Sevenfold Silence

Now, I am pretty much expecting a whole bunch of you to go ‘Wait a minute, goblins can be whatever we want them to be! There is no one way a thing should be! That would be RESTRICTING things and what if someone else wanted to be a goblin who wasn’t small, irritating or ugly???”. Well. Wouldn’t that sort of be like saying a horse can have six legs if you want it to, because saying they only have four legs is, like, restricting our creativity and stuff? I dunno, man, I’m just throwing this out there, you know?

(from a seriously pretty interesting post and line of conversation over at the LJ otherkin community)

That's an interesting point that froudgoblin brings up, although I don't really know how much I agree with it.

Ultimately I guess it's a question of philosophy, one of platonic forms. Or, alternately, "bad birds and better birds", to draw from a slightly different field. (A robin and an ostrich are both birds, but chances are you think the robin's a better example of a bird.)

We already accept, by virtue of living in a real world of imperfect things, that virtually nothing is a perfect example of its form. A horse is a four-legged running mammal. But Sleipnir, the eight-legged mythological horse, is still a horse. A mutant six-legged horse is still a horse. Eight Belles, the Kentucky Derby runner who broke both her legs upon crossing the finish line, couldn't run at the end before she was put down--but she was still a horse. Even though a horse is a mammal that runs.

Ultimately this is the big question of what it means to be otherkin, even bigger than "where did we come from" or "why are we here". Definitions are strange, fuzzy things. Where do they stop? Western dragons are winged scaly mythological creatures, who live in lairs and hoard gold and are secretive. Can a human being, who likes lairs and hoards shiny things and is secretive, realistically describe themselves in any sense as being a dragon? How fuzzy is the definition?

If we accept the constraint that a mutant six-legged horse isn't a horse because its external form is unhorselike, then virtually no one I know of within the otherkin community qualifies as anything special. I'm deceiving myself, because I don't have literal physical wings. The OP is deceiving herself because she's short and swarthy. Both of us are liars. Any doctor would tell us--rightly so--that we are both fully biologically human, and that's the end of that.

The otherkin movement, though, by its very nature, is based on the fact that superficiality and stereotypes and 'common wisdom' aren't the be-all end-all. If that mutant six-legged horse runs around neighing, then damn it, it's a horse. If I feel wings and a strange yearning for quiet green places and peculiar elegance, then I'm fey. If the OP feels "small, irritating, and ugly" (her wonderful, wonderful words), and connects that with a goblin-current, then the OP's a goblin. If someone else doesn't feel that, but can reasonably make a case for having a goblin-nature, then hie's a goblin, too--just a different kind.

This doesn't mean that all claims should go perfectly unquestioned. If there really isn't anything remotely goblin-like about our hypothetical wannabe, then maybe hie should step back and reconsider mightily what's up. But to risk shutting somebody out of one's phenotype, merely because they don't match the stereotype or your perceptions of it, smacks of weird hypocrisy. (Not that the OP is hypocritical.)

Hidebound checklists don't suit a subculture like ours. We don't think outside of the box; we burst violently out of the box, trample it, and bury it. Definitions are good, but they're only useful inasmuch as they're fuzzy--and denying a definition's fuzziness is, for us, a recipe for trouble.