Xenofiction, Thoughts, Approaches, Styles, Worldbuilding, Etc

[zoru22]

For a kind of mind-teaser or provocative on this topic, consider this picture of a mantis wearing a sweater and sewing:

https://www.deviantart.com/barukurii/art/Sewing-Mantis-466376276

This is the essence of xenofic, in visual form.

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I'm currently hyperfocusing on Xenofiction, if you can't tell.

I am making some vague gestures at coming up with terms. There's lots of opportunity within the Pokemon Fanfic scene to write some really, really cool Xeno. Hopefully authors find this setup useful.

Thus, I'm going to use this thread as kind of a half-pontification slash half-attempt at grasping and tagging Xeno fics. I wouldn't call myself an authority on the subject, but I am a collector and remixer of various ideas to fit them into something I find interesting, so by typing this out, I hope to process the information and maybe gain new insight.

Note that I'm assuming you're here because you're curious about different types of Xeno and might want to try your hand at it... So I hope the thread is encouraging, not daunting.

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I've come up with three broad tags for Xenofiction:

• Social Xeno
• Mental Xeno
• Biological Xeno

These terms are... not perfect, the more I think about them, but we're just going to pretend Social and Mental are not confusing terms. Imagine a Venn Diagram w/ three overlapping circles and that I slapped each one into a different circle, yeah?

I've come up with some modifiers of the tags, based on presentation:

• Presented to the reader as alien
• Presented to the reader as normal (opposite of Defamiliarization)
• The Xeno is applied consistently through the story
• The Xeno is applied inconsistently through the story

If you're a writer and you're planning out Xenofiction, the first thing to know is: It's not a big deal. Xenofic fans have an extremely small pool of fics to draw from, so we're often just happy you tried. There's no need for perfection, though I will say that most Xenofic readers are reading for the presentation-as-alien, even if it's inconsistently applied.

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Bio Xeno is the most clear example and it's probably the one that I would like to see more of in pokemon fics. Basically, the tag is saying "this fic draws a focus on characters or creatures that relate to the world via nonhuman bodies"

How does being a leavanny vs drifloon vs mantyke vs cresselia vs ekans vs human impact that character's life.

Surely, a mantyke will have to figure something out in order to open doors with knobs. Do ekans have a tube that takes them to their room? Do the snake types have a room with a nice heatlamp in it? What do ekans eat, that differs from what an oddish or joltik eat?

You don't need to make anyone a carnivore if you don't want to, but these kinds of questions can be fun and help flesh your world out.

There's also the sensory aspect- How does that pokemon see the world around them? For example, a fighting type pokemon like a lucario may wind up relying on their aurasight more than their sight from their eyes, and the presentation could reflect that if their physical eyes had a tendency to atrophy over time.

How do they smell, sense, feel, or how are their emotions presented to them as a result of their body. If the character's missing a nutrient, what do their cravings look like?

One example I can think of is in animorphs, the fact that Tobias can't cry while he's a hawk.

If a fic draws attention to how the non-human character does things or they process the information in the world, then, I would tag as Biological Xeno. (a sub-tag or alt-tag I am considering is Sensoria Xeno- The reader feels like they're vicariously getting the experience of the alien body)

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Mental Xeno

Basically, mental Xeno questions (or answers?) how a pokemon or character thinks and perceives the world.

The most common: A predator type might have their sympathy blunted while hungry/in hunt-mode.

If they're a grass type, they may anchor their entire life and perception of the world around having sun/no sun, and may come to view "fake" sources of sun with great suspicion and annoyance, if not anxiety.

This goes from the super subtle to what the characters notice/care about, and can be built largely from the species' biology. For example, a Leavanny who sees a Swadloon with a short leafy-coat, might instantly assume that they are being hurt/malnourished/uncared for at home, even if idk, the swadloon was in a fight earlier that day and just haven't been home to have mom/dad fix it up.

A cat-type pokemon might be extra-anxious if they are sitting out in the open/not from a high spot. They might do things, but not be able to link action and consequence together, resulting in only a temporary change in behavior or general anxiety around an area, without assigning that they shouldn't be playing with the anxious, sparking joltik.

Animorphs does a good job of this whenever a character turns into a dog, for example, they're bombarded with HAPPY that golden retrievers are known for. Or any time they just have to fight the native animal's "instinct".

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Social Xeno

Okay so it's here where I'm running out of steam and I need to go back to work, so I may write a longer post about this one later.

Social Xeno in fics might draw a focus on societies and cultures with different customs than ours. They would feel weird or alien to someone who grows up in our society. This Social Xeno would reflect everything from their government to their religions to their daily rituals, and might be influenced by which species are in charge. A hidden society of shuppets and banettes would look different from a clan of abra/kadabra/alakazam.

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Side note: While writing this, I realized that one framing might be the constructive approach:

Biological feeds into the Mentality which feeds into the Sociality of Xenofiction which feeds into whatever other tags you can come up with.

Doing this from the ground-up requires a lot of Author Energy, and I'm just big into the Bio and Mental Xeno, and as big of a Xeno fan I am, I don't have limitless energy for worldbuilding Xeno from the ground up.

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Xeno	Biological	Mental	Social
Presented As Alien
Presented As Familiar

There's also another presentation aspect I'm not going to get into, and that's "this character is alien because they find human stuff interesting/weird"

In animorphs, Ax has this in spades.

Most people I've met who want Xeno, tend to want the Presented As Alien aspect.

Anyway, uh, feel free to ask questions... I'm going to add more posts as whimsy takes me.

Possible future posts include: "why I read/write as xeno", "some approaches to xeno"

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Additional Reading:

• https://www.amazon.com/Other-Senses-Worlds-Doris-Jonas/dp/0812818415
• https://snugglyserials.wordpress.com/2022/05/23/xenodeterminism/
• https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm
• https://forums.spacebattles.com/thr...h-goldfish-stowaways-original-fiction.616857/

 

[zoru22]

If you write pokemon fics, you are already including Xenofiction elements.​

Pokemon, by nature, is Xeno[fiction]. If you're writing pokemon, you are including Xenofiction elements by default. Because it's a franchise of magical monsters who do not all behave, act or think like humans.

Even if you present everything as if it's normal, you are still writing xenofiction if pocket monsters are in your fic.

