Mary-Sue: Who is She?

The Eye of the Tiger

In all of my previous guides, I had assumed that most, if not all characters, were human, or mostly human, instead of thinking of the possibility of main characters, or even minor characters, being animals.  Well, it doesn’t really matter, because, for the most part, the rules for creating human characters, including names and powers, writing presentation, and even romance would also apply to animals.  There would just be a slight variation from humans, and this slight variation can make a world of difference in your writing.

A more common complaint I’ve seen about writers who write about animals at all, is that the animals, whether they are the main character, or whether they are a human’s pet, is that the animal is “too human.”  While humans are technically animals too, what this complaint is really trying to say is that the animal has too many human-like qualities from having a voice to feeling human-like emotions.

Don’t worry about that complaint at all because you can make your animal characters as “human” as you want.  The truth is animals do have voices, animals do have feelings, animals do have intelligence, and animals have a lot of “human-like” qualities.  No matter what animal you’re thinking of, whether it is an ant or a whale, you’ll find at least one thing about that animal that’s “human.”  

Ants put their graveyard of dead ants as far away from their food supply as possible (I‘ve noticed that every cemetery I‘ve ever been to doesn‘t have a food court or a restaurant within at least a block).  Most animals that live in family groups or packs have a hierarchy.  Prairie dogs have a complex linguistic system for identifying predators.  There was a documented report of a lioness taking care of a baby antelope as if it was her cub.  Pet dogs mimic their owner’s faces, which is where the “owners looking like their dogs” myth comes from.  Crows and ravens can remember an individual human’s face and tell their family, their children, and their neighbors to attack that human!  (Scary, isn’t it?)

I have a true story of my own.  One morning as I was walking to school I was attacked by a small brown bird—I thought I was being attacked by a remote control airplane, it was so coordinated!  It chased me until I ran around the corner.  The next morning, a Friday, I watched the bird attack more students from across the street.  I had no idea why the bird was doing it.  On Monday, I thought for sure the bird had quit and braved the sidewalk only to be attacked again!  Was it possible that a student threw a rock at it and now it hates humans?  I wasn’t convinced that the bird was an all out racist, but if that was the case, I wouldn’t have blamed it if someone did try and hurt it.  I told my best friend that I and other students kept getting attacked by the bird, so she and I investigated the site of the problem with me as bait.  The problem laid there right in the middle of the sidewalk and I didn‘t even notice it.  It was a dead baby bird.  The bird that had relentlessly been attacking students for days was only trying to protect her baby.  We decided to at least move it to the grass so people wouldn’t step on it—we probably would have buried it if the mother hadn’t still been trying to get us.  After that, the mother still antagonized the students that walked by for another week, and then disappeared.  That experience reaffirmed my thoughts that animals did have a capacity for emotions.

Animals as Main Characters

So if animals are so similar to humans, what’s the point of me writing this guide?  Simply because this is to give you new areas to focus on so your audience can see through the eyes of your animal-like character.  Even if a girly-girl is reading about a totally butch biker girl, if you express the emotions and actions so the reader understands why the biker is punching the snot out of some guy for just looking at her the wrong way, the reader will understand and still enjoy the story.  It would be one of those “I would have done it differently, but I get why she did what she did” hopefully enjoyable moments.  Think of animals just as a different kind of human.  I’ll get to secondary characters that are animals later, but for now I’m focusing on main characters that are animals.