Otherkin News

Content warning: This article itself does not have any content that would likely be troubling to the average reader. It is rated PG and safe for work. One source links to a page that has adult content, and that link is clearly marked.

Summary: Coming up in March, we have two online conventions for dragons and elfae, and a registration window for a convention later this summer for alterhumans. I'm also highlighting eight anniversaries of events from the history of the otherkin communities: conventions of yesteryear, the creations of mailing lists and community blogs, and the earliest primary source I've found from the Elf Queen's Daughters. To combat misinformation, it's important to have regular reminders that the otherkin community is not mysteriously ancient, and it is not an extremely new invention from whichever social media site is currently popular. This article is about three pages long, with in-text citations and references.

( Click here to read the full three page long article. )
 

Content warnings: Publicity.

This October, a therianthrope named Lunar Flare will host a panel about therianthropy. The panel will be at Furfright 2013 in Connecticut. Furfright is a Halloween-themed convention for the furry fandom. (That is, fans of depictions of human-like animals in art, story, and costume. Furry fans like pretend human-like animals, whereas therianthropes identify as animals. It’s different.) The panel will be an open discussion, so Lunar Flare will alternate between giving a speech, and letting the audience talk. He will base his notes on an essay he wrote last year, “Therianthropy Awareness.” Currently, Lunar Flare is open to suggestions for how to adjust his notes for the panel. For this reason, if you have ideas about the upcoming panel, please don't contact me, contact him (by private message on either site linked below).

- O. Scribner


Sources

Lunar Flare, “FurFright 2013 – Therianthropy social and panel.” 2013-06-11. Forest Horizon: Were-Beast Support & Community. http://werebeastcommunity.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=therian&action=display&thread=145
The above link is not a publicly viewable forum thread. You can see it only if you log in to that forum. I linked to it with Lunar Flare’s permission by e-mail.

Lunar Flare, “Therianthropy awareness.” http://vatolobo.tumblr.com/post/26031655211/therianthropy-awareness

Content warnings: None.

This September: An otherkin named Jarandhel Dreamsinger will host an in-person meet-up of otherkin. They’ll visit for a few hours in a restaurant in Virginia. If you’d like to RSVP, see his blog post for details.

Source

Jarandhel Dreamsinger, “Northern Virginia Otherkin Meetup - September 28, 2013.” 2013-08-18. http://jarandhel.tumblr.com/post/58615750497/northern-virginia-otherkin-meetup-september-28-2013

Trigger warnings: violence, crime, trolling (harassment). Not described in graphic detail.

The following post uses excerpts from my newly updated free e-book, Otherkin Timeline, as well as excerpts from earlier posts on Otherkin News. This isn't a complete overview of everything on Otherkin News in 2011, just a selection of relatively significant events. During the latter half of this year, I became very active with researching current events in or related to the otherkin community, and began posting regularly to the Otherkin News blog. As a result, I have more information about events during the latter half of 2011 than the early half. Would you please help fill in some events from the first half of 2011?

During this year, an otherkin community blossomed on the blog-hosting site Tumblr.com. This includes the creation of a blog called ’Kin Speak, which people can post to anonymously. In the last couple of months of the year, the otherkin community on Tumblr came to be frequently vandalized and trolled (harassed), but the otherkin there didn't falter in their high level of activity. Meirya wrote about how the otherkin community on Tumblr differs from any before.

2011-01: Someone claiming to be from a casting department spammed the otherkin and therian forums to search for someone to interview for a purported documentary TV show about otherkin that would air on the Animal Planet channel. So far, nothing has come of it, but members of the WereList forums are researching it, with trigger warnings for that link: adult topics. Currently, it looks like it's a genuine casting call, not a phishing scam, but the show would also feature some adult topics.

2011-08-14: The first annual Mer-Con 2011, the world’s largest mermaid convention. Some of the attending self-proclaimed mer-people described a lifelong desire to become real mer-people, or assert that they are now real mer-people. Recently, a participant called Mermaid Shelley reflected on this and other events in the mermaid community during 2011. The mermaid community isn’t connected with the otherkin or therian communities, and is news to me and to the rest of the otherkin I've talked to.

2011-08-13?: A vampire crime. Lyle Monroe B., 19, broke into a stranger's apartment and injured the woman living there, and then told the police that he was a 500 year old vampire, but denied it later, claiming that he’d been under the influence of a drug. I haven’t found any follow-up articles explaining what the authorities concluded about him.

2011-08-29: Media. A polite article introducing otherkin to outsiders is published in a Polish-language women’s online magazine, We-Dwoje, which is otherwise mostly about fashion and health. The article is “Otherkin – a quirk, or a fantastic way to live?”

2011-09: A vampire/werewolf crime. Stephanie P., 18, was charged with accessory to the murder of Jacob H., 16 in July. One of six suspects for involvement in the murder, Stephanie told the news station that she believes herself to be part vampire and part werewolf. Later, she was ruled mentally unfit to stand trial. For a collection of all news articles on this topic, see the Atlanta Vampire Alliance (AVA) Media Center forums, with trigger warnings for what the articles describe: murder, rape, violence, blood-drinking, teenagers in a cult, animal sacrifice, some of which is described in graphic detail.

2011-10-04: Media. On Sweden’s channel 5, a TV series titled Outsiders aired an episode about the furry fandom. This includes at least one furry fan who is also a therian. Later, in acknowledgment of this episode, a newspaper editor publicly blogged a joke about killing a child who comes out as trans-species.

2011-11-13: Media. A TV documentary airs on Channel 4 about the Crimson Blood Wolf Pack in Texas, some of whom identify as werewolves, some as vampires. Soon, the vampire community condemned it for showing unsanitary and dangerous blood-drinking practices.