The primary challenge of Xenofic is making it approachable and digestible to a diverse set of readers. And Pokemon fics have this issue too.

By "They", I mean "Pokemon" as in the magical animals that make up pokefics:

• They (usually) Naturally Love Battling
• They (usually) Love pairing up with humans (usually) in a platonic way
• They (usually) Don't Mind Pokeballs
• They (usually) Cannot talk to humans using human language
• They may have certain traits which makes certain environments hard for them- Frosmoth might have a harder time in summer. Don't leave your Charmander out in the storm. Joltiks need to feed off of static

I could go on and on. If you use the pokedex as inspiration, different body parts of a pokemon are important (say, in a fight), then it's Xenofic. You may say "What? So if I swapped in a sapient octopus in place of an octillery, that's Xeno?" or "Even if they're basically just humans in the body of animals?"

Yeah? I think that's what I'm saying, anyway.

If we don't approach pokemon as if it is at least a little bit Xeno, we wind up with fics that are unapproachable for people who aren't mega pokefans... Right, most people know the whole "tail fire goes out, the charmander dies" less people know that joltik feed off of electricity. Even less people are going to recognize an applin.

If you've ever imported milotic's obsession with beauty/cleanliness or mimikyu's costume obsessions, that's all little sprinkles of Xeno. If your character is PMD and they're having trouble mapping their body to their physical one, we're drawing attention to biological xeno.

Thus, after telling you you're already writing Xeno by writing pokefic, the next question in this post might be...

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"Why the hell are you telling me this, Zoru, I thought you were going to pontificate on how to help write xeno"

There's a thing here. And I've seen it in myself and from people who are familiar with the franchise. Most people don't actually know all the pokemon. And most fanfics I've read fail to acknowledge that.

Writers write because we LOVE the franchise and do the work of worldbuilding our stories and become ultra familiar with Pokemon, yeah? We scour bulbapedia/serebii, just play the games and read the dexes and we take note of everything we can so that we can have inspiration for how a pokemon behaves or might think, or how we should write a battle or a home scene... And this means reading pokefic for people who don't know every pokemon is really hard.

And by associating ourselves in a circle of writers, we get insulated and often lose approachability for people who are not as familiar or are not speaking our language. I've shared many fics, only for the commenters to be like "well I can't read this, I lost what pokemon is what species/type/what they look like".

If you pick a specific species of an octopus for a fic, then readers need to know why you picked that species, what you picked about it, and they need to be introduced and familiarized with that species' behavior its quirks etc. They need to know what's special or different about that species compared to the generic idea of an octopus they might have. Same deal with pokemon, even if you go with the "presented as familiar", so long as a pokemon's species, types, moveset, et cetera matters... The reader needs this information. As a simulation reader, it's nice for there to be visualization reminders in stories so I can populate scenes.

We need to keep in mind that our readership are NOT intimately familiar with pokemon. Or if they are, readers may have their entire experience tinted by, say, the anime.

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You don't need to go all out to address this.​

1. Including links to bulbapedia or images of the pokemon the first time their species is explicitly named. This is brute force, but it works well when not everyone is a native english speaker or simply hasn't played the games in english.

This is my go-to when there's a lot going on in a scene or I'm just low-energy. It's not hard to slap some links onto fics.

2. Have most every pokemon's introduction with at least a light description of the key details. Then ensure to say the pokemon's specie's names and types. I tend to pilfer the "Biology" section of bulbapedia a lot.

3. Visual and action reminders which remind the reader which species they are... I usually repeat aspects of descriptions of a pokemon or re-describe them in different detail in different scenes.

 

[zoru22]

The Reader - Fiction Contract​

(Or: When fics should not use the Xenofiction tag)​

Or: Tagging and Classification is Hard

You, the astute work of fiction, might say "Uh, I'm a normal pokefic. I'm not tagging myself as Xeno just because I use some light Xeno elements" and you would be right! So, in this post I'm going to dive a slight bit deeper into classification.

When I am a reader, and I'm just sniffing around, seeing if I might be interested in a particular fic, and I'm reading your 'hook', or your 'pitch', you're telling me "I am about these things, and will have these plot elements and these tropes", then I as a reader will say "Ah yes, I agree to that contract, I am interested in reading this," and then you are free to play with those tropes, so long as you sell me on any changes or updates to the contract as your contents evolve and progress.

Occasionally, fics will get a bit heady, or bored with the premise, and dive off into another premise. Then, I as a reader will become irate, and I will put the fic down, and I will say "You lied to me, fic! You broke the contract! You said you were about hiveminds, but you spend more time on the characters who are not the hivemind/queen!" and then you will shrug, and I will be annoyed.

Ultimately, classification is a tool for fics to present themselves, and the worst thing for a fic is for a reader to simply be bored or not find what they're looking for in a fic. A question that every work of fiction should ask themselves: "Is someone who is into Xeno going to be interested in reading me?"

The default answer is... probably not. But, don't worry! There's a way of doing your tagging and managing expectations, and that's via: modifier tags and the pitch, or hooks. See, the title of your fic plus the tags of your fic, plus the pitch all combine to set the reader pitch, and then the first chapter is where you really have a chance to show the reader what you're really all about.

If you're a fic with a trainer with a normal team of pokemon going around and doing their journey, then I would probably err on the side of not wearing those tags. See, the people who wear the tags but can't tell the story the reader wants, should probably get a new outfit. But even so, a little glam can help to really bring out the grunge.

Little Leavanny's teaser box over on SB has the following tag line:

This is a xenofiction perspective from the POV of a character turned into a Leavanny, and her perspective can be confusing!

The fic decided to pick this up because readers complained that Leah's POV was confusing, and many regular readers ceased picking up its ideas altogether because of a breach of contract. Little Leavanny is still recovering from some Reader-Fic contract problems that caused its info-pickup to drop.

Let's repeat: In my opinion, as a reader, if you are a fic, it's better for you to be clear what you are about or your elements are, and overspecify than to be vague and underspecific when it comes to whether you consider yourself as Xenofiction. Just remember that if you have Xeno elements and you're not highlighting Xeno, you can still specify yourself as Xenofiction, so long as you aren't lying to your potential memetic receptacles. And you prevent lying by telling them up front which memes your content will give.

