Nonhuman Viewpoint Characters

Hello, this is Haphazard, Haph or Hap for short. Of course, that’s not my real name, but I’m not giving out any name until I’m published either under my real name or a pseudonym.

I feel that I haven’t properly introduced myself. I live in the nostalgic city of St. Louis, Missouri, where I also go to school and write and read and generally do other functions that are necessary to live. I usually write fantasy and humor, preferably mixed together, but here’s a shocker – I don’t typically read YA. I’m a part of this blog to represent a specific group of people; those young adults that don’t read young adult fiction.

But today, that’s not the point of discussion. The point of this entry is the use of nonhuman viewpoint characters.

When writing speculative fiction, you have the opportunity to do something that not a lot of other writers get to do; you have the chance to write from the point of view of nonhuman, yet still sapient, viewpoint characters. Of course, in a lot of children’s literature there are personified animals, but they tend to be personified as more or less human anyway. An intelligent nonhuman character in speculative fiction can be as different from a human as the writer wants, whether the character be faerie or ghost or alien or AI. And this is wonderful! It gives a bunch of potential viewpoints you can’t use anywhere else. So, why don’t people use them that often?

It’s quite sad, really. There’s a stigma about nonhuman viewpoint characters, that these characters can never be related to from a human point of view, which we (foolishly?) assume all our readers have. Under this assumption, these nonhuman characters are tossed aside to play second fiddle to the humans because many writers are convinced that their point of view isn’t sympathetic enough, or, worse, they are used and their alien characteristics are toned down to make them more ‘human’ and therefore fit for human consumption.

Now, one could take this as somewhat xenophobic. If we assume certain things about our readers, we start making, well, an ass out of you and me. Lots of books have been published in the United States about characters with drastically different point of views from the average person living in the U.S., and even in the States there are thousands of ways to live. Why shouldn’t we reach out a sympathetic hand to a character just because they don’t have a proper human genome? It seems silly to me.

And either way, humans have a tendency to personify things to be human. Dolls become human in the arms of little girls instead of a lump of plastic covered in cloth, a computer becomes stupid instead of out of RAM, and, all of the sudden, because your car won’t start, it hates you instead of simply having a dead battery. It’s not like nonhuman things having feelings and generally being relatable is a completely alien concept to the average reader.

One of the reasons writers may stray away from this concept is because, according to so much fiction, readers like reading about characters that are outcasts but are still similar to themselves. The unpopular teenager appears to be a very popular character. Main characters are often characters that are branded as ‘different’ and ‘strange’ even though they have no significant personality flaw to brand them that way. With a nonhuman character in their natural environment, it’s the exact opposite. We have these characters that by our standards have every reason to be labeled ‘strange’ but aren’t because their society functions in a way that supports them. In a setting populated by humans, where these characters typically are, though, are they not a fish out of water? Everybody can sympathize with culture shock, at least to some extent.

Even if these nonhuman characters aren’t sympathetic enough, that doesn’t automatically send the story to shambles. A good story can support itself on other things than sympathetic characters, such as the narrative style itself, plot, or, if it’s a comedy, the humor involved. A nonhuman character’s point of view can easily become symbolic, giving the story a theme in a way a human character never could.

Finally, writing is as much about exploring new concepts as it is trying to convey a message. As Elie Wiesel once said, “I write to understand as much as to be understood.” So, no matter what the critics say, let’s boldly go where no human point of view has gone before!