Snowflake challenge '26 #2 (Pets)

[brightknightie]

snowflake_challenge: Pets of fandom: "Loosely defined! Post about your pets, pets from your canon, anything you want!"

I unfortunately must take the show-your-ID antihistamines when visiting furry pets. Few characters are similarly afflicted! So some thoughts on just a select few of their pets...

I won't count horses or similar as pets for this purpose, categorizing them as full partners, so that omits Uni (D&DC) and Epona (TLoZ), along with all pokémon, dragons, etc.

In The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, Zelda has a cat, white like her horse, and all kudos to the unknown-by-me fan who first cleverly fanon/headcanon-named the unnamed cat "Purra" (after the character Purah in the Wilds games by way of the cat Purry in The Minish Cap). When this Zelda wears a certain enchanted outfit, she can speak with cats throughout Hyrule, and discovers their busy cat lives and receives cat side-quests, my favorite of which is "A Treat for my Person," accessible only after completing two other side quests, in which a cat, originally from Gerudo Desert, needs Zelda's help to give her human, a Seesyde Village fisherperson, a specific Gerudo-flavor smoothie as thanks. (Trivia: In the obscure Tri Force Heroes, Link can similarly wear a costume to talk to cats. And of course he talks to all the animals when he's a wolf in Twilight Princess.)

In Battlestar Galactica (1978), Boxy, Serina and Apollo's son, gets Muffit, an experimental robotic daggit (dog), to succeed the real daggit he lost in the Annihilation of the Colonies. This is explained as training for the robot to be a guard for soldiers on planets, and of all the children in the rag-tag fleet of survivors Boxy alone gets this privilege because of Apollo's connections, but of course the real-world reason Muffy exists is merchandising. That said, Muffy, like the CORA Viper-fighter interface, sits conspicuously, problematically, and wholly unacknowledged at a thematic core of the show. The humans fear all forms of artificial intelligence because of how it led to the Cylons. Yet they keep making things like Muffit and CORA, and a recurring character is a robotics scientist. This nagging inconsistency is likely due to the Cylons mostly representing fears of Soviet communism and nuclear war at the time, not actually social/technology fears. Nevertheless, it's a point in the story that fanfic can explore. (I admit I have a small, WIP draft poking into that; I haven't touched it since before LLMs exploded onto the scene, though.)

In Forever Knight, of course Natalie's cat Sidney is seen on screen once and mentioned on screen a second time, and that's it for the full three seasons of show. As annavere mentioned, animals are generally rarer on screen than in real life, because they're difficult and expensive to work with in acting. But Sidney figures prominently in the fandom's understanding of Natalie, firmly treated as a recurring character in his own right in fanfic. Nick's lack of pets, on the other hand, is given a tragic and fully believable in-universe explanation in the "Blind Faith" flashbacks, as -- and I'm phrasing this carefully to not spoil Annavere, who is watching FK for the first time -- Lacroix sadistically intervenes.

What do you think of pets in these canons...?

Comments

[senmut]

I actually posted a picture of Muffy as a meme the other day 'post a fictional animal' on bsky. I was always fascinated by the idea of robotic pets, begun by Muffy and K-9 on Doctor Who. But I see your point on BSG and continually creating AI related things... it's a parable for being unable to uninvent the wheel, to me.

[brightknightie]

>"it's a parable for being unable to uninvent the wheel, to me."

That's definitely a potent way to deploy it! Good insight.

Too bad the original creators seemed wholly unaware of this nexus of contradiction and concern ... of course, much more, too bad the original creators had only one season in which to find their voice and vision. There's no on-screen awareness in any of the characters that Muffy and CORA are anything at all like Lucifer and the centurions. And, come to think of it, the canon that there was originally an organic Cylon people who were replaced by their own tech may come entirely from the cut scenes and novelizations and comics and related materials, rather than on-screen... I should plan a rewatch and scrutinize for that, hmmmm.

[switchbladeeyes]

I knew we only saw Sidney once, but I definitely thought we'd heard him mentioned more than that. Must be fandom amplification of Sidney that made me think that! 😍

Lacroix sadistically intervenes.

