The End of It All!

Well, I wanted to talk about something cheerful this time around, so how about the apocalypse?

I’m constantly fascinated by society’s interest in the End Times and dystopian futures, especially when it comes to literature and media. One would think that folks would be more interested in blissful escapism than delving into the dangerous realms of ‘what-if’ scenarios for when the world ends. However, an argument could be made that viewing such things in fiction IS escapism, as it gives us a safe place to speculate and observe the ultimate ends of concerns that we all might have about the world.

Plus, it’s a great way to see really cool-looking mutants!

Beast is WAY cooler anyways.

Er... Not that kind...

In all honesty, fascination with the end of the world or the fall of society is not new in the slightest. Mankind has long held an interest in the afterlife, dark prophecies of the future, and essentially with death and decay. It comes from that natural question a healthy inquisitive mind has: “What’s next?”

What DOES seem to be a little new to me is the number of works featuring anthropomorphic characters in these settings. I’ve seen a couple of books and games that depict a ruined Earth where humankind has almost entirely died out and, in their place, other animals became the dominant species, developing culture, language, technology, and so forth. It’s an interesting idea because it almost presents anthropomorphic animals as a logical and sensible thing. Some species has to fill the gap that man has left behind, right?

I do find it kind of amusing that, oftentimes, these newly dominant species end up becoming extremely human in appearance and mannerisms as well. One might think that’s a commentary on how sentient beings and society tend to operate in an immutable pattern, but I’m sure it’s also done because of the ease of relatability for readers, and because it’s simply a fun idea for the writers.

But, going back to what I said earlier, these settings are also fun because they allow the writer to play with mutants, or hybrids, as some might see them. In terms of anthropomorphic animals, the sky is nearly the limit here, with winged cats and talking, blood-red dogs being the more tame varieties. I’ve seen four-foot tall anthropomorphic mice with antennae for ears, king-sized slugs with crowns to match, and cheetah with the legs of a grasshopper. These mutations allow for all sorts of new ideas for how characters can move and perceive the world, and they can be extremely exciting for that reason alone. I think the most fun this line of writing gets is when it just fully embraces its weirdness.

Perhaps one of the best examples of this I’ve seen in writing is a Dungeons and Dragons novel called ‘Red Sails in the Fallout’. It is part of a series of novels written about the DnD setting known as Gamma World, and few things get stranger than that. For those of you who do not know, the Gamma World setting is a game type that is characterized primarily by its randomness and anything-goes mentality. It’s essentially a setting where the world has gone to pot and mutations are everywhere, both in the monsters and the player characters and even the world itself. As an example of how silly and awesome the game can get, a friend of mine once played a session where they were assigned and acquired random mutations as the game went on. By the end of the game, he was a swarm of sentient bees that all operated with one consciousness and had telepathic powers along with shooting laser beams out of his many eyes.

I’m told he was one of the more normal cases in his game.

The book is a fine read even for those who have never played a single game of Dungeons and Dragons. I won’t do a proper Book Talk on this one as I did not read it critically and it’s been a long time since I picked it up, but it has some of the marks of what I described above, where the main anthropomorphic characters travel across a radiation drenched world, fending off mutated creatures and the land itself and dealing with the understandably crazy inhabitants and their own mutations as they come. It has a very tongue-in-cheek flavor to its writing as it knows full well how weird the setting is, and is definitely written for the purposes of entertainment over science.

So, yeah, when it comes to the apocalypse and those terrifying dystopian futures, I think they’re all well and good to explore and give us some great insights into human culture. However, I also love how they’re great starting points for looking at how the world could be different if given half a chance and a nuclear fallout or two.

Though I do wonder which animals really would rise to dominance after the humans have gone… I want to say it would be raccoons, with our dexterous hands and intelligence, but the end of human society means we would lose one of our primary food sources!

I see you there, Mr. Artist!
Don't you dare give me six arms or nine tails...
I'm already mutant enough, being blue.

Speaking of food, I hope everyone has a wonderful Thanksgiving, if you celebrate it. I am extremely thankful for a great many things, including the folks who've read my words here and shared their opinion and thoughts with me as a result.

Until next time, happy reading all!

Currently Reading:

The Last Wild by Piers Torday

Impartiality

This might be a bit rambly and a touch personal, so I do apologize in advance.

Here we go...

A little while back, a good friend of mine asked a question about my own personal writing that I thought I was prepared for:

“Why ARE your characters anthropomorphic animals instead of humans?”

