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From TikTok Howls to dark academia, the Therian trend might look like just another online craze. But what if it’s really about rejecting the pressures of modern life and capitalism itself.
As an English person living in Colombia, it can sometimes feel like certain trends – or at least, niche corners of the internet – take a while to gain the same traction that they would in the UK or even the US.
Partly this is due to the financial domination of media channels – and thereby internet culture – by the Western World. It’s also due to cultural differences. The latter often means that something which would land without a doubt in the US or the UK wouldn’t necessarily have the same impact here.
Earlier this year, we saw Bad Bunny transcend these cultural and linguistic limitations. Not only did his SuperBowl performance earn him even more international acclaim than before, it even promoted a significant increase in Spanish learners on language learning application Duolingo.
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That all changed, however, with Therians. If you don’t know what a Therian is, otherwise known as Otherkin, it’s someone who identifies psychologically or spiritually with an animal. You might be thinking, ‘ohhh, a furry! That’s nothing new’. And you’d be right, it’s certainly not new, but it is very different.
Furries are people who dress and behave like animals as part of a persona or kink, often forming part of the larger furry fandom. By contrast, Therianthropy is more about a more profound sense of identity. This is otherwise known as a ‘theriotype’.
Online, this ‘trend’, for want of a better word, has manifested itself in videos of predominantly young people explaining what their theriotype is, mimicking the behaviour of their animal theriotype, and hanging out in ‘Howls’. Stay with me here.
@fox_cor Aullido con los chicos <3 #fyp #therian #therianthropy #theriancommunity #therians
According to Cuentamelo Ya!, the modern therian community has its origins in the early 1990s, emerging from internet forum ‘alt.horror.werewolves’. However, Therianthropy itself has likely been around as long as humans have, conveyed through oral storytelling and pictographs.
If you’ve spent enough time online to notice this trend, you may also have seen the recent surge of ‘dark academia’ on BookTok. Like me, you might then have drawn connections not only between therians and werewolves – as discussed in Kachuba’s Shapeshifters: A History – but also between therians and Tartt’s The Secret History (1992).
In the novel, university students studying Ancient Greek deliberately engage in a Dionysian ‘bacchanal’. During this ritual, Camilla recalls herself as a deer which the other participants remember having hunted.
As well as Dionysius, the Greek god of religious ecstasy (amongst other things), therianthropy has been associated with the Ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes of Sinope/ Diogenes the Cynic (323BC), who wrote about his own canine behaviours as a critique of what he perceived as the artificiality of human society. He was one of the founders of the school of cynicism.
In fact, the word itself, Therian, comes from the Greek θηρίον (‘wild animal’), while theriantrope adds ἄνθρωπος (‘human’) to mean a human-animal hybrid.
In keeping with the cynicism of Diogenes, the students in Tartt’s novel want to partake in this ritual in order to transcend the clutches of rational modernity and to achieve a Dionysian like spiritual unity with the divine. Without spoiling the book, could this offer a way to understand why some young people adopt theriotypes, as a way to cope with the fast pace and pressures of modern life?
Interestingly, the online discourse around therianthropy currently seems less about the therians themselves – although of course that exists too – and more about what the popularisation means in terms of the ways in which people are able to engage with mainstream media and politics.
In Latin America specifically, many have speculated that this renewed relevance is a smokescreen, intended to deflect from government failings and/or attempts to oppress more urgent issues.
In Argentina, where therianthropy has garnered significant attention in recent weeks, many are eager to point out issues such as the burning of Patagonia, the decline of the country’s national businesses, and the fact that poverty is affecting almost one in every two Argentinians living in the country.
