home, sweet friendship

What's your favorite part of the greater alterhuman community? What are your favorite groups or spaces that you've found within it?

Cool, about to promo my friends. Gotcha.

I joined the discord server Otherconnect in 2023 after having gone to the previous year’s Othercon. At the time, we were very quiet about being plural, but were slowly coming into accepting the label. Unfortunately, we weren’t the most social back then, and everyone except the host didn’t really speak to anyone. So, we kind of just ignored the server because we were really intimidated. We went to Othercon that year, where we finally started to speak more as ourselves. Alters felt comfortable proxying, if only for a little, and we really came to enjoy the community. We were still a bit quiet, though, but we were content. We enjoyed the space that Othercon provided a lot, and we felt very safe and comfortable there. Around our friends at the time, we had to keep a large part of ourselves buried. At Othercon, we could just… exist. And be ourselves.

2024 was a year of changes. We’re a larger system now. We’re stronger. Happier. More social. At this year’s Othercon, we decided to talk a lot more in the server. We had a lot of discussions, met so many people, and had a blast. We were upset when the server was finally shut down to signal the end of the con. But! Othercon has an off-season server. So, we looked back to Otherconnect. We made a new introduction, as our true self this time, and we got to talking. Once again, we met a variety of people. We’re all different, we all have different experiences, but we all get along and can talk to one another. It can be fun as fuck hearing about people’s experiences, especially when they’re something you’ve never thought of! Plus, a lot of people don’t know anything about our own experiences. It’s really cool getting to infodump about our sources, sharing information that others may not have ever known about. We’ve joined a lot of source servers, but we’ve never really felt like part of a community until joining this general alterhuman server. There’s been highs, there’s been lows, but overall, the conversations and connections we’ve made through Othercon and Otherconnect are things we appreciate so much. Being there has encouraged us to come out of our shell even further. We express ourselves through writing. Through art. Everyone has encouraged us to do so. We’ve learned a lot more about our identity through talking to everyone, and we want to share that with everyone else too. That’s part of why we write “essays”. We aren’t the best at writing serious, academic pieces, but we’d like to think our casual way of talking helps make things a bit more readable for people. We finally finished grad school, so, like, surprise! We’re going to be writing a fuckton more, drawing a fuckton more, and learning as much as we can, connecting to our kintypes and hearthomes in any way we can. We really hope that we can be a resource that people can turn to, so that they know they aren’t alone in their experiences. Or, if you can’t relate personally… might just be cool hearing other people’s experiences! I know I really enjoy it.

I’m really glad we decided to become more of a part of the alterhuman community. We’ve known we were alterhuman for ten years now. It may have taken a hell of a long time, but, like, I’m glad we’re here talking to everyone and expressing ourselves loudly and publicly now. It’s nice being yourself, and having people who accept you, no matter who or what you are! Thanks to the mods and our friends for being cool as fuck o7 and also for dealing with us being from a LOT of obscure anime and shit. and the idols. and the otome. and the danganronpa. and the (sighs, as i am personally affected by this one) hetalia.

And, hey, if anyone out there reads this long ass post and is like. Woah hey I wanna talk to this guy. Or one of these guys. Literally feel free! We don’t have to have shit in common. Talk to us about your experiences, tell us about your interests, we love hearing it. We were put here to make connections, to make friends. So… feel free to join us? lol ask box is always open