Landing? | Otherkin General Discussion | Forums

Well, I mean the overall community not just this site.  Are they still mostly finding Newkin and hanging out there for a while?  I can’t imagine so, given how quiet it’s been there.  Are they mostly finding forums like otherkin.com or otherkincommunity.net?  Or LJ communities like otherkin.livejournal.com?  Where are new folks, coming into the otherkin community for the first time being “socialized” for lack of a better word?  Where are they being introduced to the many concepts unique to our community (awakening, multiples, hosts, therianthropy, psivamps, sanguinariams, fictionkin, heck the meaning of the term otherkin itself, just to name a few) and what spin is being placed on those concepts by the moderators or other members there?  I know psychological otherkin have become far more prevalent; how much of that is really a natural progression and how much of it is people coming into the community via places where that is the party line?  

At the same time, conversations in the community seem to have generally become more superficial.  There’s not, IMO, the depth there once was even among the newly awakened.  Is that because they’ve been given a much more shallow introduction to what it means to be other-than-human? On Newkin itself, we’ve gone from the newly Awakened giving 10 paragraph introductions of themselves complete with questions like is it usual not to have memories or should they actively be trying to remember things, to posts where the entirety of the message is “hello i want to know about myself i saw a dream that i am not a ful human at night i experience strange things”.

*shrugs* I dunno, just exploring a possibility here.

I do have to say, I keep being surprised every time I hear someone comment on how rare stuff for elves or fae is.  And you’re far from the only one who has said this.  But from my perspective, resources for elves have always dominated the otherkin community with fae not very far behind them.  ER has always had an elven slant, and it’s gotten moreso in recent years, though as far as I know non elves are still welcome.  TNO used to be run primarily by elves.  The private Elenari mailing list has been around and used to be much better known than it currently seems to be.  Elenari-and-Friends was active for a long time, which was a public alternative to the Elenari list that had open membership.  The (s)Elf Help list, the Elfinkind digest, the Elven Flows list, the Elf Majik list, the Fae Mirror list, the Faeri Domain list, the Elven Nations list, the darkfae list, the Elenari Paths list, the Tuatha de Danaan list, the Sidhe list, the Wyldfae list, the Elven Paths live journal community… and these are just lists that had a significant membership at one time.  And I’m probably forgetting a lot.  Admittedly, many of these are now defunct (though I still think there are proportionately more elven and fae resources than resources for any other ‘kin types), but I keep hearing folks talk like resources for elves and fae have always been rare in the community.

As for loathing the elf sub-board on otherkin.com, you’re not alone.  The attitudes there, the desire to blame the Elenari as a group for any individual fruit-loop who has no connection to the Elenari mailing list or LJ communities and probably wouldn’t even be known to them but claims to be an “Elenari avariel”, and the complete lack of regard for the actual history of the otherkin community… I just have no use for it.  Or the rest of the board, for that matter.  I find very little to relate to there, save for new members who are rapidly beaten down by folks like Wisescarab for daring to believe they might be Elenari (among other imagined sins.)

One word: diaspora. I don't think there is any centralized (or even just majority) “landing” place anymore. It's certainly not the otherkin comm on LJ, at least not to judge by the journals of the membership requests I get.

That may be the perfect word to describe the community these days.  The otherkin diaspora.  Everyone coming in from different sources, reading different authors, finding different gathering places… in many ways, I suppose we're becoming what paganism was years ago.

I don't know about elves, since I don't regularly go looking for such information. I agree with your perception that the community used to be dominated by elves (hence the original coining of the term “other-kin” to mean “non-humans other than elves”), although I think a lot of the websites have gone The Way Of All Things and resources are fewer than they used to be. From my perspective you're pretty sweet if you're a dragon, therian, or vamp, but aside from those, I think the dominant type nowadays – at least, the dominant type vocal and findable on the internet – is angelics.

I still don't see many dragons anymore, save on dragon-specific lists.  Though admittedly I don't often frequent the dragon sub-boards of the various otherkin message boards.  Maybe I should look closer, there.  It still seems to me that, even with the number of elven/fae resources which have died out, they dominate the community.

I'm not sure if fae was ever the second-most-common or not. Though there used to be more fae out and about on the (now mostly defunct, as you mention) lists, it is my experience that there has never been much in the way of websites and forums out there for otherkin fae, as opposed to just lists of folkloric fairy types. In any case not even as much as for elves, much less dragons/etc. True, most general otherkin boards will have a sub-board that encompasses faery (although to my annoyance it is often lumped in with elementals), but the only pure-faery board I knew of went under a few years ago following a couple of years of near-comatoseness. 