Spoiler

Nighz is, one of like 3-4 people whom I would consider authorities on whether or not something is Xenofiction.

The more specific you are about yourself, the more likely you are to find potential readers who will enjoy your elements. If you wish to get help with which Xenofiction tags to add, I may be willing to help. If among your memes, you are concerned your pokemon are just "star trek aliens", you can still pick up the xeno tag, but your pitch and first chapter should make it clear that's what the reader should expect. That way you can be respectful of which memes the readers want to pick up.

 

[zoru22]

Managing Reader And Author Energy​

Or: Xenofiction is Hard, Both to Read, and to Write​

Or: Gods, Zoru was full of energy when they started writing this but then the energy went away while in the middle of writing, and how the hell do they pick up the pieces to keep the points coherent? Heh.

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First, let's talk of values- I am tweaking the definitions slightly to colloquial ones.

A Terminal Goal is a long-ish term goal.

1. A human may provide the concept of a bucket list as an example of a Terminal goal.
2. The borg's terminal goal is "assimilate all sapient life"
3. Fics simply have no long-term goals. You merely exist as a packet, a collection of ideas. And yet, within you, you act on the world when readers read you and then they ingest your memes.
   1. As a fic, you are a collection of ideas, concepts, characters, place, scenes, words, which fit into memes.
   2. Let's say your goal is to spread your ideas far and wide. This has benefits for your memes, and your author. Characters within you come to life within reader's heads. You want the characters you contain to live as many lives as they can as readers experience them. Your author may get extra interaction and social validation if your memes spread and the receptacles enjoy them.

An Instrumental Goal is a short term goal.

1. A human student's Instrumental goal might be "pass this test", "get homework done", which is then in service to their Terminal goals: "make it through the day", "make it through the week", "graduate from school".
2. Fic's instrumental goal, in comparison at any given moment is something like "get and keep readers reading me", by presenting an interesting pitch and premise and accurate tags and pitch to readers so they will want to experience your memes.
   1. Ensuring your grammar and diction is clear can optimize for the correct memes to be communicated
   2. Written and completed fics are static and unchanging. Their terminal and instrumental goals will never change. But still, you as a fic don't truly die until they stop getting read. Just stuck in a liminal state of being between life and death.

Humans have many Terminal Goals, and yet after they strive for a long time and complete one, do they consider their life complete and then die? No, such people are hyperfocused and, IMO, kinda shallow. Most humans pick up a new terminal goal. You, as a fic, you will never, ever complete your terminal goal. Even if you spread to all humans on the planet, new humans will enter the world who never read you, some will read you and drop you, some will say they read you and then not-actually-have-read you.

Instrumental goals are the iterative goals we take to achieve our end goals. Instruments for achieving our terminal goals, if you will.

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Let's take a breather. That was all really dense, right? I got into a different mind-state to write that! I haven't figured out a specific tag for this narration style yet.

- Remember which descriptors of Xenofiction I tend to prioritize? (hint: two of: Biological, Social, Mental Xeno) (Aside: Animorphs tends to have both Bio and Mental Xeno as its primary focuses... and then it has Social Xeno in there too)

This kind of mental load? It's taxing! On both the reader and the writer, and it's important that we don't exhaust ourselves and our readers- this is pokemon, after all. These are stories with/about cute magical monster animals in a franchise we obsess over and love, and damn it the company owning it is shit at catering to their vast audience base! So here we are. Anyway...

- Remember the bits about "Presented as Xeno" and "Presented as Familiar" ?

Presented as Familiar is a lot easier because you aren't drawing attention to the fact that your pokes are not human, and this lowers the energy levels required. Presented as Xeno has higher energy levels. It can still be high-energy if you're constantly ensuring "could a torchic really open that door?" (the answer is probably not lol)

That's a weaksauce explanation, TBH, but I need sleep and I am kinda running out of steam to write a whole post about it, so let's see how far I can go.

Presented as Xeno and Presented as Familiar are both sliding scales, and you can intermingle both throughout your fic.

	From Xeno POV	From Familiar POV
Presented as Xeno
Presentation Wax and Wane
Presented as Familiar

"Oooh Shit, Zoru, you're making more shit up! What's Wax and Wane?!?"

Wax and Wane - The presentation is in flux- some things are weird, some things are presented as normal, and as the story normalizes, certain Xeno elements that were there earlier in the story are also normalized, and then we draw attention to other elements, and then use callbacks in order to help readers not forget that our characters are not human and that they're making decisions or doing things in ways humans can't. Honestly, the best Xenofics have something like this going on.

Take Animorphs: the problem I have with Ax's POV is that for him, HUMAN STUFF IS ALWAYS WEIRD. IT NEVER NORMALIZES, and yet being on a a freaking alien ship gets normalized by the human characters by like, the second? third? time they're on one? But Ax can't get over Cinnabons?

Each time there's a new morph, there's a discussion on exactly what each new animal is like, and how the members of the teams deal with instinct. But eventually, they normalize and you only get light callouts to what animal they morphed into or out of. But between scenes you're reminded of those things, so that your visuals and such can imagine exactly what was going on.

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Meting out Detail So Neither You Nor The Reader Get Overwhelmed​

Now, I'm actually-mentally-tired of the whole "you are a fic" gimmick, fun as it was. I don't have the energy for doing that forever. When you're writing Xeno, and your readers are reading it... Exhaustion and mental load is the big problem. Readers need the experience to go by smoothly. They (and you, the author) need release valves which let you and them process what happened in the story and come to terms with that.

At least for what I'll consider the high-cognitive load sections like the whole "you are a fic" thing which requires some decent brainstretch.

The truth is, you don't actually need brainstretch to write Xeno. You don't need brainstretch to write Biological Xeno. You will probably need brainstretch for both Mental and Social Xeno, but I'll talk about that later.

Let's say you're writing a PMD fic. You're already including Xeno, but maybe you're having a hard time thinking about what approach you should take?

Well, Remember the numbers 2 and 3 from post #2 - Visual and Action reminders.

Take a male Salandit - for starters, a village of Salandit + Salazzle is likely matriarchal--I'm getting ahead of myself. I said Biological Xeno, not Social Xeno!

