On Creature Designs

Welp, I had a very good Friday night dinner, but it also means I’m a bit late on typing out the note, though I have some written notes.

I am trying to write a good, comprehensive review of the director’s cut of Kingdom of Heaven that encapsulates all of my thoughts. I don’t know when that will be finished, though. The books I hoped to pick up at the library this week hadn’t come in when I went, so I’m not sure what’s next after this Celtic mythology book.

Also, did you know Michael B. Jordan is in an episode of Burn Notice?

On Creature Designs

The TL;DR is: you should add spots.

This past week, I attended a presentation by a professor from the local university about the kinds of birds you find in the area. I quite liked it. Birds are fascinating little critters! I mean, just check out the marks left behind by the yellow-bellied sapsucker! I was struck by something while I looked at slides of birds, though: even the most ordinary, “boring” songbirds have unique patterns on their plumage. Admittedly, this is true of a lot of animals: reptiles, amphibians, mammals–you see interesting features like stripes, spots, eye markings, rings, and so forth all over the animal kingdom.

Why don’t more fantasy creatures have this?

[Or science-fiction creatures, too, I suppose.]

A lot of fantasy creatures (I admit I’m mostly thinking of dragons) are given one uniform color, with maybe some basic features that distinguish them. I imagine at least some of this is due to limitations of effects: it’s a lot easier to have a creature that is a single color to animate and have it move around, than to have a creature with a very complicated-looking pattern on the hide move around realistically. That excuse doesn’t fit with books, though! I also figure with creatures like dragons, having them be a single color can make them feel specifically different from other animals. I know in Inheritance Cycle the dragons are all bright colors and that makes them gleam like gems, along with affects things like a Rider’s magic color.

Makes cool book covers, too.

It’s not like a dragon needs camouflage, either–most dragons in fiction are really large apex predators that fly, so it’s not that they need to hide. But that’s not the only reason for body markings. The water dragons in Wings of Fire, for instance, have light-up body parts that can be used to send messages underwater without speech. Markings can note things like family, home environment, or geographical origin–and help them distinguish each other.

[One of these days, I’m going to write a story with dragons that actually paint themselves/]

And remember that in Chinese mythology, dragons explicitly have scales like a carp. Have you see carps, they can have all kinds of different markings on them. 

I think an issue is that many authors and designers don’t think of these creatures entirely as animals. Animals have all kinds of weird markings. Yes, corn snakes are orange, but they’ve also got patterns. If you’ve got a giant snake creature in your story, what patterns does it have? And of course, there are snakes that are one color, such as black rat snakes, but out of all the species they’re not the norm, are they?

The Jurassic Park movies are slowly getting better with this. As the movies go on, dinosaurs have been given more unique designs that look like real-world animals, and some are even getting feathers! It’s a slow march, but it is progress. Which is a bit wild, because in the books (at least the second one), there are features like stripes. The velociraptors are mentioned having tiger stripes pretty often.

This is one of the reasons I absolutely love the field guide tie-in to The Spiderwick Chronicles (the books–I don’t have enough space here to talk about the Roku series and its problems). It illustrates the creatures of the invisible world to make them look like animals. The mer-people, for example, have patterns like tropical fish. It’s delightful. It makes me think that the person making these drawings actually knows what animals look like, rather than awkwardly pasting different body parts together.

And those details matter! They make the fantasy world come alive! In books, if the characters spend a lot of time around fantasy creatures (or, you know, are fantasy creatures), they should start to notice different features like this. That might be how they tell individuals apart, too! It’d be funny if it was something that a human wouldn’t notice at first glance, but to them it’s all obvious, like a forehead spot or something. If they’re small enough to be a stealth hunter, or if they need to evade predators, how do their skins help them hide? Give them spots around the snout, give them rings on the tail, give them scales that shimmer while they walk, give them stripes on the back.

Give them random things like that! It makes them stick out more in a sea of generic fantasy creatures.

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