Snowflake Challenge 02026 #02: Pets
Jan. 3rd, 2026 12:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptThe ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
snowflake_challenge has posted prompt #2, and this time, they're definitely asking for something that will get a lot of people stopping by to say hello, in hopes that people might use the (somewhat limited) amount of image hosting that Dreamwidth has, if they have an account that has access to the image hosting.
It seems like there's no shortage of pets in our world, and if you want a social feed composed solely of good doggos, cute kitties, birbs, borbs, and even sneks, lizards, and other creatures that can be domesticated, but usually aren't, you have a buffet to choose from and you can spend all day, every day, scrolling among all of these pictures of the domesticated and the wild but cute.
Pets in live-action media are generally rarer, often because working with animals requires the animal to be trained and have a handler helping along, and because many media properties don't want extraneous things in their shots. Cats and dogs can be apparently random, and that could make for difficulties if you have to make composite shots to get a scene to work and all of your shots have a cat in different places in the shot, even though it's supposed to be a consistent and smooth set of time. So, most of the time, if there are pets in a show, and those pets have a reason to be there, or are important to the plot, they're actually puppets and not real animals. Salem, the cat from the Melissa Joan Hart version of Sabrina, the Teenage Witch, is mostly a puppet, and someone providing the voice in post. These days, I would expect most pets that have to be part of the action to be computer-generated actors, so that they will behave consistently, and if they have to be in situations where real animals could be in danger, the computer effect will be able to do the stunt work that the real animal would not be able to do. And, if you're going to build a puppet anyway, why not build something that's not as constrained by our world as pets would be. Why not get the creature part of the Creature Shop going and make something that can work just fine and provide a little bot of otherworldly flair to your program?
In animation and in literature, pets are much more common because their action is already scripted and will be consistent across takes, so it's not that unusual for cartoon and anime characters to have pets. Mr. Tadakichi, Luna, Artemis, Jiji, Appa, Naga, Felix, Heathcliff, Garfield and Odie, Nermal, Marigold Heavenly Nostrils (or Phoebe, depending on your perspective), Pluto, the cat in Coraline, the great Kuroneko (although he's nobody's pet, as such, and more just another signifier of chaos) and so many knights' horses all throughout are there to help give the world some additional feelings of being lived-in, yes, but also to provide many of the useful things that pets do and have for us, like transport, mousing, hunting, companionship, and having unerringly accurate opinions about the company we keep and whether they are actually the best people for us to have.
It's also another trope of our media that animals, especially animals that we have as pets, have greater senses of the numinous and the intents of others than the humans do. The cats and the dogs sense when the ghosts and the demons are nearby and can track them, and if the cat hisses or the dog growls at this person who seems to otherwise be perfect for your main character, it's an indication that they're not as perfect as they appear, or harbor ill intentions for the character. Sometimes the pets themselves are magical, or the magical being takes the form of a pet as a way of blending in with the society around and for having an excuse to stay close to the main character and offer advice, and/or eventually additional power levels and forms. Humans know that our animals have an intelligence, but the intelligence present for them is fairly orthogonal to human intelligence. We can domesticate wolves into dogs, but that doesn't mean that a well-trained dog still won't act on instincts and pathways present in the dog from a long tradition of being wild. We are beginning to understand that cats see humans not as humans, a separate species, but as very large and very clumsy kittens, and they treat us accordingly, trying to help us learn how to become better cats. Since we're humans, this doesn't make sense to us initially, but if we think of ourselves as large cats with strange functions, and who do a decent job of feeding our other cats, instead of as humans, we can sometimes understand cat behavior better. Not all of it, but we're getting better at it.