Literally, the most angry he's ever made me. I realize that objectively he has done more egregious things, but nonetheless... 🤬🤬🤬

[brightknightie]

The fandom adores Sidney! I have a paper zine over on my shelf devoted to Sidney stories; if I remember correctly, it was a fundraiser for an animal shelter where the editor had acquired her own cat.

But, yeah, we see him only in first-season's "Only the Lonely," and then there is one other episode -- second-season, I think, but it's slipping my mind right now -- where Natalie says something about needing to get home to feed her cat.

[potentiality_26]

Your decision about horses here is quite interesting to me.

[brightknightie]

I could have used the prompt as a springboard to muse on definitions of "pet," for sure. :-)

I believe that I was thinking: given assorted degrees of sentience, self-care, and labor... pets generally don't work. And specifically as I was not addressing Uni, as might be expected of me -- by myself, if no one else! -- I figured I should say that she was ruled out, not accidentally forgotten.

[greerwatson]

A lot of dogs work! Guard dogs, guide dogs, sheepdogs, police dogs, hound packs, retrievers, dogs pulling carts, drovers' dogs....

[brightknightie]

Correct. Working animals and pet animals are different categories. I chose to use a categorization to shape this post. You're welcome to use different standard to shape your post!

[annavere]

I look forward to meeting Sidney! And thanks for the oblique warning about the 'Blind Faith' episode. I will keep that in mind when I get to it.

[brightknightie]

I hope you will find Sidney a joyous addition to the cast! :-)

I'll look forward to your opinion of the episode he's in, entirely separate from the cat himself, too. It's one that has always sparked much discussion.

[lightbird]

We love Sidney. And I remember the really excellent Sidney-focused fic you wrote - love that story.

[brightknightie]

Oh, my goodness! How very kind of you to remember that story! I didn't remember at first, and had to use search to turn up 2015's "When the Nat's Away." :-D

(Evidently, I was misspelling "Sidney" as "Sydney" at that time. Ah, well.)

[greerwatson]

There's a list of Sydney-focused stories here on the wiki. I've been known to work him into a story or two myself! He even has his own faction.

Natalie and her cat: it's part of the fannish characterization of her, isn't it? Despite his limited appearances in canon.

[malinaldarose]

Oddly enough, when talking about fandom pets, the only one I could remember was Muffit -- and that probably only because I had been writing BSG recently. But of course, there are others: Data's Spot, K-9 (as mentioned above), Captain Archer's dog, Toto, Miss Kitty Fantastico in Buffy. Does the little unicorn Uni count as a pet? I'm betting Bobby thinks of her that way.

[brightknightie]

I decided for myself, for the purposes of this specific post, not to count Uni as a pet. I think she's probably across the definitional border into being a person/character of her own rather than primarily an extension of Bobby's character (though perhaps that's me just being over-into the canon). She can fully understand and [almost] speak English, even though she's just a baby and doesn't have a human mouth. The adult unicorns we meet in that one episode don't speak English, but they also clearly understand it (and haven't been hanging out with humans and have adult horse mouths).

I'm sure Uni exists for the same merchandising reason that Muffit does! All the toys (it's so nice that we have some official toys at last; sad the tariffs stopped the Super7 line output with only Hank and Sheila out) make Uni an accessory that comes along with the Bobby figure, not a figure in her own right, which I understand.

And yes, quite right that Bobby has much the same emotional relationship with baby Uni that he would with a bright and able pet! I think that relationship must likely change as she grows up... of course, who knows how long a unicorn's babyhood lasts!

[autobotscoutriella]

Zelda's cat costume was my absolute favorite part of Echoes of Wisdom. Call me biased, but I think every video game should include the option to chat with cats and get sidequests from them. :D

[brightknightie]

It was fun to see the cats'-eye-view of Hyrule, and it suited EoW's cute/toy-like aesthetic exceedingly well!

In BotW, I never stumbled onto the fact that you can interact with the stable dogs, but when I learned it from someone else, it became a key pursuit. (At first, I thought you had to feed them meat; later, I figured out that they will happily eat apples, too.)

More animal interactions, yes! :-)

[autobotscoutriella]

The BOTW dogs were so much fun! They're a must-have on any playthrough I do these days.

I feel like at least one of Link's many TOTK outfits should have let him talk to dogs. It could have been a Wolf Link reference and everything!