Hi anon!

First off, I want to say that I cannot tell you how to identify, or what words to use.

You should always use the words that you find most meaningful to describe yourself and your experiences. Your comfort with yourself, and your feelings about how you identify always over-ride how other people feel about the words you use to describe yourself.

That said, I am one of the fictionkin who’d prefer people not use “kinnie” or “kinning” or refer to themselves as “kin” to mean that they deeply relate to a character.

I want to be clear that I ONLY feel this way because people outside the community seeing people use “kin/kinnie/kinning” that way distorts the perception of what being kin is outside the community, and makes it harder for me to explain what I mean when I say that I’m fictionkin.

The feeling in the broad fictionkin community is that someone should call themselves kin when they believe that they really, experientially are in some way that character. Kin is something you are, not something you relate to.

The word that the fictionkin and alterhuman community at large uses to refer to the type of connection you’re talking about is: hearttype, though copinglink, faceclaim, or comfort character might also be correct under certain circumstances.

🔸Hearttype: A character that you identify strongly with, but do not identify as. A character you feel like you have a lot internally, emotionally, psychologically, or situationally with. A character you intensely feel personal commonality of some kind with. 

Again, you should use the words that are meaningful to you to describe yourself, and I can’t tell you how to identify or what words to use. But as originally created, the term ‘kin’ (whether fictionkin or otherkin) means something you are in your core being.

You can read more about different terms for different ways to relate to fictional characters in this post which I’m also about to reblog!