The people lived in tune with nature thanks to a largely agricultural existence, until the Enlightenment and its attendants calculus, petroleum and animal vivisection turned the universe into clockwork, work into wage slavery, and the family into a demographic market segment. Elves are now what people once were, before we all got office jobs, health insurance, and credit card debt, before life became like running across a flaming rope bridge. Thanks to modern society, we're all Frankenstein's monster. None of us fit. The Otherkin are making a Romantic appeal for a better world and a better life.
Online elves plunder modern pop culture for their premodern worldview.
The Dreaming, by White Wolf Game Studio, sent shock waves through the online Otherkin community in the 1990s. Changeling is a game about normal people who suddenly realize they are faeries with the power and need to bring magic back to a cold, soulless world. Rich Dansky, a human being who worked on the game, ran into Otherkin through a listserv called darkfae-l. Finally, one of the list members came to the obvious conclusion that we'd gotten it right because we ourselves were in fact changelings. Dansky denies having any pixie genes.