Hey anon!
Despite both being linked to fictional concepts, the kin community and the reality shifting community surprisingly don’t have a common origin point.
Reality shifting is a pretty new phenomenon, and seems to have grown out of a lot of the spiritual empowerment communities on tiktok.
That’s why you’ll see it often entwined with “angel numbers” and “law of attraction” type stuff. It has the roots of its practices in lucid dreaming and astral travel but reskinned for fiction.
Fictionkin, meanwhile, first appeared as an offshoot of the otherkin phenomenon. Originally called “otakukin” community, and initially gained traction on livejournal in the early 2000s.
You can tell that there’s little overlap between the communities, because both use the term “shift” to mean something very different.
In Otherkin and Fictionkin communities the term “shift” or “kin shift” means a state in which some element of you is closer to your kin self than in your normal state. For instance you may feel an astral/phantom tail if you were a wolf. You may take on more mannerisms of your kintype, etc. This terminology has been used in the community since the early 2000s at the latest.
In the reality shifting community however the term “shift” or “reality shift” means projecting your consciousness into another world.
