that anyone in the alterhuman community thinks Wolf is a sympathetic depiction fucking baffles me.

a sympathetic writer would not admit to seeing researching us as a chore or the need to depict us realistically as a burden. a sympathetic writer would not spend half the fucking movie on drawn out scenes of people like us being abused and tortured and mocked.

what purpose does that serve? not ours. people with species dysphoria are nothing but a prop to Nathalie Biancheri by her own admission and if you want to outright attack people for criticizing it just because it’s the first movie that’s focused on species dysphoria by name then like, seriously? genuinely, you ought to respect yourself more. because you deserve better than this too.

‘any representation’ is not good representation. we don’t have to settle for this shit.

[shadowfae]

I don't disagree re: #wolfgetsreal being poorly thought out (mod posted the idea in the discord chat and gave the community less than 2 hours to voice thoughts before posting it to the official blog) but I do feel like it's worth pointing out that the point in your post and one of the reblogs about how most people would just disregard the film as a bad allegory for trans people is like. The point. It's not a blockbuster or anything but it is getting a little attention specifically as a comedically bad allegory for gender by people who are now going to think of species dysphoria I'm general as a comedically bad allegory for gender, so "if you didn't say anything it would just be regarded as a bad allegory for gender" is probably like. Not...especially convincing to the people you seem to be talking to

Firstly, I find it mildly comedic but genuinely sad that Alt+H gave everyone less than two hours to voice thoughts. You give no less than 48, especially if you're an organization. Some people are asleep, my dude. I don't follow Alt+H because ultimately I don't care, but... what are they doing.

As for whether it being a bad allegory for trans stuff is a bad thing... I'm trans, and honestly? You're betting that the inner part of the Venn diagram of "people who have seen this movie" and "people who intend on only being mildly ableist to otherkin over species dypshoria" is going to be a significant problem here.

People just aren't gonna see the movie, and they certainly aren't going to decide the entire otherkin community is just idiot trans people any more than they were already going to. Either you understand that movies around mental health are very rarely done in good faith, or the conversation's over before it started.

Either it's just a bad movie and dismissed at that; or it's a bad movie with controversy over the internet's punching bag. I'll take the former every single time.

[vagabond-sun]

this is a post addressing some criticism #WolfGetsReal is getting. a good post, i promise. because people have made some good points. i’m not reblogging the post they’re from because there’s enough that i disagree with that i don’t want to just amplify it onto my own followers, but there’s also enough well-reasoned and productive criticism that it deserves a response. like, geuinely, i really want to emphasise that we do give a shit that some people think this was poorly executed (or a bad idea in general) and to enter into a dialogue about that, so we can do it better. tumblr is a fucking godawful platform for any kind of productive communication, but here goes.

cc @a-dragons-journal @spiritus-sonne @shadowfae, come get y’all juice.

the most salient point that i think was made is about how emotionally exhausting this has been for some people. i don’t think it’s selfish to point that out. i disagree with the assertion that this isn’t worth making noise about, but it doesn’t do any of us any good to alienate or exhaust people like yourselves who feel that way. while we’ve been doing our best to meter out our own posts, and formulated the hashtag with blacklistability in mind, we set into motion something that we inherently wouldn’t be able to exert that same level of control over. we tried really, really hard to strike a balance between making people see this as a problem worth taking action over without making it seem like the end of the world. that balance clearly hasn’t been managed well enough, and is definitely something that will be getting even more attention from this point on (and if you have any specific feedback on how we can do that, that would be appreciated).

speaking of which, i’m seeing you saying that this is only being taken as metaphor, and that’s why this isn’t a big deal. that’s why we think it is. in both instances, the movies were panned because they thought the inclusion of nonhumanity was queerphobic. like i said here, yeah, the movie’s bombing, but it’s getting attention from slate and polygon and the washington post - outlets with innumerable eyes on them. innumerable eyes learning about this species dysphoria thing for the first time by journalists they trust telling them that it’s a mockery of ‘real’ issues. and that’s why we saw this as a big enough deal to merit speaking out about it.

that has been communicated poorly. particularly on twitter, the focus we put on the interview with the director was... uneccesary? and has had a clear cause-effect on the message people are taking away and the actions they’re taking as a result. that’s a pretty obvious goof with a pretty obvious lesson. i at the very least thought more people would click through for the full context and nuance of the tumblr post - i thought that was pretty ok (and so did our discord users that we ran it by) but maybe you disagree?

i will admit, the whole grimes thing kind of passed me by - hell, maybe if we had been more aware of it and studied how it went, we would have formulated our approach differently. rani had concrete suggestions here, which i appreciate:

[...] make a point of talking in whatever tags are relevant about our experiences, about real species dysphoria and what it’s like and how we deal with it and why it isn’t whatever demon the movie made out of it, about real nonhumanity, about Otherkin 101, etc. etc.

we did ask people to do some of those things, but again, that part of the message seems to have been lost and/or we didn’t put the appropriate amount of focus on it. so, yeah, noted. while the campaign’s still alive, we can make followups with calls for these more specific and productive actions (indeed, that’s kind of what i was trying to do with the post linking to articles).

this criticism is important to hear because we definitely intend to do more calls for responses to media in the future. we are going to get more bad alterhuman representation, that i’m sure of. hopefully, taking what you’ve said into account, we can do them better. considering all this has left me with two big questions which will hopefully spark more discussion:

something that stood out to me was luteia saying ‘we don’t have any power we can use’ - how do we build that?

how do we strike a balance between motivating people in our own communities to see alterhuman awareness as a real issue without stirring up fear and panic?

genuinely, thank you for your opinions.

