Terminology and its modern use | Otherkin General Discussion | Forums

Skylark said
I don’t know how much anyone else has been lurking on tumblr and scouring tags and blogs, but I’ve been nosing around and noticing some interesting trends in community lingo. 

Lurking on tumblr yes, “scouring” tags and blogs not so much.  My tolerance for tumblrkin has gotten very low.

For starters, “kin” (without an apostrophe) is now used to mean otherkin, fictionkin and therians, and possibly more. Likewise, “kintype” is also used where fictotype ought to be.

That’s not really unusual.  As far back as I can remember, “kin” without the apostrophe has been used as an abbreviation for otherkin, long before tumblr came around.  Likewise, it was used to refer to both mythical-type otherkin, therians (then termed weres or shifters), and even fictionkin (then termed otakukin).  “Fictotype” was never really widely used, as far as I’m aware, kintype has always been the preferred terminology even among otakukin/mediakin/fictionkin.

The phrase “my kintype(s) is/are” has been practically replaced with “I am kin with”.

I haven’t seen that, but if so it’s another sign of the way tumblr is wearing away at what being otherkin means.  I have seen this in other areas, both with the rise of “copingkin” (a natural evolution from psychological otherkin) and the rise of “other-hearted” as a term for people who identify with, rather than as, nonhuman beings… which is a completely normal part of the human experience, didn’t really need a special term for itself, and has nothing to do with being otherkin.

Kintypes are being sorted into varying levels of ” intensity,” which has given rise to organized charts labeled, in increasing order, “tertiary,” “secondary,” “primary,” and “literally me.”

I believe that is in part due to the influence of the therian community.  See this post from 2005 which uses “primary” in a similar sense:

“SUNTHERIAN.

A SUNTHERIAN is a therian whose therioside
(primary or sole therioside)
is integrated into his baseline personality.”
http://werecat.proboards.com/thread/304

These are just a few things I’ve noticed, ones I can remember off the top of my head. I’m not very well versed in fictionkin terminology, so I can’t speak on that, but there’s quite a lot of it thrown around similarly.

The fictionkin community doesn’t really have a lot of terminology unique to itself – it uses a combination of otherkin terminology, multiple terminology, and soulbonder terminology.  I believe there have been some attempts to change that in recent years, mostly on tumblr or tumblr-influenced forums, but I don’t believe it’s had much traction yet.  Mainly because there’s no real need for new terms.

Additionally, terminology like “cameo shift,” or really any shift in general, has altogether disappeared. 

Thoughts?

Honestly, I’ve felt for a long time now that the therian community’s emphasis on shifting was a social artifact of the fact that it started out on alt.horror.werewolves more than anything else.  I think a lot of what used to get called shifts in the therian community were the same thing that used to be termed “aspecting” in the otherkin community, and the majority of them were far less dramatic than the abundance of terminology for different types of shifts and the overall community focus on shifting might make it seem.

Skylark said
Haha, I think maybe “scour” is the wrong word here – I hang out in the “therian” tag, and tend to dig through blogs when I get curious, and usually find good reasons to rethink that decision. My bad.

LOL, nah you’re fine.  I just really hate what tumblr culture is doing to our community.

Interesting! Maybe it’s just my lack of involvement in the otherkin community, but I don’t recall ever seeing “kin” be used for both otherkin and fictionkin at the same time. And as “kintype” goes, noted! I’ll have to look into where “fictotype” even came from, then. “Kintype” is used with specific fictional characters, too? Just to clarify.

I think it was created on tumblr or one of the forums for fictionkin which spun off of tumblr, with the reasoning that some fictionkin were kin with human characters so “weren’t actually otherkin”.  This is a subject that’s come up before in the community, though, and it’s generally been decided that human fictionkin have enough in common with otherkin to count, as do people who remember being humans on worlds other than earth.  And yes, “kintype” is used with specific fictional characters, too.

I’ve usually seen “copingkin” used to specifically refer to people who choose to “be otherkin” as a coping mechanism. I’ve also seen it used in the same was as “psychological otherkin,” though, so who knows. “Other-hearted”, I agree, is needless and honestly just over-complicated… and now we have “synpath” to go with it. Thanks tumblr.

When you get down to it, the only real difference I can think of between “copingkin” and more traditional “psychological otherkin” is whether the coping mechanism is conscious or unconscious. I can’t think of any other distinction to really draw a line between the two.  That’s why I think that copingkin was a natural evolution of psychological otherkin, and is unlikely to go away unless we address the concept of psychological otherkin as a group.

I believe that is in part due to the influence of the therian community.  See this post from 2005 which uses “primary” in a similar sense:
“SUNTHERIAN.
A SUNTHERIAN is a therian whose therioside
(primary or sole therioside)
is integrated into his baseline personality.”
http://werecat.proboards.com/thread/304

Interesting! I haven’t seen “secondary” used anywhere like that, but it may be because I haven’t been looking the right places. I’ll go out on a limb and guess most people pre-tumblr didn’t have 6+ under each category, though. 😛

LOL, probably not no.  🙂  But “secondary” definitely was used that way too.  From the same forum, circa December 2007:
“In both cases, the cutoff is m-shifts: neither m-shifts to their
baseline theriotype. (Rare exceptions include cameo-shifts,
or shifts to a secondary theriotype, but never to the baseline
theriotype. As a wolf primary, I will never have a wolf m-shift,
because wolf is integrated, so there’s nothing to shift TO.)”
http://werecat.proboards.com/thread/108

I see! So I guess there isn’t really any central “lexicon” for it then.

Afraid not.  I’ve seen some of the newer fictionkin forums starting to put together glossaries, but they’re heavily tumblr influenced.

I can see it, honestly. Maybe it’s just because it’s what I knew first, but I found it helpful to explain the changes I felt. I’m finding I don’t get them very much anymore anyway, I’m just 40% feline all the time.

The main reason I mentioned cameo specifically, though, was that I see people all the time feeling, for instance, wings once, and immediately jumping to the conclusion that they have a winged kintype. That’s usually a thing to be cautious of, right?

I would say so, yes.  I’ve also seen people pin their identity on one dream, and find that similarly problematic.