Name: Ryuu (they/them)
Daemons: Akumu (he/him), the Beast (it/its)
Preferred Contact E-mail: Just think real hard of me before you sleep, hopefully I make it. There are quite a lot of dream beings.
Kintype: Shapeshifter Dream Dragon
Phantom Limbs/Shifting Ability: Involuntary shapeshift shift (astral/phantom body parts/full body), sometimes hybrid form shifts happen (dysphoric). Irregular dream shift (partial or full body, into various draconic creatures not variations of my dragonself. Also into non-draconic creatures. Once into my kardiatype[link insert here]), mental shift, berserk shift, sometimes triggered by heightened emotion or during copulation. Occasional envisage shift. Does being inside headspace and seeing yourself as you are a shift? And what would the term be? Most of the time going about daily is the phantom wings and tail combo.
Akumu has mostly “opposite” of my colors. Dark purple fur, blue belly, silver mane, black wings, silver horns, monochrome with black pupil eyes.
The Beast just looks like my european form, but extra ruffled and angy.
Birthdate or age: 25-35
Birthplace: West Coast of US
Home Territory: :pensive: I don’t have that
Dream Territory: all over, where my precious people lay. But really I like ‘em cozy near the ocean with breeze and not hot. Or cave by the sandy seashore where the cave is nice and dry and big. Or if I rest inside my dream and bring people there, perfect spot, all to my molding.
Description, Human: Black hair, black eyes, 170cm height, chonk. Masc presenting.
Description, Were: Bright orange furred pelt all the way, no scales. Slight washed out yellow mane from head to tail tip. Sky white feathered wings, red short fuzz belly. Chonky build, each paws with needle long and sharp claws, three digits. No pawpads. Two long sunny yellow straight horns towards the back, cheek has three harder tuffs of fur at each side. Pearlescent eyes with rose tint. No breath weapon. Shapeshifting power—shapeshift into variations of draconic creature that are based off of the Core Form, all share similar features.
Human Career/Schooling: I’m not settled yet
General Hobbies/Interests: Arts, Games, my partner >.>
Outdoor Interests: Boats, kites, bird-watch. I want to be able to do all sorts of gliding one day.
Religious Views/Holidays you Celebrate: I come from a mixed spiritual/religious background that has flavor of taoism, folk religion, and lots of buddism. Our family does celebrate all the big US holidays like christmas, thanksgiving, easter, halloween, with other asianic holidays like chinese new year, tomb-sweeping day, dragonboat festival, lantern festival. Christianity? I don’t know them (/j).
Favorite Movies: Hayao Miyazaki’s series, almost all of them.
Favorite Shows: Natsume Yuujinchou, Digimon all series
Favorite Literature: Da Vinci Code. Does fanfic count? Should totally count.
Favorite Quote: [a lot of them and cannot pick]
Favorite Band(s): OneRepublics, Coldplay, Soda Green, GReeeeN, Mayday (taiwan)
Favorite Season: Winter
Favorite Holidays: Christmas
Games of Choice: Assassin’s Creed series, Legend of Zelda series, Pokemon but more side series
Personal Strengths: Creativity and chaotic energy
Personal Weaknesses: Highly anxious, stubborn
Personal Quirks & Things you do that others might find annoying: My lack of perfectionism, my random noise stim
5 - 10 year goals: Be with my partner physically, away from all the elderly relatives, have a decent amount of alterhuman content, some if not majority of my trauma healed, transitioned to a point where I’m content, capability to travel and visit all my friends while having a den that belongs to me and go back to, and a large nest for me and my partner.
Ideal Lifestyle (farm, urban, rural, isolated, small group of people, large group of people, etc): more rural, maybe with commune of all my precious people. Preferably with lots of nature. I want a chill life, self sustained, but also I want tech that I and my partner made.
Daily life habits (average sleep schedule, things someone might expect to see you doing if they were to randomly stop by, etc): Overwhelmingly busy. Full time work on weekdays leaves little time for other stuff. I do Flight Rising daily, art whenever I could, squeeze some time in for socializing and gaming with friends.
Preferred Prey: Seafood, fish
Hunting Tips: Strike when they least expected you
Preferred Method of Attack: Stealth
Favorite Non-Were Mythological Beast: Phoenix
Feelings Toward Vampires: Ehhhh
Feelings Toward Normal Humans: *shrugs* So long they aren’t jerks and kind and accepting and understanding, I’m cool
Personal Therianthropy:
From a young age, I see myself as Other. And others see me as someone different, weird, not one of them. I’d walk on the tip of my toes, hold my arms in a raptor way, make noises and have animalistic behavior. I didn’t think much of it. I’m not playing pretend, these are just natural to me. I also was obsessed with a sort of creature that are giant lizards with horns, wings, or various bodily attachments, I didn’t know what they were called. I come from a line of artists–painter, crafter, musician, writers, what have you, and through these I expressed my obsession with the creature.
