Talking animals in an otherwise "serious" fantasy world, tonally could it work?

Albedo

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See, for me, worrying about how they are speaking is actually part of the fun. Maybe my tastes are more "pulp" than I'm willing to admit, since the mechanics of a fictional world are rarely a subject of academic discussion (there's no fan wiki for "The Winter of Our Discontent," but there's one for the "Guardians of Ga'hoole").

No, I was more worried about it tonally than I was about the mechanics, finding a creative way to explain the mechanics actually gives me joy, not stress. I was more concerned readers would feel like their intelligence was being insulted that I wanted to make a serious drama with talking animals, but if this thread is any indication that shouldn't actually be an issue. The dichotomy between "serious literary fiction" and "fantasy" seems far less stark than I initially perceived, which is great for me because frankly I like weird Meerkat monsters arguing about politics.
Yes. And not only because there is serious literary fantasy, but because I feel even pulp can have serious aspirations. We should reject the idea of 'pulp' (and even 'trash') as a pejorative outright, IMO, and embrace the terms, but that again is probably another discussion. Genre fiction should have a dialogue with literary fiction, and take its best parts while keeping what makes genre unique. Not try to water down its more fantastic elements so it can be considered 'serious' by the people who determine what 'serious' is.
 

Albedo

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Brin's uplift universe books were good, though the series always felt rather unfinished to me. The dolphins and chimps were well done as "alien" intelligences that had been raised to full sapience via human intervention, and many of the aliens in that universe were really interesting too.

I loved Cherryh's Chanuur series. Those are one of my favorite SF series of all time, and I don't even care that cat aliens are a common motif (is that the right word, or is it a trope) in SF, and that it's really out there for a particular earthly animal type to have evolved elsewhere in the universe. She did a great job of extrapolating a lion like social system onto an alien culture, and her other aliens in that series were fascinating too. She's very good at taking alien cultures that seem "evil" at first and making them, if not sympathetic, at least comprehensible.

Trope, topos, motif, element? I've always wondered if the prevalence of catlike aliens is due to the prevalence of authors who own cats. In hard science fiction I prefer actual aliens to be truly alien, but having uplifted animals filling that role can work just as well, IMO, particularly for building realistic alien psychologies and societies. In real life we already share our planet with various sentient aliens, and for some of them we've barely scratched the depth of their complexity of mind. Brin did a great job of making the dolphins, and their language, weird.
 

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And, there are talking animals in genres outside sf and fantasy.
Rita Mae Brown's 'Mrs. Murphy' mysteries are about humans, but there is sort of a pet chorus, cats, dogs, and, I believe, the occasional horse, commenting on the actions of their humans, and the crime in the novel. All among themselves, not talking to the humans.
 

ULTRAGOTHA

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And, there are talking animals in genres outside sf and fantasy.
Rita Mae Brown's 'Mrs. Murphy' mysteries are about humans, but there is sort of a pet chorus, cats, dogs, and, I believe, the occasional horse, commenting on the actions of their humans, and the crime in the novel. All among themselves, not talking to the humans.

Then there's Jennie by Paul Gallico. (Known as The Abandoned in the US.) A little boy turns into a cat and is taught how to be a cat by an older mother cat. "When in doubt, wash" is a phrase we use often in this house. And if you like that, try The Silent Miao, which is a photo essay about Gallico taking in a stray cat accompanied by a manuscript that the cat wrote and left in his study. Instructions to younger kittens in how to take over a household. Our copy is wrapped in plain brown paper so the cats don't get ideas.
 

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Then there's Jennie by Paul Gallico. (Known as The Abandoned in the US.) A little boy turns into a cat and is taught how to be a cat by an older mother cat. "When in doubt, wash" is a phrase we use often in this house. And if you like that, try The Silent Miao, which is a photo essay about Gallico taking in a stray cat accompanied by a manuscript that the cat wrote and left in his study. Instructions to younger kittens in how to take over a household. Our copy is wrapped in plain brown paper so the cats don't get ideas.


