Still reading through Treasure Planet and enjoying it
quite a bit, but not quite finished, so it’ll still be a little while until I
give a full opinion on it!
However, the book itself does bring up a concept that I
always find interesting and even scary in anthropomorphic fiction: The concept
of a character losing their ‘anthropomorphic’ qualities.
It’s something I think we take for granted in most
stories, as the concept of a human losing their humanity is scary, but
sometimes difficult to grasp or even believe. We see a person committing an inhumane act
and we tend to often rationalize it. With an animal character, however, we have
a ready reference for what they will be like if they lose their ‘humanity’.
Suddenly a lion who is friends with a fox goes from playing catch to pouncing
on the fox and tearing out its throat. We can believe that because we’ve seen
it in nature, and seeing that reality pushed upon our fantasy talking-animal
worlds can be, frankly, chilling.
It’s sort of like that first time you go to Disney World
as a child and you see the big walking Mickey Mouse and you're SO happy because
you can hug him and give him a high-five… but then you catch the person in the
suit taking a smoke break with the head sitting off to the side. When I was
that age, I just told myself that the guy I was seeing wasn’t really the
character I’d seen earlier. It was just some guy dressed up funny. I honestly
knew better, but keeping the hope of a return to normalcy alive in my mind made
things easier to take.
I wonder if we do the same when we witness an anthro
animal suddenly becoming the beast we’ve been ignoring or forgetting exists?
Happy Independence Day, all, and good reading!
-Chammy
Book Currently Being Read:
Treasure Planet by Hal Colebatch & Jessica Q. Fox
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