Zoanthropic cultures

Continuing a theme going in my current work, I have a race of beastmen that are analogous of various cultures in real life. So far I have a race of werelions which are basically African.

I could use some suggestions for other animals I could use. So far the countries in my story have analogies to Ancient China, Rome, Saudi Arabia, Greenland, and various islander tribes.

Edited by sifsand on Oct 22nd 2019 at 6:20:25 AM

Rome is obvious. Romulus and Remus were nursed by a she-wolf, after all. China revered the Dragon but it was said the Tiger could stand besides the Dragon.

I'm temped to suggest Jackals for Saudi Arabia but that seems racist for some reason.

Nah Jackals work. Thanks for the suggestion

It might be worth checking the cultural associations related to jackals—I wouldn't be surprised if they're seen in a rather negative light. And it might cause offence to associate a people with a creature given that perception—unless you have some twist in mind that would counter that, of course.

Yeah, this whole topic is rife with unintended consequences. I would actually discourage you from pursuing this path.

The more i think about it, the more it seems like a bad idea.

The basic idea is that you combine animal motifs and culture to create a more solid, resonant theme. But this has problems because none of these things have a very solid basis.

Animal stereotypes exist, but many are negative. Foxes are sly but rarely in a good way, crows steal, jackals are untrustworthy, turtles are slow, rabbits breed fast, etc. It'll be hard to create and stick to a consistent theme if you call attention to this or use them explicitly for this. These associations may not be universal either, just look at how a mythical beast like a dragon is perceived, let alone real animals.

Culture stereotypes exist, but many are negative. This is going to create problems if you rely on them, because again it may not send the message you think it sends.

The bigger problem occurs when you combine the two, now you not only have to juggle two different sources of non-universal stereotypes but also the combination may result in new ones you might have missed.

It just seems like a recipe for disaster, for a story where people will endlessly see messages you didn't intend, miss the messages you wanted to send, and may get very very bad impressions. For what sounds like a simple "give my beastmen some flavor" idea, it seems more trouble than it's worth.

Lastly, i'm not sure how many beastmen you have, but one group for Africa and one for the Middle East gives me the impression this isn't entirely... balanced.

Edited by devak on Oct 23rd 2019 at 9:29:49 PM

This is probably no fault of your own, but you started out ONLY listing POC cultures and being a POC woman, this is a fucking minefield of stereotypes.

POC people, ESPECIALLY POC men, have a long history of being called "beastly," "primitive," and "uncivilized" compared to well-mannered, gentle, proper, and rational white men. This is about half the reason for the Mighty Whitey subplot where some random white guy "rescues" a beautiful brown woman from her own culture's terrible men.

Edited by Sharysa on Oct 23rd 2019 at 10:20:07 AM

I mean, the bad vibes associated with “beastly brown people” have gotten so ingrained that many POC don’t even want to wear animal prints on their CLOTHING because of how long white people have called us animals and savages in one breath, plus they put us in literal human zoos to gawk at “how far civilization has come.”

I...think people are misunderstanding my point. The beastmen aren't the allegory, they're meant to live in the same area said country which draws parallels to it. I should've mentioned the little detail that said story does have human characters. I was asking for animal suggestions based on animals that live in or are associated with that country.

That still seems like it has a very high chance of being “unfortunate implications” central. Frankly, I’d stay away from it.

I mean, jackals representing Saudi Arabia? Aside from the obvious connotations the animal in question picked, what about all the subcultures in Saudi Arabia? The foreigners and minorities? No region is fully homogenous, and reducing regions to a single animal can come off as time deaf at best and outright racist at worst.

Yes, it's stupid and irrational but that's the cultural climate we live in these days.

If you want to go ahead, just delay releasing the story for a few years while people calm down.

Edited by Belisaurius on Oct 23rd 2019 at 4:44:13 AM

Or alternatively I could go with option B and have the beastmen have no culture at all, having them do their own thing.

Uhhh, the “beastly animal POC man” idea has a LONG history.

Belisaurius: You sound incredibly tone-deaf to say a racist stereotype, used mostly for POC cultures, is just “people being sensitive,” after multiple posts told the OP why the “animal hybrids for different cultures” idea is fraught with Unfortunate Implications.

It doesn’t matter what the intent is, it matters that white people have been using this trope for decades if not centuries to literally dehumanize POC cultures and to justify conquering them. The bad feelings aren’t going to go away just because this one person meant it nicely, and it’s going to piss a LOT of minorities off if this gets published.

Edited by Sharysa on Oct 23rd 2019 at 3:35:25 AM

Hence the problem of staying on message. I do believe there's no ill intent here, but you can't control how people read your story all that much. And when there's an extensive collection of a trope being used for racism, then that's the context that readers will use. And as a writer, you would have to use the little control you have to make it clear that it's not part of that greater context. That takes skill, but also research and dedication, and you still might not succeed. It makes the writer overly vulnerable for what is a rather simple trope.

Which is why, well, i think it's not worth the effort, especially since you're asking advice on a forum.

As a more general writing tip, "Ancient China, Rome, Saudi Arabia, Greenland, and various islander tribes" is a very, very broad category of cultures to pick from (and SA is basically the most extreme cult-like group you can find in the Middle East), and i'm not sure how international you want your story to be. I would imagine it's easier to simply focus your beastmen on a smaller area and go deeper, especially since the nuance this leads to would help with the problems outlined in this tread. Ancient Rome was hardly a culturally homogeneous area, neither was China. China alone is bigger than Europe and look how different Europe is. Rome controlled parts of Africa but you mention Africa as separate. Egypt is also Africa, for instance.

I still think people are missing the point here. While these countries are indeed INSPIRED by real life ones they are not the same. Don't forget this is a fantasy setting I'm writing here so the rules of our rules and stereotypes of our world don't all apply.