Out here in our reality, among those who work with the numinous and the various entities and archetypes they use for will-working and spell-working, I have seen several mentions to the effect that animals are considered to be sufficiently pure or otherwise not a problem that if they cross the boundary set between the mundane and material world and the consecrated space meant for working with these archetypes, deities, and concepts, the magician/witch/conjurer/spellworker/willworker should continue on as if no such disturbance had happened. Some accounts even have those pets and animals contributing their own energies to the work, so as to make it stronger. The association of black cats with less scrupulous spellworkers, and much of the storytelling embedded in United States folklore and tales is propaganda from specific religious types who wanted to make their own religion as the sole proper and godly practice, but it has real consequences for not having been excised or reduced to a small part of mostly-forgotten lore. Black cats (affectionately "voids") are beautiful, and as varied in personality and mischief capability as all other cats, but they tend to be disproportionately left in shelters or targeted for cruelty compared to other cats because of this association they have with malefice. If you are looking for a cat to adopt, and you have the choice between many, picking a void is a good decision.
I've only had the acquaintance of a few cats in my life as my pets, and most of them left with my ex when the relationship ended, because she believed she could take better care of them than I could. The little knot-tailed void was definitely someone's pet, because he came up to me while I was loading a car and then jumped right into the car, free as you please, without any hesitation or wariness or other kind of indication that he's been anything other than a very happy boy. Since he's landed in my orbit, now he's my responsibility, at least until the "missing cat" signs appear and we can get him back to the people who lost him. Not that I necessarily want to have another cat, since there are already four indoor and one outdoor cat at the house at this time, three more cats than I wanted to take care of at that time, but it's not good to have someone's pet going about the neighborhood, where the other cats are. (And, as much as I dislike admitting it, the marginal cast of one more is not all that great, and therefore it's not a major additional burden. No signs appeared in the next few weeks, which is disappointing. If the cat was local, then I would have expected other people to be actively looking for him. If he wasn't (and there are stories of cats traversing very long distances), I still would have hoped to see something in some neighborhood about their missing kitten. But no, no signs appeared, and so that zoom-kitten, now named Zephyr, joined the household.
My ex, for all her great faults, was someone who wanted to take care of animals near her. That she was not financially or physically capable of doing it should have stopped her from this, but instead she went forth anyway, and relied upon me to provide the physical portions of animal care, like feeding, litter, running the dogs outside for their bathroom times, and cleaning up after that, as well. So I have some amount of experience now in running a household with some pets in it. Pets, like children, are responsibilities, and I think that it is ill-advised to expect children to have and maintain the responsibilities of having pets. Pets require habits, and children are still learning the processes by which they can develop habits and maintain them. Children can help out with the processes of keeping pets and making sure they are healthy and well-exercised, but they are not yet suited to being the primary caregivers for pets. There needs to be a backstop of at least one grown-up who is willing to take on the responsibility of raising and caring for the pet, or we end up with the situation where an animal is given to a shelter because the grown-ups didn't want the responsibility of raising the pet and the children didn't have enough capacity or interest in maintaining the habits necessary to take care of pets.
The care and feeding of fictional pets also sometimes gets abstracted away in our media properties. There might be the meet-cute of a woman walking her dog, but there are rarely scenes where she has to put her boyfriend on hold to feed the dog, or who says that she's putting in her Bluetooth earbuds, because it's walkies time and the dog doesn't want to wait. Or the new partner getting roped into feeding the cat. About the only animal that consistently ends up having to be cared for on the page is a horse, and most of the time, when horses are involved, it's either the character doing the maintenance work themselves, or there's an obvious hand-off from the character to stablehands, grooms, or others who are explicitly there to ensure the horse gets cared for. I don't know if it's because there are a lot of people who enjoy horses and want to learn about them in writing, especially in writing fantasy worlds where the horse is the best and fastest transport technology there is, or because there's just no avoiding horse care as there could be avoiding other animal care as part of the narrative. Maybe because knights and horses are too intertwined for someone to leave out the part where horse care happens.
