Changes in the Community

Some of my thoughts on the state of the otherkin community as of 2002.

A remark on conversation trends on lists and boards as they were in 2006

Jarandhel Dreamsinger's thoughts on the differences between the community ca. 2013 and about 10 years previously, and a response from Liryen Enderea

About Changes & Growth in the Therian & 'Kin Communities by Sonne

Talakestreal's musings on the "generations" of otherkin

Legends of Ourselves, on how forums and other online spaces used to be ca. late 1990s/early 2000s.

Some recent thoughts (mid-2021)

(I say "conceptually" because although the two groups arose mostly separately in the 1990s, there is also history of varying amounts of overlap between them as well as many individuals who defy categorization.)

Some of the links above show up the shift in "otherkin" meaning primarily mythfolk -- and though otherkin not infrequently thought of therians as "a kind of otherkin" and certainly they could fit a broad definition, in earlier times a lot of therians resisted this inclusion and preferred to distance themselves from otherkin. If I say "otherkin" without further explanation, I usually mean primarily the mythical sorts. If I intend to include therians, I am more likely to say something like "nonhumans" or, well, "otherkin and therians". But when most people today say "otherkin" they probably mean a pretty large and amorphous group that comprises not only mythical creatures, but also therians (who now frequently use "-kin" forms like "foxkin" and may not even refer to themselves as therians), characters from popular culture (fictionkin), and a miscellany of other things like plants (phytanthropes) and even manmade objects or concepts. (To me this is lamentable as a loss of precision: if I say "I'm otherkin" not only to outsider, but even to an insider, they are very likely to form the wrong idea about what sort of thing I am.)

In the 1990s and 2000s mythical types made up the majority of those using and referred to by the word "otherkin", and Earth animals were usually meant by "weres/therians". (However, it is important to recognize that neither category was "pure": there were animals in otherkin spaces, and people in the were/therian community who called themselves "were-dragons" and similar who could also be classified as otherkin. Today we have the term "theriomythic" for those whose experience is "bestial" in character, but something mythical or imaginal in form.) Somewhere around 2010, give or take, a shift occurred. There was a disconnect between the older email discussion lists (mostly hosted on the Yahoo! Groups platform) and web boards, and the newer social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. "Cultural" information like specialized vocabulary ceased to be directly handed down to new people coming into the communit(y/ies) as it was previously. I speculate that younger folks then newly discovering their animal selves ("therians") more easily found the word "otherkin" than "therianthrope", saw it defined as something like "someone who believes they are something other than human", and took to it readily, whereas their forebears from the 1990s and early 2000s were more apt to want to distance themselves from otherkin as being ridiculous for believing we are things that "don't exist" while animals are provable. This may have caused, or I think is at least correlated with, a loss of the importance of magic (majik) and spiritual concerns within the "otherkin" community. The net result of all this is that the majority of people calling themselves otherkin today are either technically therians (although they may not use that word) or pop-culture fictionkin (meaning primarily specific characters rather than ordinary members of fictional species).

Last updated 8/17/2021