Tangential to the thread, but I had a cat short story collection in the late 1980's that included two chapter excerpts from Gallico's book, one where she taught the boy (Peter?) the importance of washing, and one where Peter has his first rat hunt aboard a ship. His stuff is fairly hard to find these days, though...
 

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Tangential to the thread, but I had a cat short story collection in the late 1980's that included two chapter excerpts from Gallico's book, one where she taught the boy (Peter?) the importance of washing, and one where Peter has his first rat hunt aboard a ship. His stuff is fairly hard to find these days, though...

Do you remember what it was called? I can find a lot of stuff from Gallico on my fave not-Amazon book site, so it probably has that short story collection, too...
 

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Stumbled across this on the InterTubes:
https://dogpatch.press/2020/09/08/christopher-polt-boston-college/
https://dogpatch.press/2020/09/09/christopher-polt-boston-college-2/

He teaches a course on talking animals at Boston College.

That looks like fun.

One question I have for him, though, is why the overwhelming majority of cartoon animal characters, talking and otherwise, are male? I know there's a male bias in human narratives too, but it's really biased with animal stories.
 

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That looks like fun.

One question I have for him, though, is why the overwhelming majority of cartoon animal characters, talking and otherwise, are male? I know there's a male bias in human narratives too, but it's really biased with animal stories.
That's because all animals are male, unless they have big eyelashes and hourglass figures, and hence female animals take much longer to draw. Science!
 

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Went to the dog patch link, found this: What are we doing when we speak by using animal voices, and what does that say about our attitudes towards humans, animals, and the lines we draw between them?ā€

This articulated something for me. When I look at Falls end, it would be impossible to articulate the themes through humans. They have to be animals. For example, Thaleen is a huge jaguar Monster insecure about being taken hostage. He feels immeasurable humiliation at the vulnerability. Itā€™s supposed to be a bit of an absurd insecurity that eats away at him, making him feel like he would fail at protecting his daughter and husband. A human feeling insecure about their vulnerability is one thing, but making it one of the most deadly creatures of all time says something I feel like I couldnā€™t say using humans. Thatā€™s why I used the animator who made the wall as a reference point in my OG post, the designs themselves matter to me. Iā€™m surprised at how long this thread has lasted but Iā€™ve thoroughly enjoyed everyoneā€™s perspectives.
 

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That's because all animals are male, unless they have big eyelashes and hourglass figures, and hence female animals take much longer to draw. Science!

That link has some cursed images wow.

Forgive the incoming tangent, but I would want to stray pretty far from anthro characters they design in a lot of kids media. It just seems a bit lacking in natural curiosity to them, for the males it's "here is x animal but walks on two legs." And then for the females "here is x animal but on two legs, but also they have eyelashes." I really like designs that are "truly" alien, though I recognize that is my subjective taste. If it is based on an animal they probably want it to be easily recognizable as that animal, which makes sense, especially in media for kids (and Fall's End is decidedly not for kids); but I wish not every talking animal piece of media looked like zootopia, ya know? Zootopia looks fine in isolation, but not everything has to look like that. Make some truly strange new creatures with three pronged tongues and triangular heads that can spin 360 degrees, keep me on my toes, make me think what the heck is this creature capable of?. That's an advantage a book has I'd say, readers can easily buy strange designs, and they don't have to be focus tested or easily recognizable.

My subjective taste aside, objectively, those female designs are atrocious. The Ice Age one triggered a fight or flight response from me.
 

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If they live like humans, they can definitely talk like humans. I'd maybe give them their own language that humans have to learn, just like we learn foreign languages in the real world. Even if they live in the same town as the humans, they must surely have formed their own culture and language, even if it's "only" a dialect of the local human tongue. I would however make doubly sure not to let language and/or species speak to character, which happens very easily when it's animals (Lion King, hyenas), and this is when I have trouble, because when the animal wears clothes, it's subject to human social dynamics and prejudice.