Bio Xeno is the easiest to answer. Here's a shitty template:

• What is Salandit's Terminal Goals? How do they differ from other pokemon they interact with?
• In a given scene, what are Salandit's instrumental Goals?
• How does being that pokemon impact their instrumental goals? You know, the goals which lead to terminal goals?

Then, you write the story from the Salandit's POV, and your focus isn't on their social thoughts, they can think just like a human, but what makes their POV Xeno, is references to how large everything in the world is around them, do they have claws, what does their skin feel like? Do they lick the air? How do they open a door? Do they swish about their tail? If they're eating, how do they eat?

Rule of Thumbs for the descriptive approach changes based on 1st vs 2nd vs 3rd person POV.

I rate 1st and 2nd POVs as high-energy- if I'm reading first-or-2nd pov of pokemon, I'm hoping for some kind of callouts reminding me of coloration of the other pokemon in the scene, their sizes, their types, their body styles, and what the character perceives those characters to be doing. Third person, we won't get the POV translation layer.

By all means, write that full two paragraph description of the scene from the Salandit's perspective, then what you do is you have your scene, and you include frequent reminders, and then as the chapters progress, you have the number of visual, audible, smell, reminders drop lower and lower as the scene shifts.

When slowly reduce the callbacks, you simultaneously reduce the chance of overwhelming yourself, and avoid "I forgot what type/species/pokemon the Salandit was" because you're using spaced repetition to remind readers what's what.

These thoughts are clearly incomplete, so I'll probably try to revisit it in a future post.

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Up next, Social Xeno and Cities ?

 

[zoru22]

Since I've been going a bit hard into the Xeno, we need to get a bit clearer so I can actually make this more approachable if you're not already into Xeno. If you're feeling overwhelmed by the last post... Well, I was told that this thread is a decent "Xeno 101" curricula, so us Xeno-lovers aren't the best at evaluating what an "intro to Xeno" actually looks like... 🙃.

I was going to give a society / citybuilding a shot, but after some feedback, I feel like this would be a good time for a more practical demonstration for building up and writing pokemon-as-xeno characters.

But first. Why? Why write characters with a Xeno lens? Well, one thing that Xeno does is it help us as humans get out of our safety zones and empathize with beings we normally can't relate to. We don't need to translate their their entire experience one-for-one into the fic. But by making their lives feel more real, it can give our stories and worlds more depth.

And we can empathize with the characters better.

An Approach To Building and Writing Xeno-Pokemon Characters​

Or: Star Trek aliens are still aliens​

Or: Learning to love injecting Xeno

Imagine that one meme with the uh IQ bell curve graph:

0 iq: "Xeno? You mean like Star Trek Vulcans?"
100 iq: "Haha Star Trek Vulcans aren't real Xeno"
200 iq: "Star Trek Vulcans are Xeno"

In the last post, I already talked about salandit, right? Well, how about I kinda just stream thoughts of a salandit character as part of the post?

For some inspiration I used a monster boy/girl generator until I found one I could work with. This salandit boy could be a pokemorph or mainline or PMD pokemon, it doesn't matter to me. Pokemorphs can be excellent for cashing in on teen angst tbh.

I'm going to say they're a PMD or mainline pokemon where pokemon are sapient. Maybe I'll reuse this when I do my city/cultural worldbuilding.

Lying <<salandit>> boy who wears a headband and dislikes Sandwich

Aight, so. I've got a salandit-boy who's a chronic liar and dislikes sandwiches.

Let's say this is the mainline pokemon series, with sapient pokemon. Let's even say that pokespeak with each other works. They could even talk to humans! First, let's talk about the elephant in the room: only female salandit evolve into salazzle.

So, why would they be a compulsive liar? Well, maybe they're in Unova/Kalos/Kanto idk, whatever region that doesn't have a lot of salandit/salazzle. Maybe this makes them a novelty in their region, so they have grown to boast, and are like "One day, when I evolve into a salazzle, I'll show you all!" So maybe the salandit is constantly working hard and boasting about their powers, but because they're not a salazzle, they know they'll never be as strong as they could be, but they are worried about being rejected by their trainer or their fellow pokemon if they are forever stuck as one.

So far, all I've done is given them a bit of angst for being in a body and species when the female members of their species can evolve and get a boost from it. Or, the salandit simply enjoys having the attention, being in a region they're not native to.

So perhaps they have Terminal goals of:

• Find out a way to evolve
• Don't get kicked off their team
• Don't lose their friends
• Don't let others kick them around for being two feet tall

Now, our little salandit boi is starting to flesh out a bit. Oh, and they have a preference against sandwiches.

Why don't they like sandwiches? Maybe they don't like lettuce/mayo/cucumbers/breads. Maybe they only like berries, fruits, and meats. To make it Xeno, move it to a species trait where most Salandits don't like sandwiches. But our salandit boi in a non-native region might not know that. So maybe they lie and say they "love" the sandwiches and eat it anyway, even if their taste buds think it's like eating chalk or it makes their tummy upset later.

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Cool, so I've just genned what I would consider a "star trek" or "human in fursuit" Xeno. And that's all we need for this exercise.

To go deeper into Xeno for Salandit, we would look up what species it might have been inspired by and then dig into their biology and their sociality. I would look at how said inspiration species manage their young, what foods they eat, and how they behave, and build their personality based off the biology.

But this Salandit is a member of a trainer's team, and we're only doing this bit of Xeno for the flavor. We'll get into discussing a POV from the Xeno later, but to keep the scope of the post down, we'll say it's from a 3rd-person POV or from their trainer's POV.

I'm going to brute force this next section some, as it's only for demonstration.

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Kaden walked through the pokemon shelter's back yard. With the money he'd been given on his thirteenth birthday, he'd been able to purchase both a pokeball, and could now afford the adoption fees at the shelter. Walking among the various pokemon, was a curious little lizard resting on a rock in the open summer sun. Its head was dark, its eyes and the look of its face seemed to be smiling, almost smugly, at him.

Scanning the lizard with his pokedex, it was a salandit. Kaden had always had an affinity for the more reptilian pokemon. So, he sat down, next to the rock, and waved at the caretaker who was watching them. "Why are you here, little fella?" Kaden asked, pulling out a blue oran berry, offering it to the poison-and-fire type. Even in the sun, the gleam of the orange-red markings along the salandit's tail practically called to the soon-to-be-trainer.

