So a while ago I was having trouble on tumblr with an ongoing harassment campaign (nothing interesting, just stupid fandom drama), and I was sent a lovely message recommending this forum. I decided to sign up, lurked for a bit, and just now have worked up the courage to say hi. A bit about me: I'm Kem, or Manu; either works. No pronoun preference - most people use she or they for convenience. Diagnosed with anxiety and ADHD; reasonably sure I probably am autistic as well. I have a possibly-related speech and language processing deficit, which is mostly not a problem in text, but sometimes it surprises me. Also chronically anaemic and regularly disabled by my goddamn uterus. Thank god for modern medicine. I've been stuck in the Transformers fandom since 2012 and I've enjoyed the great majority of it! Autobot4lyfe. I write a lot of fanfic, mostly for TFP/Bayverse, and I have a tumblr rp blog for a mainly-TFP Optimus Prime. The potential for worldbuilding in Transformers is endlessly fascinating and I can ramble on about my headcanons and things that happened in canon for literal hours. Other fandoms include Jak&Daxter, Bleach, One Piece, MAR, Pacific Rim and Blue Exorcist. I also write originalfic, though none of it is published or even posted. I keep having Ideas and then getting distracted by the next shiny new thing that comes along. I used to draw, but I haven't had the spoons for more than sketching lately and my tablet broke a few months ago. My favourite medium is colored pencil or digital. Psychological fictionkin and therian. I don't believe in past lives or the multiverse theory, but there are some things that I can't really describe as other than kin. My kintypes are giant ground sloths (I may have sent Seebs an ask about this once), Optimus Prime, and Alan (from MAR). I have a few friends who are also kin, but tbh the tumblr kin community in general makes me very uncomfortable, so I seldom have an opportunity to talk about kin stuff. If anyone wants to chat, though, I'm up for it! Finally, I am a small fluffy ratite birb from Middle Earth. Kiwis represent, ya.
Hey there! We've got a pretty thriving transformers fandom group over here (the thread is mostly screaming about IDW these days, but TFP and other continuities come up pretty often) and a bunch of threads for writers over in Make It So. It's nice to meet you!
Ay, thank you! :D I actually found the TF thread a while ago, read through the whole thing and wow it makes me remember why I got into this fandom in the first place! ♥ I may go join in the conversation; I'm not up to date on IDW in general but MTMTE is SO GOOD. edit: ohmygod there is a worldbuilding thread. if i'm not back in three days tell my mom i love her.
We'd love to have you! A lot of people are only caught up on MTMTE (and full disclosure, I'm still making my way through TFP :P) but crying about robots is the best pastime.
Welcome! :3 If it's okay to ask, what is it about giant ground sloths that you feel a kinship with? Like, what specifically is relatable about them? I don't know much about sloths, admittedly, so I'm kinda curious.
Whee I got buried in work, but now I'm back and I may ramble about this just a teeny bit, fair warning XD Basically for as long as I can remember, I've had this weird sensory perception thing where the brain-body map thing that tells me where my feet/hands/legs/knees/whatever are in relation to my head and chest (without needing to see it; I think it's vestibular perception?) tells me things that aren't actually true. Usually I have a pretty accurate brain-body map, but sometimes the shape of me in my head morphs into something quite different: something that's bigger, furrier, definitively not human. For most of my life I assumed that everyone felt something like it, and therefore didn't really pay attention to it, but then a couple of years ago some people on my tumblr dash were talking about otherkin... so I researched that, and while there's a lot of spiritual woo stuff hanging around the general concept, a few people described feeling something a lot like what I had. I said "Huh, that kinda makes sense," and went away satisfied that otherkin was not the entirely ridiculous concept I had previously dismissed it as being. And then, for an unrelated reason (I'm putting a load of extinct megafauna in one of my original worlds, haha) I was doing a bit of casual research on ground sloths, and I got this really crawling feeling of absolute familiarity with the things I was reading about. The non-human mental map I described above, it turns out, maps almost perfectly onto the ground sloth's general physique, or at least that which science can surmise from the family's fossil remains. It has a longish, blunt face, heavy claws, a short, thick tail, a barrel-like chest with heavy shoulders, and it's just generally frikkin huge. If I'm really paying attention to the feeling, I might unconsciously duck going through apertures, even those that are easily large enough to admit me. (For context, I'm just under 5'8", not really inconveniently tall XD) To be absolutely clear, I'm at least one of the least spiritual people you'll ever meet; I don't necessarily disbelieve in things, so much as I see no point in belief itself. If something exists or is a thing, then it is, and I don't need to believe; if it doesn't, then belief in the thing is pointless. That said, I do think that human minds do some absolutely fascinating but weird as heck things sometimes, and that's what the kin thing is for me. I've read fairly widely about human psychology and our evolutionary history, and while occasionally I find things that probably explain parts of what I've talked about above, I feel it's quite useful to have a term or set of terms that describes these things without needing to go back to the academic discussions. All of which is a long and complex way of saying that there's actually nothing that I find particularly relatable about ground sloths - although they were absolutely awesome creatures, I tend to feel the same way about most really large megafauna XD What there is, is a recognition of a thing that my brain does, which is not quite normal and also surprisingly specific. Hopefully this is somewhat helpful. :B
