#SORYR FOR WRITING A FUCKING ESSAY ANON IM JUST KINDA LIKE THIS .

[aropride]

as someone who has never been involved in like. kinning stuff or whatever I am very curious about what kind of discourse they would have

surprise anon u just unlocked an old hyperfixation .sorry in advance also oh my god i wish i was you

ok . theres two. main types of what i generally consider "kin discourse". the first is "well im this character so you CANT be this character fuck you fuck you fuck you stop committing identity theft" . which is definitely something someone could say online for sure! and thats more of an in-community thing that likely someone who Doesnt Go Here has seen/heard about but hasnt been involved in. its probably happening on tiktok considering all the rehashed 2014-2017 discourse on tiktok rn

the second is a lot more complicated and ive got my own opinion on why it happens which ill explain. the take is basically "well, if you kin a character outside your race/gender/ability/etc you're being racist/sexist/ableist/etc by appropriating another group's struggle."

which, my theory is that. there's two things ppl mean when they say "kin." one began in the 1970s-1990s (with the otherkin/therian/elfinkind communities, the word fictionkin didnt come until the early 2000s and was originally called otakukin) and was popularized in the early 2010s right here on www.tumblr.com, and the other was popularized around 2014-2016 at the height of this particular subsection of kin discourse

the first one is what ppl generally call spiritual kin. it's a spiritual belief that's usually (but not always) explained by a belief in the multiverse where basically you believe you were a character in a past life, you share a soul with them, something along those lines.

the second is, in spiritual circles, most frequently called "kinning for fun" or "kinning to cope." it used to be most frequently called copinglink or mirrorlink and i like those terms a lot more bc it allows the language to be clear so im using them. kff/copinglink/whatever u wanna call it is basically "i relate to this character a lot"

so what i think happened in around 2014 when this particular discourse started is copinglinkers or outsiders were going, for example, "hey. this cis person is saying they kin a trans character. but I heard kinning is when you relate to something. how could a cis person relate to a story that's centered around being trans? that seems kind of odd." whereas the cis person i just made up would be thinking "i believe in a past life i was this character, and i dont claim to have trans experiences in this life"

basically what I think happened is two groups of ppl with entirely different experiences started using the same word to describe their experiences, leading to a bunch of discourse that just . didnt need to happen at all

this is so long . im sorry