What is clicking?
A click is a character (or something else like an animal) that someone strongly relates to. They may see themself in that character, roleplay them, go by their name, find comfort in them, see them as family, or anything else! Clicking can be different to different people, and anyone can have a click (or many clicks!)
Someone may use click in a sentence like:
“I click Rapunzel from Tangled”
"I'm an Amaru clicker"
“I'm clicking Glimmer so hard right now"
"But wait, isn't that what 'kinning' means? Why use click instead?"
In short, because the word fictionkin was taken from another community.
To be 'kin means to involuntarily identity as something nonhuman/fictional on an integral level. The word was created around the 1990s, and is still in use by the alterhuman community to this day.
Sometime around 2013-2015 however, some people started misusing the word to mean “really relating to a character” and spread this usage to the point very few people know what fictionkin actually means, and actual fictionkin are often made fun of or lashed out at for using the word fictionkin as it was intended.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with having a word for strongly relating to a character and having a community for that! However, taking a word from an existing subculture and changing the meaning isn’t okay.
So that’s where click comes in: it’s an alternative that doesn’t harm an existing subculture. And it’s also short, snappy, and cute!
Additional info
The term click was coined by nonhumananomaly and Seishi System. The original post coinding the term can be found here.
This carrd was made by Saffron and Fae of the Calico Collective. Saffron is partially nonhuman and Fae is otherkin, and both have a growing number of clicks!
Here is a longer explanation of what fictionkin means and how the word gets misused. We highly recommend reading it!
Here is another alternative to the term “kin”, created by someone within the "kinnie" community. If you don't like term clicking, maybe you'll like this one!