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randomlycastle:

i’m not otherkin. not even slightly. i have a few otherkin Insiders sharing this head with me, but i’m not one of them.

anyway. i’m seeing a lot about a ‘kin space. and i don’t get why people are bagging the idea at all. at my local community centre, there are meetups for a whole bunch of…

Well, thing is, they *don’t* want to arrange meetups at an existing community center  that they would share with other groups, like the examples you have listed have done.  Nor do they want to set up meetups at restaurants or parks as is commonly done, and as I have suggested they try if they really need to connect with others like themselves. They want to create an entire community center exclusively for otherkin.  Their own private no-humans-allowed clubhouse.

And they want to do it with funds that nobody in the community actually has - at most, one person has stated they’re saving money up that is the difference between what they are paying for an apartment now and what they would pay for a nicer apartment.  To rent or buy a building.  Slight difference in scale, there.  Let’s be really generous and say they’re saving $1000 a month for the otherkin community center.  In comparison, renting a 1500 square foot office space in Waconia, MN (my mother lives there, and it’s one of the more rural places I can think of - its main street has four way stop signs) runs roughly $20,000 per year.  So in just under two years, you might have enough saved up for a very small space, about the size of a one or two bedroom apartment, in a fairly unpopulated area.  And would run out of funds after a year since it would take you another two years to save up a second year’s rent at that rate.  And yet people are talking about helping to design “floors” of this community center, and wanting it to include wetlands.  This isn’t remotely realistic.

The other option that’s been under discussion by several people is taking over parts of abandoned buildings and using them as otherkin spaces.  This is dangerous: abandoned buildings are, by nature, insecure.  If you broke in, others can too.  They are also frequently structurally unsound.  That’s often part of why they’re abandoned.  They may already be used by squatters, or by criminal elements, either of which can pose a threat.  And there’s also the fact that you’d be trespassing and possibly also breaking and entering: crimes.  If all that’s not enough to show why this is a bad idea, think about this: what would the public reaction to the community be if someone got hurt and/or arrested and it got out in the press that it was because otherkin were setting up shop in abandoned buildings?  People think they need shelters now?  This could make public opinion of otherkin far worse.

The final option that’s been under discussion is the creation of hidden upstairs areas in shops for otherkin.  This has the obvious flaw that there aren’t very many otherkin who own shops, first of all, let alone have sufficiently successful businesses that they could afford to set aside so much space that would normally be used for displaying inventory to customers or storing stock and designate it an otherkin community center/shelter/whatever instead.  In fact, I can’t actually think of any.

I’d like to see some realism here.  Not just pipe dreams and dangerous/illegal plans that will actually harm individuals and the community.