Talking Animal and Furre Novels- Is that your tail or are you happy to see me?

My NaNo involves racketeering, vigilantism, and mob violence, so it just seemed best to use anthropomorphic animals. It takes place in something like the 1920s and lovely prohibition times.

I'm keeping some of the dynamics of predator-prey, fortunately. A cat and a mouse can have a pleasant conversation together, true, but if it comes down to it, the cat will eat the mouse without hesitation. Rats will eat dead animals, and are therefore used by the mob to dispose of unwanted bodies. For dogs and rabbits, it's similar. Though they may be closer in size (and not as much variation for dogs sizes), I'd like to keep this.

Call me prejudiced, but I'm keeping with animals with digits, namely mammals with front paws and some lizards and amphibians. Sorry, no birds as main characters, and though they seem to have a modicrum of intelligence, they aren't involved in the society because of the handicap of not being able to hold things the same way. That's part of what made the human civilazions the way they were, the ability to carry things in hands without using the mouth and walk at the same time.

That means no hoofed animals, or fish, either. Frogs, I'm thinking, are borderline...

I have a cat in my novel. While he narrates in first person, he hasn't decided to talk to anyone else yet!

Enter the Banana Cave

Ha that's too cool. Is he the POV character or the hero?

I could see hoofed animals being intelligent enought to be furs. but not on hind legs.

It sounds sort of like Maus by Art Spiegelman for some reason, and his tales of Auschwitz and Nazi Germany

I suppose I should mention that my story does include a sentient feline race.

But they're about as comparable to cats as humans are to lemurs.(Sure, they're feline like cats, but ring-tailed lemurs and humans are both primates.)

I'm doing Science Fantasy and the galaxy it's set in has both humans and furries. Every planet generally has one or two dominant species, though most planets have a good mix of a number of species. My main character, as well as half of my 9 other major characters are furries. My main character is a Blue Jay, and I've also got a mouse, a dragon, and two ravens. I'm also trying to include predator-prey relationships and such. As for my avians, they have both arms and wings, so they can function pretty much like everyone else.

I do a lot of writing--short stories, unfinished novels, online roleplaying--and most of what I do involves talking animals. I'm only a borderline furry, though. I generally prefer to have talking animals that are otherwise normally shaped--not anthropomorphic. I enjoy webcomics and art with anthromorphs, but they're not exactly my own thing.

In '03, I began a novel with a race of silly aliens resembling winged panthers. In '04, my novel involved an expedition with sixteen humans and six talking animals, and the animals were the most important characters. In '05, my narrator character was an eagle made immortal by modern technology and famous around the world. In '06, I decided to limit myself by having no non-human characters, and pulled it off. This year, I'm doing something different. For the first time, I'm going to use anthromorphs. To date I've only used this kind of character in short, silly pieces, but for the idea I picked spontaneously on November 1st, it just seems natural. So far, it looks like the main characters are a family of anthro arctic wolves, going out Trick-or-Treating. I'm gonna go with the flow, though, so who knows where this novel will go? It's exciting to be using anthropomorphic characters for the first time, though--like a 'normal' furry. ;)

2003--Eva and the Killjoys
2004--Edge Friends
2005--The Adventures of Peter Mint
2006--House of Harpers
2007--Happy Halloween

I love furries. My fursona is a hammerhead shark, which is why I gave myself a hammerhead tattoo. Hmm, TMI. Anyway --

I've written a few furre stories, mostly erotic stuff, but never anything serious. I have lots of ideas and characters, though. And I have a horde of Werecreatures in my novels. I love the strange and exotic ones -- wereferret, werepenguin, werelemur, wereoryx. And I have an idea about the souls of people who die while dreaming becoming trapped in another dimension in the form of fantastical animals -- the Obsidian Panther, the Glass Stallion, the Paper Crane, the Cheese Armadillo.

Yeah, I do a lot with Furres, but I've never actually written a Furre novel. Maybe next year's NaNo.

Breach: When a sexsomniac meets an incubus, sparks fly, but can they stop hating themselves long enough to fall in love with each other? Find out at http://katicalocke.livejournal.com/.

It's not the point that they're not intelligent, it's just the point that they would be handicapped. I just don't want to address it.

For 'some reason'? Never read it, but I think it may have something to do with that I'm not entirely getting rid of the predator-prey relationship, like many people seem to do. If they're animals, there's no point in making them entirely human without just using, well, humans, is there? It sets up a different dynamic similar to but different than racial tensions that are fairly obvious within the novel.

