Why settle for a girl who’s lumpy and hairy on purpose, pretty much daring you to walk away… when you could get a big strong beautiful goddess bowing at your feet, because she WANTS you?

‘That was the first of his videos that I ever saw,’ says a man calling himself Peleus over an online message. ‘I had just gone through a messy breakup with a regular girl and there was AK, with one of those bird girls, wings wrapped around him like a blanket. I knew I had to try it out.’ He generously drops me a zip file of a few more favorites. ‘I’m not into the goat stuff,’ he says, referring to satyrs, ‘but I’ve got some of that if you want it.’

The official AK Undercovers channel has been abandoned for nearly twenty years. Ravaged by years of rule overhauls, site revamps, and shaky server migrations, its page on Neovision Blue is a shadow of its former self. But a dedicated following has preserved virtually all of Kir’s output and spread it far and wide without the need for its old proprietor. The full archive includes bits and pieces only tangentially related, and items that were never uploaded to the main channel - shorts sneakily filmed on phones by guests, television featurettes on the topic of Kir, paparazzi photos and so on.

Ironically, the two groups who together serve as the greatest curators of Kir’s content to date are of opposing sides.

Peleus (screen name) is one of the founders of Mystic Love, an online community - consisting mostly of men - with an interest, sexual or otherwise, in variant women. Practical-minded members discuss pick-up and dating advice, and there are occasional success stories, though large swathes of discussion are devoted to pure fantasy. Size is a popular topic - the bodily size of their ideal partners, that is. The phrase ‘monster girl’ is endemic. To many, Augustine Kir is their patron saint.

The opposite end of the ideological battlefield is best embodied by the organization All Human, a thoroughly modern collective aiming to dismantle the very concept of variants relative to the unvaried. Kir’s content is saved and distributed in order to shock and disgust - and in doing so, teach future generations to do better. To AH, considering variants ‘other’ at all is to demean and deny their humanity. As the group’s name suggests, all are human - which is true in the legal sense.

‘Laws don’t mean anything unless they are enforced,’ says Whistle12 (real name, with the numerical attachments frequently seen on first-generation migrant merfolk). ‘And someone has to put the lawmakers to task.’ She is a merwoman with fiery hair, patches of golden scales, and a lower body tapering into a finned tail. Born without legs, she traverses the city in a motorized wheelchair. She meets me in person, gives a hard handshake and an equally ironclad smile. ‘I suppose you think you’re here to mediate.’

All Human's proponents are known for being rather radical when it comes to online discussion.

‘I’ll admit it: some of our younger members are a little too zealous in places that don’t matter. Drawn into ugly flame wars. I try to put a stop to it when I can. Choose your battles wisely.’ She sighs. ‘Immaturity is one thing. But to call us, at our core, radical? That’s disappointing to hear. I suppose it means that the men over on ML dream about taming and chaining us up are the acceptable ones.’

Mystic Love says that they follow all legal obligations.

Whistle snorts at this. ‘What their terms say is ‘we will now be following all legal…’ Ask them about the public decency case where explicit images of minors were involved…’

‘That faerie shit was before the courts had even decided anything about them. We complied the second the law went live,’ Peleus tells me. ‘And anyway, technically all those girls were adults, and a lot of them weren’t happy about the ruling - isn’t telling them to be ashamed of their own bodies actually a violation of their humanity? The rules were made by normal humans to make normal human girls feel good - jealousy, if you ask me.’

A fellow Mystic Love moderator, who goes by X (xximmortal is his screen name), also gives his take. ‘At least the faerie girls knew where they stood. Regular girls don’t. We all need to acknowledge our weaknesses.’ Equitably, he proceeds with a long story, summarized here for privacy and length. ‘When I grew up, I was always the strongest guy around - I did wrestling, and got into fights almost every day. I didn’t know the limit of my own strength before I got with a griffin gal.’

‘They’re talking about physicality, of course,’ Whistle says. ‘They were on top of the world, until they weren’t, but then the girls above them bowed to their cocks and everything was okay. Everyone likes to see themselves as the victim, owed compensation by the world. Ever notice how often they use the terminology of fantasy games, fantasy novels? The hero, the chosen one, rising up? They say the girls choose them, that the girls hold the power, but really, it’s all about themselves. The girls are their reward. And besides, the comparison of strength isn’t even true. Unvaried folk fail to consider the social protection they are simply born into.’

‘I don’t like the word unvaried,’ a disgruntled X tells me. Especially from those All Human skanks. If we’re all the same, why do we have to put each other down, huh?’

‘And the thing about the unvaried men on the ML Forums,’ Whistle continues, ‘is they think that sex, of all things, is the thing that is going to tame what isn’t theirs’.

