In previous journal entries I’ve loosely touched on matters pertaining to the topics of otherkin and dragonkin. It’s not a belief system that I personally subscribe to or align with; I dabbled in it for a period some 20+ years ago and while I did have the luck of making a few good friends I ultimately decided it wasn’t “for me”. In a general sense the way I talk about my dragon identity might imply that she’s an otherkin representation of me, and for a period I really tried to make that puzzle piece fit, but she’s more of a subconscious thing than a spiritual connection or anything like that. (Further reading: “The Dragon with No Name”) That said, I don’t necessarily discredit the people who do believe that in some intangible or abstract way that they “are” a dragon. (Speaking historically of course, these days the concept of “otherkin” as a spiritual identity has been cheapened and trampled into the dirt by legitimate dumbasses. Anyone who’s showed up recently claiming to be something they aren’t I just instantly assume is full of shit.)
I’m a Christian, I do have my own set of beliefs about what mankind is, where we came from, and where we will go when our time here has ended. Everyone has their own outlook on these topics even if their answer is a nihilistic “we evolved from pond scum and when you die there’s nothing but darkness that you won’t be conscious to experience”. That’s a valid assessment too. I’m not the type of person to tell others my beliefs are the only correct ones and everyone else is a heathen who is wrong. Generally. A good many ancient cultures and native peoples had very close connections to the natural world. Animals such as deer and wolves played a pivotal role in their societies to the point that in many cases they were literally deified. Dragons are a type of beast that I feel fall into that category. The things they symbolize varied greatly across cultures but it was always a peculiar thing to me that these massive reptilian animals that have never been proven to actually exist permeated what amounts to the entire civilized world centuries ago in a time where cultural exchange wasn’t an everyday thing. They had to come from somewhere.
This is all to say that when someone, twenty years ago, would tell me that they identified as a dragon on a metaphysical level my reaction to them wasn’t to just call bullshit on those claims. I don’t know what the fuck happens after you die, nobody does. Anyone who claims they do is a shyster trying to get something from you. I could be wrong about my beliefs in Christ, maybe when I die there really is just nothing. Or maybe the Hindus are the ones who are right and when you die you just keep being reincarnated as something else and your soul never goes to an afterlife. You could even tell me that you were a dragon in a past life and maybe under a very specific set of circumstances I might buy that. There’s a lot of planets out there, Earth cannot possibly be the only one with life on it. Do I think it’s very highly unlikely that a theoretical dragon who lived on an as-of-yet undiscovered planet could be reincarnated as a human on Earth? Yes. But, you can’t exactly prove that is 100% impossible, either. Maybe there is a dragon planet. Maybe reincarnation is a thing. Maybe the higher concept of life itself is not beholden to the conventions of time and space as we understand them.
But I do know one very important thing about dragons: They have never, at any point, existed here on Earth.
People have drawn and written about them for centuries, but there is zero fossil record to claim that the creature we commonly understand to be a dragon – a reptilian vertebrate with six appendages, two of which are wings that were capable of flight – has ever walked the Earth. You can tell me you may have been a dragon in a past life on another planet and while I’d be suspicious of that I wouldn’t call you an idiot to your face. But if you were to tell me you were a dragon in a past life and that life took place right here in my backyard I honestly cannot entertain the possibility of that. You’re either just LARP’ing for fun, you’re delusional, or you’re straight up lying for attention. One of those conclusions is lighthearted. One of them is actively malicious. The remaining one could be either of them depending on the context.
A person I used to know was very adamant that before he was born as a human he lived an entire previous life as a dragon. Here. This happened in a European country, of course, because they have castles there. Dragons love castles. Initially I just assumed this to be a kind of “in character” thing that some furries like to do because they’re just “always on”, which is annoying but autism is a funny thing sometimes. No, this person was being genuine in his statements, as genuine as you could be about something that is demonstrably untrue. To this day I do not actually know if he was delusional or malicious. He was a very well connected person and an expert manipulator though, so he certainly wasn’t an idiot. He had to have known what he was doing and know that the words coming out of his mouth were patently crazy. The last time I spoke to this person, which is approaching a decade ago as of this journal being posted, he still believed this to whatever degree that meant to him.
So, I don’t believe something like that is possible. Something else that always rubbed me the wrong way was when someone would be friends with someone else and you’d read their profile pages and they’d claim they were “family”. I’m not talking about that weird pseudo-RP stuff that youth on the internet used to do when they’d make an online house and assign familial roles to their friends. I’m also not talking about calling someone your brother because you have such a close interpersonal relationship with him that you consider him one. And, I’m also not talking about that weird sexual thing where people refer to someone as their “daddy”. I’m specifically talking about the notion of “I knew this person in a past life, they are/were my [blank]”. Really? How would you go about determining that? Who broke the ice on that topic? Did one of you see the other’s dragonkin avatar and say “wait a minute I know them” and when they looked at yours they said the same thing? That seems very unlikely.
