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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   13527 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 16, 2026

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OTHERKINS ARE BACK! This time in pog form Spanish!

In case you don't know/remember what an otherkin is, it's a person who self-identifies as an animal (other than homo sapiens, that is) or a mythical creature (dragons, angels, etc). The centroid example of an otherkin would have been Shiro Ulv, the "on all levels except physical, I am a wolf" guy.

Once, around 12 years ago, they were central to the tumblr ecosystem to the culture war and to discussions around neo-pronouns. Then around 2018, possibly connected with the porn ban on tumblr, the identity sort of died off. Most of them reabsorbed into some kind of trans or agender identity (Shiro Ulv himself is now a trans woman) and the only surviving neopronoun is "they".

But now they are back, except this time it's in latam. The phenomenon seems to have started as a viral trend on spanish-speaking TikTok and then spread to the real world, all over latin america, enough that people are again talking about them. The name they are now known by in spanish is therians, not otherkins, which is a name that existed even back then but was less used. For example here they are being talked about in Argentina, Mexico and Peru. Argentinians therians seem to be particularly out of control, one supposedly bit a man and a girl was rape-sniffed by a pack of feral therians, both could be fake, I don't know, but they were funny anyway.

If it spreads back to the anglophone world, remember that you read it here first.

When I was somewhat deep in the furry fandom, circa 1997-2003, therian was the new fancy word for “furry lifestyler,” and otherkin was for non-furry species dysphorics who felt they should have been born elves, hobbits, or other fantasy/D&D species/races.

The first time I remember it leaking out into normie culture was the Na’vikin inspired by James Cameron’s Avatar.

Relevant news report from San Antonio, Texas from 2010 or so:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=T7PFhI3RR_k

I've never seen much reason to view otherkins as anything beyond a furry roleplay. Yeah the spiritual elements are stupid, but spiritual elements are pretty much always stupid. They're roleplaying being animals in the same way that someone speaking in tongues is roleplaying being filled by their holy Spirit.

There are people who will never understand dysphoria and cannot bring themselves to believe such modes of mind can exist.

To me, this is like the aphantasic disbelieving I can actually have a picture in my mind of a horse spinning in three dimensions while galloping.

Therians are just a furry subculture and furries are just a subculture of the set of all people throughout history that have linked their identities with particular animals. It's not really "new" behavior, it's just the modern version of Grugg refusing to take the lionskin pelt off during sex

Yes, I generally find that "heretofore-unheard-of modern degeneracy" is a bad framework for thinking about this kind of thing, when it would be better to remember the nearly forgotten examples from antiquity, and think of them as regressions. Trans women are equivalently just the modern version of Grugg the castrated male temple prostitute; "multiple systems" are just the modern version of Grugg stalking around the village and gibbering, possessed by fifty demons. These aren't new challenges to the Christian order; they’re reemerging aspects of human nature that Christianity stamped out pretty well.

We had a moral panic about "quadrobers" in Russia a few years ago. Surprised to hear this fad reached Latin America only now.

It's probably not new there, it's just a random fad resurgence.

My non-Hispanic US middle schoolers have been talking about kids at their school doing this for at least two years, for what it's worth.

See also 'litterboxes in schools'.

Therians (the modern iteration) have been a thing in Finland for some years now.

Your link is broken.

url=

Should work now.

TinyURL? What year is it? IIRC, link shorteners are even banned on Reddit due to their potential for causing problems.

All you have to do is delete the "url=" that you accidentally added at the start of the link.

I feel like the Therian nomenclature has been around for a while. Maybe it's ahving a resurgence in the LATAM community, though.

Yeah, I practiced back in the usenet wereweb and werewolfdotcom days; while the modern version has drifted a bit just as the late-90s early-00s one itself was drifting from some of the goofier forms of crystal witch neopaganism, it's still pretty recognizable. It's weird and I wouldn't recommend it, but it's been around for a long time.

Dunno enough about the current or historic South/Central American therian stuff to comment there, but there's a decent number of South American furries, so it wouldn't be a huge surprise.

I consume a decent amount of Spanish language social media and it’s everywhere right now.

Explaining this to my older hispanic family and friends is very funny. A tumblr blast from the past.

This doesn't pass the *ahem* sniff test. The word "therian" isn't pronounceable in Spanish because Spanish doesn't have the /θ/ phoneme. So a bunch of Argentinians calling themselves "therians" sounds about as likely as them calling themselves "latinxes" (which is equally unnatural in Spanish and a phenomenon that native Spanish speakers are either unaware of or mock us gringos for). My guess is that to the extent this phenomenon exists in the hispanic world, it is pure "cultural imperialism" from the ultra-online-left imposing "therian values" on the backwards latams.

Of course, I didn't watch the youtube videos, so I could be way off base.

Spanish regularly pronounces the letters 'th' as 't'.

I don't speak the language but the Spanish wikipedia does use the word, Teriantropia. Plenty of uses in the wild too.

It is real in the sense that it exists, but it seems to be blown way out of proportion.

