#i also have a vague idea for a dragon type eeveelution

[kinfeelings]

Stream of Consciousness: Looking Back, Labels & a Bit About Dysphoria.

I first began believing I was “strange” and “more/other than human” in elementary school (I distantly remember I had feelings of it before then but it became blatant in elementary) and then also the horrible daycare I was placed in for many hours after school ended. Probably had a lot, if not everything, to due with my undiagnosed autism and untreated trauma. I spent recesses wandering around the playground or digging in the dirt, stuck in my head, mostly ignoring my peers who wanted little to do with me anyhow, and then at the daycare, where it was near-constant torment, I was still always pretending to be Something Else. A non-canon OC Warriors cat, a tiger (sometimes even an aquatic “water-tiger”), a werewolf, many different things. Before elementary school and that daycare I was simply obsessed with thinking I was an ordinary house-cat every now and then.

Skip ahead years later and suddenly I am a teen in middle school scouring Tumblr, fixated on Tom Hiddleston at the height of the Avengers-mania. I begin hearing glimpses of something called “otherkin.” It’s so harshly ridiculed that I veer away from it immediately despite it vaguely catching my interest for some reason. More time goes by and I’ve become a young adult, who’s ready to learn more about this concept that I only caught snippets of before. I find I relate to a lot of it, but haven’t any clue what my kintypes are yet. I tried so many freaking labels, y’all. It was ridiculous. Meowth and persian pokémon, a sable working-line German shepherd dog, an Eastern water-spirit dragon, a Maine coon, Bluestar from Warriors, Star Catcher from My Little Pony, Zira from The Lion King, I even attempted to test out an archetrope…

None of these were true, but it’s good I searched, and developed more understanding of my identity.

I am currently twenty-seven, and I call myself: spiritual/psychological, alterhuman, voidpunk, and beastpunk. My current kintypes are as follows: feline cladotherian, all the eeveelutions including eevee itself (pokémon), and various fluctuating fiction- and OCkintypes. My favorite animals are felines, which is cool considering that I am literally all of them at once. I don’t dislike anything that I am, to be honest, which is pretty lucky—some individuals hate what they are, and I feel bad for them. Species euphoria comes to me as a sort of inner peaceful feeling, like all the bullshit of living humanly is ignorable and tolerable, like me-as-my-’types are having no trouble piloting this body I inhabit. I do recognize I value humanity and don’t scorn it anymore, which is why I choose to say I’m alterhuman instead of purely nonhuman. Though, I’ve been wondering about that, lately. Not that I’m going back to hating it as I did when I was younger, just that...am I latching onto the idea of being only a “human but slightly to the left” out of habit and fear of repercussions?

Someone in the OtherConnect Discord server told me “alterhuman” doesn’t imply either having humanity nor lack of it, it’s an umbrella term that includes examples of both. So I guess I was kinda mistaken? So I’m calling myself nonhuman from now on, too.

Dysphoria is a hellish time when it does occur for me, especially since I’m already mentally ill to begin with. Everything feels discordant, borderline painful; the air itself that I breathe has a blunt and mocking edge to it, cruel and relentless. You will never be anything you are within. Fuck my intrusive thoughts and anxiety disorder, frankly. They can kiss my ass.

[ravenwolfie97]

well, here we are. it’s been a whole decade, and i gotta say, the 2010s were definitely the most formative years of my life, especially in terms of art

i’ve only drawn more and more over the years, so as time went on it was harder and harder to choose pieces i thought were best and most representative. and i’m glad to see such a remarkable change after all this time

i started to take art seriously by 2011/12, and i think that shift in focus is visible. i started to join in and contribute to online communities, making valuable artist friends and giving myself a bigger motivation to draw rather than just for myself. i couldn’t be happier with the results :D

in-depth talk about all these years under the cut

i focused primarily on what i could find on my computer because 1. it was easier than digging through my hand-drawn art and 2. it was more organized and i could search them by the date. so that’s why it’s pretty skimpy for the first few years, in addition to me not drawing nearly as much as i am now

2009: so, i’m obviously a pokemon nerd. that wigglytuff comic is the only notable piece from ‘09 on my computer. i started off drawing digitally in MS Paint, with a mouse/trackpad, and i am not one of those savants who can draw clean lines with just that. i had also been developing my own fakemon, heavily inspired by gen4 with a bunch of evolutions to previous pokemon. since i was now able to draw on the computer, i set out to make sprite art of all of my fakemon. i showed off a small selection of them, including my starter trio, a Ghost-type eeveelution, and an evolution to Heracross

2010: late in the year, when i had turned 13, i finally decided to make myself a persona, and the character on the left in my attempt at drawing it and being Cool. obviously a huge difference in design is the lack of wings - those were not an initial idea and were added later on. the other two characters were the protagonists of an old, long-dead story called the Legendary Spirits: John and Shala. i think by then i was just starting to write it and worldbuild, but only a couple years later i scrapped it completely and vaguely incorporated ideas from it in Legends: Children of the Dragons