The salandit sat up, then accepted the berry, holding it with his two small arms, its four-fingered claws digging into the berry, causing the juice to drip down. It was more cautious than the permanent grin would suggest, Kaden noted. "Would you like to join my team? I know I'm just starting out..." Kaden said, his voice trailing off as he looked out over the field, the various other pokemon who'd been surrendered milling about.

He held out his pokeball, as salandit nodded. And with a tap, their new team just begun.

---

And then later, as the pokemon is in its first fights, we call out to the salandit's body's properties- the markings on their back and their tail, do they get nervous in fights or before them? Does the salandit boi like fights? Are they fighting because they are scared of losign their first friend? How does this kind of anxiety show for the salandit, like, physically?

Here's a shorter, sample blurb from salandit's point of view:

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Even when he stood at full height, salandit only came up to Kaden, his trainer's waist. But that was hard, and he oft found himself sitting down, using his forelegs to prop himself up. Their second day together had gone well, he'd have estimated. It beat not being stuck in that shelter all day long.

Kaden held a thing in front of him, he couldn't quite describe it. It smelled of egg, meat, and chalk. He winced, but Kaden didn't retract it. But he'd smelled worse. He'd smelled better, too. Luckily for him, Kaden hadn't quite learned his tells. In particular, it was the twitch in his tail, which went stiff.

"It's a sandwich," Kaden said. "Never had one before?"

Well, truth be told, he hadn't. So he shook his head. Would Kaden think he was unhappy with the arrangement if he rejected it? The little grey lizard sat back on his haunches, holding out his arms, and Kaden handed him not the whole thing, thank goodness, but a quarter.

His claws sunk into the bread, and he tore at it like he was tearing at a particularly difficult-to-eat berry. The bread dissolving in his mouth, further compacting the feeling and taste of eating cement. Or chalk. He was undecided which. Still, he ate it, simply glad to be doing something new.

---

These are what I would consider little Xeno-snips. I did a few things to add little reminders of the salandit's body shapes mannerisms, and such. From here on out, eating a sandwich can now become a small, recurring in-joke for readers. And I can mix in smaller and smaller reminders of salandit's biology. Then, perhaps later, I can come up with a puzzle or some such where salandit's size and biology will really come in handy.

The trick as the fic moves on is to mix in those bio and typing reminders naturally, as part of the story. I'll propose a few ideas for actually doing this later.

If you don't want to do this, you don't have to frontload the body or biology stuff so hard, and can instead sprinkle out the references. But it's important to give a good description up front and then add callbacks to different features of the pokemon for approachability reasons.

Anyway, what do you think? Was this helpful? Are there other questions I maybe missed or didn't think of?

 

[Venia Silente]

I'm currently hyperfocusing on Xenofiction, if you can't tell.

Given the title of the thread, you could have fooled me!

Anyway, I thought I'd participate since most of what I write is Pokémon-centric with a side dish of hooman in it. Reading through the thread gave me a few impressions and stuff, but there's a lot of stuff going on and not much of it is presented in a way that helps contrast other authors' experiences, so I'll try and contribute some things with the but that I have yet to go in depth through the *entirely* of the links.

I've come up with three broad tags for Xenofiction:

• Social Xeno
• Mental Xeno
• Biological Xeno

These terms are... not perfect, the more I think about them, but we're just going to pretend Social and Mental are not confusing terms. Imagine a Venn Diagram w/ three overlapping circles and that I slapped each one into a different circle, yeah?

I've come up with some modifiers of the tags, based on presentation:

• Presented to the reader as alien
• Presented to the reader as normal (opposite of Defamiliarization)
• The Xeno is applied consistently through the story
• The Xeno is applied inconsistently through the story

If you're a writer and you're planning out Xenofiction, the first thing to know is: It's not a big deal. Xenofic fans have an extremely small pool of fics to draw from, so we're often just happy you tried. There's no need for perfection, though I will say that most Xenofic readers are reading for the presentation-as-alien, even if it's inconsistently applied.

Partly in the interest of helping the potential definitions, and assuming I understood the later points well, may I suggest "rebranding" of sorts Social and Mental xeno as "Cultural" and "Personal" xeno? It's still not perfect (and it can get into the thorny territory of how do you conceptualize the requirements and borders of culture) but I felt across the thread that at least the concept of "personal" xeno gets more deeply into the point of what is going to be explored.

Plus, it helps more or less contextualize those propositions of xeno when projected upon a first-person esque perspective: "what I am", "what I think about myself", "what I think about the surrounding world".

Anyway, carry on!

Bio Xeno is the most clear example and it's probably the one that I would like to see more of in pokemon fics. Basically, the tag is saying "this fic draws a focus on characters or creatures that relate to the world via nonhuman bodies"

How does being a leavanny vs drifloon vs mantyke vs cresselia vs ekans vs human impact that character's life.

Surely, a mantyke will have to figure something out in order to open doors with knobs. Do ekans have a tube that takes them to their room? Do the snake types have a room with a nice heatlamp in it? What do ekans eat, that differs from what an oddish or joltik eat?

I'm going to differ from your proposition here a little: a Bio Xeno doesn't have to put a mantyke into the prospect of opening doors with knobs; in fact if it did, I'd qualify it as a Mental or even as a Social (Cultural?) Xeno instead of as a Bio Xeno. Why? Because analysis of perspective of a different species starts with the world they would naturally build, and the world Mantyke would naturally build is unlikely to have doors with knobs (that said: the prospect of "what changes in environment would lead them to put knobs on doors" does make very good Mental Xeno!).

While "what do Ekans eat" or "how to snake types derive their body heat" are flatly biological questions about biological requirements, "how does a Mantyke open a door" is about a foreign social requirement. Rather, I'd qualify "how do you put a different species into a human environment" as "Anthropo Xeno": an extension of Social Xeno, since the focus there tends to be less about the species being themselves and more about the species Being Human Enough™.

Mental Xeno

Basically, mental Xeno questions (or answers?) how a pokemon or character thinks and perceives the world.

The most common: A predator type might have their sympathy blunted while hungry/in hunt-mode.

