Animal Fantasy NEEDS To Be Gayer And Transer So Here Are Some Of My Queer Xenofiction Thoughts

We need more games where you play as animals.

Regular animals.

Cyborg animals.

Alien animals.

I don’t care. Just more animals please.

helloo

Hi! I'm trying to write a fic where the main characters, who are normally human, are now animals. I'm having a hard time figuring out how to keep them in character though, since certain things they could do before, they can't now (ie. no hands, can't do certain things humans can, etc.) I'd very much welcome any advice, since I'm close to deciding this story idea is at a dead-end. Thanks!

Is this a fic where humans are suddenly turned into animals and now trying to deal with their new forms? Or is this an AU where the cast just are animals and that’s the world that they live in all the time? I’d write those in very different ways.

If this is an animal AU, and that’s a very doable thing. Just think about animated films. Even though the characters are animals doing very animal things, they also maintain personalities that are familiar to humans. 

If it’s a case of humans being transformed into animals, then they’ll need to spend time (and probably get frustrated) figuring out how to do things in their new bodies. No opposable thumbs means they’ll need to find another way to turn a doorknob, for example. No ability to talk means that they won’t be able to utter passwords for electronic locks. 

I haven’t written this kind of fic before, so I’ll open up the floor to see who else can add thoughts here. This could be a really interesting challenge for you, anon, so I hope you don’t give up!

This is insane

Trope of the Week: Aliens are Blue-Skinned Humans

There are two types of aliens in science-fiction: the monstrous of mind and body who only wish to destroy, and the incredibly human who are sentient and sly. Rarely do we find a race that is somewhere between. Sentience and intelligence is almost a guarantee of a human-like body, and the lady aliens? They will definitely have boobs.

Why this can be bad: There are several things at work here when we’re crafting an alien species. We have a tendency to think ourselves the top of the food chain and therefore the most intelligent species. Anything on par with or superior to us must therefore look similar to ourselves. As species of organisms on earth grow more advanced in neurology, they come to have a very specific pattern: major sense organs all located around the brain and in the head, two arms, two legs, tendency for bipedalism, et cetera. And, of course, there are the influences of pop culture such as earlier seasons of Star Trek, which lacked the budget and technology to create intricate unhuman characters capable of being on screen for more than a couple minutes.

Put this all together and it culminates in many uninspired alien designs. The sentient beings end up closely resembling us, if not being nearly identical. Some of this can amount to laziness, but a lot of it has to do with the factors I listed above. While we can’t exactly argue whether or not this is realistic, it nevertheless becomes tiresome when aliens devolve into humans with strange skin colors and maybe a few other “exotic” features. While fantasy can have this issue (dwarves, elves, and humans are all pretty much the same as far as special variation go), they at least tend to exist on the same planet and therefore go through the same evolutionary process. Aliens do not have this excuse.

How you can fix it: To ask you to create a dozen completely unique alien species for your science-fiction novel/game/movie would be insane. It’s very hard for us to think of creatures uninspired by ourselves or the world we see, and similarities to humans make it easier for the audience to envision or connect. However, I would challenge you to make your sentient aliens more diverse. Octavia Butler does a fantastic job in her Lilith’s Brood series. The oankali, a sentient and highly-advanced alien race, only resemble humans because they take on the traits of the species they are preparing to make first contact with it. In truth, they’re covered in sensory tentacles, have three reproductive sexes, and have a greater range of perception than humans. While similar to humans, they are also highly different and incredibly unique, which makes them much more interesting to read about than most other aliens I’ve seen.

Creating an unparalleled alien race is not easy, and it’s hard to expect a writer to make each species he or she creates entirely unique. Nevertheless, there is still a want for more diversity and otherness to our aliens. It shows a real effort has been put in to the world building, rather than the writer slapping on some black eyes and hooves in an attempt to make them different.

Bottom Line: Not every sentient alien has to be incredibly unique, but put a concerted effort into your world building to avoid making boring human clones.

I think for me, the hardest part of writing xenofiction is striking the perfect balance between sapience and animality.

Because really nature is so variable and so strange in its "rules", but many times we are not aware of it. Sometimes we see animals and their worlds as one thing and ignore all their capabilities, all that can be and will be.

The type of story you want to make can also enter a little bit, realism doesn't matter too much if your story doesn't pretend to be one (or in any case go for a more fantastic side than real). On the one hand you have stories of not entirely sapient animals (White Fang, Wild Animals I Have Know, Bambi etc), on the other hand stories that are already entirely fantastic and/or anthropomorphized (Warriors, Redwall, The Jungle Book etc) and those that try to mix both concepts (Watership Down, Gahoole in its beginnings, among others).

For my part, although I have in mind a couple of more fantastic and "cheesy" ideas, my xenofiction is mostly based on the real side of things, I strongly believe that animals themselves create thousands of amazing stories, stories that happen in front of our noses but that we are missing.

So, what I'm referring to with this. It's that we are usually left with only one idea of what animals do. We have those who believe that animals are like in fairy tales where they are all friends where there is peace and love, and then there are those who see nature as a gore horror movie where there is someone dying every second and everything is infinitely horrible and morbid.

And, it is not like that. Animals may not be complete friends all the time, but neither are they machines programmed to just follow an order and be devoid of feelings. It goes far beyond all of this that we as humans have learned. That's why it's so wonderful.

For example, many people know that Capybaras are incredibly calm animals that seem to get along with a lot of wildlife, and they do. But also, among them there is also aggression, male Capybaras fight even to the death just to dominate a territory. They are also hunted by other animals such as pumas, jaguars and crocodiles.

And even with all that, you can see a Capybara enjoying life with his species, passing through the territory of crocodiles without any of them being interested in killing him and even climbing on the back of one to cross streams.

So, you really don't always need to give animals human values or morals in order for them to "get along" or "have peace". They are much more than harems, infanticide and reproduction. They are beings that in their own way feel and think, can fight and at the same time, have peace.

That is all.

For the Solstice: “Invictus”

In the dimness he woke and knew it was too late. Morning never came so late unless the world was ending.

Fortunately, he knew what to do about that.

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Hmmm I've seen a lot of crow and raven people in fantasy settings but sci-fi 'uplift' premises tend to focus on dolphins and chimps and other reasonable targets.

Want a sci-fi story that's set long after some unwise scientist CRISPRed a be-much-smarter tweak into at least two species each of corvids and cephalopods.

so we've got established society of crows, who absolutely picked up human languages fast and use them routinely to interact with human beings, and maybe don't have citizenship in human countries where they reside because they have their own political units that aren't based on terrain, but they are recognized as people by law

(but like, i want to emphasize they are crows that are physically the same as crows have always been)

and the much more mysterious and retiring underwater society of the octopuses.

Concept: an aggressively assimilationist interstellar hive-mind that’s also completely pacifistic, so instead of devouring worlds and forcibly subsuming entire species, it sends its creepy drones around to conduct informational seminars and hand out explanatory pamphlets about why you should submit to the glory of the Swarm.