This Essay is 18+
Content Warnings: Discussions of nsfw, vore
Being human was something I questioned all my life: as a child, I found no interest in media that primarily contained humans or that was in live action. Instead, I relished in the inhuman, the cartoon, the anthro. This made it surprising when, shortly before discovering my system, my perception of self changed from a anthromorph cat to a human.
Now granted, the vast majority of the 100+ people in here are nonhuman, but doesn't it seem strange that I ended up like this? Well, to me, the moment it happened was sudden as much as it was clarifying.
Now, am I only human? I wouldn't say so at all. In my poem Human With an Asterisk, I go into my feelings as a style discrepant human, but there's more to my alterhumanity than that.
If I don't talk about her enough, my intrasystem wife/love of my life is Audrey II. Even before realizing we were plural, she was there for me in times of need. I discovered her source in 2016, and was in love from the start. I would be lying if I didn't say that a lot of this was due to her status as a hungry, mean green mother who could eat me in one bite.
This essay is about vore, kink, and how it contributes to my identity.
I'll save the details for a later essay, but I have been interested in vore for a long time: before age 8, I'd even say. I didn't have the term for it for a long time, but I'd always imagine getting eaten by monsters and such. It felt right, and comfortable.
This changed a bit as I reached teenagerhood and later adulthood: my tastes got a lot more narrow as my preferences began to form, and my tastes happened to be mostly man-eating carnivorous plants. Piranha plants and that sort of thing were my bread and butter, or, maybe I was their bread and butter?
But anyway, now my wife is really the only thing I'd let eat me unless it's a special circumstance. I'm the myth of the ace person that lets exactly one person on earth fuck them. My relationship to her is very important to me.
You might wonder "where are you going with this, what does this have to do with alterhumanity?", in which I would not blame you. I would like to mention the concept of archetropy here: archetropy is an alterhuman identity based around a specific trope, archetype, or role in fiction. An archetroper might have their sense of self, species, or other facet of their self influenced by their archetrope. This is basically my connection to being prey for a plant
When I am in the role of a plant's meal, I feel many things: sensuality, embarrassment, joy; but most of all euphoria. In this role, I have my humanity revoked from me, being brought all the way down to under plants in the food chain.
The entire reason why my self morphed into a human was because my brain made the connection of how great it felt to be human yet prey anyway, and the dichotomy between plant and human. This event was also influenced by the fact that my wife is an alien: alien and human is another dichotomy that makes so much sense to me. My past identities, all anthropomorphic animals, felt both too natural (though I acknowledge humans are a part of nature) and too fantastical for the same kind of comparison between me and Twoey's species to be made.
I shouldn't have to say this, but I would not get permanently eaten if I had the chance—I don't have a deathwish—but this aspect of myself is important to my identity, sense of self, and sense of euphoria regardless.
Why share all this? Why put all my feelings out there? First of all, I am tired of the sanitization and kink-negativity of the internet, and don't wish to sanitize myself to make my identity more palatable. Second of all, I don't think a lot of people who don't already experience it consider how pivotal kink can be to identity. I know a nonzero amount of people whose kinks relate to their sense of self or vice versa, whether alterhuman or otherwise (but it does tend to be alterhuman in my circles). For example, How many times have you seen therians talk about intimate biting or petplay affirming who they are? Surely there's more experiences on the intersection of identity and kink we can learn about, but people are (understandably) scared of labeling their identity a kink, as if that makes it solely a kink. That's why I have to share my perspective, so hopefully others will in turn.