@errant There's Tumblr and posts on fedi and Bluesky under the right tags I guess. No idea how representative all of that is compared to the huge black box that is Discord
Today I'm going to take a closer look at current interactions in the community to see if my impressions really are accurate. No Discord servers, though, because they draw attention to you when joining and I don't like that at all.
Yeah, the description on Wikipedia is a bit hard to grasp. It took me a while to really understand it.
I don't have in-depth knowledge about all the discussions happening, so I appreciate your perspective. Please correct me if I make assumptions that aren't true. All I have is a very far away perspective where I see bits and pieces of where the discourse is going, as a general trend. My impression of Tumblr over the years has always been of a place where people keep coming up with more and more labels. And as time went by, those labels felt increasingly empty and redundant to me. Maybe it makes more sense to view those waves with blurred boundaries.
When I said "subsequent waves have pretty much removed this level of elaboration", I think I left out too much information about what I mean. I don't think those waves have completely gotten rid of explanations, but they shifted to be more about other concepts and terms rather than actual experiences. Holotherianthropy seems like the perfect example of that to me, and I still do believe it's a perfect example for the "pure simulacrum" stage. The statement "I am physically a wolf" is objectively false, so the only way to have it make any sense is to disconnect the concept "physical form" from its roots in our common reality. The pedantry you're talking about are efforts to achieve exactly that.
None of this means that those labels can't have any meaning to those people, and that wasn't the intention of the original reply on Werelist nor was it mine here. It's just a very plausible explanation for why a lot of modern discourse has felt so inherently empty to me, as if people are saying things without saying anything at all. Some of the things they're saying are actually outright offensive to me. I wouldn't be suffering if I could "physically be a dragon" just by saying so. Maybe this statement means something to them, but to me it's all meaninglessly throwing around words and concepts.
As for the quadrobics thing, the original post didn't specify the stage it corresponds to, so I just kinda assumed he included it in the third wave. He may have intentionally left it out because it's an entirely different beast.
I removed the long post I wrote this morning because I wasn't really happy with it upon rereading. I ended it on a weak point and without a proper conclusion. But it has been a good practice nonetheless.
I'm getting better at writing my thoughts down without correcting sentences and structure over and over and over again. I'm not joking, when I tried writing about these things in the past, I would spend way more time on moving words around than actually writing, only to cancel the whole thing anyway.
I'm following the mindset I adopted last year when I suddenly started drawing so much art. I wasn't afraid to try new things and I would find a positive lesson even in "failures". I'm sure it will help me now as well.
Just posting whatever I feel like writing about is so nice. I don't think I can keep this much posting up for too long, but I'll take advantage of my motivation while I can.
@sneexy There is so much you could do with ActivityPub to handle more advanced use-cases. There's no reason for users to only have one actor — we could have multiple timelines per user you could follow granularly. ActivityPub supports way more flexible addressing than just ["everyone"/"only my followers"/"that one person"]. But no, we have to stick with a social network that's more like Twitter+.
@foxovision Thanks for your perspective! I wish I could articulate myself as nicely as you did, but that's what I'm practicing here now after all.
It's interesting to see the parallels between the different communities. I only have some passing knowledge about plurals from many years ago when I learned about tulpas. I definitely do recognize the "roleplaying in their mind" aspect, though, as that was the reason that made me bail pretty quickly. People were talking about not just conversing with their tulpas, but also having outright epic battles with control over their body at stake. There was romance, action and drama. It was wild.
The way I like to look at this phenomenon is that labels and people will always change and that it isn't up to us to determine who's "valid." At the end of the day, that's up to the community as a whole and we, as individuals, can't change that. It does suck for people who are part of a community, only to have it slip away from under their feet and turn into something they don't identify with anymore. Not only that, artifacts from before — the culture and terms that helped us find each other — are overwritten with new meanings, so you can't even reliably find people who share the same values.
I was thinking about using the therian label for myself for a while, even though I don't feel like part of the community. In fact, during that time I made that custom emoji you're using. I eventually decided not to and instead let my "vibes" speak for themselves. I think it works pretty well since I do have quite a few therian followers I'll happily interact with. Don't take this as me pressuring you to stop using the label, though!