The more conspiratorially minded believe it's a media op to distract from congress passing a labor law that will significantly reduce some workers rights.

This doesn't pass the ahem sniff test. The word "therian" isn't pronounceable in Spanish

They typically pronounce it with an hard /t/.

Spanish doesn't have the /θ/ phoneme

Wikipedia disagrees with you.

Here's the technically correct version: Spanish doesn't have any native words with a "th" in them pronounced as /θ/. The Castillian dialect pronounces "c" as /θ/ sometimes, but that's not relevant here.

Russian doesn't have this sound either. That doesn't stop us from using Greek roots.

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A2%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%B0%D0%BD%D1%82%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%BF%D1%8B_(%D1%81%D1%83%D0%B1%D0%BA%D1%83%D0%BB%D1%8C%D1%82%D1%83%D1%80%D0%B0)

Spanish uses plenty of greek roots too. They just adapt them to Spanish orthography, and this has not been adapted.

Recent loanwords typically don't get adapted ortographically. Even an older one like hacker is only rarely written in the RAE prescribed way (jáquer).

Eh? I'm sure Fortnite and Roblox use sounds not common in many languages, yet their popularity is nigh-ubiquitous. I think this is a very weak argument to make, the internet is a series of tubular superhighways for memes.

Fortnite/Roblox are examples of Western imperialists pushing their culture on the global south, not an indigenous cultural phenomenon. I'm using this language ironically because it is a famous fail-mode of the American-left to insist on calling hispanic people latinx. You can tell that the latinx word is not native to spanish culture because it doesn't use spanish orthography, and so native-speaking spanish people don't know what to do with the term.

I'm not doubting that there are people in Argentina calling themselves "therians". What I am doubting is that these therians are people that could meaningfully be called hispanic. In the same way, I am sure there are people in Argentina who call themselves latinx, but these people are not meaningfully hispanic. They are people who grew up in the US and were forced to re-immigrate back to their latam home for whatever reason and are trying to reconcile with the fact that everyone in their "home country" considers them foreign gringos.

To the extent that there exist therians in latam, my prediction is that they are people who got removed from the US and have tied their identity to American leftist politics. I do not believe that any "grassroots" movement in a hispanic country would come up with this term. The correct Spanish of this from-greek-word would be "teriano", and that's what real hispanic (tm) personas would actually call themselves.

Are you really going to No True Scotsman this? Nobody disputes that these guys are unusual, and as far as I can see, nobody says this is particularly common. The OP says that it's (probably) happened at a number greater than zero (but probably less than a few hundred).

If they are of South American heritage (whatever mix of indigenous and Spanish ancestry is common), live in South America, and speak Spanish predominantly, this is a bad argument.

That's like saying furries can't be American because they're a very small proportion of the population, and have different tastes and values from the majority. It's less than helpful. There are no broad claims being made by OP, it's a slightly interesting cultural curiosity, like the Japanese subculture that tries to be American as fuck (red tailed hawk screech) or those dudes somewhere in Africa who dress up in leather jackets in 32° weather. Them being uncommon doesn't mean they don't exist.

Yes, I am going to "No True Hispanic" this.

I'm not calling these people "weird". I am calling them "not hispanic"[1] because they are not using Spanish. And I am making a prediction on their backgrounds based on this observation. For example, "True Hispanics" write "furros" instead of "furries" because furros conforms with Spanish orthography. My understanding is that the word "furry" first entered the Spanish lexicon through American heritage Spanish speakers and then native hispanics started using the word furro (although I admit to not being an expert on the linguistics of Spanish sex fetish vocabulary), and I expect a similar phenomenon to be happening here.

[1] In all my posts I'm using the word hispanic to mean Spanish speaking as that is literally what the word means in Spanish. I'm not trying to use the word to imply racial/ethnic ties or to mean latam-culture-adjacent the way it is sometimes used in the US.

TIL I'm not Finnish because I regularly use words that have the letter c, q, w or z (none of which exist in native words).

Frankly, your so-called argument is just complete bullshit.

Frankly, your so-called argument is just complete bullshit.

I prefer mierda. But you're probably right.

Battles over loanwords are pretty common: The Académie Francaise (nominally the authority on French as a language, but opinions differ) would love to excommunicate Francophones who use "email" rather than «courriel». IIRC Spanish as a language isn't quite as centralized given among other things how many countries use it: a decent chunk of its speakers even call it "Castilian".

French is pretty much an extreme example in the language purity debate. In Finnish there is little to no controversy in using such loanwords but they are inevitably changed into a finnish style pronunciation, usually without changing the spelling. So c becomes k or s, q becomes k, w becomes v and z becomes ts. It goes even further than that in some common names so that the name is pronounced as a best effort pronunciation without the spelling being changed. Thus curry sauce gets written "curry-kastike" and pronounced as "karri-kastike" (but if you were to actually write it like that, it would sound like sauce made from a person named Karri).

Which is all to say that cultures take up loanwords all the time without necessarily caring one bit about the root or changing the spelling. Doubly so for anything related to internet or recent trends.

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