Let’s back up a second. Earlier I did say I was unwilling to discredit the idea of reincarnation even if that meant, hypothetically, that a being who lived on another planet died and was reborn somewhere else entirely (i.e. Earth). Yes, I did say that. What’s the time frame on that, however? How long does it take a soul to travel across the universe? Is it instantaneous? Does it take a thousand years? A million? A billion? If this thought experiment requires there to be more planets than Earth that can support life then it stands to reason that there’s probably more than just the two planets from this example. In theory, there’s an unlimited number of them. Tell me then, what is the likelihood that two dragons could exist at the same exact time in whatever world they live on, presumably die at different times, and then just so happen to be reincarnated as two humans of approximately the same age who both live on the same planet (Earth) and who also remember enough about their past lives to recognize each other purely on a drawing they saw on the internet?
Do you see where I am going with this? Now tell me the likelihood of this happening with three people. I would imagine if something like this were even calculable at all the chances would be astronomically low with two people. Adding a third would bring that probability so far down that the term “rounding error” would be several magnitudes too large to describe it.
Something’s not right here. Someone started this chain of events and other people bought into it for whatever reason. This little network of people are not hypothetical. The concepts and arguments are though, in a general sense, but this is a real world example from my time in the fandom. You have these three people who claim to remember each other from a previous life, and the third one was added to the circle quite a while after the first two made their initial connection. The guy who unironically claimed to be a European dragon? Yeah, he’s not one of the three people in this group but knew them and was, in keeping with the weird family dynamic analogies, a “kissing cousin”. He had a very strange way of describing bringing the third person on however: “When we found him.”
Found? Kind of a weird way to put it.
For a while, they and the people around them were willing to uphold and carry these beliefs, however improbable and delusional they may have been. I hesitate to call it a “cult” because in a general sense these were not bad people. There was no brainwashing or manipulation as far as I could tell, though I am speaking as someone on the outside here. I was one step removed from this inner circle and I really had no interest in participating in it myself because I didn’t believe any of it.
Time passed. I gradually fell out of touch with the one person out of this group whom I knew – the European dragon guy – and by proxy everyone else just sorta faded into the aether as well. When I left the fandom and moved on with my life that pretty much shut the door on this entire thing. But those people are still out there, though. One of them has just up and vanished. Gone. The other two… no longer seem to identify with their family name. One of them has even changed their apparent fursona entirely. The other is still the same dragon but has changed their entire online name, apparently for the second time now (the otherkin one was name #2 of what is now 3).
But I thought this was all figured out? You all knew each other. Against unbelievably impossible odds you lived multiple lives at different times and death itself could not separate you, supposedly. The dragon you identified as, was that not the right one? If that’s the case how’d the other people even recognize you? If it was incorrect they would’ve known, surely? “No, you had blue skin. I remember. Everything else you’ve said is correct except for that.” That’s it though? It was just never anything at all. People better at the craft of writing than I could ever dream to be have written stories about soul mates that couldn’t be kept apart even by their lives ending. And… yours was just a roleplay, I guess. When the cracks that formed became too much to ignore, that was it.
I’m not dunking on these people. Honestly. It’s just kind of sad. Pathetic, in a way. Pitiable? I don’t know the right words to describe it. I guess in a sense we all do grow up someday, even if that takes us well into our late 20’s and early 30’s. I don’t know the full reasons or the manner in which these people came to know each other. Perhaps to them this really was just an extension of the “online youth playing house” thing I mentioned earlier in this post but they outwardly spun it as something more than it was for the sake of looking cool or whatever. If that’s the case that was a stupid idea because at no point did I perceive them as anything other than “weird” because of their outrageous claims. It’s also entirely possible that I’m somehow the dumbass for reading too far into something that was an obvious LARP to everyone else. I guess in a sense we’ll never know, because I’m uninterested in reaching out to anyone involved. It isn’t something I need closure on.
At the end of the day though, the question I wanted to ponder is the one this journal is named after; “What happens when family fades away?” I guess in a sense these were more akin to extremely close friendships that were unintentionally warped by a lens of slight mental illness and a desperate search for some kind of validation or personal meaning. Perhaps the surname these people all adopted was symbolic, not literal. Feeling like you belong somewhere is a powerful thing. Friendships come and go, even the ones that you feel are so strong that you’re willing to base your entire online identity and persona around. Like I said, I don’t know what their angle was. I was only close enough to catch glimpses of conversations in Telegram and other messengers named awkward things celebrating some sense of family and camaraderie.
Everything ends someday.
Until next time.