Edit: I'd like to point out the animal choices are based on the kinds you would actually see in said countries, symbolism be damned.

Edited by sifsand on Oct 24th 2019 at 4:23:31 AM

@Sharysa The problem isn't the "X is beastly" aspect but rather that people take offense to it. Many cultures actually encourage beastly perceptions of themselves. Calling someone a "Bear of a Man" is usually complementary and is perceived as such. Calling Rommel the "Desert Fox" was a remark on his cleverness. Asian warriors are often compared to Tigers.

So it's clear that a beastly comparison is not innately offensive rather it is something that someone chooses to take offense to.

By the same logic I can consider your avatar offensive. It's effectively using the Flag as apparel, which is disrespectful, and hanging it upside down, which is reserved for US bases in distress.

We can agree this sentiment is stupid and nothing should come of it but at the same time I can consider it offensive and have cultural evidence to back my claim. How is this any different from your own claim of racism and if your claim is valid, why is racism wrong?

Perhaps, but it becomes fraught when you start associating an entire people that you don't belong to with an animal- it's stereotyping. "You can choose to not be offended by this stereotype" is not a good way to approach this, and it frankly stinks of victim blaming.

I mean, yeah, but those stereotypes still exist. Your story doesn't exist in a vacuum, no piece of art has, does, or ever will, and it's irresponsible to pretend your readers are just going to ignore similarities between it and the real world. That doesn't mean the readers are incapable of separating fiction and reality or looking for something to get offended about- it's because fiction and art have power, and we need to understand that.

Now, does that mean you can't let your beastmen have cultures of their own? No, you totally can- you just need to be smart about it. I'm terrified of being accidentally offensive with my setting's invented cultures, and go to great lengths to not let them resemble any one real-world culture. There's also giving the animals a different name to further divorce them from real-world associations, and focusing on lesser-known aspects of the animals, including drawing from Earthen cultural associations. You could take a couple of these aspects, place them in a different flavor of the environment you're going for, like an American or central Asian desert instead of Middle Eastern, borrow aspects of this new local culture, study other real-world cultures for ideas on context and history that would have made this new combination of cultural aspects possible, develop them as people and give them problems independent of and that they're working on without white people, and before you know it, you've made something new.

For instance, when I think of jackals, my first thought is ancient Egypt, Anubis, and reverence for the dead. Checking Wikipedia, jackals have also been associated with coyotes and foxes in myth as clever sorcerers, and they're most active at dawn and dusk, aspects that are reminiscent of The Fair Folk. (And to break the mold, they could just be a culture that has mages/mystics like any other, or a culture of mages with Magitek, or just something totally inhuman, like straight-up Fair Folk or elves. Who knows?) Wikipedia also lists four different species that fall under the banner of "jackal", some of which live in environments that aren't just deserts, and like most canids, they're largely nuclear family-oriented (the "alpha-beta-omega wolf" thing is bullshit and doesn't occur in nature). It also counts the coyote as a flavor of jackal, inviting inspirations from the Coyote, the Native American trickster god, and the cultures that acknowledge him. (Of course, I would caution against combining too many Fair Folk or magical and obvious Native American aspects because that risks hitting upon the Magical Native American or even "evil/incomprehensible savage" stereotype.) The area map for the non-coyote flavors of jackal on the Wikipedia page also shows most of Africa, the Indian subcontinent, southeast Asia, and southeastern Europe alongside the Middle East, opening up possibilities for environments and cultures to borrow from and mix together.

And as you do all this, keep in mind: write people, not stereotypes.

I see the solution to this problem as being less about how to avoid racism, and more about just thinking outside the box. You're writing fantasy- theoretically anything is possible to create, so why not use it to solve a problem rather than making a new one?

All well and good, except the beastmen AREN'T meant to be associated with culture in that area, they just live there. If any stereotypes do pop up I intend to present them as a bad thing or as something not typically the norm.

The aforementioned jackal people (I really need to give each therianthrope their own in-universe names) are tiny compared to a human, measuring up to their waist or torso in height. No two are alike personality-wise much like how real people are.

It's these parts that people are taking issue with.

How am I to read "the werelions are basically African"? They look "African"? They're culturally "African"? Because neither one is good. Are there at least "basically African" humans nearby so it's not like all of Africa's getting stereotyped into lions? And that's not even getting into the fact that "basically African" is its own can of worms.

I could've phrased that better yeah. What I meant was the area they live in resembles the african savannah which lions do come from. Perhaps culture was the wrong word, the COUNTRIES are analogous.

So to be clear, the various were-animals and so on are more or less living in the biomes the normal animals would live in IRL (not accounting for the hodgepodge characteristic of the borders of two or three biomes)?

Edited by akanesarumara on Oct 24th 2019 at 6:46:41 PM

That's right. Be aware that the map of this world is also not like ours so biomes aren't exactly the same.

For there to be victim blaming you must first have a victim. For there to be a victim you must have some kind of crime.

Emotions are irrational, you can't always predict how someone will feel. As a result, you can't hold someone accountable for the feelings they cause no more than a thief can hold you accountable if they trip on the carpet when breaking into your house.

As for stereotypes? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ME6PUW_jM-c It really comes down to a case by case basis and the question "Is this person being denigrated by their stereotype?".

just to clear up any thoughts that beastmen are portrayed as bad or inferior or other nonsense like that, that's not my viewpoint. All the beastmen are, from a narrative viewpoint, are people who happen to be animalian in design.

Obviously as a writer you can’t choose how people interpret your work, but you also can’t just blunder ahead and blame everything on readers. If you write a story where a fictional version of Africa is populated by stereotypical lion-men, you’re going to be rightfully called out for racial insensitivity no matter how much you insist you meant well.