These days, if you're looking for the intersection of Otherkin and plurality, a great place to start is in the Postfurry movement/community. For back in the day... well. I spent a lot of time in alt.fan.dragons back in the Usenet days, and I have a few stories I could share.
Wow! That's a blast from the past. We knew some former alt.fan.dragons posters on LJ, who told us a few things about the factionalizing in the Otherkin community and the crossover with the furry community. We were also on Usenet when alt.horror.werewolves got invaded by trolls, and although we were never involved in that group, we were in a couple groups that got flooded with crossposts from the trolls. The general attitude from bystanders seemed to be "but these people DESERVE to have their community wrecked and be mocked because they're SO CRAZY." And we were like "but why? Just because of something they believe about themselves?"
I'm kind of curious about what stories you have to share, but it's up to you, of course.
Can confirm that highly targeted subcultures in the Encyclopedia Dramatica and Portal of Evil days had ways of using resources like said sites to devour their own. No one has both the inside dirt on a high-profile furry and the motive to spill it quite like other furries who tried to commission them once and got burned, exes in the fandom who had a falling out, or the like. I am absolutely not surprised to hear that other picked-on groups were doing the same thing.
We've found out in recent years that there were more soulbonders and multiples browsing ED and PoE, and later on Fandom Wank, than we ever knew. I guess some people's reasoning is... how better to disguise where you're really from by continually insulting the community you're writing about? And yeah, Portal of Evil was a big thing in some of our fandom communities from around 1999-2002, and a certain number of people would do spite submissions of other fans' personal sites. We saw people openly admit to submitting sites by people they didn't like, on mailing lists and similar. In 2000 or 2001 someone submitted a couple of multiples' personal websites, which put the general plural community on their radar, and then the Soulbond Sanctuary messageboard got submitted in 2002. (We definitely recall some Memory Wars-related arguments making their way onto the PoE messageboards too, with some people claiming to be psychiatrists or that their parents were psychiatrists or similar.)
We tried to stay away from ED, but some people pointed us towards specific entries a couple times. Shoiryu had an entry there, and some people who had been close to her in the past confirmed that it had to have been written by someone who knew her, probably one of the many people she had a falling-out with. The thing is, there were quite a few people/systems we could have done the same thing with if we had wanted to, but we didn't want the bad karma. It wasn't so much that we thought people had found out we'd written an article about them and retaliate, it was more that just through writing it to work out a petty grudge, we would perpetuate the idea that it was acceptable to do this to people at all. I guess the best way I can put it is "do you want to help create a world that will return your kindness to you, or a world that will come back to haunt you?" (Also we saw someone take out a weird, disproportionate grudge against one of our friends by inventing a long convoluted story about them that made its way onto ED as "Sarah Saga." That is not the kind of thing we want to even think about putting into the world.)
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Date: 2020-08-26 04:47 am (UTC)Wow! That's a blast from the past. We knew some former alt.fan.dragons posters on LJ, who told us a few things about the factionalizing in the Otherkin community and the crossover with the furry community. We were also on Usenet when alt.horror.werewolves got invaded by trolls, and although we were never involved in that group, we were in a couple groups that got flooded with crossposts from the trolls. The general attitude from bystanders seemed to be "but these people DESERVE to have their community wrecked and be mocked because they're SO CRAZY." And we were like "but why? Just because of something they believe about themselves?"
I'm kind of curious about what stories you have to share, but it's up to you, of course.
Can confirm that highly targeted subcultures in the Encyclopedia Dramatica and Portal of Evil days had ways of using resources like said sites to devour their own. No one has both the inside dirt on a high-profile furry and the motive to spill it quite like other furries who tried to commission them once and got burned, exes in the fandom who had a falling out, or the like. I am absolutely not surprised to hear that other picked-on groups were doing the same thing.
We've found out in recent years that there were more soulbonders and multiples browsing ED and PoE, and later on Fandom Wank, than we ever knew. I guess some people's reasoning is... how better to disguise where you're really from by continually insulting the community you're writing about? And yeah, Portal of Evil was a big thing in some of our fandom communities from around 1999-2002, and a certain number of people would do spite submissions of other fans' personal sites. We saw people openly admit to submitting sites by people they didn't like, on mailing lists and similar. In 2000 or 2001 someone submitted a couple of multiples' personal websites, which put the general plural community on their radar, and then the Soulbond Sanctuary messageboard got submitted in 2002. (We definitely recall some Memory Wars-related arguments making their way onto the PoE messageboards too, with some people claiming to be psychiatrists or that their parents were psychiatrists or similar.)
We tried to stay away from ED, but some people pointed us towards specific entries a couple times. Shoiryu had an entry there, and some people who had been close to her in the past confirmed that it had to have been written by someone who knew her, probably one of the many people she had a falling-out with. The thing is, there were quite a few people/systems we could have done the same thing with if we had wanted to, but we didn't want the bad karma. It wasn't so much that we thought people had found out we'd written an article about them and retaliate, it was more that just through writing it to work out a petty grudge, we would perpetuate the idea that it was acceptable to do this to people at all. I guess the best way I can put it is "do you want to help create a world that will return your kindness to you, or a world that will come back to haunt you?" (Also we saw someone take out a weird, disproportionate grudge against one of our friends by inventing a long convoluted story about them that made its way onto ED as "Sarah Saga." That is not the kind of thing we want to even think about putting into the world.)
-Riel