#luteia laments

Also, joy of joys, LycanTheory, also known as “that guy who has provably committed multiple acts of bestiality and should be in prison”, has cropped his head up on tumblr.

He’s at @mountainshep17. Wouldn’t it be a shame if he was mass-reported for bestiality and driven off-site?

I think it’d be funny.

-Southern Star

I’m barely awake right now, but I read VS’ answer, and that was… hm, pathetic, so I think I’m gonna write that off as a total loss despite the fact absolutely nobody was accusatory and everyone offered suggestions.

But taking a movie nobody cares about over the actual, major bestialist issue… yikes.

Saw Vagabond’s post. He asked for no reblogs, so I won’t, but I don’t want to go back and forth with original posts so I’m not gonna answer it. I have many thoughts on that, though, if anyone from Alt+H cares to reach out; although my position on the initiative they took hasn’t changed.

In related news, I went and crossposted that to my website. It needs updates, especially some plural stuff, and I really want to work a whole lot more on my website.

But alas. I have the final exam I’m most dreading tomorrow evening, and it has to wait. :’)

I mean, don’t get me wrong here, Goni said that the summary and reactions we’ve heard from the movie reminds him unpleasantly of freak shows, and I don’t know much about those so that’s his take on the matter, and I too would be happier if the movie hadn’t gotten made.

But ultimately… I want no spotlight. Not right now, and if we must have a spotlight, I want it on a foundation of us in control. I don’t want it built off our misery. Again.

Right so… #WolfGetsReal, huh?

I mean, none of this has really sat well to me. I’m not a therianthrope myself, but theriomythic arguably applies to me, and I am more animalistic than I let on. Species dysphoria is the one thing that affects me directly, and very little of it is social: without physical transition, which is scientifically impossible, there is no treatment nor cure for the symptoms I have.

I haven’t watched Wolf (2021), owing largely to my general disinterest in movies. It’s rare I do watch films, and I’m certainly not going to waste two hours of my time watching a movie I’m guaranteed not to like. Everything I’ve heard about it so far says that it sucks, it’s a shitty B-list movie, and has pretty well no artistic value.

Alt+H decided to call a community initiative to drown the movie’s tags talking about actual species dysphoria, owing to an interview with the director where she admitted she went out of her way not to do any research.

Now, I’m not defending the director here, because that’s a stupid move in general. But I am gonna come outright and say that I don’t think this community initiative is a good idea. Actually, let me make that slightly plainer: I think it’s a stupid, ill-thought-out idea at best, and an actively dangerous one at worst.

This is a B-list movie, with zero famous actors, that very few people are going to watch. Of those few people, most if not all of them are going to either a) think it’s a werewolf movie spliced with an ableist mental facility movie, or b) think it’s a bad allegory for queer struggles.

Literally nobody but us is going to go “hm let’s be ableist towards the delusional with ~species dysphoria~ :)” because we’re not in the spotlight outside of when we’re brought up linked to transphobia. We are very occasionally that weird guy in an internet story you heard about once, and that’s only if you’re on the internet a lot.

Now, I know where this idea came from: back earlier this year when Grimes put ‘otherkin’ in her twitter bio and changed her birthdate to that of a nuclear bomb, the otherkin community flooded the twitter tags with introductions and 101s and threads on how cool the community is. It worked quite well, I think, and it’s clear this is more of that.

We were forced into the spotlight, so we forced the spotlight to be about us, and not the misinformation. Grimes has a depressingly large following, we didn’t have a choice.

This… isn’t that. The only reason anyone would watch this movie is if they’re bored of Sundance films. Hells, it’s even released right around two very anticipated Spiderman trailers. It’s a movie destined to be overlooked, a box office flop, and forgotten.

So tell me: if we don’t actually have a spotlight, why the hell are we making one? In the twitter tag of #WolfGetsReal, I’ve seen not one but two bestialist / animal abusers trying to overtake the narrative and link therianthropy to bestiality. Right now, the therianthrope community is having a nightmare time trying to kick them out.

You’re telling me we should go viral with zero cohesiveness, focusing on therianthropy, and give them the chance to irreparably link therianthropy to bestiality? Because of a shitty B-list movie that otherwise would fade into obscurity?

No. No, this is a bad idea. If we want to go viral, this is a terrible way to do it. Don’t get me wrong here, talking about species dysphoria and writing up posts and essays and 101s is great. But doing it specifically to go viral, when we have some major predators already frothing at the mouth to steal the mic for their malicious and substantially evil purposes?

It’s ill-thought-out at best, and I cannot approve. There’s literally no upside to this. The director wouldn’t listen to us at best (if that were possible, it would have been done already), we do not have any power we can actually use, any spotlight we make right now on this issue will be immediately hijacked (and we have currently zero plan to mitigate that major issue), and making a spotlight of us being made fun of isn’t something we can turn around.

There’s no upside to doing this. If we want to talk about species dysphoria, let’s focus on that, not bring emphasis to a movie that should fade forgotten into obscurity.

I know Alt+H also noted that between this and Wild Mountain Thyme, it seems the beginning of a trend. But WMT was taken almost universally by people who aren’t us as a metaphor, and had a total of zero impact on the community. If we let this pass us by the same way, it will also have zero impact. And right now, I’ll take no attention over almost-guaranteed-to-be-bad attention.

So that’s my thoughts on that.

It’s 12:05pm right now, I’m about to go into my Java final. In two hours, someone harass me to make a post on the hashtag Alt+H is trying to get people on, because I have a post about it, and just need to write it down, but can’t do that right this second now that I’m awake.

Someone harass me about 2:30pm PST / GMT -8:00. I’ll do my thing.