The House of Grammar Part 8: The Island of the House of Grammar

Since I was on a bit of a sci-fi kick a few days back, I figured I'd return to that genre. Besides, my mom's planning to throw down a bit of schoolin' in the comments section of these posts so I may as well get my vitriol out. I was lucky to get away with it this long, but I suppose that's the benefit of her being away from a computer for a couple weeks; no time to knock me off my high horse.
Anyway, I was talking about sci-fi. You know how in Part 6 I mentioned I would buy just about any method of communication you dished up for me for a non human species? Well, there's a caveat to that.
Talking animals are not a non human goddamned species.
I'm not talking about alien species that share superficial similarities with let's say, deer. If you want your alien species to flick its white tail in the air and flee at the crack of a twig, go ahead. I'm also not talking about creatures like The Cheshire Cat, who is not a talking cat, but some kind of reality warping quantum hate beast from Mars who just happens to look like a cat. I'm also not talking about animals speaking only with each other because they are the only main characters. Even the movie "Babe" had a hard divide between its animal and human characters. They did not speak to each other, even though they worked to coexist. It was very clear in that story that the humans could never, and never did understand the dialogue happening between the animal characters, and the suspension of disbelief comes into play there because it is very easy to believe a farmer imagining the things going on inside the heads of his stock, but never being able to know for sure. This is mainly because that's something we all do.
Quite simply, what I'm saying is that if the best you can come up with for your sidekick character, or for your power behind the throne villain, or secret group of vicious rebel insurgents, is that the reason they're able to succeed is because they are house pets with the uncanny ability to talk human language, granted to them by experiment/radiation/viral evolution/because they didn't want us to know/venereal disease/you're a lazy writer/I hate you... etc, then you have just failed at engaging my suspension of disbelief. You have successfully managed not only to be less imaginative than my less than two year old son (who is at least capable of imagining that a chicken finger is in actuality a dancing train) but you have also managed to step into the ranks of the same sorts of people who created the movie "G-Force." Yeah. That's how talented you are. "No round of applause?" you ask. Nope.
I really don't care what your counterargument is. Nor do I care how long you spent developing the really detailed back story for your nattering llama, your sobbing pet iguana, or your pleading chimpanzee. And no, even if the talking cat is green, it is still a talking fucking cat.
And no, I don't have a thing against Furries. As long as you keep it in the bedroom or wherever it is you do your thing, do whatever you like. But just because I'm fine with whatever people want to do for kink does not mean I'm going to excuse you for deciding because you lack even the merest, infinitesimal fragment of imagination that your main character is going to be (and I can imagine the fervor of excitement as you say this) "A bipedal female wolf whose species happened to evolve on Earth in the hundreds or thousands of years following the release of a terrible nanovirus, and speaks English because of books we left behind." I'll tell you what you just said to me, but with more brevity: "TALKING GODDAMNED ANIMAL."
What about Planet of the Apes? What about Dolphins? Well, there's quite a lot of scientific research, to start with, that human beings evolved from chimpanzees (one might argue that it is scientific fact, but I'm not here to spark an evolutionary debate) and many primates show a marked ability not only to mimic human speech but to communicate in rudimentary sign language. That's fact. Dolphins, too, are said to have near human intelligence, so I can accept a logical argument for one being able to communicate with humans.. I'm not, however, going to buy a raccoon that suddenly possesses the ability to engage in witty banter with a Yale professor just because you think it's very "Odd Couple" to have that happen. If a raccoon could talk, I imagine it would say "Screeeee!" because it's a godsbedamned raccoon, not Chris Rock.
Now I'm going to dial down the rage a little. I'm as guilty of being tempted by this trap as anyone, but the difference here is that any time I have found myself thinking along those line, I've stopped myself. If you find the same, go drink a coffee, or take a nap, or talk to a shrink for all I care, because you are now on the wrong track. No matter what rationale you come up with, people do not, cannot, and will not communicate with animals, and anything else you come up with to explain it is going to shoot your story right in the kneecap before it can go thirty feet.
I haven't explained why yet? I suppose not. Let's put it simply, then. No matter how fun it is to pretend that your pet dog is thinking something in particular, or that your cat has an opinion of your hygiene, or that your fish is concerned about the diver in its tank getting the bends, any conversation you imagine between yourself and them is you putting words in their mouth. We cannot put ourselves, as an audience, into the shoes of an animal, without realizing this. At that point, the animal character in question may as well be a human character, because for your audience they have already become a human character. They have become a ventriloquist's doll, at the very best, and a poor second hand one at that. We immediately realize what you're trying to do, and it fails, because you're trying to get us to actively believe that all the conversations we have with our pet are real, and that's when it falls apart.
Save yourself the trouble. If you think a talking animal would be a hoot, try an experiment. Write that character as a person. How much better or worse would the story be if that character were human? Do they need to be there at all? And if they need to be there, if the quality of their character improves the story, why do they need to be an animal? I'm far more likely to fall in love with a human character to whom I can relate than an animal character who happens to talk like a human character to whom I can relate, for the simple fact that I, as a human, am not capable of relating to an animal. Period. By making them an animal, you have just removed my investment from your story.
And at that point if your story makes it to the bottom of my rabbits' cages, I've probably gone to more effort than I should have.
And when I tell them why your story is now their litter, they're going to stare up at me with the blank suspicious eyes of prey and say nothing.