Cultish

Thursday, February 20, 2025 - 10:30 PM

Aw, right! So reading/re-reading Abbey Kumquatwriter's blog (especially the Crazy Train posts) reminds me of things.

It really fuckin' sucks to hear Andy Blake/Jordan Wood's narratives (Video and Video from Strange Aeons for background). Like. Specifically hearing his narratives utilized to suck people in on his Secret World and to indoctrinate him into his cult. Because there are so fuckin' many parallels to my fuckin' crazy ass experiences as a fictionkin soulbonder.

I don't reach out to my soulbonds much anymore. I'm too overwhelmed, too busy keeping my head above water. And my coping methods, as mentioned earlier today, usually run more towards checking Tumblr or popping on a YouTube video to distract myself. Ever since I worked as a dog groomer, being inside my head has been really dangerous. I'm getting better, but...well. Trauma. I've needed different reliefs. So all those points coming together, and I'm effectively an out-of-practice soulbonder. Which is pretty much how I am with my IRL long-distance friendships. Out of practice, not reaching across the distance the way I'd like. RIP.

Anyway. I'm out-of-touch and physically an Over 30 and therefore Old, so I'm not super up on how it all plays out now. But these niches: Otherkin, Therian, hells, even just Paganism are super easy hunting grounds for these sort of predation. Cuz we're already niche. We already know the kinds of things we receive push-back about--especially from the vicious christian and republican fuckwits. And the militant conservative-ass atheist types.

So we're easy to control. Because of the outside pressure. Because of the shame. Shame is what made me procrastinate on writing this sentence for an hour and a half. Shame is what is making me want to write about anything else, than my truly held beliefs about myself and my experiences. Shame keeps us in the closet. Shame isolates us. Shame makes the slightest push back from people we care about feel like a blow. Shame is what left me broke down sobbing on a dime when my good friend one time said he was a furry, "Not like one of those weird Otherkin."

Shame puts us in a corner. And that isolation makes us vulnerable. So we have bad actors, like Andrew Blake, like Emshir from the unicorn Otherkin community, and like others, I'm sure, who use those things to gather a loyal following. And because we already feel the need to protect ourselves, attempts to reach us, either for good or to mock, are met with defensiveness.

This one time, before Emshir burnt down the whole forum and thus my support system the first time (I mean that I was there for it. I'm pretty sure it wasn't his first time throwing a fit and taking his ball to go home), a group of people were trying to reach out to us kids to let us know that shit was fucked. We were warned a group of "Starseeds" and "Otherkin", neither words I'd heard before that time, might reach out to us to tell us lies about how Emshir, the 30 plus year old in charge of a group of mostly teenage kids on the internet, was Actually Bad, and that we should ignore anything they said.

Naturally I wanted to debate with the one who contacted me instead. He went by Michael, and...he was not helpful. Mostly, it turned into me giving him a listening, therapeutic ear as he told me repeatedly about how he'd been a pallbearer for someone close to him, and that had been very hard. As far as arguments for why our leader was Bad, Actually, it was lacking.

All that happened was that we cleaved closer to one another, staying just as isolated as ever. So when Emshir blew it all up because we didn't post enough and because one forum member had remained logged in on their home computer, and their dad found the forum and wrote a scathing thread that, though quickly deleted, left us all shooketh, and got that poor member in horrible hot water with their family...we were hit hard. The only good thing that came from the Outside people contacting us was that it gave us the word Otherkin for the first time. So we would have been able to connect with other groups...if we hadn't been so gun-shy. Having our home forum explode, and having the only other Otherkin we'd ever heard of be...A Lot left us trying to just hold each other. Some members made an alternate forum, and that lasted for a bit, before Emshir started up again. And for some reason, we went back to him.

