Snowflake challenge '26 #2 (Pets)
Sunday, January 4th, 2026 07:49 am![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
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
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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...?
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