2011-11-17: An early group of elf people called the Silver Elves return one of their books to print: An Elfin Book of Spirits: Evoking the Beneficent Powers of Faerie.

2011-12-05: Ashlyn Nafina prints To Dream, Perchance to Soar, an urban fantasy novel with intentional themes of the otherkin experience.

2011-12-20: The Forest Voice, an independent magazine “for those among us who are nonhuman in nature,” releases its first issue.

- O. Scribner

Trigger warnings for this article: none I can think of. Work-safe. Enjoy!

Last Friday in Las Vegas, mer-people and mer-people fanciers attended the first annual Mer-Con 2011, the world’s largest mermaid convention. Men, women, and children swam while wearing fish tails, and competed in a beauty contest, the International Mermaid Pageant. Other attendees were mermaid-focused painters, authors, tail-makers, and other artisans.¹

What kind of people real mermaids, exactly? I ask for your forgiveness in advance, as I am probably going to make some mistakes here as I try to answer this question. I not familiar with their subculture, but evidently they have one. The official Mer-Con site mentions that one of the attending authors is working on a non-fiction book about mermaid culture.² MerNetwork is a social networking site for mer-people, established in 2010, originally with the intention of connecting performers with tail-makers.

The definition for real mermaids includes—but is not limited to—dancers who perform while skin-diving, during which they may or may not wear fish-tails.³ This type of performance was invented in Weeki Wachee, Florida, “in 1947 by an ex-Navy frogman named Newton Perry.”⁴ Some Weeki Wachee mermaids performed at Mer-Con, and at an earlier event this year, Mermaid Camp at Weeki Wachee. One experienced Weeki Wachee mermaid, Barbara Wynns, now age 61, says that

“I knew when I was 7 years old I was going to be a mermaid. Yeah right, you say! Me too, but when I first saw the show at Weeki Wachee … I was like, oh my gosh you can get paid to do that? I made up my mind then that I wasn’t going to college, wasn’t going to get married, I was going to be a Weeki Wachee mermaid. [… When I was 7, I had been] daydreaming, and I saw clearly I was going to be a mermaid, and not a cartoon character one, a real one. I just saw it clearly.”⁵

Some modern mer-people are not just performers, but people who express a serious desire to become real mer-people, or who assert that they are now real mer-people. I am not clear on the boundaries, but evidently for some, it is more than a costume or a role. It is an identity.

A performer who attended the convention, Mermaid Shelley, said in an interview, “When I was a little girl and saw the movie Splash, I knew instantly that I was meant to be a mermaid. Something about Madison’s outsider perspective on human society and her understanding of the depths of the ocean just resonated with me.” When asked, “Have you always identified as a mermaid?” Shelley replied, “Yes, I think I have since I was about nine years old. … It wasn’t until I met my boyfriend (now husband of 16 years) Chris that I really started embracing it culturally.”⁶ In her blog, A Mermaid’s Journey: Thoughts of a mermaid in this world, Shelley writes eloquently about environmental issues from a mermaid perspective, and apparently not as a role-playing character.⁷

Participating New Age author and fish-tailed performer⁸ Doreen Virtue has written a little in her books about people who identify as mermaids and/or believe that they were marine animals in their past lives.⁹ Participating mermaid Allie Causin indicated a preference for life underwater and said, “I’ve discovered that I hate having legs.”¹⁰ Hannah Fraser (not attending this event?), who has a talent for skin-diving with a fish-tail, says “I’m a mermaid,” and as a child, “she told her parents that she wanted to become one—for real.”¹¹ Traci Hines performs as a lookalike for Ariel in Disney’s The Little Mermaid, calls it cosplaying, and says,

“I think a part of me has always been ‘Ariel’ on the inside…we’re a lot alike I think…but ever since I dyed my blonde hair red, and began actually performing as The Little Mermaid for children, even when I am out of costume I think I tend to take more care in how I act and present myself, at least whenever little ones are around, since they always seemed to believe I was her regardless of what I was wearing! Even in jeans on the street I would be stopped and asked almost daily if I was ‘The Little Mermaid.’”¹²

Raina the Halifax Mermaid (Stephanie) describes how her more confident mermaid persona is an acting role, which has nonetheless changed her life for the better:

“Through Raina I’ve met and made more real friends then I ever did as Stephanie and perhaps that’s because Raina is just an outward expression of my true inner-self. The gap between the two is closing though and Raina and Stephanie are becoming one and the same. I’m starting to realize it’s not the fin that makes the mermaid- it’s her spirit!”¹³

I recommend Carolyn Turgeon’s blog, I Am A Mermaid. (Caution, NSFW. No actual nudity, but mermaids are not known for wearing a lot of clothes, either.) It includes interviews with many mermaid and mermaid-interested people, in which they explain how they are mermaids, advice to aspiring mermaids (such as safety tips for swimming with a uni-fin), and what they see as special about mermaids. Many of them answered that last question in beautiful ways, but this is one of my favorites, by fantasy author (not a performing mermaid) Sarah Porter:

“I love the image of a divided nature: human vs. other, visible vs. secret and subaquatic, everyday vs. magic. If you only saw a mermaid as she was rising to the surface, you could think she was a human girl. Her tail is like the secret side of her personality, her hidden self, or the unconscious mind.”¹⁴

In the otherkin community, mermaids are a surprisingly scarce type of otherkin. In all, I’ve heard of perhaps three of them in the otherkin community. Nonetheless, it seems that there is a substantial community of people out there who do identify as mermaids and mermen. It’s just that nearly all the mer-people don’t call themselves otherkin, and they don’t mingle in otherkin communities. Is this by choice? Or could it be that they have not heard of “otherkin,” which is still a very obscure concept?

( Sources )