Really, it’s an extremely fair question that many writers of anthropomorphic animal fiction have no doubt run into. I’ve seen it posted up on webcomic and author FAQs at least several times. Yet somehow, that day, it tripped me up a little more than I was expecting. My knee-jerk response was probably the one that was the most true, as I responded “Well, my characters are animals because that’s what they are.”

It’s a bit circular in logic, but I feel it is true enough. Why are any characters in some novels human? Their species doesn’t have to be their primary identity, right? Honestly, I feel some old-fashioned fantasy fiction is kind of mocked for having Dwarves always ‘act like Dwarves’ and Elves always ‘acting like Elves’. Typically the characters that break from the molds created for their races are celebrated and memorable. Why else does the culturally unheard of friendship of Gimli and Legolas feel so strong and honest by the end of the Lord of the Rings trilogy?

Of course, me being the type of fellow that I am, I couldn’t just let such a simple statement be the end of my answer to my friend’s question. I actually quickly backed up on my statement and tried to make a more solid and professional one that took on a different angle. My response was something of a mix of an answer I’d heard before from an author I can’t quite recall at the moment:

“My characters are animals so as to bypass racial stereotypes and to focus on how different types of people can get together despite their obvious differences. I can use my characters to make a statement about diversity and racism without calling out specific races and maybe make people think differently about the issues.”

Before some of the more cynical of my reader mutter “Yeah right…” on my somewhat canned statement, I actually feel there is a modicum of truth to what I said, though I wasn’t quite honest with my feelings on the matter and what really irks me about such a question sometimes.

I’m tired of race as being ‘a point’ in fiction.

After my answer, I was told a bit about how many publishers in the industry are looking for more diversity in literature, looking for stories about minority cultures and races that aren’t often represented in popular literature. While looking at publishers to contact for my own work, I actually saw something like this pop up several times where publishers were looking for works primarily focusing on ‘minority culture’ and a rather amusing statement I heard from that angle was ‘aliens don’t count as diverse cultures!’

It actually makes me a little angry that publishers and much of the media is clamoring for minority representation. This is not because I want women and people of color to continue to be under-represented and wrongfully stereotyped, but rather because I don’t think the people who publish and ask for this sort of focus really know what they’re asking for or how offensive it really is when they say they want something with a clear focus on ‘minority culture’.

When people are asking for stories about African Americans, they’re not really asking for stories about people who are black. They’re asking for stories about people who SHOW they’re black. They don’t want a black young black man named Jonathan Reed with a successful mother and father who live comfortably in upper-middle class America with dreams, problems, and ambitions of their own that have no bearing on their race. They want a story about a boy named Miles “Hoops” Jordan who struggles in a poverty-ridden neighborhood with his divorced mother as he fights to rise against the gang and drug culture and the ‘walls’ created by the color of his skin as he tries to prove what he can do.

I’m so tired of reading stories telling me that my race is the only major identity I have. Good at music, good at art, honors student, professional public speaker… all of these are subcategories that go under the heading of “He’s black, but…” and it seems to be all folks want to see when they want to read about ‘minority culture’. In fact, I remember a book called ‘Anansi Boys’ I read where the race of the character actually shocked me. He didn’t have a stereotypical ‘black’ name, he was successful and spoke well and never once was his race an ‘issue’. I only realized he was black when someone commented on his African heritage as it related to the mythology that was being referenced at various points in the story.

It actually shocked me that this well-spoken man I was reading about was black, and I feel like that’s a BAD thing. You know what’s also funny about it? Anansi Boys is not labelled in any fashion to suggest it’s primarily focused on characters of color, and yet I see publishers and readers looking for ‘black fiction’ and ‘minority fiction’ and putting lovely labels on them like ‘urban fiction’ and ‘urban romance’, just so folks don’t get confused about what they might pick up.

When I hear that publishers are looking for more ‘diversity’ in their books, I get the feeling they just want to pad out the ‘urban’ genre or the ‘women’s fiction’ genre. I do not get the feeling that they want to see new and interesting characters or strong, unique stories, but rather that they want stories they can put into their box in order to draw certain attention to themselves.

I don’t think that’s right to do to readers, and I feel like it’s poisoning our literary culture and culture in general. Rather than focusing on people, stories, and ideas, we’re focusing on covers and categories. We don’t need more stories about ‘black people’, we need more stories about ‘people, who also happen to be black.’