I mean, if you haven't noticed, many of the rats in the Redwall books were cannibals, in that they ate other sapient creatures (not necessarily rats, but voles and etc), like how rats in real life tend to be scavengers and eat anything. I mean, it's fine and nice to make them pretty much exactly like humans for an allegory (like Animal Farm), but if you're not doing that, you've got to do something to make there be a point to the animals, and I decided this one.

My story involves lion-like creatures that walk upright... although they are aliens so I don't know if that counts as furre or not. Hmm...

Nano 06: Man of Sand and Glass (Winner!)
Nano 07: To Chase the Moon and the Watercolor Sky

What the hell is a 'furre', anyway? I mean, for the most part, I've just been thinking in terms of kid's cartoons, like Bugs Bunny and Tom and Jerry and Mickey Mouse and stuff.

I take furs, furres, furries, etc. to just be a catchphrase for animal characters that are anthropomorphised to whatever degree. For me, everything from Bugs Bunny, as you say, to the rabbits from Watership Down - you know, they retain their basic animalness, don't wear clothes or walk on their hind legs, but their thoughts and communications with one another are related in essentially human terms.

I favor the terms anthropomorph and anthropomorphism myself because "furry," to me, is too loaded/vague to be useful, except as it pertains to furry subculture.

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"Where there's a whip there's a will, my slugs." ~ Orc-driver, The Return of the King
"And pass me another elf, Sergeant. This one's split." ~ Ashnak, Grunts

Well, I don't have any furries in my story as you're thinking, but it is entirely about fantasy creatures. The main focus is on wolves, but there are others, too.

» the pen is mightier than the sword «

I have Some Furries in my novel,

I have Greln, Who is a dragon of sorts. I have an alice blue Talking cat,

And, I have Rentel Who is a dragon too, I also have Rinken who is of a fox descent and I have a few others who are furre based. Furre's can bring some life to a dull story, but there sterotyped alot.

I've always done all my stories about furres, ever since I was about nine (mainly due to an obsession with Redwall XD), so this time I tried to do humans, just to try something different.

But there were two or three characters that I just couldn't picture as anything other than furres. Thankfully, their species do suit the personality (I have a catty cat, a weaselly weasel and a ... lizard ... who's pretty impassive, like lizards are) so it's not just an excuse to include them.

Hey, it's a fantasy NaNo: the ultimate combination of 'anything goes'!

Yes when the story was in the earlier stages of the book the furres I were using were pretty much human, but soon it became apparent that wasn't working. It is the subtlety of Pack dynamics and animal instinct shaping conventions of behavior that I became interested in.

Like my Gevarians, the canine people, have a really nebulous concept of war for eample. They believe in fighting and agression, but they have trouble dealing with the concepts of rebellion or social justice. They believe that the strong should stay in charge are in charge and if anyone isn't strong enough or decent enough to lead they'll be struck down by a lightning bolt or something. Human's do have a sense of Hierarchy but they will toss it out the window for personal gain or rarely justice.

And my felines the Khaddish while very honorable have trouble with compassion it seems. It has become a bit of a social fauxpas to show pity, or give someone a break. Though in their characters it does exist and younger Khaddish are prone to this behavior and scolded

And that doesn't even begin to scratch the surface about romantic entanglements and mixed species love... So I think it the long run I made a good decision to make it furre.

doublepost

Ah that is where I started of so long ago in highschool. Everyone loves a Catboy! Everyone loves a Cat Girl!
How do they look? Often alien races can look totally bizarre, so they can have the edge on regular old furres? What is their race like. This List is Jumping!

Ah that is where I started of so long ago in highschool. Everyone loves a Catboy! Everyone loves a Cat Girl!
How do they look? Often alien races can look totally bizarre, so they can have the edge on regular old furres? What is their race like. This List is Jumping!

Dude, you are wrong! *I* do not like either catgirls or catboys.

I like penguins. P)

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"Where there's a whip there's a will, my slugs." ~ Orc-driver, The Return of the King
"And pass me another elf, Sergeant. This one's split." ~ Ashnak, Grunts

One of the reasons that storytellers in every generation have used animals instead of people, is that usually animals can be flat and stereotypical. A bit of short hand to show what kind of characters they are. So one you start thinking in that mindset it can be hard to break free.

Like Renard the fox. He had a lot of adventures but very little characterization, so he was great as a plain old red fox, it showed what kind of character he was right away.
Same thing with Bugs Bunny, but characters like Bugs Bunny messed around with those archetypes all the time, changing a desperate scared rabbit into a powerhouse of wit and sublime destruction.

But Bugs, Tom and Jerry and Snagglepuss all had chracter designs and animation to help them come to life. We just have words and the occasional illustration

yeah that can get annoying when those types of Characters are such cliches. Or they use really bad puns. That kills my face. I still can't watch Road Rovers man....

