So @vagabondsun wrote some stuff and it make me want to write some stuff and all of a sudden I had my first Dreamwidth post in three years!
https://indicoyote.dreamwidth.org/5377.html
I call myself 'otherkin' a lot, because it feels like a broad term, easily encompassing experiences of being multispecies and synthetic and such. And yet, 'therian' is still a term that resonates for me, and one I still use in some contexts. Here's a stab at explaining why.
@indi @vagabondsun I really love the *texture* of the word Therian, but it feels like it's not mine to use since I've never actually been in any of those communities and am missing a lot of cultural context.
@starkatt @indi @vagabondsun I was in ahww back in 1992-3, and I don't recall anyone using the word before Eternal September; it evolved later, when some people tried to distinguish "non-human identity" and "were means 'human' and I'm not" from "spiritual animal connection." Honestly, I think more people have heard of the word from the Furry Surveys than from original community source material.
@starkatt @indi @vagabondsun I don't think that word "belongs" to anyone, is what I'm getting at. It didn't evolve organically from within the old guard; it was a late introduction drawing a distinction most older community members didn't really see as relevant because "were" covered a broad range of identity-expressions. We'd already rejected Lion Templin's "contherianthropy" by then, f'rex. "Therian" wasn't our word for ourselves until after several schisms and subsumption into furry.
@literorrery @indi @vagabondsun It's less about belonging, and more like feeling like the word probably has connotation and baggage I'm not fully aware of.
@starkatt @literorrery @vagabondsun See I get the stuff about the baggage, and that's what gives me reclaiming feelings, though admittedly I'm going off of just having read a lovely dissection of how the mid 2000's communities really made a toxic hash of things.
