2 - The Otherkin

Summary

More so than any other community of which I am aware, the Otherkin embodies the particular conjunction of popular culture, spirituality, narrative fantasy and new media communication forms. There are other groups that demonstrate such a concurrence of themes, of which some will be briefly mentioned at the end of this chapter, but the Otherkin stand as the premier exemplar of these domains as conjunct locales. That being the case, the majority of this chapter is a general and limited overview of the community as it exists online: general insofar as each individual participant's interests and beliefs are divergent enough that detailed examination of specific aspects of the community inevitably leads one into a morass of individual preference at the cost of accurate, if broad, representation; and limited insofar as the following material is largely drawn from one online nexus of the Otherkin community. It is important to understand that the Otherkin are here taken as an exemplary community rather than an isolated one: many others share similar, if not the same beliefs, but do not necessarily associate with the rubric “Otherkin”. Thus the following material may ring true to a Pagan, for instance, and yet they may have no affiliation whatsoever with the community. I emphasize this point so as to illustrate that the beliefs discussed below are by no means limited to this particular community, but rather that the Otherkin serve as exemplars of a broader trend.