I have lots of dogs in my story and one horse. Only three of the dogs actually ever talk but I might stick POV from them in the story. Thats always fun.

Out of the three dogs that do talk there is Kuma and Tora, two Akita Inu like dogs that get granted a little bit of time with human vocal cords. Then there is Nix, the evil Chinese Crested like dog (spirt thing) bent on taking over the world by use of a doggie sweater and (as my sister calls them) bling collar.

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Class of '09

I was in the park, wondering why frisbees get bigger and bigger as they get closer. Then it hit me.

OOh like Watership Down or Ratha's creature? Where they are animals but they have a civilization. That is cool and should count

My cat is one of the POV characters. I'm writing in first person, but there are different people who will narrate. (If you've ever read "The Innkeeper's Song" I'm modeling it on that.) I KNOW that he will reveal himself to other characters eventually but it's too early. I think he might be waiting for the right opportunity! And I think he might be able to shape shift, but he hasn't told me that. And he also hasn't told me his name! He is a mysterious little critter.

Enter the Banana Cave

I like this kind of universe a fair bit, for casual stories. It would be hard to publish, no doubt! Do you have interaction between the mouse and the dragon? I'd imagine the huge size discrepancy would cause some interesting drama between them.

I'd personally find it cooler if the avians in your world were normally shaped, and did their technological work using a combination of their toes and beak. It wouldn't be too much of a problem for bluejays and ravens, and would give you the opportunity to describe some interesting procedures. But then, six-limbed critters are cool, too.

2003--Eva and the Killjoys
2004--Edge Friends
2005--The Adventures of Peter Mint
2006--House of Harpers
2007--Happy Halloween

Actually there isn't much size discrepancy since they're all humanoid, though the mouse is 5 feet and the dragon is 6 feet. And there should be some interaction between them, as all of my main characters are on the same crew. And I've thought about doing that kind of thing with the avians, or at least giving them prehensile feathers on their wingtips, but I don't think it'll work well enough within the story.

I have some furry races in my book... like all the races in the world, they were at some point genetically engineered by the humans ^_^ It made sense to me that, if humans would ever start messing with the human genetic makeup, furries would be one of the things they'd be making :-p

Yeah, I was originally going to do a Sci-Fi story involving anthro sheep. Otherwise normal not too distant future, where sheep have been genetically modified to perform various useful labor duties, mainly because the android robots that had been invented didn't really work out so well. Why sheep? Wouldn't chimpanzees or some other primate be easier to modify for this role? Yeah, but we saw that movie and didn't like it. What about dogs, they're loyal, and easy to train? Yeah, and sometimes a dog will eat your face if you get too close to his food. Not too keen on that kind of liability. What about cats? No. Definitely not. You can't even domesticate a regular cat. Make them humanoid and we'd all be doomed. What about horses, they're pretty cool, you can train them, and they're not meat eaters? Yeah, but one digit on each limb? We're scientists here, not gods, we need critters that have multiple digits, thoroughly domesticated, docile, nonthreatening, and that already have their genome well documented. Quick, easy, cheap, what could be better than sheep?

But my wife voted on the other idea, which I'm currently doing, and is plenty of fun, and features a talking, lecherous (non-anthro) unicorn as the title character. Hard part is trying to keep it PG. Maybe I'll just go ahead and write in all the X stuff to pad my wordcount and edit that all out in December. More likely I'll just make it suggestive, so that the young'uns won't know what's hinted at but the grown ups will be able to get that there's more action than is directly printed on the page. It's fun to have people tell me that something happened in a story (which in fact it did) and I tell them that I never wrote that, and when they look it up they find out what they thought they read, they didn't really read, but just inferred because I implied it and let them use their own imagination to fill out the details so I wouldn't have to. Brainhacking like that is the way to turn the "picture is worth 1000 words" thing. Yeah, a picture's worth that, but my thousand words puts 100 pictures in your mind. Beat that, Art! muahahaha!

Okay. That went way out there. Yeah. I like talking anthro and non-anthro critters. Makes things more interesting.

I, too, love having talking animals in my stories, anthro or otherwise. Although their 'talking' isn't always the fact that they can converse with humans, but rather I merely dubbed what they were saying into English purely for ease of conversation. But that's not the point...

My novel this year currently has a talking dragon and a talking frog, both non-anthro. But it also has non-talking animals and humans and other monsters/creatures, so it's a very mixed bag, character-wise and I wouldn't be surprised if any anthro animals turned up sooner or later.

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The FireHawk's Realm - Welcome to my world...

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I am gold and not for you-oo.' (Zelda: Twilight Princess)