I'm back to my floofy self here to tell my accounts apart more easily.
Also, now that I tried the synth form for a while, it's clear to me that I'm only going to keep it around as a secondary character rather than a "me" character.
That's how I decided to handle my animal feelings. If I have a sudden inspiration for a form that might fit, I'll draw it and become it for a while. I have no issues with changing my species if that's how it turns out, because people constantly change and that's good. I'm not the same person I used to be 10 years ago. Embracing that part of myself feels way more honest than clinging to the past.
There's currently a discussion going on elsewhere about how therianthropy has changed over the years, with one reply capturing the thoughts I've been having on this so well I want to echo them here. I'll try to sum it up to the best of my ability and add notes of my own.
The creator of the thread has identified 4 waves of therians:
- The 90s with the were community - The 2000s with forums and grilling (a practice I mentioned in a reply earlier) - Tumblr otherkin and increasing mainstream attention - TikTok, quadrobics
In response, someone brought up the "precession of simulacra": en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation#Stages They assigned each wave to such a stage: The first wave is stage 2, the second wave stage 3, and the third wave is stage 4.
This tracks with my own observations of past interactions compared to interactions nowadays.
Back when I thought about joining therian forums, people would often talk about their personal experiences in great detail. If the topic was mental shifts, they would go on to describe what exactly they had experienced in that moment. They would describe their journey to determine their theriotype, the significance of past events, and so on.
This shows very well why this wave does indeed correspond to phase 3 of the precession of simulacra: People pretty much had to elaborate on their experiences because otherwise, it wasn't clear if everyone was on the same page about what something like a "mental shift" really meant to someone. The terminology suggests an objective reality, but it's actually based on subjective interpretations of memories and experiences.
The subsequent waves, however, are shifting the focus from these elaborations to discussions about labels and concepts. Statements that used to be straightforward may now be complex constructs of nuances usually based purely on one's identity. They turned the term "therian" into the purpose itself.
A good example of this is a statement I remember reading a while ago: "I consider my body to be that of a wolf." I learned today that this idea is called "holotherianthropy." Normally, such a statement would be outright rejected. You can't physically be a wolf just because you consider yourself to be one. But it does make sense when viewed through the lens of the precession of simulacra.
If someone says they're physically a wolf, their line of thinking is as follows: they have a body, they consider themselves to be a wolf, therefore their body is the body of a wolf. The concept of a "physical form" has changed from being straightforward and observable to a matter of "I consider this to be the case". It has lost its connection from reality. And this is exactly what stage 4 is.
"Feeling welcome" was the wrong way to put it, so let me correct that to "feeling comfortable". It captures the point I hinted at earlier way better: a community may change to be more inclusive, but that doesn't mean a lot if I still don't feel like I belong there.
To pick up the example scenario: a community of PC builders may happily welcome me, who's interested in hardware design, but it wouldn't change the fact that I'd be overwhelmingly surrounded by people who don't share my interest in hardware in the same way. "Overwhelmingly" is the key here, as differences in individual values are expected and good, but there's a threshold.
I'm completely fine with not using the label and not considering myself a therian. I found a way that works for me.
@aearo I just wanted to show that I got more arguments I will address in that future post.
I'm participating — well, mostly lurking — in a therian forum and often see long-time members talk about how the community has changed. One of the earlier phenomenons was "grilling", i.e. asking newcomers invasive questions to make sure they were genuine. This practice had died by the time I learned about therians, thankfully, but it certainly was a thing when that comic was released.
After the grilling, there was still a baseline of shared experiences you were expected to have. That's when I found therians and concluded I didn't fit because I didn't experience any of those "shifts" or animal instincts or some kind of awakening. To be extra clear, I know not all of these are required simultaneously, but I had nothing.
Nowadays, however, even that baseline has pretty much disappeared. If you want to be an animal — even if "only" anthropomorphic — , you can pick up the therian label and you're good to go. It couldn't be any less strict.
