Otakukin

[mindstalk]

I would like to go on the record as thinking that otakukin -- people who believe their set of past lives include fictional characters -- are not, in fact, crazier than your more mainstream religious or spiritual types. The invocation of parallel universes, time-travelling souls, or Dreaming-type planes needed to have the idea make some sort of sense is not crazier than the Christian Trinity who is outside of time and loves us infinitely but will send many of us to Hell for using a condom, and who decided to wait for 95% of the history of the human race before letting anyone know about this. Or who made the world 6000 years ago so as to look 4.5 billion years old. Then there's the body and blood of Christ of the Catholics, or the Protestant necessity to believe that the miracles of the Gospels are real, but not the miracles of the Catholic saints. Nor crazier than the Hindu who thinks vast mathematical and scientific truths are encoded in the Vedas. And I've never gotten neo-Paganism to make sense to me (actually, I've never quite learned what they do believe) while I figured out one otakukin justification in a flash on my own.

And as ideas ago it's a lot less morally ugly than Orthodox Jews going on about how the Torah condemns buttsex and gives them eternal title to the land of Israel or the Rapture Ready Christians hoping the world ends real soon now.

One of the communities has posts which don't seem any dumber than Christians I've seen recently going on about their faiths, and let's not go into the vicious defensiveness of some otherkin ("Hi! I'm an elf!")

Keep in mind I'm speaking as a hardcore empiricist/materialist, so "not crazier" is a rather low bar for me. But at least these people claim some sort of direct experience, rather than a "Bible is true because it's the word of God because it says so" faith-based closed loop. And hey, most fiction is better edited.

Comments

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

I was seeing mention of the soulbonders, but couldn't quite get what was up, and I'm way past rational bedtime as it is. I guessed it was something like psychic contact with the character. Oh, an otakin had a nice summary, if I can reconstruct it: soulbonding would be Character X screaming at human Y that "they got the anime wrong!" while otakukin was human Y (who is/was character X) screaming "you got the anime wrong". Anyway, by itself this seems no big deal compared to the otakin; once we're postulating semi-real fictional characters I'm not going to say contact or reincarnation is crazier.

But yeah, in that community at least the otakin seemed charmingly self-deprecating and self-aware, kind of like the liberal Christians at Making Light.

Yeah, neo-pagan as a big tent. I've run across "I'm just in it for the rituals" to vague hints of "my gods are real!" for various gods, just never delved too deeply into any of it. Also "I can really cast spells", where the poster meant not mental focusing or "raising energy" but real shapechanging. I think he criticized the Buffy show for showing shapechaning magic as being harder than protective magic. Or vice versa, it was years ago. He definitely felt they had the order wrong, though. Does my tolerance have limits? Sure does, right *there*.

[anima-mecanique.livejournal.com]

I know one or two otherkin and a couple of people who would probably call themselves that if they had had more access to the internet. Some of them seem to be into the otherkin subculture, and a couple of them have said that they avoid it because of the drama *shrug* I think there are MORE otherkin than there are otakin, so you get more people with a persecution complex.

Soulbonding just annoys me because it's a bunch of people claiming that their experience of their characters is far and above anyone else's experience of their characters, which strikes me as arrogant. They're probably not trying to be, but whatever. It's a personal impression. Yes, I have conversations with my characters in my head. Yes, my characters do really odd things that I'm not expecting. This is what characters DO.

Either that or I'm OMG secretly a soulbonder.