What Do All Alterhumans Have In Common?

[mackerelgray]

Written by Max Biscuit-Machina on February 22nd, 2026.

(This used to be part of a reblog thread, but it's long-winded enough that I wanted to give it room to breathe. Check out Sora's blog though, he's got good thoughts!)

I recently read a post by my friend Sora (leo9ish, through-lines on Tumblr) about the way alterhumanity is often mistaken for a synonym of nonhumanity - and ve made an excellent point!

A lot of alterhuman identities seem to be viewed through the lens of species identity and apparent proximity to nonhuman identity.

People understand that being nonhuman makes you alterhuman, because otherkin and therians are the most recognizable part of the community - it's the most obvious way someone can be different from normal humanity, by not being the same species.

Unfortunately, this means nonhumanity is seen as the standard for other alterhuman identities to measure up to - the closer to nonhumanity someone is, the more accepted they are as an alterhuman. Put another way: the closer to humanity someone is, the less accepted they are as an alterhuman.

This is a problem, because most alterhuman identities are not nonhuman - they don't involve being a different species! But they're all judged against nonhumanity as a benchmark. It's something we've griped about before.

It got me thinking: if I'm not using species identity as a standard, how would I define an alterhuman identity? What do we have in common as a community?

Personally, as someone who wrote and thought about one alternate universe fanfic for the better part of a decade, that’s an alterhuman thing for me! I call myself fictionhearted because of that. And I say I’m fictionhearted because I figured out how significant this work was to me while being in alterhuman spaces, and I can talk about it as an alterhuman without fearing judgement over "being too invested in fanfiction" when writing it for 5+ years became a major part of my life, part of who I am and how I think about myself.

(There's different issues within the alterhuman community with judgement, of course, along the usual lines of "you're too weird to belong here!" or "you're too normal to belong here!" - but it's a community I care about, enough that I'm willing to dig in my heels and stand my ground instead of agreeing that I don't belong.)

I think alterhumanity serves its purpose as an umbrella term for many different identity-based subcommunities, all united under a common banner of being considered abnormal.

Someone can be nonhuman and call themselves alterhuman for it. Someone else can be sharing a body with other people and call themselves alterhuman for it. Someone else can be a dedicated furry and call themselves alterhuman for it. Someone else can be a fictional character and call themselves alterhuman for it. Someone else can love a video game so much they spend all their free time talking about it and call themselves alterhuman for it. Someone else can choose to embody a narrative archetype and call themselves alterhuman for it. Someone else can feel homesick for a city they’ve never lived in and call themselves alterhuman for it.

(And the list goes on! I’m not listing every possible way to be alterhuman, I just want to shout out different ways to be alterhuman that aren’t related to species identity.)

These are all different identities, they’re different ways of seeing oneself and moving through the world, but they’re all considered weird in a way that means being wrong.

According to the status quo, being nonhuman or fictional or plural means you’re insane and need to be locked up for your own good. Being a furry means you’re some kind of gross sexual deviant. Being too invested a video game means you’re childish and embarrassing. Being an archetype means you’re one-dimensional, pretentious, and out of touch with reality. Being deeply attached to a place you’ve never been means you’re exoticizing it and wrong about your feelings.

And all of this prejudice tends to be justified as a normal reaction to your behavior, like being too weird automatically means you’re laughable, dangerous, untrustworthy, incompetent, disgusting, or all of the above.

I think sharing this common sense of marginalization, not being taken seriously by mainstream society - not being considered a “normal human being” for one reason or another, and finding community with others who don’t fit in - is enough to call yourself and your experience alterhuman.

I’m not really sure how to sum this up in a single-sentence definition? But I think it’s a more comprehensive framework for the alterhuman experience than seeing it as The Community For Nonhumans (Plus All Those Stragglers, I Guess).