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olderthannetfic · 2 years

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Sorry to drag on the antis and kin thing, but hi! Ive been in otherkin spaces for 10+ years and I can say that everyone is sort of right here- it is both coming from antis invading our spaces and using us as talking points and doing the kff 'steal our serious words to mean 'I project on a fictional character' thing AND from kin who havent been taught appropriate 'kin manners' so to speak.

See back in the forum days it was generally understood you Never Ever went into fandom talking about 'kin and how fandom effects you as fictionkind. It was understood that they were engaging with fictional cutout dolls that just happened to mirror your experiences (in past life or otherwise)to an uncanny degree. It was understood you did not make your kintype the fandoms problem, and more importantly Never Ever made it the creators problem. If fandom negatively effected you, that was a YOU problem, not that they were evil or whatever for playing pretend.

We used to be able to teach people to manage this stuff dammit!

With the advent of tumblr and its telephone game, it sort of ruined the ability to make sure newbies were given this sort of coaching or knew the oft unspoken rules. Newbies(often YOUNG newbies) now high on tumblr sj and newly Awakened and having not yet integrated their experiences, then started doing the things that they were once told to not do but no longer were(helped along by tagging culture and broken search). You would see kin in the fandom maintags, you see kin talking to small-time creators of their source, things that used to be opt in to see were put in front of those who might feel profoundly upset about it. These people, not knowing the most important part of being fictionkin(and many other 'woo' ey communities like astral travelers and immersive daydreamers) is how to integrate it safely into your life so you dont start eroding your ability to tell fiction(people writing fictional characters being hurt) from reality(terrible things happening to *you*) and that if you are struggling with that you should be seeking therapy instead.

The real problem was the advent of Yandere Bitch Club. Maybe not them specifically, but they popularized the 'kinning is a social justice act' thing because they wanted to be the Most Valid version of their kintypes. They also were white cis women racefaking, pretending to be trans women, and faking DID and having been actually caught doing so iirc. They sent gore to people and threatened them for 'kinning outside your race'. Which is a concept that has a lot of problems im not getting into. Because it sounded 'sj-ey' enough, people hopped on the bandwagon, kin and nonkin alike. They may not have been the first people to claim this, but they certainly popularized it. When people said 'hey kin isnt a cute fun choice, this is serious and integral to our identity' the tune became 'saying this is not a choice is racist then, it totally is a choice and not that serious' because that was the only way to keep their point held up.

About at this time things like 'you cant kin an abuse survivor' and 'if you arent a gay man specifically you cant have a gay man kintype' and 'if you have a exomemories of abuse and arent an abuse survivor thats ableist' and other inane policing of integral identity. This went hand in hand with anti-ism almost always.

This is when KFF started getting real bad, because it became a performative faux social justice thing because otherwise their 'no im the most valid' wouldnt hold up anymore. Kin was telephoned to mean 'like family, relating to' instead of Kind shortened to Kin as in 'identifying as, like mankind'.

On both these fronts is where the 'antis who are kin' thing comes from. Same with the huge amounts of plural folks who are antis. A lot of these people are abuse survivors who drank the radfem kool aid unknowingly then because they have no good outlets and want to feel valid enough they start hurting others and with the encouragement of antis using them as a tool of violence ('see this person had a panic attack because they saw that bad ship art!' its materially hurting The Real Character) and often eroding their ability to keep those fiction-reality boundaries separate you end up with the droves of people who are antis like this.

Antis destroyed a community that was older than they are. Fictionkin tags used to have like 30+ active posters, you used to see them frequently on forums, now they have all but vanished in part because if you were too problematic in public theyd skin you for it and in part because they encouraged people to end up with terribly unhealthy relationships to their source, and in part because antis saw it as a tool to hit people with if they went 'oh im x then' (as in related to the character) and then went 'that means I can harass others and have it mean something'.

Those goku-against-ddlg and 'ed-against-elricest or whatever blogs often used to be run by either 14 y/o kin who were encouraged to have no boundaries with reality or KFF using fictionkin as a bludgeon to attack fandom. They were a staple of anti-ism in 2016 or so for a reason. These blogs used to actively encourage eroding fiction-reality boundaries and actively and (I strongly suspect)intentionally used to trigger their followers so they became a rabid hoard of hurt kids to throw at the target of the week.

There is a reason now so many fandomfolk hate otherkin and its going to be so hard to patch that because of what antis did to both our communities and it sucks real bad.

So theres the dumbest wank history I know guess! Sorry for the psychic damage.

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