when I see something dated 2019 I think “oh that’s not too long ago” and then I remember that 2019 was not only five years ago but those five years have somehow contained several lifetimes
Every now and then I see a post that reminds me that most non-kin have an idea of the otherkin community that's defined more by people who made fun of us than by our community itself
If you heard about otherkin through general tumblr osmosis but never made an effort to actually understand us, your mental image of otherkin is mostly likely informed by people who pretended to be otherkin to start drama with the express intent to get people to hate us. It was really common a while back for anti-kin to create blogs posing as otherkin and post absurd, ridiculous, and inflammatory things like "I'm plantkin and keeping houseplants is slavery" or "I'm dragonkin and I ate my mom's jewelry". If you actually knew anything about the community it was fairly easy to figure out that these blogs were trolls, but most of the people on tumblr at the time either didn't know enough to be able to tell, or didn't even consider that they might be fake
And the most upsetting part? It fucking worked. So many people still seem to think that those posts were genuine reflections of what being otherkin means and how we act or talk about our kin identities