How you behaved, and what you believed, and the feelings you acted on in a previous life or as another version of your self does not necessarily correlate what you believe, how you behave, and the feelings you act on now, in this life.
In the last couple of years I have gotten a lot of deeply personal, hand-wringing and guilty feeling asks about fictionkin or people questioning kin about “problematic kintypes”.
“If I am this person, if this is my kintype, that means I-”
“that means I was in love with my brother.”
“That means I committed genocide”
“That means I was in an inappropriate relationship with someone older/younger than me.”
Yeah. Maybe it does mean that.
But the thing is that a kintype isn’t a thing you can decide to have or not have based on whether or not a character is “problematic” or “pure”. If you can ‘decide’ whether something is a kintype or not, then it’s not a kintype, it’s something else.
A kintype is an innate, immutable fact about yourself that is impossible to extract yourself from.
And sometimes – most of the time! – kintypes come with some kind of emotional baggage. A lot of us were not good people in our other lives, fuck knows I wasn’t! I’ve killed lots and lots of people, some of which I didn’t regret then and don’t regret now, some of which I didn’t regret then and DO regret now. And that’s just scratching the surface of my complicated feelings and problematic actions.
But what you did as your kintype, and what you believed was okay then, doesn’t dictate what you believe is okay, and what you do now. All of us took actions in our other lives that we regret or that we would do differently in this life. Or maybe we WOULDN’T! There are also things, dark parts of ourselves, that we accept and cherish, even if we don’t tell other people about those parts.
Everybody has kintype feelings that they struggle with. That’s part of being fictionkin. Some of those things are going to be heavier, or lighter, easier or more difficult to deal with.
But if you can base your decision on whether or not you’re kin based on whether or not a character is “too problematic” then that’s not a kintype.
And if you do have a kintype that makes you feel uncomfortable, and is problematic and you struggle with feelings about –
Welcome to what it means to be fictionkin.