Damn, I missed out on the otherkin “golden age” for sure. Since you were presumably there, what was it like? Was the bad press as bad as the furry fandom got it, worse, or less severe? I just want to know what the community was like before Tumblr became part of it (like fictionkin ACTUALLY talking about past lives/purpose/etc.)
Well, I don’t know if I’d call it the ‘golden age’ but it certainly was a different age, to be sure. It had its positives and negatives.
Otherkin, under that name, has been around since the late 80s/early 90s. In the 90s, kin were hard to find, because information was harder to find. We as humans were less connected to one another as a general rule, because social media had not yet been invented. Kin kept to their own websites, and their pretty heavily moderated forums.
When I came into the kin community in 2005-2006, we ere just at the burgeoning beginning of the social media era, when we were becoming more connected. Communication was more immediate- less a matter of updating a website, and more a matter of updating a blog. (Trust me, they are very different). Everything became a conversation, instead of a publication, and it was easier to run into the thoughts and opinions of people that you weren’t necessarily looking for.
I was most active in the most publicly visible section of the kin community at the time, specifically, the various livejournal communities.A few things about Livejournal. IT was one of the first blogging communities to offer a hub where you could see all of the posts that other accounts you followed posted- these were called ‘friends’. You couldn’t reblog anything, but every post had a threaded comment section. Blogs, and posts were publicly visible by default, but you could set it so only friends, or certain friends, (or group members) could see certain posts. Communities were shared blogs- people who followed them were expected to contribute to the conversation in them.
The kin communities on livejournal started out very publicly. They were large, open forums that anyone could easily see and contribute to. Unlike the private forums off livejournal, they were listed on google. So it was easy to find by accident.
This meant that a lot of new people started to understand themselves as otherkin, and contribute to the discussion. There was an open culture of talking about memories, physical feelings, philosophy, etc. Because people subscribed to communities, rather than just individuals, there was more of a sense of community, and every discussion was more public, instead of limited to a group of smell friends. Comment sections turned every minor thought and memory post into a whole discussion.
However, the fact that the communities were so open meant that they attracted trolls by the dozen. If you think anon hate is bad, this was the golden age of trolling.. Because all the communities were public, links and screenshots were often posted on ‘lolcow’ sites, for public mockery.
After a while of this, a lot of communities went more friends only and shut down. But this only had the effect of making trolls go stealthy as well. Fake blogs were created to gain access to private communities, with the intent of gathering humerus material.
Of course, what trolls always found funniest were our memory discussions, and our discussions about magic, and spirituality, and how all of this kin shit worked. So eventually, after enough trolling, people started talking about this less and less, which is a shame.