Of course, I don’t mean to undermine the wealth of wonderful literature about civil struggles. I feel they’re incredibly important, especially for historical purposes and showing the evils of society and how we can stand against them. In a way, such stories are fantastic accounts of what it really means to be ‘human’ in the fullest sense, and that’s really the idea that anthropomorphic literature was meant to bring into focus too. I’ve loved reading many stories about civil rights and I feel like they are still relevant and can be written about issues facing us today.

However, and bringing this back to the question that started this, I am tired of civil rights being the only place we see racial diversity.  I don’t write and draw stories about anthropomorphic animal characters in order to subvert or attack racial ideas.  I write about these characters because I love the worlds and ideas that they bring to the table, and also because I want to bring the focus away from the color of skin and towards who these people are as characters.

Yeah, folks may always associate raccoons with thievery and cats with wanting to take over the world, but I feel like, once readers see traits in these characters that they can identify with, they’ll more readily take to them and their stories and won’t be afraid of whether or not these characters are appropriately representing their race.

I do apologize if I went on a bit of ramble here, but I actually felt this was pretty relevant to the topics we’ve covered in this blog. Next week I’ll try to hop into something a bit more light-hearted, I promise!

For those who want a bit more 'cute' with their rant!
This is what I get for starting trouble...

Until then, happy reading, all!

-Chammy

Here Be Dragons

Dragons are interesting creatures when it comes to anthropomorphic fiction. Really, of all the anthro beasts available, dragons are perhaps one of the most common to see in fiction, even if those stories have no other talking animals outside of the dragon. They hold a ready spot in fantasy and fairy tales and are easily accepted as sages, monsters, and even sidekicks to the heroes. In rare instances, they even get to be heroes themselves! If anyone would like to see probably the best and most renowned book series with dragon characters, you don’t need to look any further than the “Dragonriders of Pern” series by Anne McAffrey.

However, and this may seem like an odd question, but: What exactly IS an anthropomorphic dragon?

I don’t think there’s any doubt that dragons are highly anthropomorphized. They’re known for telling riddles, hoarding treasure, and kidnapping beautiful women. Even at their most monstrous, dragons are still considered beasts under the domain of good or evil. It’s extremely rare for a dragon in literature to be treated like wild cattle, without any real rhyme or reason for what it does. With that in mind, though, there are also clearly different ‘levels’ of anthropomorphic dragons.

In recent years, the Dungeons and Dragons franchise has popularized a race called ‘Dragonborn’, who are basically wingless human-dragon hybrids. They look like the dragons in that universe, having scale patterns and most facial features to match, but they’re also still clearly human-like by standing upright and with plantigrade feet. They speak and move not unlike humans do and are regarded as odd in that universe, but not unheard of. Despite the name given, I think we could easily get away with calling this race an anthropomorphic dragon race.

Definitely an awesome race, but I wish they didn't always look so angry...

Then there are the more direct anthro dragons, seen less in every day literature and much more in proper furry literature. These dragons are essentially like D&D’s Dragonborn race, but they have wings, tails of varying lengths, and usually look a little less monstrous by design. Of course, they stand upright and have hands designed for manipulating objects, and their height varies. While these dragons ARE uncommon to see in everyday media, they’re still around in some places. One of my most favorite examples is Llewellyn, from the Ozy & Millie comic strip, and Lazarus, a dragon from SEGA’s Shining Wind series. When it comes to purely written and published works, however, I’m afraid I can’t think of any off the top of my head.

The real question here is: who's playing black?

When we look at these characters, I’m wondering, is it fair to call them ‘anthro’ dragons? Dragons are already plenty anthropomorphized in terms of speech and personality, and all these types of characters are adding to the human element is an opportunity for them to wear more clothes. I’ve seen some folks calling these types of characters ‘dragonkin’, but I think that just makes them feel like an entirely different race. Oddly enough, I feel the most comfortable just calling these characters ‘dragons’. Dragons are so varied in design already, and I feel like there’s little confusion about the animals anthro dragons are based upon if you were to present them to folks who know little of anthropomorphic characters.

What do you readers think? How would you name a difference between anthro and normal dragons? Dragonkin, dragonborn, dragonmen… no change in terminology at all?

Also, if anyone out there has any mainstream literature with such dragons featured prominently, please share it in the comments below! I’d love to get a better look at how these characters are dealt with in writing, and books about dragons are just fun in general.

One of the many reasons raccoons have short lifespans.

Until next time, happy reading, all!

-Chammy

Currently Reading:

The Unlikely Ones by Mary Brown