If they're a grass type, they may anchor their entire life and perception of the world around having sun/no sun, and may come to view "fake" sources of sun with great suspicion and annoyance, if not anxiety.

This goes from the super subtle to what the characters notice/care about, and can be built largely from the species' biology. For example, a Leavanny who sees a Swadloon with a short leafy-coat, might instantly assume that they are being hurt/malnourished/uncared for at home, even if idk, the swadloon was in a fight earlier that day and just haven't been home to have mom/dad fix it up.

A cat-type pokemon might be extra-anxious if they are sitting out in the open/not from a high spot. They might do things, but not be able to link action and consequence together, resulting in only a temporary change in behavior or general anxiety around an area, without assigning that they shouldn't be playing with the anxious, sparking joltik.

I liked these two examples and they reminded me of something that is not explored much in Xeno fiction works, at least in the Pokémon fandom and others of its like: how do mental inference shortcuts build up in a different species. We humans barely even notice them — that's kind of the point of them — and it could be presumed that other species would not notice their own either, but it's interesting to read (and write) how the process builds up or functions from an external perspective, because how else do we get our own catering of it?

This "how to build up the mind" aspect is one of the two reasons why I suggested the rebranding of sorts above, as well. But even with this point up, I leave it only as a proposal because I still dont think it covers Social Xeno well.

Xeno	Biological	Mental	Social
Presented As Alien
Presented As Familiar

I'm probably going to go outside of the intended direction of the semantics you chose, but why is here the Alien presented as the opposite or complement to the Familiar? Or how much distance there is between the Alien and the Familiar (as I understand the term "familiar" in the literary study sense, narrative or conceptual familiarity is something that either one achieves or that is pre-fabricated and given to one. it's not an inherent trait of its surrounding system, as "being alien" more seems to be) versus let's say the distance between the Alien and the Native (that which inherently is, or derives from the construction of, the traits the being has)?

Of course I'm not yet up to date so I presume there's subdivisions coming up here at some point, but I found the particular choice of distinction interesting.

Anyway, that's it for now, I'm only up to the second delivery but I have yet to fully parse that one, let alone the next ones, for feedback. I can certainly say seeing someone who knows their Animorphs ("I see you are a man of culture as well" meme etc) is welcome.

 

[zoru22]

I'm probably going to go outside of the intended direction of the semantics you chose, but why is here the Alien presented as the opposite or complement to the Familiar? Or how much distance there is between the Alien and the Familiar

I'm still processing the full of your comments, so I'm not really ready to respond to the whole post, but the answer to this specific question is that I always intended for the slide between alien (the emotion of something which feels unfamiliar/alien) and the familiar (the emotion where something feels familiar) to be a sliding scale, and the table chart was the best visual I could come up with, barring opening up gimp and scratching my own imaginary chart out.

Also, I don't think there was miscommunication here, but just an fyi, I lean on colloquial definitions for terms more than definitions from literature or a dictionary. I need to get better at that, as I'm sure it would help communication.

---

Spoiler: Tangential, Definitional Aside/Mini Rant

Definitions are difficult, and Xenofiction has a slim content and wide definition. We get everything from "star trek aliens", "humans in fursuits" to anthorpomorphizing of ideas to aliens who are intelligent, but not conscious. I've seen fics about mantisses which are decidedly not human but the fic still reads like a grimy naruto fanfic.

And we do all of those in presentation via different literary techniques and tools which aren't much individually, but when we add them together, we get different kinds of Xeno. Since everything that's slightly alien gets the Xeno tag, the definition I can come up with is "there are nonhumans and their biology, mental states (and goals!), and perhaps their socials, matter to the story".

---

Exercise 2: Increasing The Xeno In Stories Via Biology, Moves​

Or: Making pokemon fights feel more visceral​

Or: Showing moves, instead of telling them makes fights more Xeno-like

Remember how the big problem with Xeno is approachability? Well, one way of making pokefic hard to read is to list moves off and not describe the effects for the reader. I don't need to tell you that, probably. You've probably seen some readers talk about it. Naming moves is bad, but they fall prey to the same problems that pokemon species and characters do. Readers who haven't played the games or haven't played them in english with the same move or ability names.

"Should I be linking people to bulbapedia the first time I use a move?"

No, gods no, please don't. I mean, you totally can! If you feel it's really, really important. But if readers have to go to another website to understand what's going on in a fight, then we've lost. We should be able to convey the descriptions and actions that make up a move, and this will make fights more interesting and visceral for the reader. In this particular case, if I show off a move working in a fic, and a reader can't visualize what that move does, that means my descriptions need improvement.

I'm ignoring this for the pokemon biology thing mostly because linking to bulbapedia/serebii is already a big concession for authors. Adding the link takes the reader out of the chapter and out of the scene, and that's a big way of breaking immersion in the fic.

Actually, now that I'm talking about immersion. One of my favorite parts of Xenofics is when they are immersive. This means whenever I feel like the non-humans or pokemon are as real and contributing as much or more to the story.

An immersive First or Second POV makes me feel the same way as the aliens. Third person can do this as well, but it's a bit harder, and that gets into the theory behind the sets of techniques we now call Deep Third.

And if you were to compare my description of what I consider a Xeno approach to a battle, it will sound a lot like a first person wizard battle. The mechanics of the fights would feel a LOT like a Brandon Sanderson battle, such as Mistborn or The Alloy of Law. But the difference is that I would dive right into how it physically feels for that character to be interacting with the magic or power or whatever.

We're not looking to build up a whole magic system from scratch, just call out how the characters' body, mind, maybe even socials!

With that out of the way... Let's revisit our Salandit character and get into the example, shall we? Let's take a First Person approach this time. Bulbapedia is down, so I'm using Serebii.net for the moveset reference. We're still keeping Salandit on the "human in fursuit" relative end of the sliding scale.

All I'm doing here is bringing up biology to remind the reader our salandit is in a fur suit.

---

I jumped off Kaden's shoulder, now with a leather patch on it where I could sit without my claws digging into his skin, to face our purple assailant.

"Ember?"

The rattata stood in front of me, baring its fangs, looking up at me, its ears straight up, tail stiff, and whiskers twitching with every movement of the wind. I was standing back, on my haunches. I'd fought pokemon before, back at the shelter. Even rattata. But nothing feral. I waved my tail back and forth, the rat's eyes following me.