"Pet" has several meanings, and in the case of fandom, it's possible that "pet" could have meaning more akin to "blorbo" or "bias," an indication that this particular character is a favorite and a go-to when it comes to writing, arting, or other fannish activities. Or "pet" used as an affectionate word between a romantic couple, or as an indication of petplay, a dominance/submission relationship, (or, possibly, omegaverse) or other things that are normal parts of human sexuality but still mostly outside the bounds of discussion in company that has not explicitly opted-in. It might also be an affectionate name for those parts of fandom or media where anthropomorphized characters appear, with foxgirls, dogboys, catboys and catgirls, Rabi-en-Rose, and other such human/animal hybrids (or people who like wearing nekomimi, keromimi, or other such things) appear, as there's a half-sort of expectation that the hybrids have some of the same instincts, and enjoy many of the same things, as the animal whose ears they wear. If Marinette calls him "Kitty," regardless of whether she's saying it affectionately or not, it's a reference to the part where he has willingly put himself in the position of pet to her, and she acknowledges it (even as she wrestles with whether or not it is a responsibility she wants to take on). Even in the language I just used to describe the situation tends to use "girl" and "boy" as the language, it's not "cat-woman" (unless it's Selena Kyle) or "dog-man" (except Dav Pilkey's character of that name). We get closer with "foxy lady," but that's got other connotations, especially around race, wrapped up in it that make a straight comparison less possible. There's a specific throughline that pets and people with animal characteristics are going to be young and immature, and need some amount of guidance and a handler, minder, or owner who will take care of them. (Unless the story is about how they're not taking care of them.) I don't know of all that many properties where there are middle-aged characters with the mimi. RWBY does, and has basically no indication anywhere that humans intend to treat Faunus as pets, but I think it's unique in that regard. (The protests and the White Fang pretty well explain that, but as far as I've seen, anti-Faunus sentiment is much more on the line of anti-immigrant sentiment, and the racist reasons that come from that, rather than "oh, these Faunus are just too stupid to function in our society and need to have an owner," which was one of the earlier justifications for enslavement of black people in the United States.)
So that's the extended riff about pets in fandom. Hopefully there's something there that you find interesting, or that you want to chase up or find more detail with. If not, have a good time exploring the other entries in the challenge for this time around, and we'll see you back in a couple days.
snowflake_challenge has posted prompt #2, and this time, they're definitely asking for something that will get a lot of people stopping by to say hello, in hopes that people might use the (somewhat limited) amount of image hosting that Dreamwidth has, if they have an account that has access to the image hosting.Challenge #2: Pets of Fandom
Loosely defined! Post about your pets, pets from your canon, anything you want!
It seems like there's no shortage of pets in our world, and if you want a social feed composed solely of good doggos, cute kitties, birbs, borbs, and even sneks, lizards, and other creatures that can be domesticated, but usually aren't, you have a buffet to choose from and you can spend all day, every day, scrolling among all of these pictures of the domesticated and the wild but cute.
Pets in live-action media are generally rarer, often because working with animals requires the animal to be trained and have a handler helping along, and because many media properties don't want extraneous things in their shots. Cats and dogs can be apparently random, and that could make for difficulties if you have to make composite shots to get a scene to work and all of your shots have a cat in different places in the shot, even though it's supposed to be a consistent and smooth set of time. So, most of the time, if there are pets in a show, and those pets have a reason to be there, or are important to the plot, they're actually puppets and not real animals. Salem, the cat from the Melissa Joan Hart version of Sabrina, the Teenage Witch, is mostly a puppet, and someone providing the voice in post. These days, I would expect most pets that have to be part of the action to be computer-generated actors, so that they will behave consistently, and if they have to be in situations where real animals could be in danger, the computer effect will be able to do the stunt work that the real animal would not be able to do. And, if you're going to build a puppet anyway, why not build something that's not as constrained by our world as pets would be. Why not get the creature part of the Creature Shop going and make something that can work just fine and provide a little bot of otherworldly flair to your program?
