#tickled fucking pink that some certain gross individual(s) is still buttmad about...I'm not even sure what

[astral-actias]

So I heard through the grapevine a bit ago that there's been some certain people with an axe to grind for whatever the hell reason I can't fathom considering I haven't talked to them in multiple years going around saying, 'lol Nevi doesn't know shit, he's basically kin-for-fun, he thinks you can just say you have a kintype because you want to be a thing, how stupid is that.' Like, I must be doing something right if I've got hate-followers letting me live rent free in their head, and given who it was (no I'm not sharing) I'm personally flattered that they dislike me so much. It's a good sign.

And if you thought I was going to refute that, no, fuck the law, you really can just be a thing because you want to be the thing, but there's also a lot more nuance in that than certain people are giving me credit for.

It starts with trusting people, and that includes yourself. You have to trust people to know what they want. You have to trust people to know why they want something. You have to trust them to make accurate statements about themselves in good faith, even if they might later conclude that they were wrong or that their situation has changed. (You also, as a corollary, have to trust that a situation can in fact change, and why wouldn't it? Things change. Identities fluctuate. That's just life.)

Obviously this doesn't include trolls, because they aren't making a factual statement, nor are they acting in good faith. But it does include people whose criteria for judgement may not match yours. It also doesn't mean that you cannot ask constructive questions, or offer other ideas.

I sincerely don't think it's possible for someone to really, wholeheartedly want to be nonhuman if they don't have some kind of connection to the type in question to begin with. Wanting to be a thing is a major symptom of being the thing. You don't claim an identity because you don't see yourself in it, you claim it because you do. And if you feel you're nonhuman enough to say that you're nonhuman, and not be completely lying, congratulations! You're nonhuman. It's literally that simple.

This also doesn't mean that it's impossible to realize you're a kind of nonhuman that you aren't excited about. That happens. I legitimately was not very interested in fae and even now I don't feel much kinship at all with other fae. It's whatever to me. But I still see myself in that as an identity and I still want to say that I'm fae. I can say that I am and I feel truthful, or I can say that I'm not and I feel dishonest. That's literally enough right there.

You also don't have to claim labels that you don't want. Nobody has to be otherkin. That's just a word. Nobody has to subscribe to the entire ideology, and make no mistake, it is a heavily prescribed ideology, with a ton of social and cultural norms. You aren't obligated to follow them if you don't feel like it. You can just not do that. On the flip side, because forcing labels onto people is shitty, nobody is otherkin unless they say they are and actively adopt that label, which hilariously enough makes being otherkin entirely, 100% voluntary. Go figure.

But at the end of the day, if you can say, in good faith, that you are this or that or the other thing? You are. That's it. That's the whole bar you have to step over and it's not high. There's no way to conclusively prove or disprove someone else's entirely internal, subjective experience anyway and that's fine. You can just say you are a thing, and you are the thing. Boom. Easy.

Assuming that I'm out here proclaiming that people are allowed to invent falsehoods for shits and giggles kinda says more about the person making the assumption than it does me. Nobody is saying that, but go off I guess. I'm saying that if someone really, sincerely feels it's true, and they want to assume this identity as a result, then yeah, it's true, because that's all any of us are working with anyway. All the 'proof' in the world amounts to a fuckin' hill of beans, in which the beans are various little thoughts we've decided to see patterns in and assemble in a certain way. That isn't different regardless of if you just got here or if you're the grayest of muzzles. Nobody's got shit over each other, here.

(Also maybe if we haven't spoken in years and I'm still coming up in your conversations as some kind of bogeyman who is simultaneously too stupid to live and yet also somehow menacing your identity with my big smart mouth words, you may be sorely in need of a thing called 'a life.' 'Cause that's kinda sad and I guarantee I'm not thinking about you.)

#otherkin #nonhuman #kin #fictionkin #alterhuman #therian #lol the usual things I say but this time with a lot more words than usual #tickled fucking pink that some certain gross individual(s) is still buttmad about...I'm not even sure what #considering we haven't exchanged words in a fuckin grip or three #but I'm pretty sure the words were something like 'yeah you don't get to tell me what I am fuck off' #so y'know #nothing of value lost there anyway #I waited quite a while to vague #and if you're trying to guess who it's about #you're probably already wrong unless you were in the car for the conversation