[Free Write] Why You Should Put Up With Na'Vi Otherkin

[krinndnz]

So now we've got Na'vi Otherkin - and the obligatory bashing. Unoriginal. Pathetic. Insane

Comments

[krinndnz]

EDIT: Which Golden Rule? Well, they both fit well inside a Tweet! :D
Exactly! This shit ain't particularly difficult.

As for cults, yes. That's part of why there was a dig at Scientology in the rant. There's also the Hale-Bopp guys, who are one of the examples that come to mind easily for me. That's also why I want that state of self-actualization, of agency-belonging-narrative, for people - someone who already has that is pretty much impossible to recruit into a cult.

[darkheartsclub]

you know what I want as an unobtainable dream?
I want to see a fantasy world that is at it's core totally mundane
I want magic with a comonplace storyline, I want to see a future full of aliens that isn't a fucking war. I'd really like to see a focus on public affairs,politics and the like for a goddamn space movie, fuck it even a teen drama set in the far future would be interesting
the best works of science fiction I have set my eyes on have been WAKE and Planetes, and as far as medevil crap goes I suppose Berzerk, it was really nice to read something so well put together and that actually held a sense of something honest to god core moral.

this really dosent bear any relevance but fuck it

[krinndnz]

You should totally write about the thing you want to see.

And it's plenty relevant. Glad to have you commenting here.

[heron61]

Well said, I largely agree. Speaking as both a long-time reader and creator of fantasy and a member of the otherkin community, one other aspect of the Na'vi otherkin is that the Na'vi don't exist in a vacuum. In addition to being obvious Native American (or insert your favorite conquered hunter gatherers & early agriculturalists here) analogs, they also draw from a long tradition of portrayals of elves in Medieval and later Western media. So, someone who is drawn (as clearly many people are) to the archetype of the elf (which, in the modern otherkin sense has been going on since the Tolkien revival of the late '60s), who hasn't encountered it all that much elsewhere, may find it in Avatar.

[ff00ff]

I sat through Avatar wondering if I aught to get up, denounce the screen in front of everyone and march out for the way it used the noble savage archetype. I watched it not more than twenty miles away from a settlement on an Indian reservation full of appalling horrific poverty, and the idea that we herded these people into such ghettos so we could sit in our theaters and watch silly fairy stories about what they used to be like, while simultaneously mocking their modern incarnation for not living up to the myth we created out of their past sort of made me dizzy.

[krinndnz]

I half expect to see wooden statues of them outside cigar stores any day now.
Ice burn! Seriously, that is so good a line that I'm stealing it.

[krinndnz]

If you care to know more about the Otherkin deal in general, I'd suggest making the acquaintance of baxil, who is compared to me -
a: much more personally invested in the matter
b: much more involved in the Otherkin social web
c: has written much, much more about it.

Standard link set

[baxil]

Also worth investigating for more in-depth reading:

My Draconity FAQ
lupabitch's Field Guide To Otherkin (the closest thing the community has to a scholarly overview, based on 100+ surveys; self-selected respondents, but it's a good overview of a niche this size, and not meant to be statistically significant)
The Therianthrope and Otherkin Booklist

[paka]

This really connects to some of my problems with discussions of atheism and spirituality. Maybe anything even vaguely religious is completely delusional; I'm not very good at having faith.

But the most basic and least numinous reasons anyone goes to religion are that they would like to be important and meaningful and have an identity in a world so focused on destroying identity and meaning, and because they would like some chunk of the world to be something which isn't sad oppressive bullshit. One problem I find with how atheism is usually phrased is that people get so focused on religious delusions that they forget that it'd be a lot easier to let those go, if the world wasn't such sad bullshit

[krinndnz]

My personal opinion is that the whole Otherkin thing has the potential to be a big learning opportunity about transience, about permanence, about ego, and maybe by hanging the "I want to be a noble savage" archetype or whatever on something nobody'd heard of before a coupla months back, maybe these guys will be less likely to fall into the trap of literalism.

I am totally with you on that. I hold out much hope.

Thank you for this commentary, it adds sympathy that I feel about the matter, but that I was very badly expressing in the original post.