Deconstructing Beast Fable

I am trying to come up with ideas for deconstructing the beast fable genre.

Some things I would like to deconstruct are:

The Moralistic Message. Animal Sterotypes Replacing Humans. Talking Animals.

edited 12th Nov '14 5:01:58 PM by absurdblackbear

Hm, well the first two seem simple to deconstruct.

In most cases, the Beast Fable has a very clear black and white lessons e.g. don't be lazy, don't lie, practice compassion. In order to deconstruct that, present scenarios or fables with no clear right/wrong answer or an answer that wanders into the grey. Considering the sheer brutality of the Animal Kingdom and Nature, that shouldn't be too difficult to achieve.

As for having animal characters rather than humans, you can set the fable either in an age before man or during early man -which would give you greater creative licence with the beasts- or in an incredibly remote area where man itself is mythic.

Now as for the third one. To be honest you could take it anyway, I guess. The beasts could speak a language entirely of their own, they could be silent, their voices could be provided by a narrater a la Aesop. Really depends on where you want to take it.

I had always assumed that an animal that could talk would inevitably speak through their nose. So nobody gets the moral before the punch the animal in the face for whining everything it says.

As for the moral itself, Family-Unfriendly Aesop such as "everyone kills something to survive" would be great. Mostly because I'm a Child Hater.

edited 13th Nov '14 2:41:22 AM by dvorak

What if the moral is something that simply doesn't apply to humans (in that era or setting)? 'Kill or be killed' in the Garden of Eden, for example, or 'The meek shall inherit the earth' to Ozymandias? Alternately, learning the moral is so hazardous that it defeats the point of learning it - learning 'kill or be killed', for example, requires that you leave the safety of your home and city and country...

No talking animals? Have a character who understands the wild-speak, the catch being that the animals are not all that intelligent and there are some severe translation gaps.

(Also, what exactly do you intend to do with a deconstruction of these tropes? Seriously - something as vague as 'I intend to use these tropes' is less an idea and more an excuse for this tree to get to 400 posts. If there's anything more specific...)

edited 13th Nov '14 11:23:06 PM by DeusDenuo

Thank you for the suggestions so far. They've been great. To clarify, basically I am wanting to write a story that is set in a world in which there are no humans in the story, but it is inhabited by Largely Normal Animals. I want to take the ideas of what happens in a Beast Fable type of world to their logical conclusions and played realistically.