I didn't hear anything, but Kaden was behind me, I was sure by his scent in the air. I didn't really want to fight, but he was in front of us, and we were in his territory. From the back of my stomach, I pulled, pooling together my internal oil store. A flash of purple, and the small rat was in my face, its mouth biting down on my arm from the side,

I coughed, spewing my oils all over it, before regaining control of myself, emitting a spark, and it was covered in a short blast of flame. Its eyes widened and let go, screeching off into the forest. I looked back at Kaden, who smiled. My heart pumped. I'd nearly lost my beautiful hand. The rat was protecting its territory, and I my trainer.

"That was awesome!" Kaden said. "The said you knew Ember, but I didn't think it would work like that!"

Well, kid, it didn't. It wasn't supposed to work like that. Ember was supposed to be a small gush of flame that flew in the air.

"Ach!" Kaden exclaimed as I climbed back up onto his shoulder. Yeah, I didn't mean to make it hurt, but I didn't exactly want to be in these woods, either. I looked down at my arm, my claw, nursing the indents of the rat's teeth a little bit, before settling back in. The rat hadn't even bit half as hard as it could have.

At the same time, I wasn't about to tell Kaden not to be a trainer. Not that I could write, or speak.

---

Note that like, this is only an illustrative example. Note how I'm calling out specifically to the mechanics of the fight itself, and how the character interacts with their biology in order to initiate the move. In a larger fight, or when Salandit's a bit stronger and they're using more powerful moves, the descriptions will shift and change based on my interpretation of what that "move" is doing.

If you go for a "magic" approach, then I would focus on the feeling, the emotion the character uses to get the "move" out there, and how that magic interacts with their body.

---

There's probably also a side note for "what about bigger battles, won't they get bogged down by biology?"

Emphatically: yes. The expectation is that the biology, how moves work, how moves affect the character, are all established in earlier scenes or fights, and then, when the big ones come in, the biology and mechanical reminders are light, so the reader can personally imagine it happening, and have it recalled.

 

[zoru22]

I'm going to differ from your proposition here a little: a Bio Xeno doesn't have to put a mantyke into the prospect of opening doors with knobs; in fact if it did, I'd qualify it as a Mental or even as a Social (Cultural?) Xeno instead of as a Bio Xeno.

After chewing on this part of your comment, I've slapped open paint and come up with this (terrible) visual diagram.

(I'm still mulling on Social vs Cultural Xeno as labels because I feel like Social and Cultural Xeno are distinct enough to be their own labels)

Anyway, I'm going to take a minute and pontificate here a bit.

"Why would Mantyke Build doors with knobs" is definitely Social or Mental Xeno, probably both. (There could be external factors! Like another creature they need to keep out which can't operate knobs but a mantyke can, which might be fun to explore)

In the context of bio Xeno, A mantyke's interaction with the door impresses upon the reader the shape of the body the character is in and how they have to use to navigate it in order to do things which adult humans take for granted.

Its biology interacting with an object they didn't create. I would argue it's at least 55% bio xeno because the attention is drawn on the character's attempt to use their body in a way they weren't built for.

---

A Light Review of a Light takes on Xenofiction!​

GO READ THE INALIENABLE DREAMLESS BEFORE PROCEEDING.​

It's 10k words, should take about an hour at most, and it is very, very good.​

Alt-Title: Reducing the barrier of entry to what makes something Xenofiction.

---

The bare minimum qualification for Xenofiction is that it's about non-humans. If the fic is about pokemon and we tag it Xeno, we still need to be sure exactly what the reader wants is specified up front in the description of the fic, its tags, and the first chapters.

If you've ever read a comic about furries, then you'll remember their worlds often make accommodations for the fact that they are furries, and the artists of the fics show the reader many of the issues and changes that come along with being a furry.

Take this cutesie comic:

From HERE on Furaffinity (Artist gallery is mostly-clean)

My friend Snuggle Squiggle, provided the following insight:

1) nonhuman perspective
2) has experiences a human cannot
3) contrasts with human experience

is something less of a murder mystery if it has 1 dead body instead of 12

(She wrote the essay on Xenodeterminism I linked in the first post. It's a bit thicker of a read but I recommend reading it if you want to explore another lens for Xenofic and approaching it in your mental model)

Slice of life exploring non-humans is still non-humans is still xenofiction.

PS: When I call something "Humans in Fursuits" or "Star Trek aliens", this is me giving the fic a tag. It is not derogatory and I would love to get out of binary thinking in terms of is/isn't xeno.

Writing and adding a couple xeno elements to your fics is not a big deal. All we have to do is explore how our non-human characters relate to the world, perceive, navigate and interpret it, in a way that's unique to their experiences which humans can't have. And in doing so we shine a light on what it really means to be human in the first place.

---

"My PMD fic is about nonhumans and I'm not really sure I should add the tag"

Here's a proposed smell-test: The problem is not that they're humans in fur suits. The problem is when the readers are never reminded that the character's even in a fur suit and thus their experience is still human and doesn't contrast with humans.

I'll do a sampling of more Pokemon-POV in a future post, so we can elucidate this.

---

If the fic draws a direct magnifying glass onto the fact that the characters are in fur suits and how the characters have to deal with that, then the fic is Xenofiction. No mental, no social, no fancy other stuff is needed!

We don't need some crazy non-human society or wacky value system

• Your pokemon don't need to be weird or have strange mindsets
• Your Celebi don't have to be using acausal trade to negotiate
• Your Dialga and Palkia don't need to communicate via market dynamics

If concerned, recall the idea/concept of the reader-fic (or reader-author) contract. Adding additional description or tagging so the reader knows what kind of fic they're signing up to read will help readers!

---

Q: Can you put an alien mentality in a human-suit?
A: Yes, but it would lose the xenofiction tag and it would become a story about a human with certain mentalities/modes of thought. A "human hive-mind" in one body would be a plurality, a thing that happens in humans. (read Blindsight by Peter Watts, it's so good and available online and features both great aliens and great humans with "altered" minds and Watts' vampires are pure edge)

A sociopath/psychopath in a human suit is still a human. A person with strange fixations and strange values is still a human. They need something a little extra which changes up their senses and perception. Plenty of humans express feeling like aliens in a human suit.

