Okay that's a bit clickbaity but hear me out.
By "They", I mean "Pokemon" as in the magical animals that make up pokefics pokecomics, etc:
They (usually) naturally love battling
They (usually) love pairing up with humans (usually) in a platonic way
They (usually) don't mind Pokeballs
They (usually) cannot talk to humans using human language
They may have certain traits which makes certain environments hard for them.
Examples:
Frosmoth might have a harder time in summer.
Don't leave your Charmander out in the storm.
Joltiks need to feed off of static
We need more fanfic from the Pokemon POV which emphasizes and treats pokemon biology with the weight they deserve.
Sorry y'all but purity culture has genuinely made fandom so boring when you enjoy nuance and variety lol
Sometimes it just feels like everything is squeaky clean and sanitized, no conflict or complications, no character is really evil or are seen as broken and need to be fixed, they become better through the "power of love", every single one gets into a romantic relationship, have vanilla missionary procreative sex because all kink is bad and wrong, are put in a conservative lifestyle and marriage with a white picket fence and kids where nothing bad ever happens and everything is so wholesome and pure and must follow one life script
And yeah people have the freedom to do what they want and not liking it personally doesn't mean everyone should stop. But what really bothers me is there are people like me who feel the same and have very different darker complicated things they want to create but don't because anything considered too evil and dark is demonized and shut down. Then they're too afraid share in fear of backlash and it's really sad. So it's not being mad that the former exists and saying it should stop, it's being sad that the latter isn't allowed
And I do know people who used to explore and create for the latter but after backlash started only making the former and that's sad too. That includes many of your favorite artists that have now blocked me for creating things along the lines of what they did in the past. (Themes of violence and abuse in this case.) And many end up seeming really repressed and restricted as a result. It feels like there's a pressure for it and sometimes it feels forced. And because I don't want to do it it feels like I'm punished for it
But anyway yeah if you're an adult who enjoys evil and killing and violence, blood and gore, hurt and angst, complicated relationships, toxic fucked up characters, or are a sadistic freak like me who loves when terrible things and suffering and death happen in fiction then please, I invite you to join me as we travel to places in analysis and concepts that the surface of the fandom won't go lol
And before you can say something like "this is a kid's series and you're the problem for expecting and creating these things", aside from the ns4w and graphic blood and gore, all of these themes such as as violence, death, abuse, etc, has always existed in the official media already, so I think it should absolutely be okay to explore in fandom too and they have always been what's compelled me the most to create and I'm not the only one :P
non-human character: *moves their ears/wings/tail to indicate their emotional state and for emphasis when communicating*
me:
New Letterboxd list.
no piece of teen media has ever accurately depicted the quiet psychological warfare of bullying. bullies on TV are always dumb brutes and not the evil geniuses of emotional manipulation that they are in real life. being given a wedgie and having your lunch money stolen is nothing in comparison to a classmate quietly creating a taboo against speaking to you that they intend to enforce against all the other kids. it’s nothing like continuous cutting comments from people you thought were being nice to you. that way that the work of one kid can make you feel like every person on earth silently hates you and that you are dirty, disgusting, worthless, creepy and useless. that you can have friends but many of them will not speak to you at school for fear of the social consequences on their end. how that damage lasts in any social setting for the rest of your life
So I am a really big fan of animal point-of-view fiction (or xenofiction as it's sometimes called), but I can't help feeling that the genre has so much wasted potential, and writers in this genre have fallen into so much laziness. Animal stories have been a part of human culture since pretty much the beginning of time, and the more you read of these old animal fables and tales, you realise how clever and unique a lot of these stories were. And even more recently, we've had stories such as Jungle Book, Call Of The Wild, Animal Farm.But it seems since the release of Watership Down in, that the animal fiction genre has fallen into a sort of generic mould that every story has to follow. Don't get me wrong, I ADORE wds and I've read it so many times that the pages are falling out of my copy, but I've lost count of how many books I've seen that have the same "animals live in a tribal society with their own language, culture, and religion have to escape the clutches of The Evil Humans" narrative. While there are a few recent books that don't follow this exact mould (Felidae for example) the genre has seemed so stagnant for the past 50 years or so. And one thing that bothers me about these kinds of stories is how easily they fall into these really disturbing ideas. (I don't know if "ecofascit" is the appropriate term here, but it sounds very similar) They just all seem to drone on and on about "all the humans are evil and cruel and destructive and only the animals and untouched nature are pure bla bla bla" in such an embarrassingly misanthropic way. I read Garry Kilworth's Hunters Moon (the one about foxes) last year, and I could take none of the plot seriously because the writer couldn't go a single chapter without having a laughable Humans Bad rant. I don't know. Animal stories have meant so much to global human culture throughout history, and it makes me slightly sad to see the genre become stagnant and unoriginal over the past few decades.
(and I'd love to hear any book recommendations if you have any)
Watching lion xenofiction and, why the most are literally copycats of the other? There's a lot of interesting things on lions life just to make the same thing over and over. And some of the "realistic behaviour" is not really realistic, is just a lot of misconceptions and stereotypes.
Just, Holy hell, i heard the entire story of the Mapogo lions coalition and why anybody writtes an story based on it? It's perfect, is HOLY SHIT like a xenofiction story actually happened. These lion coalitions have a LOT of potential to writte an story about it.
Huh, I wouldn’t say that animals that live in groups make better protags than solitary animals, it’s more like the average writer doesn’t really go that far out of their comfort zone even when writing xenofiction.