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Being 'Kin Without A 'Heart

Written by Max on October 28th, 2024.

I think I have an interesting disconnect between being otherkin and being otherhearted. I see people who feel as though the two terms are nearly indistinguishable, and for some reason it's not like that for me! There's a clear line between them in my brain, and I wanna journal about my personal experience with that.

I'm a velociraptor, velociraptor therian, raptorkin, raptorkind, a prehistoric bird, a wereraptor. I use those words interchangeably, since they all convey the proper information: I'm a raptor. I also strongly identify as human. I have two species, equal in value, and they fluctuate in intensity - in my daily life, I'm content to see myself as human, and my raptor side is almost a separate creature entirely, but not quite. It's a median headmate, an important part of me, and also different from me. We are the same until we are not.

And I'm not raptorhearted, even when I'm only partly identifying as a raptor, when I'm feeling more human. I don't identify with raptors, with the traits humans have given them or with their reconstructed biology - I don't feel a sense of belonging, or home, or love for their species in a way that's beyond what I feel for other animals. Raptors are, for some strange reason, not very special to me. I just happen to be one.

Even when I'm not a raptor, when I'm a human with a raptor side and raptor instincts, I don't relate to my raptor brain - that's why I separate it from me! I don't feel a sense of familiarity with it, beyond the familiarity of being it and knowing how it works from being it.

Other raptors aren't inherently family to me. I'll call them cousins, as an affectionate shorthand, because they're like me and not quite the same, but I don't feel a sense of caring for them simply because they're raptors. I feel familiar with them because they're like me - I enjoy seeing how much we're alike, what ways we might differ! But I don't deeply care about them, in the same way someone who's raptorhearted might.

Here, for contrast, let me tell you about how I experience being fictionhearted with a particular canon, and why I'm confident in calling that a hearttype.

My heartcanon, the fictional canon which I'm connected with, is a personally-created alternate universe of the video game Detroit: Become Human, which I've named Detroit, Machina. I've named it, given it a different title, because it's so fundamentally important to me and feels so different from the original source from which it was derived that calling DBH in general my heartcanon feels painfully wrong.

I don't identify as any character from Machina. I don't live in Detroit, I don't come from this canon, but I see myself so deeply in it that it's my canon. I identify with the beats of the story, with the characters and their struggles, with the joys and failures and everything about creating it. I say I have a heartcanon because I could tell someone about it as a story, as a fanfic, and it would not convey the depth of how this story is embedded into my psyche. I would not be the same person if I hadn't written about it for years of my life, put pieces of myself into it. I'm not fictionkind, I'm not anyone in this story, and the story is an integral part of me anyway. I have such strong feelings about it that I don't know how to put it to words, and I don't feel comfortable trying in a public post. It's important to me. If you told me I could never talk about Machina again, I would crumble to ash.

Contrast that with being a raptor. If you were to tell me I could never have any piece of dinosaur paraphernalia ever again, I would shrug. They're cute, sure, but I don't care about raptors that intensely. I would be just as disappointed if you said I couldn't ever have any cat paraphernalia, and I'm not a cat in any alterhuman sense.

Basically - I don't care about raptors in such a strong, personally intense way that they've changed who I am. I am a raptor, and that's changed who I am, and that doesn't mean I love them. And that's perfectly okay.

-- (This second part was posted on Tumblr as a reblog, and I've added it here as a relevant second part to the essay!) --

I think it's interesting that I don't care much about raptors. Because my relationship with humanity as a species of mine could probably be said to also contain 'hearted feelings? I love humanity so much that it's a part of me. For all our faults, I genuinely cherish human beings. I care about them, and I recognize that they're not special to everyone in the world, and they're still important to me.

Raptors? They're a wonderful family of animals, don't get me wrong, and I'm jokingly biased towards saying raptors are neat because I am a raptor, but I just... don't care that much about them in comparison. A raptor is as interesting to me as a shark, or a mole, or a lion - wonderful animals in their own rights, very interesting, and not the sort that's embedded themselves in my life forever, except for how I'm a raptor. Raptorishness is mundane in its existence for me.

Some of my friends and acquaintances drop dinosaur pictures in my messages pretty often, because they know I'm a raptor, and it's very sweet and touching, and I love that they're thinking of me. I enjoy being recognized as a raptor! But liking raptors is not a core part of who I am as a person. I don't care about the dinosaurs I'm sent just because they're dinosaurs - I care about them because they are a display of my friends' sincere acceptance and love for me, even if I don't have many opinions about the atrociraptor skull I was shown beyond, "Hell yeah, that's a cool skull!"

And I think it's interesting to compare my feelings on species identity with those of my headmates. Jude is rather ambivalent about being an android, and they don't usually feel any specific joy or familiarity or protectiveness towards robots. They tend to feel a bit estranged from many other machines, since they also identify as human, and media with robotic characters has a 50/50 chance of being exhaustingly unrelatable to them. And Gavin, the only guy here with one single species, actively likes being human and likes humanity in basically the same way I do.

So we all have different relationships between "being our species" and "having a strong connection to other members of our species" - it's interesting!