The Value of Talking Animals

Man, I hope the government shutdown ends soon.

I am presently reading the next Artemis Fowl book, The Atlantis Complex, which is, uh, an installment in the series, I guess. Hm. I finished Mr. Robot and began Leviathan, the anime adaptation of Westerfield’s trilogy. Still on LEGO Skywalker Saga, which has kind of grown on me.

I think I’ve done something like this in a Note before in the last couple of years? We’re doing it anywhere.

The Value of Talking Animals

The thing that struck me when I was re-reading The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents was A) Keith, the human boy, is not really the protagonist, and B), the talking animals in the story are people. No, they’re not human, obviously, but they are people–fully realized beings with independent agency and roles in the story. That sounds pretty basic, but if you stop and think about it, you’d be surprised how few fantasy authors actually understand that. 

Generally, talking animals aren’t people outright–they’re funny little pets who exist entirely to help out the protagonists, or be comic relief. And to be fair, most stories with talking animals are for children, so they’re not really aiming for incredibly complex characters. That doesn’t work in every instance, though, because not every children’s book is a picture book, and the whole idea that readers can’t connect with a character if he or she isn’t human is absolute bunk. Again, compare to Maurice and the Rodents (name for a band?), who are characters with depth whose lives and choices mean something to the narrative.

I switch back to Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica, in which talking animals are definitely A Thing, but outside of the main badgers, don’t really do much and are treated as silly curiosities. Most horribly, there’s a scene in one of the later books in which an antihero tells an odd account of how to hunt talking aardvarks to eat. This is treated as something of a grim joke in bad taste, and not as if the man is honestly discussing murdering and eating an actual person–which, in context, he totally is. Compare that to the scene in The Silver Chair by good old C.S. Lewis, in which our heroes find out that the meat they’re eating is from a talking stag; it’s treated as something like cannibalism, and the characters in question are both sick and horrified by it.

The Amazing Maurice takes the idea of talking animals in a story and vigorously interrogates it. The rats have questions about how they should relate to other rats, how they should relate to other peoples, and what does that mean for the order of things. At one point, Keith suggests that maybe they see non-sapient rats as something like how we view monkeys and apes–but they’re still willing to kill the non-talking rats if they feel they have to, even though they clearly don’t really like it. There are discussions about how these rats have adapted certain ideas. Clothing is difficult for rats, at least if it’s too close to human clothing; but Darktan works out that a series of belts and straps can work.

When we get to the end of the novel, when the rats and the people of Bad Blintz are starting to live in harmony, there are negotiations about what that kind of life looks like. That means human and rat craftsmen working together, it means street signs in two languages, and it means that law enforcement applies to and hires both humans and rats.

The only other piece of fiction that I can think of that gave this much thought to the talking animal situation is, of all things, James Gurney’s Dinotopia. Even then, the dinosaurs of that series are rarely important characters in the narrative with their own agency–though it’s clear, at least, from the worldbuilding, that this may be more of a problem with our viewpoint character, as the dinosaurs are clearly considered people by the humans of the island. So much of the world is designed to accommodate them, from the writing system, to the construction of cities and towns, to their weird spiral clock thing.

The reason that I think all of this is important to think about is that many fantasy stories non-humans are used as a stand-in for marginalized groups. Wicked explicitly does this with talking animals–the musical, at least–I don’t know about how the novel uses them because I haven’t read it. I do know there’s an animal sex dungeon or something, which clearly explains why I haven’t read it. And mind you, I think there are certain issues with fantasy using non-humans as a stand-in for marginalized groups when done badly–like, hey, you can’t imagine a brown person in your story, but you can imagine white people with pointy ears bearing the brunt of racism? Uh, okay.

Still, it can be done, especially if done with thought and care. And with talking animals, if you’re going to use them as a stand-in for an oppressed minority, then you have to make it seem like they’re actually people. They can’t just exist as something that helps the majority group of people accomplish their goals. That’s a very cynical take on talking about an oppressed group, isn’t it? That they have value because they help the real important people, rather than a group of people who have their own inherent value and culture? Yeah, no, let’s not do that. Let’s instead develop them as characters. It’s better for everyone all around.

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