Starblade Enkai

Starblade Enkai, also known as Starblade Riven Darksquall (real name Matthew Paul Finnigan; born May 12, 1984 - September 22, 2010), was a Dragon otherkin.

Fandom involvement
According to various sources, Finnigan started to use alt.fan.dragons around 1998, posting under various names such as Talbain Nova, Starblade Riven Darksquall and Starblade Darkstar due to repeatedly accruing disrepute. He mostly ceased to post to the newsgroup around 2005.

During the early 2000s, he also played in the Alfandria MUCK, an otherkin-oriented MUCK which eventually shut down in 2007. An autistic person who extensively posted to various communities, he was an ongoing student at Monterey Peninsula College at the time of his murder.

FYIAD
In 2003 Starblade posted a topic to the debate community on LiveJournal in which he criticized detractors of his belief in what he called "Otherkinism" and his own self-perception as a spiritual dragon. The resulting debate, attracting mostly detractors or outsiders to discussion of the otherkin subculture, resulted in what became known as Fuck You I'm a Dragon! (FYIAD), which has become a byword for any overly-reactive defense of a seemingly-improbable self-assessment.

Starblade's murder
On September 22, 2010 at 2:10 AM PST, police responded to the report of a violent incident at an apartment complex in the 800 block of Casanova Street in Monterey, California ; there, Starblade was found with a wound resulting from being stabbed at least once in the upper torso. A friend, James Torrey Hill, a fellow student at Monterey Peninsula College, was initially arrested at the scene on charges of attempted murder. Starblade was then transported to Santa Clara Valley Medical Center in San Jose, where he was pronounced dead at 7 a.m. PST. While an autopsy was performed on Starblade, Hill's bail was then set at USD$1 million.

At the September 23 arraignment, Hill, defended by the Monterey County Public Defender's Office, pleaded not guilty to charges of first-degree murder.

After interviewing acquaintances of Starblade, Starblade's parents, and the accused, a student journalist covered the case for a CSU Northridge magazine. A PDF of CSUNScene is available online, and the article is published on the author's personal blog "FenceHopper" as well.

Hill's trial began on October 22, 2013. His defense attorney, Michelle Wouden, did not dispute that Hill killed Starblade, but told jurors "what is in dispute is why this happened", suggesting that mental illness was a key factor. In police interviews, Hill said that demons had urged him to kill.

On November 12, 2013, after a half day of deliberations, a jury decided that Hill was legally sane the night he stabbed Starblade. Found guilty, Hill was sentenced to 26 years to life.

Reactions
Starblade's murder elicited a widely-divergent range of emotion within and without the fandom. Arcturus, who had personally interacted with Starblade, posted a journal to his Fur Affinity account:

Which resulted in user condemnation and a suspension by Fur Affinity staff, while Palshife (a former user of Alfandria, a MUD which both he and Starblade had used in the early 2000s before relations soured between the two and the MUD shut down) posted to his LiveJournal a critically-damning appraisal of Starblade's actions and behavior towards others, even though he expressed condemnation of Arcturus' journal post.