---

Xenofiction takes many different forms, and has gradients in each. Let's give a shot at evaluating DreamDiver's "The Inalienable Dreamless!"

With that out of the way, ONTO THE REVIEW lmao​

This was done with @NebulaDreams explicit permission, and before posting I sent them a copy of the review for pre-review and thoughts, via TR DM's.

Dreamdiver is Xenofiction. I say this to help us lower the internal mental bar for what Xenofiction is. It's the whole sum of the chapter which earns it the "Xenofic" tag. Our Banette's experiences + Jung's abilities + the callouts and body references here and there which humans don't have, experiences humans can't have, and experiences which contrast with humans all combine to push it over the line.

---

We only need to hit a few boxes for Xeno:
1) Story is about non-humans

Whoops! One Box! Dream Diver is about non-humans. It is Xeno. Xeno is not looking for the most alien aliens we can possibly alien-ate. :P

Okay, that's cheeky and reductive. Instead, a test we can use to determine whether Dreamdiver is Xeno.

1. Is the fic from nonhuman perspective
   1. Does the reader know this- are there references to the inhuman (outside of repeating species' names)
2. Are the characters having experiences which humans cannot?
3. Do their experiences provide contrast with our human experiences?

She desperately thrashed her cotton-filled body forward, hoping she would get through the haze and reach the door to safety, but to no avail.

Help came when a paw touched her face. It was a Hypno, who looked down at her with inky black eyes.

Flames spread to the helpless doll too, enveloping her. Hot, white heat. Hot. Burning. Excruciating. Silent screaming. Mouth zipped up.

There's at least three references to our Banette's Biology right off the bat.

If the references to their biology only happened once, the reader would forget that they're in fur suits. How often are we reminded that they're nonhuman? Direct references to their nonhuman biology, experience, or body-shape etc

The story's clearly about a Banette who inherited many disparate memories from other pokemon or creatures. The entire crux of the dreams of the story is based around her evolving from a shuppet unlocking her past memories. Banette's problems are because of her being a unique, inhuman being, and stuck in these loops of dreams.

And her human trainer is worried about her and wants her to recover. Because of her inhuman nature, Patch has to get outside help from Jung to help her out of her looping terrors.

On top of the biological xeno, we're shown and told that Jung tried eating her dream- something only a Hypno can do in-setting. No human's going to be diving into dreams in Dreamdiver's setting. No human's going to be able to be able to eat dreams.

“No, but… I’m not me… It feels like I’m full of other people’s pieces… full of their memories… I don’t have any of my own. I’m nothing…”

Patch played with her mouth-zip.

A familiar set of paws entered the room.

There's a couple references to Patches' height, since Banette are ~3 feet and shorter than Jung.

Humans do not have mouth-zips. Humans are not the collective memories of multiple beings' memories. They are not a being with not-their-own-memories all stuffed into one cotton-filled body. Thus, humans are not the focus of the story and we are reminded of that throughout. "Star Trek Xeno" or "Humans in Fur Suits", it may be but it is still a story about non-humans. The non-human is focused upon and made relatable and lovable in spades.

In terms of presentation (see my first post), all is portrayed with normality, and we are pushed along by Nebby's loving hand through a pokemon's unique trauma.

Thus, this chapter/one-off is Xenofiction!

It's "light" Xeno, but still Xeno nonetheless. We could use the "sapient pokemon" and the "talking pokemon" descriptors on AO3 tags and sneak additional description to hint a bit at our lovely Banette being a therapy patient.

---

If the goal were to go a bit harder on the Xeno...​

(This is explicitly not advice for Nebby. These are only examples, demonstrations and loose thoughts)

I would tune the dreams and remove modifiers such as "desperately" and describe the act of thrashing. What this would do, is it would force us to think about Patch's body-shape at that moment. What does the act of thrashing mean for Patch in that scene?

Overall, I would draw more attention to Banette's physical body, and make a few more callouts to her being a ghost and how a stuffed-plush-type ghost relates with the world around her. When Patch is going through the memories of being tethered to the house, I would touch up and focus on the fact that she is a doll in those scenes.

In the "real" world, I might have her notice/pick up his yellow fur shedding on her body in their dance. And contrast that with how she didn't pick up his fur in the dream world. This would show not only that Jung is also in a fur suit, but it could help call out to the reader the difference between dream and reality.

(A non-Xeno aside/thought I had while writing this up, lol) Dreams lose details, as they are an expression of our emotions and inaccurate memories of the event. The event themselves may have been less traumatic if experienced by a different person. But, they were experienced and what's left is those emotions of the prior victims and poor Patch is left picking up the pieces. The ones that stood out to us at the time of the memory. In contrast, reality would not lose details, so Patch noticing the fur being left on her body after the dance could be a really poignant moment while simultaneously calling out to the fact that Jung and Patch are nonhuman.

Banette Biology:

How, physically, does a banette emote in the "real" world? Or a shuppet, for that matter? Do their faces shift like a human's or does their cloth bodies sag and droop when they're sad? If they're angry, does the "inside" of their body puff outward and become taut? If she's scared, does her body lose definition so she can run away with less wind resistance?

A biology-xeno approach calls out to these things and draws spotlights on them, and shows how the creature interacts to and relates to the world through their body. I'm sure if we poured more energy into it, we could come up with a lot more.

I kinda toyed with the idea that Patch's memories/emotions had been getting worse as she lived through them and subconsciously built up more and more anger/negative emotion at the repetition with a self-reinforcing feedback loop.

Mental, Social:

For an approach to Mental Xeno, I would ask questions like: "what does thinking like a Banette mean" and this would be built from her unique problems as a banette and how she navigates her world day to day.

For Social, I would ask questions such as "With her body shape/size/powers, how does Patch use that to relate to others around her? How can we have her use certain words or phrases which call attention to the fact that she's not human?"

Mental, Social cut short b/c this was just a demonstration. I'll review and contrast other fics/stories which lean a bit more on the fact that the characters aren't human.

---

Dreamdiver Inalienable Dreamless fits the bill. Also I love Patch and the shuppet line is like, top ten and now I'm thinking about making a banette/shuppet OC oh gods.