2011: most of my art from this time was either Warrior Cats or Animal Jam-related. the pikachu was actually my first drawing done with my Wacom Bamboo tablet, and i was really proud of it until i realized the Corel Paint Studio program or whatever sucked (or i was just bad at using it), so i switched back to MS Paint the other piece of my Animal Jam character Ferret exploring Sarepia Forest was probably my first major digital art endeavor, and it’s been something i’ve been wanting to redraw for a couple years now, actually

2012: i joined deviantArt in late 2011, but didn’t really take off until 2012, so i redesigned my persona to be at least a little bit better. now i’ve added the raven wings! it was also around this time that i started getting involved with the pokemon nuzlocke community, finding the original webcomic and then diving headfirst into the fan-made adventures - i even started my own, but never posted it anywhere this is also where my “taking art more seriously” starts to come through, mostly thanks to my friend North and our constant involvement with anime and video games together. bonding over those things really drove me artistically, and it’s because of that that i suddenly had the thought to really practice art instead of basically just winging it

2013: this is when i actually joined my first community, that being the pokemon nuzlocke community in the form of the NOCT: the Nuzlocke Original Character Tournament. it was brand-new and an exciting prospect, so i took the opportunity, and i’m so glad i did. i had just started using GIMP for my Image Design class in highschool, so with only about a month of practice with it under my belt i used it for my entries in the tournament, mainly because it was just so much better than MS Paint. it had LAYERS and TRANSPARENCY, and as far as i knew MS Paint didn’t have anything like that. the picture at the bottom was part of my final round and last entry to the tournament, and just seeing my growth within the year was incredible. and then, in the summer, i stumbled upon a little webseries called TOME. and that kind of changed my life forever. i got both of my best friends hooked on it too, and we all made OCs. mine just looked like my persona, AKA boring, but they got did look a bit better than the year prior

2014: even though beyblade was a big part of my life and a huge inspiration for my art since 2012, it started to consume more of my artistic drive in 2014, with the help of my friends, of course. we wrote fanfiction and drew comics and made self-insert characters and everything. so it was during that time i tried really hard to replicate the style more, and now bits of that have been incorporated into my current art style. also, that december, i challenged myself to my first 30-day art challenge, of course starting with a pokemon challenge. later on in the challenge, with broader themes, i expanded my entries into full-fledged pieces with shading and detailed backgrounds, which i believe was a great step, since i still struggle with and avoid drawing backgrounds. even to this day, i’m very proud of my work in those last few entries

2015: the second NOCT, appropriately called the NOCT2, started this year, and after my experiences with it two years prior i was eager to join in again. however, i did not have as much time to set aside for this one, either because my ideas were too ambitious or because i was also graduating highschool and developing an animated trailer for Legends:Children of the Dragons for my senior project. it was also during this time i was developing a new original story with the help of my friend North called The Dark Side: War on Destiny, which actually came to be in late August 2014. i continued to expand on the lore and designed all of the characters, and so far those aspects have still being adhered to. the drawings of the main characters Kyle and his partner Guarudan are part of a larger 30-day art challenge i took on called OCOctober, where i drew a variety of my original characters throughout time, including my current ones. this is also the year i started my annual art summaries, which is pretty cool, and i’m glad i’ve stuck with that since

2016: not much to say about this year, honestly. i was busy working and preparing for my first year of university, and i mostly focused on TOME and OC stuff. i think this is when my involvement in the tumblr fandom started to come to a head, and once again i’m very thankful for that

2017: this was an extremely hectic year, with university struggles and social shenanigans online eating me from the inside out. however, i made an extremely valuable friend in Mana, and we continue to collaborate on her original stories to this day. featured on this year’s slide is a scene from District of the Stars also, even though i mostly frequented tumblr from 2014 on, i still contributed to pokemon collaborations on deviantArt, mostly for the Gotta Draw ‘Em All group

2018: again, not much to say other than i continued to grow. i used pretty much all of my free time during college to draw, and i strove to draw different things and focus on improving specific parts of my art, which i definitely think helped

2019: now we’re all caught up, and in retrospect i think 2019 was my most productive and proudest year for me in terms of art. even compared to the year prior, i see a lot of growth in coloring and shading, which is something i had been fiddling with for a couple of years. but this time, i’ve made all sorts of friends and colleagues, and i continued to strengthen those bonds

it’s crazy how much can happen in a few years, especially when ten years is almost half your life. my old art still definitely looks like it came from me, but my inspirations and growth definitely helped develop my style into something much greater, into something i can be proud of

okay, i think i’m done now. have a good day