i feel like a therian is gonna yell at me for this, but here’s how i see it.
everyone’s under the alterhuman umbrella. just means we all experience more or less the same thing. nbd.
otherkin and fictionkin sometimes overlap, but not always. it happens.
all therians are otherkin, but not all otherkin are therians. some people put therians outside of the otherkin circle, and that’s cool too. it’s not like this stuff is standardized or anything, and they did grow independently of the otherkin community/whatever you wanna call it.
(disclaimer: the sizes of the circles don’t actually indicate much other than i’m bad at scaling.)
Springboarding off of what @bitcheshavebirthdays said, therian should at least overlap with fictionkin, also.
/obligatory therian interjection
And while technically, by today’s broader definition, therians would fall under nonhuman, otherkin was not largely an umbrella term for all nonhumans until very recently. Therians and otherkin began separately, and as someone who began in the therian community and has participated in otherkin and fictionkin spaces since then, I can definitely tell you there are nuances to each community that do make them different, though related. The therian community is different from the otherkin community when you actually step into our spaces, even if you don’t see it by definition alone, and the degree of blending between the two that we’re at now is fairly recent. Not making a moral judgement, just as a fact.
Personally, I think this might be a better way of depicting the communities and overlaps between them. And I think a good example of what might fit at the intersection of all three are Warrior Cats kin. Definitely theriomythic in that they’re very animalistic, still, while also having sentience, and so not technically a regular Earth animal, and being from a modern fictional source, thus making them fictionkin.