Peleus shrugs this off. ‘True, there’s way too much sex talk sometimes. But sex sells. I hate to say it, and it’s really caused a lot of headaches when it comes to moderating the chat. It’s also how AK got the word out. What if he hadn’t? What if it had been some real creeper, a hunter or a murderer or a bunch of gangbangers rallying people to rape the girls, instead of one eccentric little guy? Plus, he really loved them. You can tell how he placed the cameras… He always took responsibility for protection - you know how many women complain when guys don’t do that? Never touched a girl who already had a man. He was dedicated to his craft, ethical. Do you know how many women he allowed to walk out before getting one that made for a good video? And he never hit any of them…’

Whistle huffs when she hears me read these traits out, particularly the last one. She smiles sharply when I ask why she laughs. ‘Of course, with the griffins and bigger merfolk, he wouldn’t have stood a chance in a fight, even if he tried. But do you really think targeting socially isolated women is an ethical strategy?’

‘My girlfriend would crush my spine like tissue if I dared to step out of line,’ X announces. ‘And at the same time, I can be sure no other guy is going to force her into anything. AH cunts can never make up their minds. Are they really untouchable freaks or frail little babies who need to be protected from the big bad men? They’re making the few remaining pure girls into bitter hags like the rest of them. We all need to know our place. That’s how Augustine wanted it, too.’

Whistle puts a stop to that line of conversation in our interview. ‘Kir was always highly controlling - and controlled. He just got complacent. There’s no way he wanted it all to end like that. How can anyone say he did, knowing what happened?’

The channel’s unexpected end is as glorious as it’s active days, as far as most of ML’s members are concerned. Peleus chides me for bringing it up in a negative light. ‘So many people who never watched his videos, and smugly say they never will, love to pretend they know what he meant and what he was planning every step of the way.’

‘Usually, it’s women he’d never have given the time of day who think they know it all,’ says X.

Whistle laughs at this. ‘And all this from idolizing idiots never even met him. He’s just an excuse to unleash their sex-pest habits on the unsuspecting public with the facade of elevated morality.’

‘Jealous femdroids turn the last pure things left in the world against us, and they call themselves progressive. Then they turn around and complain when anyone gets upset by them, when they were the one stirring shit in the first place! Everyone wants to be the victim. The AH folks will spin you as a rapist for just speaking their name,’ Peleus warns me, before I head out to meet Whistle. ‘If anyone says these girls were being used and abused - just think of Roha. Was she a victim?’

The same topic brings me to the end of my chat with Whistle. ‘Of course those ‘monster lovers’ would use her as an ace in their sick debates. Picking one case out of hundreds and saying that’s the one that defines everything. We aren’t a monolith - we, being… all women. All humans. One difficult case…’ She pauses, and decides sometimes exceptions are to be made. ‘Roha was a separate thing entirely.’

—

There is a self-awareness in both sides of the argument today that was never quite evident in Augustine Kir himself. His confidence and - absurd as it is to say, considering the nature of his channel - composure made him magnetic. Not all, but plenty of women flocked to him even as his activities became known. And as the men of Mystic Love correctly recall, Kir took serious, personal responsibility for health and contraception. He was also never filmed nor accused of using excess force until the last, muddy case. For the most part, the legal troubles were largely rooted in privacy violation - the fact the videos were posted online, not the specifics of their content beyond knowing it was intimate in nature.

Onscreen, his banter is unfaltering. Everything - as his assistant remembers - was a bit of a joke. I suppose there is something comforting about that. The surprises he orchestrates are pleasant. If not, they are only temporary. Kir appears to be coasting through life, dignity be damned. Living looks fun; almost artful.

But the more I uncover, the more acquaintances I speak to, the more this artifice seems to not have been artifice at all. Hidden talents and suspected secrets have been scrubbed and swept off by denial or feigned ignorance of his so-called friends and family. The only things they can’t deny are what wound up on video. And so it very much became the case that the being put to camera, the performer, was all of him. 

There is an essay from his final year of high school, hand-written for an in-class Philosophy exam. His old teacher shares it for analysis at a talk show, when Augustine’s fame reaches its peak. Another one-time hidden aspect of the man set before the public.

The teenage Augustine writes, in the cavalier manner that would be cultivated further in his videos, about ‘Obliteration of the self’. The world, he recounts casually, is inherently cruel from its component parts to its higher powers. Any happiness is an illusion to keep one on the ‘infernal treadmill’ that conveys them to their inevitable demise; to 'land another speck on the mounting pile of corpses that weigh heavier and heavier' on the ensuing generations until sanity buckles under 'history and obligation.'

Many believe this an analogy to the pressure he was receiving from the family to decide what he’d do after graduation.

But Kir bids the reader not to worry about what they can’t control - rather, embrace the illusions head on. Ceaselessly seek as many as you can, never stopping to dwell on what lies between and below, and engulf yourself in the illusions, so thoroughly enough that the illusions never end. A happy existence of hedonism.

A messy life won’t be ‘worth it’, but the truth is nothing is worth it. We don’t have hundreds of years to put off rewarding ourselves. Live fast, die young..!

Like an omen, the end of the famous adage is omitted.