Communication is key
I’m reading fanfic with involuntary animal transformation. There’s a basically human mind in a tiny cat body now. And as almost always happens, the fic is driving me nuts, because everyone is trying to guess what the tiny cat dude means as if he’s a cat having cat opinions in only body language.
Give him a touchscreen or keyboard!
If that won’t work, make bigger buttons!
Or a bunch of flashcards, or yes and no cards, or something.
Fic treats becoming non-verbal as if it were a unique problem, instead of a common one. Non-verbal and lacking fine manipulators is trickier than being able to write or quickly type, but it’s a thing that happens to actual human people, even abruptly. Animal transformation is a unique method, but the problem is old and the solutions available.
Other fantasy situations bug me the exact same way. I got wound up by someone becoming a ghost because I read it as sudden disability, and all his friends / allies / acquaintances just kind of left him to it, as if wandering around unable to touch anything was just the new normal. I was all, get him a computer that can see or hear him! Hire him an assistant, at least for some of the day! So he can’t pick things up any more, so what? You ignore him now?
I think the problem is that most people don’t think about losing an ability, suddenly or otherwise, so when they do it to a character they act like they have to think up solutions on the spot. Whereas I think about disability a lot, and will think of a transformation in terms of impairments and how they are now disabled, and then there’s whole catalogues and careers of accessability solutions. It’s probably not the most obvious mindset when you’re talking ‘suddenly has paws instead of hands’, but it’s pretty obvious from here, where disability is just a thing that happens.
Or, alternately, I see a lot of fantasy story stuff as basically about disability, because that’s the lens for a lot in my life. And that means that stories the author probably thinks are basically about cats are scored, by me, on how they write about disability. Which they don’t know they’re doing, so they don’t score very high.
To be fair though, it do seem to have properly observed felines.
It’s just not cool watching someone have to communicate in tail mime because their friends keep forgetting there’s a person in there and go straight to the pet shop, not human solutions.
