Where am I?! Who are you people?! Who am I?!! What's going on?!!! What is a TiA and How do I Otherkin?!!!! SOMEBODY HELP ME!!!!!

Calm down! Stop panicking! You're safe now! Welcome, newcomer, to the

TiA Semi-Condensed* Primer for Confused Newbies

*^{Full fat, may contain traces of nuts.}

Greetings, new user! The following is an essential run-down for newbies, covering, briefly, the basics of what TiA is, and the kinds of content you'll likely be seeing. It won't cover all the in-jokes and advanced nomenclature specific to this sub, because they shift so rapidly, but it should provide enough information to set you on your feet.

Let's start with the obvious: what this place is. TiA stands for TumblrInAction. TiA originally began as a place to make fun of the really, really stupid stuff that people on Tumblr post. We started on Reddit, but then the admins tried to fuck us with screwdrivers, so we covered our asses and left. Also, we're not just about Tumblr nonsense anymore, because... well, I dunno if you've noticed, but most of the Tumblr crazies left the site a few years back.

Now, we still refer to the crazy stuff as "Tumblr shit," which comes in a couple of distinct flavours, all of which are intermingled to certain degrees.

• Otherkin - People who believe that they are in some way the soul of a non-human trapped in the body of a human. Therians and tulpas are basically the same thing. Mad as fucking hatters, the lot of them, but largely harmless. Good for a laugh.

• Transtrenders - You know how trans rights is currently a serious issue right now, which will potentially affect the well being of many currently marginalised people? Yeah, well, these aren't those people. They're stupid teenagers who think that making up a totally unique gender or pronouns, specific to themselves, will make them special, and they're trying to ride the coattails of the real trans movement to legitimacy. In some cases, they've actually found it (some people actually think "fae" is a real pronoun!). Essentially, they're like otherkin only for gender. Actually, the two categories have got more and more ridiculous, so much so that they've started to become kinda indistinguishable, but that's how they began.

• Fat Activists - There is a movement called "Healthy At Every Size," or HAES. Essentially, they started with the principle that if you exercise enough, you'll be healthy, regardless of your weight. Many people took this a step further, disregarded the entirety of medical science, and claimed that your health (and physical beauty) are completely unrelated to being obese. Now, obviously, this is bollocks, and medically dangerous bollocks at that, but, given that it allowed lazy people to abdicate personal responsibility for their own well-being, it was extremely popular on Tumblr. Mostly it involved people bitching that the world is not designed to support people weighing 200kg, and blaming other people for their own lack of sex appeal. Perhaps the most hilarious part of it, however, was how much time HAES activists spent projecting their own self-loathing onto the people around them, and hating people who weren't medically overweight. Ever hear of "thin privilege?" You can blame these guys for that shit.

• Radical Feminists - This is where things get less funny, and more worrying. It's also grown to be a key focus of TiA. Essentially, these are the kind of extremist, radical feminists that see absolutely everything as the fault of men, see anything that ever happens to anyone who isn't a white, cissexual male as oppression, and claim that all woes are the fault of the patriarchy in general, and every man ever in particular. I wish I was exaggerating. It also encompasses lots of Americentric racial politics. Frankly, these are the kind of nutjobs that give feminism a bad name as a movement of man-haters, and they've formed a little spawning pool on Tumblr.

• The Woke - You thought radfems were bad? These people are worse, and ironically, they hate radfems. Yes, these are the people who believe that you are not allowed to have any opinions that disagree with the gold medalists of the Oppression Olympics, you should spend all of your time trying to dismantle all systems of oppression, and you need to give all of your money to the gay, black, nonbinary Muslims that suffer violence every time they read a mean tweet. Sounds batshit insane, but that's only scratching the surface. These people want you to feel guilty because you're existing wrong, and they'll do everything in their power to make you subservient to them. We call them "woke," because chronic sleep deprivation is about the only explanation we have for this sort of madness.

• The Disorder Fakers - You know how Emo and Goth kids have the whole self-harm thing, on the basis that it makes them edgy and special? Well, this is the next-level of that: teenagers self-diagnosing themselves with mental illnesses on the basis that it makes them different and interesting. It used to be stuff like OCD, Asperger's, ADHD, anxiety, etc., but as of recently, people (mostly teenagers) have moved on to faking rare disorders like DID and Tourette's, all for the sake of attention. The most outrageous of these are called "multiples" or "systems," which is like a form of DID, except they can switch personalities on command. If you know anything about DID, this is pretty much impossible, as is communicating with your other personalities. Oh, but it gets worse—some of their "alters" (read: headmates) are real people. As in, popular YouTubers and shit. No, it doesn't make any sense, and yes, it's just an elaborate roleplay with imaginary friends.

Now, these are quite a diverse set of delusional trends, but the more political of them tended to converge in a group of people known as "Social Justice Warriors," or SJWs.

There are people who believe deeply in effecting social change, about volunteering to help those less fortunate than themselves, and about fighting for the rights of others. These are "Social Justice Activists," or SJAs. SJWs are... not these people.

A Social Justice Warrior is someone who is in it to get a sense of moral superiority. They're extremists, plain and simple; although they talk about their causes a lot, they're there because it gives them an enemy to hate and an identity to claim. They're keyboard warriors, teenagers and young adults who are happy to spout hatred and bile if it makes them one of the group, but not to actually try and accomplish something. Occasionally, they try and tackle really serious issues, like classism, but this tends to be a farce, because SJWs are typically well-off middle- to upper-class girls, and that would make them the bad guys. Instead, they pursue anything that allows them to frame straight white men as the ultimate evil, because that gives them a group to despise—a source of all evil to attack.

Characteristically, SJWs have almost zero self-awareness, plenty of identity guilt, some really jaw-dropping double-standards, and absolutely zero grasp of how the world works. They almost exclusively choose battlegrounds in pop culture, on the basis that trying to effect change in the real world is far too much work, and, given that they're stereotypically under the age of 21, they have almost no experience of it anyway.

Unfortunately, this kind of post-rational, intersectional feminism is currently something of a Zeitgeist, particularly in the San Fransisco bay area and the pop culture that stems from it—including quite a lot of stuff on the Internet. This growth has caused quite an extreme backlash from those who'd like to be judged by the content of their character rather than their gender or the colour of their skin, and unfortunately in this backlash SJW has become something of a catch-all pejorative.

I recommend you start by having have a look at some of the stuff on TumblrInAction; it may provide you with a few good laughs at some very crazy people. Alas, the community isn't what it was, but if you ask sensible questions people are usually happy to answer them, and this wiki can come in handy.

Aside from that, go and read the rules, and try and follow the spirit of them as well as the letter. Don't just avoid being a dickparade; be excellent to those around, and remember that you create the community you want to see. We mods can look after almost everything, but we can't make the TiA community a nice place to be, because that's up to you, the user. See something you like? Say nice things about it! See something you don't like? Consider, is that person putting their opinions forward in the spirit of civil discussion? Then don't downvote them! We can only grow as people by exposing ourselves to new perspectives and ideas! Look, you get the idea; just try to be less toxic than Reddit as a whole has a tendency to be.

Good luck, have a laugh, and try not to lose your sanity!