Ok, I’ve been seeing some fighting in the fictionkin community lately and as one of the sane adults on this website full of immature children, I think I should step in
Being kin has nothing to do with your race, your disability, your gender, or anything like that. The whole point of being fictionkin is that you have the soul or mind of the character that you identify as. If you are kin for psychological reasons and/or don’t believe in a soul or want to call it something else, that’s fine. But you are still kin with the characters you are kin with for who you as a person are.
I’m a person who is kin with a character who has a disability that I do not have. I can’t magically stop being kin to this character because that isn’t how being kin works. If the character didn’t have that disability I would still be kin with that character. I do not use the fact that I am kin with that character to push my way into spaces of people with that disability because I recognize that I do not have it.
You guys can pressure people to “change their kintypes” all you want, but the truth is that you actually have no real way to “change their kintypes”. The most you can hope for is to get someone to hide it due to bullying on here, and even that doesn’t work 90% of the time because people prefer to tell you guys why what you’re doing is wrong. Most of what you guys do is immature finger pointing and shouting as well. If you’re going to try to convince people to do something, that sure as hell isn’t the way to do it.
Another thing I want to point out is that the concept that all of this gatekeeping was originally based upon was created by some racist assholes who wanted to pretend to be Japanese for funsies and were extremely possessive about their kintypes. This is where the concept that “you can’t be kin with a character outside of your race” comes from. The people doing this were ironically enough doing just what they said not to do. They did it so that no one could “steal all the Japanese kintypes”.
From this concept, other concepts like “you can’t be kin with a character that doesn’t match your disabilities” arose. They are based off of the same lack of logic and desperation that the original concept held. They go against what it means to be fictionkin in the first place.
So I’m going to leave it at this. People who have kintypes that don’t match them in ways like race or disability are not hurting you. They are not hurting oppressed groups because they do not claim to be the things that their kintypes are. You do not have to persecute them. If you want to go after people who are actually harming those oppressed groups, my suggestion would be to go after actual racists and groups that attack people with disabilities.
Reblogging because I still can’t believe I still have to say this.
