Puzzle Wood by Criss_shady2007

unhinged thirty days of otherkin challenge, day 6: does your kintype migrate?

no migrating. i think we go into dormancy with the forest in the colder months. i wish i could go into dormancy in this human shape... big nap.

day 7: sleepy or awakey?

in the hottest and coldest times of the year i am. sleepy. when the weather is milder, i am awakey!

The moon being illuminated by light reflected off the Earth during the total eclipse [OC]

my fictionkintype is psychological in nature, so it's a bit funny to me that i talk about it in metaphysical terms.

in reality, i shaped the identity of [sleepyhead]. but i think about it as a past life that helped to shape me. i may not have that holy courage, but the soul lives on in me.

From Ursula K. Le Guin’s Cat Dreams. Illustrated by S. D. Schindler.

Psychological therian not as in "this one circumstance from my childhood made me this one species" but as in "millions of tiny things over the course of my entire life from birth to well into adulthood added up to create a nonhuman identity that likely continues to evolve as my psyche changes, some of which I can identify but many of which will get lost as memories of unremarkable life events seemingly unrelated to my nonhumanity"

Territory, and What it Is to Be a Dragon

That last essay I reblogged got me thinking about what being dragon really means to me, what the core of it is, so here I am writing.

(Obviously my experiences of draconity and what it means to be a dragon are not going to be universal. When I say "dragon" in this post, I mean specifically my species of dragon; I just don't know what we call ourselves in our own tongue, so I only have dragon to call it.)

Disclaimer aside:

What is it to be a dragon?

Dragon is many things, many small things that come together to form a larger picture. Or at least, that's how dragon-in-human-skin is.

Flight, for one. Flight is the first thing I remember wanting so badly that it hurt all the way down to the core of my bones. What is there to say about it? It's home, it's life; a grounded dragon is a dead dragon. Flight is hard work, yes, but the sky is where we are safest, where the only thing that can touch us is another dragon, and it's difficult for even them to approach unnoticed. Hunting from above is the safest and most effective way to do it. Patrolling the territory is easiest when one doesn't have to contend with any obstacles but the currents of the wind.

I have to concur with Rook (@/words-of-wolf) in that aforementioned essay; the violence in me does not come from the hunt, it comes from the territory. Dragons are viciously territorial creatures, more often than not willing to die for our claim, our lair, our hoard. But the hunt... the hunt is swift, and lethal, and does not strike dragonbrain as particularly violent. A hunt isn't a fight. I don't know whether dragon!me thought of my prey as beings capable of fear and pain; we were sort of sapient (enough so to have names, at least), but only sort of.

Territory, though. Territory is core to being dragon, for me. A dragon needs to claim things and places as mine, and it will, whether or not that claim is appropriate. Much like a parrot, if it doesn't have an appropriate outlet, it will make an inappropriate one (and sometimes it will do so even if it is given an appropriate outlet - despite having an actual territory my brain likes to claim any room I spend a significant amount of time in as mine, even if it's technically shared space, and I've almost lashed out at a coworker for the crime of turning the fan off in my room when it was just as much his room as mine). There is a certain amount of possessiveness to a dragon that is inescapable.

My mother often questions why dragons hoard gold. I can talk about courting behaviors, I can talk about how it theoretically proves you're able to protect something precious to a mate, but in the end, the answer is simply because we must. Hoard is core to us, as much as allogrooming is to a primate or hunting is to a cat. My hoard serves no purpose now; I have no other dragons to court even if I wanted to. But still I am driven to hoard nonetheless, just as a cat is driven to hunt no matter whether it's actually hungry or not. Dragonbrain only sort of cares about why territory and hoard are important, how they feed and protect and offer mating opportunities. It just knows that they are important, and that it will fight to the death to defend them - why only sort of matters.

This is, I think, a lot of where my draconic pride comes from. Draconic pride is something we talk about in draconic spaces with some regularity; whatever the kind of dragon, there's more often than not some amount of pride and vanity associated with being a dragon, any kind of dragon. It's instinctive for many of us. It's probably culturally learned for all of us. But there is also a sense of natural pride that comes with this is mine, none can take it from me, I think. Pride, too, is core to draconity, in all its flawed glory, but it is integrally tied with these things, and perhaps that's why it's so core to draconity. (Perhaps that's why it's so common as well - I've rarely met a dragon who isn't some degree of territorial.)

Tech Fun Fact #7

The term “kin”, in contexts of fictionkin or otherkin, actually originated from a Lord of the Rings forum! Some members of the forum felt as if they where spiritually elves from the series, and thus coined the term “Elfkin”. When other kintypes appeared, Elfkins assigned them as “Otherkin”, which is where the term comes from!

Tower by saminspeer on Flickr.