In animation and in literature, pets are much more common because their action is already scripted and will be consistent across takes, so it's not that unusual for cartoon and anime characters to have pets. Mr. Tadakichi, Luna, Artemis, Jiji, Appa, Naga, Felix, Heathcliff, Garfield and Odie, Nermal, Marigold Heavenly Nostrils (or Phoebe, depending on your perspective), Pluto, the cat in Coraline, the great Kuroneko (although he's nobody's pet, as such, and more just another signifier of chaos) and so many knights' horses all throughout are there to help give the world some additional feelings of being lived-in, yes, but also to provide many of the useful things that pets do and have for us, like transport, mousing, hunting, companionship, and having unerringly accurate opinions about the company we keep and whether they are actually the best people for us to have.
It's also another trope of our media that animals, especially animals that we have as pets, have greater senses of the numinous and the intents of others than the humans do. The cats and the dogs sense when the ghosts and the demons are nearby and can track them, and if the cat hisses or the dog growls at this person who seems to otherwise be perfect for your main character, it's an indication that they're not as perfect as they appear, or harbor ill intentions for the character. Sometimes the pets themselves are magical, or the magical being takes the form of a pet as a way of blending in with the society around and for having an excuse to stay close to the main character and offer advice, and/or eventually additional power levels and forms. Humans know that our animals have an intelligence, but the intelligence present for them is fairly orthogonal to human intelligence. We can domesticate wolves into dogs, but that doesn't mean that a well-trained dog still won't act on instincts and pathways present in the dog from a long tradition of being wild. We are beginning to understand that cats see humans not as humans, a separate species, but as very large and very clumsy kittens, and they treat us accordingly, trying to help us learn how to become better cats. Since we're humans, this doesn't make sense to us initially, but if we think of ourselves as large cats with strange functions, and who do a decent job of feeding our other cats, instead of as humans, we can sometimes understand cat behavior better. Not all of it, but we're getting better at it.
Out here in our reality, among those who work with the numinous and the various entities and archetypes they use for will-working and spell-working, I have seen several mentions to the effect that animals are considered to be sufficiently pure or otherwise not a problem that if they cross the boundary set between the mundane and material world and the consecrated space meant for working with these archetypes, deities, and concepts, the magician/witch/conjurer/spellworker/willworker should continue on as if no such disturbance had happened. Some accounts even have those pets and animals contributing their own energies to the work, so as to make it stronger. The association of black cats with less scrupulous spellworkers, and much of the storytelling embedded in United States folklore and tales is propaganda from specific religious types who wanted to make their own religion as the sole proper and godly practice, but it has real consequences for not having been excised or reduced to a small part of mostly-forgotten lore. Black cats (affectionately "voids") are beautiful, and as varied in personality and mischief capability as all other cats, but they tend to be disproportionately left in shelters or targeted for cruelty compared to other cats because of this association they have with malefice. If you are looking for a cat to adopt, and you have the choice between many, picking a void is a good decision.
I've only had the acquaintance of a few cats in my life as my pets, and most of them left with my ex when the relationship ended, because she believed she could take better care of them than I could. The little knot-tailed void was definitely someone's pet, because he came up to me while I was loading a car and then jumped right into the car, free as you please, without any hesitation or wariness or other kind of indication that he's been anything other than a very happy boy. Since he's landed in my orbit, now he's my responsibility, at least until the "missing cat" signs appear and we can get him back to the people who lost him. Not that I necessarily want to have another cat, since there are already four indoor and one outdoor cat at the house at this time, three more cats than I wanted to take care of at that time, but it's not good to have someone's pet going about the neighborhood, where the other cats are. (And, as much as I dislike admitting it, the marginal cast of one more is not all that great, and therefore it's not a major additional burden. No signs appeared in the next few weeks, which is disappointing. If the cat was local, then I would have expected other people to be actively looking for him. If he wasn't (and there are stories of cats traversing very long distances), I still would have hoped to see something in some neighborhood about their missing kitten. But no, no signs appeared, and so that zoom-kitten, now named Zephyr, joined the household.