Some of it, I think, is trying to come up with a definition of fae.  Some would lump satyrs into that mix, some wouldn't.  Some would lump dryads into that mix, some wouldn't.  Some would lump elemental spirits into that mix, some wouldn't.  Going with a fairly broad definition of fae, I'd say that they were once the second most common group.  With a more narrow definition of fae, then I'd probably say the second most common has always been angelics, though admittedly I may be biased by my time as a co-moderator on angelkin.  I'd probably put dragons third, historically.  These are, obviously, just my own impressions.

Aside from the days when people were commonly using “elf”, “Tuatha”, and “sidhe” (and sometimes “fae”) interchangeably, there has never been much out there for sidhe kin particularly, either. (Although I suppose there's another rare type, is Tuatha. Sort of the same problem as with fae: plenty of myth and lore to read, but not resources for it approached as a kin-type.)

*nods* And there are some people, like Aine, who still use Sidhe and Tuatha fairly interchangeably.  And others who use elf and tuatha fairly interchangeably.  I don't know that there's ever been full agreement on them being different things, let alone what exactly the differences are.  Getting otherkin to agree on definitions of anything is like pulling teeth…

There did use to be more out there for sidhekin, though.  It looks like someone tried to make a fresh mailing list for “Faerie Kin and Sidhe Folk” in 2008 with some initial success, but it seems to have petered out after about three months. 

Arethinn said:

I wouldn't say I frequent them but I do look. OKA has dragon posts fairly regularly. There are dragons in the otherkin LJ comm. Life and Pursuits of Happiness (lapoh.com), though it does not bill itself as a dragon board, is essentially exactly that to judge by the population.

Hmm… I should really add lapoh to the big list of otherkin links, then.

Not a member of any dragon-specific lists, so I can't judge there.

I'm still on realdragon and truewyrm.  There's some activity, but not a ton.  More than on most of the general lists, though.

Apparently a number of dragons are more involved in the fur/therian section of the overall community than the strictly otherkin section. But the fact that a semi-separate dragon community even exists says something about how many there are, I think.

*nods* Unfortunately I think a lot of them are sticking with the separate community these days, rather than mingling with the wider community.

(Whether there are a lot of new ones, I dunno. New awakenings seem to have gone down, but that might just be our perception, due to the very issue this post is about: they're in too many places to see them all. I dunno.)

*nods* Yeah, could be.  

 It still seems to me that, even with the number of elven/fae resources which have died out, they dominate the community.

It's just not my perception. Maybe you and I are in different places, but except for elven-realities I bump into few elves these days, especially not new ones, and even fewer fae and sidhe. As I said, a lot of angelics seem to cross my path. And I get/got overrun with dragons at Feywood and MythiCalia.

Lately, almost everyone new I run into seems to be elven or fae.  The new otherkin directory on my site, for instance, has five elves and sidhe listed not including you, me, or Alaereth.  There are five of every other type of otherkin combined listed, again not including you, me, or Ally.  Not exactly a scientific sampling, of course, but it's the trend that seems to play out on the sites, forums, and lists I frequent.

I've been reading posts on a fairly new board called The Faerie Channel and was tickled pink to find like three other sidhe incarnates there, plus a link off to the blog of a woman in Australia who is the same. It's rare enough that it's always a little exciting.

I wonder how many of the genuine sidhe incarnates come into the community, see things like the Groves of Annwyn site, and either get stuck there or run away… 

Maybe elves are still the majority and just not vocal online. I would never see that since there is either no offline community here to speak of, or I have not located it.

I was mainly speaking of the online community.  I'm involved with portions of the offline community, but not as much as I once was.  Though, there too, most of the ones I hang out with (and even the ones I'm not hanging out with anymore) are primarily elves and fae, at least in this area.  I think we've got all of one dragon in the local DC area, and no angelkin.  Roaming a little further afield (Baltimoreish) I can find more of each, but again more elves and fae than anything else.

Do you mean afootinbothworlds? I'm on that, if so. And yeah, dead air.

No, I don't believe I've even heard of that one.  I meant http://groups.yahoo.com/group/…..idhe_Folk/

Liryen said:

Groves of Annwyn = . I don't think anyone who came across it would take it seriously.

Never underestimate the power of people to make poor choices.

Elven Flows was an old yahoogroups list.  I’m not sure exactly what dates it was active, but it was listed on otherkin.net’s mailing lists page back in 2004, with the url http://groups.yahoo.com/group/…..Flows/join – at some point between then and now it seems to have been deleted and its contents lost to the ages.

Elven Nations was a private listserv started in 1995 – you may remember the “Elven Nation Manifesto” spammed to various usenet groups?  https://groups.google.com/d/msg/alt.folklore.ghost-stories/bVmq63ofYh4/Gb2aViG6reUJ  Elven Realities was supposed to replace that list after it went defunct.  There are some archived posts on Rialian’s site.