by Androgus

I was unsure of what to submit….However, during one boring afternoon of movie watching I came across HBO showing a movie about the Salem Witch Trials. I could not help but notice certain parallels between these women who were accused of witchcraft and those of us who are otherkin. These people were forced to live in secrecy and keep their lives in shadow. Once they had been discovered they were persecuted for their beliefs. We all must live in this fashion. The main to my little blurb here is not that we are like witches but that a lot of humanities’ entertainment industry contains such subject matter. Look at our favorite super heroes: Spiderman, Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, etc. The list continues on for more than is necessary. Now these characters have two lives; much like the double lives many of us keep. On the outside we may appear to be as “normal” as most (I use normal here for lack of a better term). The best example of “otherkin” in society’s entertainment is of course the X-Men. These people exist as more than human. Some of them are so much like animals and other things that their names derive from them: Wolverine, Cyclops, and The Phoenix (for those of you who are not gargantuan geeks like me “The Phoenix” is Jene Grey), Beast, Toad, Sabertooth, etc. Like the former list of superheroes this list can continue for ever. But the point I am making here is not the number of them but impact they have on us. Such “fantasy” shows human desire to be something more. Some of us have that something more inside us and that is what makes us otherkin. The extent of fantasy is not so deep rooted in animals or “mythical” beings but we can see it in the children’s novel about the boy wizard Harry Potter. The wizards live in secrecy to avoid another event like the above mentioned witchcraft trials. In seeing these parallels I could not help but put my ideas down on paper. The farther I delve into these similarities the more I find. Almost all of our “entertainment” literature of this century is concerned with legendary creatures and mystical powers held by what most people think are just “ordinary” people. I’m not saying that we need to get out there and tell everyone how we feel. The Salem Witch Trials shows us how detrimental that can be. We don’t need to change anything we are doing but we do need to change how others look at those of us who are different. With that I leave to draw your own conclusions. Are these characters just coincidence or is it that there may be more of us among society than we and others think?