I've been asked: "Why are your characters animals?"
My first answer was: "Well, why not?"
Here's the thing, though. If you have mammals, birds, amphibians and reptiles all trying to live together, interesting things can happen.
There are:
Size differences. Small creatures are likely to be mistrustful of larger ones. Large creatures may have a lack of understanding of the difficulties experienced by smaller ones. How much size-blindness will creatures whose dimensions make them dominant by default have?
Interesting advantages and disadvantages. An example: are snakes disabled? No limbs, plus requiring very specific temperature parameters to be able to function. How would a serpent get a job? What if they can't? (I haven't inserted any kind of safety net for those without work, because, so far, my world-building has not gone there. Sooner or later, though, I'll have to think about it and decide how much support the disabled, injured, sick, elderly, carers, stay-at-home parents, etc. get and what form it might take.)
It raises questions about racism*. There are four races: amphibians, birds, mammals and reptiles. If you had to guess, which race would you expect to have the best advantage and receive the least prejudice? Which do you think would suffer the most?
Then there is the question of what the world itself might look like. How do large and small creatures live and work together? How do amphibians go about their lives without their skin drying out?
The point is, there are a lot of possibilities that I can explore, by making a world populated by animals, in ways that are all my own. A world with very real problems, prejudices and struggles. It is fun to find one and overcome it. I hope you have fun alongside me.
*As a white person, I am uncomfortable discussing racism as it stands. With the best of intentions, I would still be talking over those who experience it daily and have done so for centuries. I would rather highlight it as wrong and cruel in a way that silences and talks over nobody. That is part of the reason I opted to create this world and populate it in this way.
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