And then I learned they are called dragons.
This is around the first decade of this life.
Sometimes after, I drafted something that I dub “me”. But it didn’t feel right. Bipedal, webbed wings, spiral horns, cheek fins, 4 digits on all paws, some strange spikes on the elbows, plated belly. Probably scales too. I didn’t really hold on to it.
In the meantime, my art of dragons grew. Perhaps it is the multi-cultural background I grew up in, perhaps is the medias I surround myself with, Digimon, Pokemon, Monster Rancher, or other various media that has any sort of draconic creature in them, my concept of dragons has never been just “giant fire-breathing scaled lizard with bat wings”. I drew pineapple wings dragons (don’t ask), some quirky serpent, dragons that are literally just glorified fish, wyrm and yinglong fusion, dragons with multiple sets but different types of wings, you get the idea. I even got a gift of a book called 幻獣ドラゴン, and it contains a plethora of dragons from all over the world, there’s even a clown dragon! I still have the book.
It isn’t until when I entered my second decade of this life that I had something. It was a chinese draconic forum I found called DraFryCastle (it’d gone through several names then), I spent a good amount of time there. And where I figure out what I look like. Perhaps I just made it up, it is a possibility. But it felt right. Fur, round, bright colored, feather, no breath weapon, no scales, no fins or frills. I’m a living eyesore that goes against natural harmony of how creature ought to look like. But I am a Dream Dragon. Dreams don’t follow the physical world’s logic. You can even see me on the image inside the link above, right in the center.
Ah yes, I happen to be the forum’s mascot. Or lucky charm? Probably both. Translation is kind of finicky.
The timeline here is a bit fuzzy, but around this time my mom’s friend invited us into some mountain top, deep into the woods, where a monk resides. Apparently, this one can read some sort of heavenly book. And in front of the many audience that are also there, the monk told our family, with even surprise coloring his own voice, that I was a dragon of the pacific ocean.
Now, my family has always do inside joke of me and my sibling being the dragon and phoenix, and only us inside knows the actual truth. My sibling just more or less embarrass the human lifestyle, while I delve back into nonhuman.
So this “big reveal”? Surprises no one but everyone outside of our family. It is merely a confirmation.
Fast forward where we reached the start of the third decade of my life. I met my first partner. Well, not quite met in-person. It was online. I don’t remember when I told him about me being a dragon, but he was accepting. What did end up happening was him slowly turning into a dragon identifying person. Till this day we still don’t know what it means for him. Since young I’ve always conceptualize the people around me as represented by a variety of creatures, I even drew my whole year in high school as dragons! So slowly I develop with him, or perhaps I did most of the heavy lifting, what his dragonself looks like. It’s been nearly a decade and he still is that same dragon.
Come in discord. Or well, he introduced me to it.
Somewhen around the time, I came across the terms otherkin and nonbinary. It was the firecracker moment where everything just slot into place, it all clicked, everything suddenly made sense. And the most amazing feeling?
I’m not alone.
I was also probably a redditor then. I couldn’t find my old post so it might be another account. Quickly searching for community to join, I came across subreddit talking about otherkin, and I asked if I could join the discord server. That was my first otherkin community, Otherkin Haven. From there, I learned of Othercon, joined the off-season server Otherconnect, and it opened up my world to the alterhuman community experiences.
I was also in fandom spaces around the beginning of my kin journey. From within these fandoms, I found my second partner, and later on, my third and current partner.
The second partner came with a preexisting polycule, and nobody seemed to mind my dragon statue too much. My partner herself was vampire identifying, in an aesthetic way. She viewed otherkin as a purely spiritual concept. By then I was well acquainted with all sorts of kin identity, origin, even the darkness of the community. Not even a year in! Our ending… wasn't the prettiest. That ending however, led me to my current partner.
After settling some from the break up, my partner stuck by me as we care for each other. They are a gentle, kind, and accepting person. They had know me to be otherkin before this relationship. They were curious enough to ask, and I accidentally infodumped them. Despite that, they stayed around. I ended up dragging them into various of my kin servers. They are still firmly human identifying, but apparently, being with me awakened their more nonhuman side. They say they liked -hearted, and maybe they don’t use the term, but I was ecstatic to find another alterhuman-esque person as a partner. With them, I was comfortable, safe, open to explore myself.
More and more I discovered the meaning of shifts, of just what extend my shapeshifting can go to, where the various forms I drew back then wasn’t just for artistic purpose, they were real, I felt them. With the community, I’d learned to face my past, finding out and understanding that it is a kardiatype, a foundation to who I am today.
And today, I am the orange furred shapeshifting dream dragon.