Hey there, I’ve been wondering how certain people on the kin communities feel about “concept” kin, ie windkin, spacekin, ghostkin, plantkin etc. I know you deal mainly with fictionkin, but you also seem pretty level headed and not immediately saying every little thing is valid, and also give some respectable views on kinstuff. I’d love to hear what you have to say about these things. Thank you.

Thanks for the compliment, anon. Let’s see.

I obviously don’t speak for everyone, but the general consensus that I have seen among more serious and reflective otherkin, is that you can not be kin of something that does not have a mind, personality or will of some form.

Things like objects and abstract concepts don’t have any sense of ‘self’ or identity, that is a mind, personality, or will, so you can’t be them. There’s nothing to ‘be’. All of the qualities that we might ascribe to these concepts or objects are examples of athropomorphization, that is, putting human traits on things that don’t have them. So, instead of feeling the experience of the concept within us as kin, we would be projecting our humanity onto that abstract concept.

That said, you can certainly be kin of the spirit of the wind, if you believe that there exists or existed somewhere a conscious spirit that was the wind, or controlled the wind. Same with stars. You can’t just be ‘a star’, but you could be ‘a star’ in the sense like the old women from Madeline L’Engle’s Wrinkle in Time were stars. They were conscious entities with feelings and goals, who left their star bodies behind and took on (apparently) human bodies.

You can’t be a chair unless that chair was aware and had thoughts. You can’t be all of space, unless you’re an entity that was all of space. (For example Snowman from Homestuck).

Ghostkin, I have a special caveat for. Obviously ghosts are the spirits of other dead entities, humans, etc. However, it is possible to spend so much time in the state of being of a ghost that it supercedes whatever you were before that. The experience of being a ghost is (presumably) very different than being a living human, and is in fact conducive to being a kintype.  A particular fictional example would be the ghosts from the Casper (1995) movie, who lose their human memories and exist only as a kind of supernatural being.