Eventually, he'd try and lay the groundwork for creating a Unicorn Otherkin sanctuary/commune in Alaska. Reminder that he was twice our age, and most of us thought we were girls (fillies or mares) at the time. Yeah, it's skeevy. He blew that group up later, too. I can find proof of one, maybe two other iterations of the same thing happening. Where Emshir would start a group, then get mad and leave the members high and dry. There'd always be some sort of attempt to establish a new group afterwards, which would gradually lose steam. Emshir would use this as evidence that he was the only one who could run a Real Unicorn Group. I'm more inclined to believe that outside of the heightened, high control environment our energies to Always Be Posting waned, and that being burned by the community that had been our Home getting wrenched away made us hesitant to lean on it the same way.

The third (or was it fourth? I don't know if those were contiguous?) time I joined his forum/cult, because of course I came back for more, was more of the same. This time, he had his 17 year old mate living with him, whom he'd Rescued from her abusive family. And truly, I'm glad she was able to escape her abusive family. I'm just not confident she didn't escape them into another abusive relationship, as so many of us who've been abused tend to do. Cuz hey, this isn't As Bad As That Was, so it Can't Be That Bad. I hope she's okay.

How much do I want to pick a fight over all this? Emshir has books self-published through Amazon under his legal name, so while I don't currently see sign of a forum or things that he's running online, that doesn't mean he's not, and it's just a Discord or tucked in through his authoring. I just really doubt he's stopped targeting kids to pump up his self-aggrandizing ego and framing it as being a Protector and Leader unicorn.

I wish I had more useful memories, or better documentation of what he did. One of my IRL Otherkin friends from the last time I was in his group walked me through a cult evaluation, and we scored pretty highly. But other than, "He was the Leader and therefore Important," and "We didn't dare say anything against him or disagree with him strongly," I don't have great detailed memories of things that happened. ^_^;; My memories in general are pretty scattered. Hi, trauma. So recounting details is difficult. And the Wayback Machine archives are really spotty. There are some, but none of the forum posts were ever archived there, or if they were, it's in a way I've never managed to access. I had backups of all of his podcasts from the mid to late aughts, but they were saved to an external hard drive that no longer works. I've still got it tucked away in hopes that I can take it to a document recovery place sometime, but I've yet to try. And the more time that goes on the less likely it is that it works.

Emshir wasn't one for leading us into astral battles (at least not in the public parts of the forums or while I was there, no idea what he got up to behind closed doors. In closed glades?), but it's a favorite of cult leaders. Andy Blake loves bringing his cult members into some high stakes fights. My unicorn Mommy Dearest utilized it on me. And though I haven't discussed the situations with my friend since they got out of another bad relationship with some cultish signs and looooots of astral battles...I'm wondering how much was orchestrated by said cultish partner.

So it really sucks when you believe in that sort of stuff. And have to decide how much stock you want to put into what so-and-so is telling you about it from their end. Because, from your end, shit's very real. The fight is always there, and it's always hard. Part of the problem is how we're taught to view struggles like this through fiction, since those of us who're likely to be targeted are pretty damn into fiction. If your hero is genre-savvy, and expects everything to come to a nice, clean conclusion...they're gonna keep looking for fights until they think they've found it. Or, more likely, completely burn out.

I've burnt out from this shit even without a cult leader to drive me. My friend shredded herself fighting war after war after war. And Abbey describes the same sort of thing as a lever Andy used to control her and the other cult members--interrupting sleep, constant drama, consoling, caretaking, explaining, and going to bat for Andy and the Others he claimed to channel.

I dunno. Something, something, denouement. Basically, I wish it was less shitty to talk about these kinds of experiences so we wouldn't be so damned isolated when it happens, and so that people could support one another better and so that we could be less fuckin' likely to fall into high control environments. I want to talk about my own experiences about this shit more, and I'm trying, but it's hard. Both because it's simply emotionally hard to confront, but also it's hard to remember and organize into anything that isn't just me spewing thoughts on the page. But that's effectively my writing style as I get back into it, and out is better than Never and Perfect, so it is what it is. Sorry for the disorganized ramblings.