10 Years of Being Otherkin
It’s hard to believe I’ve gotten this far, honestly. If you told me 9 years ago that to this day, I’d still be identifying as otherkin.. well, I’d probably believe you, but it’d make me really happy to hear. A lot has changed since then. Hilariously, it took me longer to learn about my gender identity than it did my nonhuman identity. I want to take some time to reflect on things. I don’t think I’m going to edit this down that much. Just kind of a free-form piece on how things have changed within both the otherkin community and how the public views us. 10 years is a lot of time, and in that much time, so much can happen. Let’s take some time to talk about how things have changed.
I personally track the date of the beginning of my otherkin awakening by the date of the Wii U press conference. It’s kind of silly if you think about it, but I have a pretty vivid memory of everything beginning to click in place while watching the conference. I’m not comfortable sharing the specifics of what led up to everything publicly, but I’m sure I’ve told a few of you the story by now. That press conference happened on September 14th, 2012, and I consider that day to be when I started considering myself nonhuman, specifically Espeon, even. For a while, I didn’t really have a word to describe myself. I just knew that I was an Espeon, and I described myself as having “the spirit” of one.
It actually wasn’t until nearly an entire year later when I joined my first otherkin forum on July 6th, 2013. It’s long-since gone now, but it was a small site called Otherkin Alliance. Something that was incredibly prominent in the community at the time was “grilling” new members. Having to answer so many questions right away was honestly intimidating, and I’m glad that it’s nowhere near as common anymore. However, the time I spent on Otherkin Alliance was overall wonderful. It was so nice to finally meet others who felt the way I did. I didn’t feel alone in the world anymore. Fictionkin like myself were still relatively rare, and in many cases looked down on, but I was too stubborn to leave because of one or two people who thought I was full of it. All in all, most members of the forum made me feel incredibly welcome, and I still even have friends that I met there to this day.
Another forum I frequented was one called Otherkin Community. At the time, it was probably the biggest.. well, otherkin community on the internet. Grilling culture was even more intense there, on behalf of the site admin, whose name I will not be sharing. Now’s a good time to mention that I will not be namedropping anyone in this article. Anyway, grilling was INTENSE here, and I noticed that it was mostly fictionkin who took the brunt of it, especially as fictionkin began to grow in numbers in the coming years (more on that later). Because I wanted new fictionkin members to feel more welcome on the forums, I volunteered to be an assistant moderator to help greet new members. For a while, it went really well, until I butted heads with the aforementioned site administrator for being too gatekeep-y. After that, I stopped moderating the site.
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However, around the same time, I began helping on a fictionkin-dedicated site called Fictionkin Dot Com. The URL is exactly what you’d expect. I’m not sure if the site is still maintained or active, but I do know that the original staff left it years ago, in part because I was part of it. I helped run the forums, as well as the site’s Discord server. The site was mostly great, but eventually, it got to be too much for me to handle, so I stepped down. This was due in part to increasing demands from high school at the time, but also due to the rapid shift in visibility of otherkin, especially fictionkin, the surge of new members that came with it, and the surge of bad actors that came with them.
I really don’t want to get too much into it here, since this is supposed to be a happy trip down memory lane for me. However, when how otherkin community dynamics and general otherkin community perception have shifted over time, I think it’s necessary to mention the 2014–15(? Not sure. Time gets kinda blurry.) Tumblr era that gave otherkin a LOT of visibility, and along with it, many misconceptions on what it is. Otherkinity has always referred to identifying as something, rather than relating to it. A lot of people got the idea of actually being and considering yourself to be something mixed up with.. just relating to it, and a lot of misinformation spread that made it seem more like people were “just relating” to things, mostly fictional characters. For many individuals, their introduction to the concept of being otherkin was being told that it’s “people who relate to fictional characters or animals”, then learning that it actually goes a step past that. I think in the end, while a lot of people still to this day don’t really “get” what being otherkin is, so many others were introduced to the community through this, so I think if it isn’t already, by healing these misconceptions, we can turn this into a net positive.
Back on track, though… after stepping down from Fictionkin Dot Com, I kind of kept my otherkinity to myself for a little while. I didn’t feel safe being open with it publicly, and I didn’t have much space to express it outside of a few small friend groups. Honestly, it felt like torture to me. But early-ish into my junior year of college, I finally bit the bullet and went public about my otherkinity, and I stand by it being one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. Since then, I’ve tried doing my best to help others learn what it is to be otherkin, and I think I’m doing a good job of it. Helping others learn who they are is my passion, in many ways. If I can be a part, even a small one, of someone’s self-discovery, then I think I’m fulfilling my purpose here. There are so many others where I was back in the summer of 2013, finally learning that there IS a word for the feelings they’ve had, and that they’re not alone in it at all, and knowing that I can contribute at least a little bit to that warms my heart.
The otherkin community has continued to grow, too. The third yearly Othercon (https://www.othercon.org/) just happened in August, and each year has only gotten bigger, if I recall correctly. I didn’t have time to attend much beyond hosting my own panel, but seeing such a large gathering of otherkin in one place is always wonderful, and my panels seem to always get warmly received. I think the community is the heart of any shared experience, especially one as personal as this, so I always make sure to dedicate a large amount of my panels to a discussion section where audience members can add in anything I missed. My experiences aren’t all-encompassing, so if I can give others a platform to share their own, I think the community will be better for it, and I know I certainly will be, after getting to learn from so many others.
The visibility of otherkin has increased a lot since Othercon started, too, and I think it’s in part to the community getting a real chance to just.. congregate in one place for a weekend and talk to each other and share experiences. It’s magical seeing how much the community has grown over the years, and I think we’re finally starting to see real awareness of what otherkin are on a larger scale, outside of the community. In the ten years since I’ve awakened, and nine since I’ve joined the community, I’ve seen us go from a niche subculture, to an overexposed and misunderstood identity, and finally to something respected by so many others. A lot of people still treat us like the butt of a joke, but I don’t think that will change for a while. What’s more important is that the number of non-otherkin who know who and what we are, and respect us about it and for it has increased dramatically over the past few years. It honestly makes me happier than anyone (except maybe my own headmate) can know to see this much progress made over the past few years. I know we can keep going, too.
I want to end this piece on that note. The note that things have never been better for the otherkin community. We’re finally beginning to be seen by some parts of the public in a positive light, and we have a yearly event to celebrate ourselves. More and more individuals are discovering happiness within themselves by embracing a nonhuman identity. I think the community only has good places to go from here, and things are definitely looking up now. I don’t think I ever would have thought that things would be this way when I first joined the community. Ten years is a lot of time, but in the grand scheme of the life of a community that has existed for longer than I have been alive, and I hope will still continue to grow past my time in this world, a lot has changed in a relatively little amount of time, and I think, as a whole, it’s been for the better. Of course, with our increased visibility we will also see increased hostility. However, I think our unity as a community and the support we have from non-community members vastly outweighs, and will continue to outweigh, any hostility we meet. Thank you for joining me on this little retrospective of my time in the otherkin community. I hope you enjoyed seeing a small piece of the community through my lens.
