About

Hamilkin refers to a subculture of people who identify with characters from the musical Hamilton to the point where they believe they are those characters, spiritually.

Definition

Hamilkin is a part of the Factkin subculture, itself a part of the Otherkin^[1] subculture. In the Otherkin subculture, people believe they are spiritually or genetically non-human, and are confined to a human form. In the Factkin subculture, people identify with people who have lived on Earth. For example, according to Tumblr user conceptkin,^[2] "Someone who believes they were Abraham Lincoln in a past life, or someone who shares a spiritual link with Chris Evans, (etc) would be factkin." Hamilkin identify with cast members of the 2015 Broadway musical, Hamilton.

History

Mentions of "Hamilkin" began appearing as early as spring of 2016. On March 31st, 2016, a piece of Hamilton fanfiction posted on Archive Of Our Own^[3] by Angsty_boy mentioned that the idea for the piece was inspired by "hamilkin chat." Hamilkin blogs appeared over the course of the following year. For example, in the Tumblr Hamilkincalls,^[4] people submitted their feelings about being Hamilkin (example shown below).

Anti-Hamilkin fandom emerged as well, as people found that identifying with 18th-century American aristocrats also meant identifying with slave-owners.^[6] This led to discourse surrounding the legitimacy of identifying with such people, leading Hamilkin members to stress that they were identifying with the characters from the musical more so than their historical bases. Aminoapps user Fictionkin^[5] argued this point, claiming that people change, and people in the Hamilkin community have strongly opposed the transgressions of their kin and believe they, as people like Hamilton, etc., have changed their views on slavery. Fictionkin added their personal experience as a Hamilkin, writing:

[[I'd also like to add, before you go yelling at me "oh, you were a slave owner, how dare you!!!!111!!!!1!11!!!" allow me to just inform you that in my own canon, I have very vivid memories of sneaking out many, many times, spending many long nights attempting to heal the sick and injured of my father's slaves, becoming friends with many of them, releasing large numbers on a regular basis, refusing my inheritance, being beaten and disowned by my family because of all this, then proceeding to illegally release the majority of them and offer a chance to fight for America's freedom before returning with whoever agreed to join me to the army camp at the beginning of the Battle of Yorktown. Wether or not this means anything to you is for you alone to decide, but I just thought I'd let you know the reason why I take being called racist and a slave owner very personally. Talk shit about me all you want but I'll never give in to consider myself racist. This has been my personal rant. Good day.]]

2017 Fanfiction Drama

On October 27th, 2017, Tumblr user digoxin-purpurea^[7] posted an exposure outing Tumblr user Israa of HIV-positive living blog hivliving, a user who claimed to be an "HIV-positive Chinese-Pakistani trafficking survivor, living in India with their Catholic Somali-American wife." "Israa" pretended to be this person in order to give her Hamilton high-school HIV fanfiction authenticity. She was exposed for lying and for being a white American college student who took money via cash.me. The user's actual blog was called allolesbean,^[8] which has since been taken over in Woody's Roundup, and there, she admitted that she lied about the persona the day before digoxin-purpurea's exposure post.

However, an investigation by Tumblr user pure^[9] into the drama uncovered that digoxin-purpurea exposed allolesbean because digoxin-purpurea once wrote a Hamilton fanfiction about the creator Lin-Manuel Miranda and involved mermaid cannibalism. According to pure, "Digoxin’s expose of Allolesbean is an extension of them getting back at Allolesbean and her friends for turbo cyberbullying them into deleting that cannibal mermaid hamilton fanfiction about Lin Manuel Miranda."

Tumblr user moltencalf^[10] summarized the entire drama in a post, which gained over 50,000 notes, which reads:

I sincerely apologize for spamming you all with the Hamilton fanfic controversy, but it’s really giving me so much strength. It’s been a while since we’ve had the kind of scandal that only Tumblr can provide (like the person who robbed graves; the person who mailed their toe to another person so they could make a necklace of it; etc). This scandal is just so fucking good, you know? White American college girl pretends to be a nonbinary Chinese-Pakistani Muslim human-trafficking survivor AND their American WOC wife and they live in India? And they suffered a miscarriage? And they both have HIV? All so she can scam people out of money and amass kudos on Archive of Our Own for her Hamilton HIV fanfic? And she does this for YEARS? And the person who uncovered it is doing it for revenge because the fake-HIV-fanfic writer made them delete a fanfic about Lin-Manuel Miranda and Thomas Jefferson as cannibal mermaids performing oral sex and unironically accused them of gentrifying cannibalism? I mean, this shit is fucking gold.

Search Interest

External References