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

[elynne.livejournal.com]

I can't speak to Otakukin - I don't know any, or if I do, they haven't admitted it - but I know a bunchload of Otherkin (half-raises hand) and all I can say is that, like virtually everything else in life, it totally, utterly depends on the Otherkin in question, and to a large extent on where they hang out and who they listen to. Some Otherkin are very loudly defensive about everything; some (of us, I like to think) are quiet, laid-back, more than willing to discuss such stuff reasonably, and just as willing to simply walk away from what we percieve as strident hysteria, blatant trolling, or otherwise completely untenable situations.

Me, I think that Otakukin... how to put it politely. I think they've jumped to conclusions, generally speaking. I do know that, on the one hand, wish-fulfilment is an extremely powerful drive for us humans, and we're willing to jump through seriously crazy hoops to feel like we belong, safe and wanted. On the other hand, regardless of your faith, real spiritual understanding is a long, difficult, not always sparkly fluffy bunny journey; it takes fucking years, and you'll never really know until you die (maybe), and you have to be willing to boldly and honestly question your bedrock assumptions. But, y'know... easier to say "I'm a reincarnation of Buffy the Vampire Slayer!", just as it's easier to say "Jesus loves me and His blood will save me from Eternal Damnation (TM)!" or "Allah knows everything in His infinite wisdom and has assigned me a place at His side in Paradise (TM)!" or whatever else.

So, I guess it can be summed up that I think that Otakukin are in general latching on to "easy" explanations, and wallowing in their own imaginations, rather than... doing that other thing, you know. With the thinking. And stuff.

For bonus fun, I give my religion as Polypantheistic Zen Discordian agnostic, which roughly translates that I may or may not believe in a variety of different gods simultaneously, and I'm not sure it matters anyway. I put great value in personal experience, because that's ultimately all I have to go on, and I've had personal experiences that lend credence to some fairly wacky idea(r)s; but I wouldn't say that it's anything that would, fr'ex, convince Randi enough to part with a big wad of cash, or that couldn't be explained by a combination of coincidence, a very active imagination, and the Power of Wishful Thinking (TM).

... I'm sleepy. :P

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Not that I want to get into an argument about a subculture I don't know much about, but a journey of years and questioning assumptions don't seem inconsistent with some of the otakin stories I was reading last night. And digging new pits in the geek hierarchy hardly seems like the easy way out. Some of them seem to be independent re-inventions, too, along the lines of "oh, there are others like me" rather than "ooh, cool idea, I'll be an otakukin too!"

Basically they, talking about themselves, sounded like any other spiritual seeker, (in my admittedly limited experience) but talking about being Inuyasha instead of having God in their heart. And my reaction is that the crazy starts the minute you walk past public empiricism into private empiricism (unshareable experience) or worse, pure faith. In those areas all you can judge by is logical consistency and effect on their lives and behavior, and they seem to come out pretty well there.

Plus I don't see why spiritual journeys have to be long and difficult. What's wrong with having instant revelations? I don't fetishize difficulty, only testability, and that's been left way behind.

Having read Sandman and played Changeling is probably a big prep for me; a notion of a Dreaming eases the whole "fictional characters are real" thing.