My ex, for all her great faults, was someone who wanted to take care of animals near her. That she was not financially or physically capable of doing it should have stopped her from this, but instead she went forth anyway, and relied upon me to provide the physical portions of animal care, like feeding, litter, running the dogs outside for their bathroom times, and cleaning up after that, as well. So I have some amount of experience now in running a household with some pets in it. Pets, like children, are responsibilities, and I think that it is ill-advised to expect children to have and maintain the responsibilities of having pets. Pets require habits, and children are still learning the processes by which they can develop habits and maintain them. Children can help out with the processes of keeping pets and making sure they are healthy and well-exercised, but they are not yet suited to being the primary caregivers for pets. There needs to be a backstop of at least one grown-up who is willing to take on the responsibility of raising and caring for the pet, or we end up with the situation where an animal is given to a shelter because the grown-ups didn't want the responsibility of raising the pet and the children didn't have enough capacity or interest in maintaining the habits necessary to take care of pets.
The care and feeding of fictional pets also sometimes gets abstracted away in our media properties. There might be the meet-cute of a woman walking her dog, but there are rarely scenes where she has to put her boyfriend on hold to feed the dog, or who says that she's putting in her Bluetooth earbuds, because it's walkies time and the dog doesn't want to wait. Or the new partner getting roped into feeding the cat. About the only animal that consistently ends up having to be cared for on the page is a horse, and most of the time, when horses are involved, it's either the character doing the maintenance work themselves, or there's an obvious hand-off from the character to stablehands, grooms, or others who are explicitly there to ensure the horse gets cared for. I don't know if it's because there are a lot of people who enjoy horses and want to learn about them in writing, especially in writing fantasy worlds where the horse is the best and fastest transport technology there is, or because there's just no avoiding horse care as there could be avoiding other animal care as part of the narrative. Maybe because knights and horses are too intertwined for someone to leave out the part where horse care happens.
"Pet" has several meanings, and in the case of fandom, it's possible that "pet" could have meaning more akin to "blorbo" or "bias," an indication that this particular character is a favorite and a go-to when it comes to writing, arting, or other fannish activities. Or "pet" used as an affectionate word between a romantic couple, or as an indication of petplay, a dominance/submission relationship, (or, possibly, omegaverse) or other things that are normal parts of human sexuality but still mostly outside the bounds of discussion in company that has not explicitly opted-in. It might also be an affectionate name for those parts of fandom or media where anthropomorphized characters appear, with foxgirls, dogboys, catboys and catgirls, Rabi-en-Rose, and other such human/animal hybrids (or people who like wearing nekomimi, keromimi, or other such things) appear, as there's a half-sort of expectation that the hybrids have some of the same instincts, and enjoy many of the same things, as the animal whose ears they wear. If Marinette calls him "Kitty," regardless of whether she's saying it affectionately or not, it's a reference to the part where he has willingly put himself in the position of pet to her, and she acknowledges it (even as she wrestles with whether or not it is a responsibility she wants to take on). Even in the language I just used to describe the situation tends to use "girl" and "boy" as the language, it's not "cat-woman" (unless it's Selena Kyle) or "dog-man" (except Dav Pilkey's character of that name). We get closer with "foxy lady," but that's got other connotations, especially around race, wrapped up in it that make a straight comparison less possible. There's a specific throughline that pets and people with animal characteristics are going to be young and immature, and need some amount of guidance and a handler, minder, or owner who will take care of them. (Unless the story is about how they're not taking care of them.) I don't know of all that many properties where there are middle-aged characters with the mimi. RWBY does, and has basically no indication anywhere that humans intend to treat Faunus as pets, but I think it's unique in that regard. (The protests and the White Fang pretty well explain that, but as far as I've seen, anti-Faunus sentiment is much more on the line of anti-immigrant sentiment, and the racist reasons that come from that, rather than "oh, these Faunus are just too stupid to function in our society and need to have an owner," which was one of the earlier justifications for enslavement of black people in the United States.)
So that's the extended riff about pets in fandom. Hopefully there's something there that you find interesting, or that you want to chase up or find more detail with. If not, have a good time exploring the other entries in the challenge for this time around, and we'll see you back in a couple days.
