Non Cat Xenofiction - Blog Posts
@bananaruntz i think what sucks the most about it with xenofiction in particular is that when you have characters that are simultaneously nonhuman and anthropomorphic, it creates this issue where you're forced to accept any misogyny at face value and assume that it's just scientific accuracy, because nature CAN be notoriously unfair. it can't be denied that the females of many species get the shorter end of the stick, but way too many xenofiction authors seem to operate on the idea that this is innately true for the entire animal kingdom when it's just not. even if you are writing about a species where male animals generally dominate the hierarchy, that still shouldn't preclude you from being able to write well-rounded female characters, especially ones that aren't bound by suspiciously human misogynistic tropes.
xenofiction presents so so so many fascinating opportunities to really examine things like sexism and identity and biological determinism but it feels like no one has properly taken advantage of that yet. i am being so fucking serious when i say that xenofiction desperately needs a queer, trans, feminist upheaval.
A preamble to the live reading of Hunter’s Moon/The Foxes of Firstdark by Garry Kilworth
As a work within what I’m going to be calling the mythic subgenre of naturalist animal xenofiction (as coined by YouTube user Cardinal West on his excellent video detailing the history of the genre), mythic NAX for short, one of the primary appeals of a book such as Hunter’s Moon/The Foxes of Firstdark should lie in how the author incorporates real biology and behavior of the animals he’s writing about onto the fictional human-like society he’s constructing.
Thus, before we dive into the live reading on the blog, I thought it’d be good for us all to be more aware of actual fox behavior so that we may better appreciate the bits of real animal behavior incorporated into the text and recognize the artistic liberties taken by the author. I’m writing a short distillation of my preliminary research done on the following four webpages:
https://www.nwf.org/educational-resources/wildlife-guide/mammals/red-fox
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/mammals/facts/red-fox
https://www.discoverwildlife.com/animal-facts/mammals/understand-fox-behaviour/
https://www.wildlifeonline.me.uk/animals/article/red-fox-behaviour-the-social-hierarchy
Obviously, as a Warriors fan, I’m not too demanding about biological accuracy in my mythic NAX novels, but I still expect the authors to incorporate it in some way. The Erin Hunter team’s portrayal of a feral cat colony may not be completely accurate but it shows in places they are at least aware of the basics of how they operate.
I’m also not a biologist nor do I have any particular knowledge of foxes, so I’m doing all this preliminary research from scratch. Obviously, I’m not going to go super in depth or go into super academic sources. This is, afterall, being done for fun.
Distillation of my research unde the cut:
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