This is a very nuanced take and matches with my observations.
There's a thing I've been noticing for a while now where agents provocateur (in the fictionkin case, usually people from 4chan) show up and behave horribly in a subculture, and then some of the members of that subculture who don't yet have their own strong ethical reasoning and/or follow the standards of behavior set by the people around them start emulating the agents provocateur and things get bad. I'm pretty sure that was a big part of what went wrong with Tumblr fictionkin circles. I also see this happen in serious political activist circles and it's just as terrible.
(...Not that otherkin spirituality isn't serious, either- but in the past, at least, its highly personal and decentralized nature has limited the blast radius of these tactics, until Tumblr and its junk-propagation engine.)
no subject
There's a thing I've been noticing for a while now where agents provocateur (in the fictionkin case, usually people from 4chan) show up and behave horribly in a subculture, and then some of the members of that subculture who don't yet have their own strong ethical reasoning and/or follow the standards of behavior set by the people around them start emulating the agents provocateur and things get bad. I'm pretty sure that was a big part of what went wrong with Tumblr fictionkin circles. I also see this happen in serious political activist circles and it's just as terrible.
(...Not that otherkin spirituality isn't serious, either- but in the past, at least, its highly personal and decentralized nature has limited the blast radius of these tactics, until Tumblr and its junk-propagation engine.)