Kin, ID, and selfhood

This is the rewritten version of Kin, ID, and selfhood. The original post was a lot snarkier in its writing and I have come to understand this topic a lot more than when I first wrote it. I recommend reading this version instead of the original, even if you've read the original before.

This is part of a series of posts about the concept of kin and its history. For a more comprehensive explanation of what kin is, check here. A glossary is also included at the bottom for convenience, as not all terms are immediately explained. This was posted 13 Oct, 2022.

It was last updated on 05 Aug, 2024.
What changed: Unlisted entry. Keeping up for posterity.

The Tumblr era of fictionkin spawned many misunderstandings in the community, and you may be familiar with its successor, new-age kinning. It's a little confusing to know how we went from a more spiritual community to something you just 'do for fun', but it's actually a lot less jarring than it seems.

When the fictionkin community boomed on Tumblr in 2014, a lot of younger people were introduced to the concept. The difficulty of explaining the spirituality of it caused some people to forgo it entirely in talking about it to others, which caused the major change of 'I believe I was this character in a past life' to 'I relate to this character'. This small change likely doesn't seem like much (since if you believe you were them, you probably find them relatable to some degree), but it ruffled the feathers of a few people.

With the original kin term being watered down, people needed another way to explain their spiritual connection to their kintype, and the term ID was born. Effectively, this meant the same thing as a kintype, but hadn't yet been co-opted by people who claimed to kin 'for fun'... yet.

Eventually it found its way to the less spiritual community, and people found that yet again they would need a stronger term. This was the birth of the selfhood, which meant the same thing as the previous two terms, but was at this point considered the pinnacle of kintypes.

To the spiritual groups who had been unaffected by this discourse and nonspiritual groups who had found the terms, they were ranked a bit differently. A kintype was just that: a kintype, and the other terms instead described stronger experiences. Spiritual groups would often use use ID to describe kintypes they felt more connected to, and selfhood would be used to show which kintype you felt most connected to at any given moment (if such a thing existed for them). Non-spiritual groups used it similarly, but the higher ranked a kin is, the closer it would be to some kind of delusion that you are the character. This is probably the birth of the delusional attachment community, however that term wouldn't be coined for many years.

Either way, a selfhood would be very hard to separate from one's identity. If one didn't have a selfhood, the term ID functioned the same.

Spiritual communities criticized the coinage of these new terms, because a kintype already functioned as both. However, the damage had already been done, and the kin community on Tumblr became even more confusing than it may have already been. Personally I think this marks the beginning of the new-age community, which wouldn't become as prominent until the Tumblr porn ban, when a major portion of Tumblr's userbase migrated to Twitter. 

The non-spiritual community began to consider their older, spiritual predecessor as old fashioned and saw their attempts to keep definitions intact as some form of gatekeeping. Despite this, you could make the argument that the non-spiritual community tended to gatekeep more. With the belief that one can choose their kintypes* becoming more common, arguments such as 'you can't kin outside your race' would come up out of seemingly nowhere.

After the yanderebitchclub drama, people no longer wanted to associate with this toxic and reactionary version of the kin community they had created. This is when kinning for fun really found its footing, and snowballed into the community on Twitter that most people know today.

The spiritual kin community does still exist, however they don't seem to be as prominent on Twitter or Tumblr anymore, probably being drowned out by the sea of teenagers in the new community yelling about the drama of the week. Considering how long it's been since the term fictionkin was even coined, many of the members are also much older now and don't concern themselves with conventional social media. Some prolific users remain, however.

Yanderebitchclub: the kin drama that changed Tumblr (for more on the kin/race drama)

A decent amount of this is from personal experience and observation. Feel free to take any of it with a grain of salt.

ORTHODOX TERMS

• Kin: Believing that you or your soul is a reincarnation of something
• Fictionkin: Kin, namely with fictional characters. Formerly known as Otakukin
• Kintype: Whatever you're kin with (eg foxkin)
• ID: Synonym of kintype, sometimes used to denote a higher kintype
• Selfhood: Synonym of kintype, sometimes used to denote your highest kintype (the term 'permashift' is often used by people who don't use ID/selfhood)

NEW-AGE TERMS

• Kin: Relating to a character or wanting to be a character
• Fictionkin: Antiquated term for kin
• Kintype: Whatever you kin (eg a fox) - antiquated term, often just 'kin' is used
• ID: A character you identify with/as
• Selfhood: Delusions related to a character - antiquated term, 'delusional attachment' is used instead

OTHER

• New-age kinnies: What happens when you don't know what you're talking about
• Delusional attachment: What happens when you give new-age kinnies the DSM
• Gatekeeper: One who controls access to something (often a community)