Bad examples: Xenofictional Literature

zerky left a message on the discussion page months ago, but no one responded.

Anyway, some tropers were interpreting xenofiction to mean "stories with some kind of animal in them". The thing that sparked the discussion was the addition of Redwall to the page, which is about as far from Xenofiction as you can get. zerky stole the disclaimer from the Xenofiction article and pasted it to the Xenofictional Literature page to help avoid further confusion, but there are still a few examples that are kinda iffy.

Notably:

• Animal Farm
• Charlottes Web
• Rumo And His Miraculous Adventures
• The Thirteen And A Half Lives Of Captain Bluebear

And potentially Duncton Wood, although zerky has not read the series and cannot be sure if the person who wrote the entry is just not writing about the things that make it xenofiction. There is some anthropomorphic shift, allegedly.

Anyone have any ideas?

I didn't even know Xenofiction could refer to fiction from the POV of real-world animals. I've only ever seen it used for fiction about non-humanoid aliens.

And yes, a lot of inappropriate examples here.

edited 28th Mar '11 1:55:17 AM by DoktorvonEurotrash

Any examples to add to what zerky's already gathered? or anything from them to be refuted?

Why is this a separate page from Xenofiction?

Xenofiction is a trope page describing the genre. Xenofictional Literature is a subindex of Literature, which was split by genre.

According to the Xenofiction page which has a lot of Lit examples, animals count.

^ Unless you're specifically responding to Doctorovon, zerky is aware that animals count as Xenofiction. However, the story must emphasize how different or alien the world is from the animal's perspective, and are generally not Beast Fables or works with Funny Animals.

A good example of xenofiction would be Raptor Red, where the characters are non-sentient utahraptors with Blue-and-Orange Morality. An example with animals does not count if say, the animals are just like humans, but what sets them apart is that the rabbit characters are really horny and have an affinity for carrots, or that the sheep characters are really stupid and are prejudiced against dogs. That's just Animal Stereotyping, not Xenofiction.

Therefore works like Redwall or Animal Farm are not examples.

edited 28th Mar '11 4:43:37 PM by zerky

I would agree with this. The main point of Xenofiction is writing from a nonhuman perspective - if that perspective is virtually the same as human, then it's not really Xenofiction. Although one lingering question I've always had about Xenofiction in general - does it count if only one character is the "Xeno"? For instance, a story with three human and one Starfish Alien protagonists.

(Off-topic, I just have to ask: zerky, why are you a Third-Person Person anyway?)

Probably not, unless the story focused on communicating/interaction between the Xeno character and the human characters or if the book in question is first-person/third-person limited from the alien's perspective. If it's just them going on wacky hijinks, and occasionally the xeno character will say/do something to show how weird he/she/it/ is, that's not really Xenofiction.

zerky is a Third-Person Person because she sees no reason not to be. Her personality exists as a self-aware fiction, and thus she cannot honestly refer to them from an inside perspective. First person would be lying to everyone.

Okaaay...

Anyway, I meant a work with multiple POVs (first person or third-person limited). Three of those POVs would be from normal humans, but the fourth would be from a Starfish Alien. Would that qualify it as Xenofiction, or not?

edited 28th Mar '11 9:48:36 PM by nrjxll

In zerky's opinion, definitely.

Genres aren't tropes, though. I'd say merge 'em and just make it an index.

Yeah. One of the main reasons to separate the genre classifications into media sections is if the page is getting too big, and Xenofiction doesn't really have a buttload of examples anyway. Merging the two pages would probably clear up a lot of the confusion around what and what isn't xenofiction as well.

So the best plan of action would be to strip the bad examples and move everything else over and then nix the Xenofictional Literature page?

But the reason Xenofictional Literature is its own page has nothing to do with the size of Xenofiction; it's because Literature is too big.

At the moment, you index a work of literature by finding the appropriate "X Literature" page (or putting it somewhere on Small Genres and Unclassified Literature if there isn't one). If you merge them, we'll end up with a situation where every single literary work is supposed to be listed on some subindex of Literature, except the members of this one tiny genre. That makes no sense.

edited 30th Mar '11 10:41:40 AM by Micah

Well zerky isn't too attached to it either way. It's up to you guys. :P

I don't disagree that the index should exist, just that the "trope" page is redundant, and not really a trope, to boot. We can just trim the "examples" down to an index and make Xenofictional Literature a redirect to Xenofiction (or vice versa, but I think the shorter name is a better name for the page).

edited 30th Mar '11 6:55:55 PM by ccoa

But not everything on the "trope" page is literature. So either you're losing some examples, or xenofiction is the only kind of literature that doesn't get a literature-specific index.

This one is still a mess to be sorted.

Well, since ccoa (or a like-minded individual) either didn't care enough in the last 5-6 months to bother responding or couldn't come up with a good enough argument against what Micah's point, then it can probably be assumed that Xenofictional Literature can be left as its own page, with the bad examples cleared out and then this can be closed.

zerky'll delete the examples on the page that she suggested in the first post and presumably that'll be it.

edit: Okay. What gives. Apparently the disclaimer wasn't nearly enough since at least 3 not-xenofiction examples cropped up on that page since this thread was made. Two of them were animal private eye stories. zerky's gonna add a big fat warning in the markup as well.

edited 4th Oct '11 9:13:28 AM by zerky

Could this be closed?