On the subject of multiple fictotypes/kintypes

So, the reaction surrounding recent posts about polykin and multiple kintypes has convinced me that I need to talk about something that I’ve been keeping to myself.

For the last few months, since around November or December or so I have been questioning additional kintypes. Admitting to myself that I had more than one kintype at all, in the form of accepting that I was Vriska, opened my mind up to exploring the idea that I might have other kintypes that I had rejected, ignored, or that had not come to the forefront yet.

I allowed myself to explore feelings, behaviors, experiences and connection that I had dismissed, suppressed, or written off. I let myself come face to face with a lot of feelings that I would otherwise have ignored.

Not a lot of people within the community know that I’ve been considering more kintypes. Those who do are the people I talk to most frequently, privately, and closely.

The reason I have not been open about this process, aside from it being an extremely personal, and emotional one, is out of concern for the reception it would receive within the community. Polykin have historically been met with a dismissive attitude from a lot of the older community, especially in purely otherkin/therian circles, where the expectation is that you have one overriding, unchanging self, which is your kintype/theriotype.

In the last few years, and especially in the last year or so, seeing the community as it is now, I have realized that that expectation of one kintype does not fit all experiences of what being kin is, and can honestly be harmful especially to reincarnated fictionkin who very likely had more than one prior existence.

The ‘one kintype’ model fits much better for immortal beings that somehow slipped into a human existence and expect to slip back into that same immortal one, and for those kin/therians who believe they essentially had the wrong model brain put in their head. But for those who believe in the reincarnation model, it is simply an inapplicable restriction.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m absolutely not attempting to lend any extra legitimacy to those people with lists of kintypes span several columns and haven’t had any particular thought or reflection put into them beyond ‘I like this character and it feels nice to say they’re me’.

What I am saying is that those kin who have three, or four, or even eight or ten or however many kintypes that they HAVE put thought and reflection into, and do experience genuine kin phenomenon in relation to, and can’t pick up and discard them at a whim– they shouldn’t be ashamed by that.

As long as you’re treating being kin as the serious mental/spiritual phenomenon that it is, then you are legitimate no matter how many kintypes you have. 

This is why I say that people who have large numbers of kintypes aren’t automatically WRONG, but that they should absolutely scrutinize and examine each of their kintypes closely. 

Because we ALL should scrutinize and examine our kintypes closely, even if we have only one. That’s a part of what being kin is. If you’re just going ‘oh I’m kin with X’ and then shrugging it off, no, you’re not kin.

And if there’s a character that after careful scrutiny and lengthy reflection, does seem to be a kintype- if you have memories and sensations, or supernumerary limbs of the character, related image dysphoria, nostalgia for that world, and other kin phenomena- then that’s a legitimate kintype, whether its your first or your fourteenth.