[alt--h]

Current community initiatives

If you want to help us advocate for alterhuman awareness and acceptance, try getting involved with one of these!

#AHWikiProject - Help us improve alterhuman representation on Wikipedia by contributing to and creating articles on alterhuman topics.

#WolfGetsReal - Lend your voice to the conversation surrounding Nathalie Biancheri‘s Wolf, a movie whose protagonist is committed to a mental asylum for species dysphoria.

[shadowfae]

Right so... #WolfGetsReal, huh?

I mean, none of this has really sat well to me. I'm not a therianthrope myself, but theriomythic arguably applies to me, and I am more animalistic than I let on. Species dysphoria is the one thing that affects me directly, and very little of it is social: without physical transition, which is scientifically impossible, there is no treatment nor cure for the symptoms I have.

I haven't watched Wolf (2021), owing largely to my general disinterest in movies. It's rare I do watch films, and I'm certainly not going to waste two hours of my time watching a movie I'm guaranteed not to like. Everything I've heard about it so far says that it sucks, it's a shitty B-list movie, and has pretty well no artistic value.

Alt+H decided to call a community initiative to drown the movie's tags talking about actual species dysphoria, owing to an interview with the director where she admitted she went out of her way not to do any research.

Now, I'm not defending the director here, because that's a stupid move in general. But I am gonna come outright and say that I don't think this community initiative is a good idea. Actually, let me make that slightly plainer: I think it's a stupid, ill-thought-out idea at best, and an actively dangerous one at worst.

This is a B-list movie, with zero famous actors, that very few people are going to watch. Of those few people, most if not all of them are going to either a) think it's a werewolf movie spliced with an ableist mental facility movie, or b) think it's a bad allegory for queer struggles.

Literally nobody but us is going to go "hm let's be ableist towards the delusional with ~species dysphoria~ :)" because we're not in the spotlight outside of when we're brought up linked to transphobia. We are very occasionally that weird guy in an internet story you heard about once, and that's only if you're on the internet a lot.

Now, I know where this idea came from: back earlier this year when Grimes put 'otherkin' in her twitter bio and changed her birthdate to that of a nuclear bomb, the otherkin community flooded the twitter tags with introductions and 101s and threads on how cool the community is. It worked quite well, I think, and it's clear this is more of that.

We were forced into the spotlight, so we forced the spotlight to be about us, and not the misinformation. Grimes has a depressingly large following, we didn't have a choice.

This... isn't that. The only reason anyone would watch this movie is if they're bored of Sundance films. Hells, it's even released right around two very anticipated Spiderman trailers. It's a movie destined to be overlooked, a box office flop, and forgotten.

So tell me: if we don't actually have a spotlight, why the hell are we making one? In the twitter tag of #WolfGetsReal, I've seen not one but two bestialist / animal abusers trying to overtake the narrative and link therianthropy to bestiality. Right now, the therianthrope community is having a nightmare time trying to kick them out.

You're telling me we should go viral with zero cohesiveness, focusing on therianthropy, and give them the chance to irreparably link therianthropy to bestiality? Because of a shitty B-list movie that otherwise would fade into obscurity?

No. No, this is a bad idea. If we want to go viral, this is a terrible way to do it. Don't get me wrong here, talking about species dysphoria and writing up posts and essays and 101s is great. But doing it specifically to go viral, when we have some major predators already frothing at the mouth to steal the mic for their malicious and substantially evil purposes?

It's ill-thought-out at best, and I cannot approve. There's literally no upside to this. The director wouldn't listen to us at best (if that were possible, it would have been done already), we do not have any power we can actually use, any spotlight we make right now on this issue will be immediately hijacked (and we have currently zero plan to mitigate that major issue), and making a spotlight of us being made fun of isn't something we can turn around.

There's no upside to doing this. If we want to talk about species dysphoria, let's focus on that, not bring emphasis to a movie that should fade forgotten into obscurity.

I know Alt+H also noted that between this and Wild Mountain Thyme, it seems the beginning of a trend. But WMT was taken almost universally by people who aren't us as a metaphor, and had a total of zero impact on the community. If we let this pass us by the same way, it will also have zero impact. And right now, I'll take no attention over almost-guaranteed-to-be-bad attention.

So that's my thoughts on that.