Otherkin Timeline

About this book

Spanning from 1972 to 2011, this 115-page nonfiction book traces the recent history of therianthropes and otherkin: real people who identify as animals and mythological beings. This information comes from primary sources, such as contemporary print and electronic media, and interviews with people who were active then. Learn about mailing lists and blogs that came and went during the 2000s, and about foundational groups from the 1990s, such as the Elfinkind Digest, alt.horror.werewolves, and alt.fan.dragons, and from outside the Internet, such as the Elf Queen's Daughters and the Silver Elves. Find the dates for the coining of words, the publication of books, the rise and fall of various ideas and parts of the community.

Notes on version 2.1

This version is slightly different from the one that has been in circulation for years. It has some small changes from an unreleased draft from 2013, in which I had edited the introduction and added more information about AHWW. In 2024 I only corrected some names and updated how to cite this document. Otherwise I’m preserving it as the second edition from more than a decade ago, with outdated research questions and dead links. I'm letting that be, because all of this will be repaired and greatly expanded in the third edition, which is in progress. The third edition will be a collaboration between myself and my partner system, the House of Chimeras, who are excellent historians and archivists.

License and authorship

I'm the only author of the second edition, Orion Scribner (they/them). I license this book under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. It is not public domain. I am sharing it for free, under these conditions. If you want, you can give me a tip when you download it. You can share the book and post it to other places, as long as you credit it to me. If you change it or translate it, you need to say so on it. If you have questions about whether something you want to do would fit with these terms, please ask in the forum below.