✦ PC / Grimm / Gakvu ✦ 22 ✦
Voidy undead alien-goat-bug thing.
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I make images with my hands and have elected to make that everyone's problem.
Do they know how exhausting and alienating it is to be a nonhuman illustrator right now. Do they have any idea.
it is really quite depressing how many people just... stop seeing animals as real living things when they happen to have medically significant venom
It is palpable how much fictionkind are getting left behind in the growing push for therian/otherkind acceptance. And no, I'm not really surprised by this, but it is frustrating nonetheless. The KFF trend has thoroughly drowned out our voices and made it difficult for us to find each other and build community, making effective fictionkind self-advocacy nearly impossible. At the same time, it has swallowed up the vast majority of what otherwise might have been potential allies and made them into cogs in the misinformation machine instead.
And now we are simply being left behind because, I don't know, I guess we're too hard to advocate for. And I can't even disagree on it being hard.
I do not know what to do about it. I know this post will change nothing. Making 1000 of the most eloquent and comprehensive posts ever put on the internet with full APA standard citations would change nothing. So, I guess I'm just venting.
Another thing about this that has been on my mind:
the way our vocabulary has been horrifically mangled has made it extremely difficult to plainly state my identity to most people.
Like, if I say "I am Widowmakerkin", most people will assume I mean that in the KFF sense. If I say "I am Widowmaker" they will assume I mean I relate to Widowmaker (and may or may not be KFFing about it). If I say "I am Widowmakerkind", other fictionkind will be able to tell I am being sincere, but nonetheless nonkin either won't know what I'm talking about or they might assume I just made a typo... and we are back at square one.
Explaining what I am always comes with a (sometimes rather lengthy!) clearing up & debunking of misinformation, and that in itself might get me painted as humorless at best or outright vilified at worst.
It is tiring. Far more tiring even than having to explain what my semi-obscure orientation label means over and over. Because at the very least, people aren't weirdly drawn to some vapid, brutally bastardized, insincere meme culture interpretation of the word "polysexual" like they are for the word "kin".