10 Animal Archetypes in the Fantasy Genre
Animals in Fiction, Pt. 5: Fantastic Beasts
Animals exist before, between, and after “once upon a time” and “the end.” They breathe life into stories, and they add dimension to the background of fictional universes, making fantasy lands feel real. Crack open the cover of When the Moon Hatched and you’ll find a list of the various magical creatures you’ll meet in the story’s pages. Delve into a Dungeons & Dragons campaign and you’ll battle against a litany of otherwordly beasts.
Though they are essential worldbuilders, rarely do animals receive deeper analysis. We’re so accustomed to seeing nonhuman characters in fantasy that they become almost invisible. By understanding the roles and tropes animals commonly fill, we can also learn how to subvert them and use animal characters to flip fantasy stories on their heads.
But let’s not dally. Onward, fair reader…
SPOILERS AHEAD!
For a full list of the books, shows, and movies with plot spoilers, please see the following footnote1
1. The Human Hybrid
Many of the creatures to come have anthropomorphic qualities, but the human hybrid blurs the line between man and beast. Like the talking animals of Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, Hoodwinked!, or Beatrix Potter’s books, hybrids often appear as animals with human minds and speech. But not always. Some mix and match various traits—like puggish snouts, elongated ears, erect posture, and opposable thumbs—and physically resemble humans more. Popular figures of this ilk include the lion from The Wizard of Oz, the beast in Beauty and the Beast, the fish-man from The Shape of Water, and the faun from Pan’s Labyrinth.
Some hybrids are fully human or are able to change into a human form: Miss Peregrine of her School for Peculiar Children; Hogwarts’ Professor McGonagall; Rachel Hartman’s dragons in her bestseller Seraphina; the werewolves and shapeshifters from L. J. Smith’s (tragically unfinished) Night World series; and the Wesen of the NBC show Grimm.
Other hybrids are cursed or forced to shapeshift: Ren and Kishan from the Tiger’s Curse series by Colleen Houck; Toadling from T. Kingfisher’s Thornhedge; Prince Naveen from The Princess and the Frog; and Binx from Hocus Pocus.
2. The Faithful Companion
As the name suggests, the faithful companion is wholeheartedly loyal to a human character. They follow this person—often without being trained—regardless of personal risk, interest, or reward. They seem to have a deep understanding of their human companion’s desires and emotions, acting as friend, guide, and guardian.
Leigh Bardugo offers an apt example in her fifth Grishaverse novel, Crooked Kingdom:
One of the six protagonists, Matthias, comes from a deeply religious Scandinavian-like country where men are recruited and trained to become drüskelle, “witch” hunters. Each drüskelle is paired with an isenulf, a large wolf bred to fight alongside their human master. Matthias’ isenulf, Trassel, initially attacked him, but something passed between them as their eyes met. Trass miraculously calmed and became Matthias’ loyal fighting partner from that moment onward.
But the relationship isn’t equal. When an isenulf perishes, their drüskelle is entitled to acquire a new one. If a drüskelle predeceases their canid companion, the wolf is released to the wild but “will never be accepted by any pack.” Alone, they are doomed to death.
The bond between the two companions is steadfast, though sometimes of a sinister nature. Ursula’s eels in The Little Mermaid, the flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz, and the swarms of snakes in Joe Hill’s novel Horns show that it’s not only the good guys who partner up with animals. Rats, cats, crows, toads, spiders, and other creepy crawlies often loiter around evil characters and are sent to do their bidding.
the dumb puppy
A subset of the faithful companion, the dumb puppy is the loveable goofball who provides the characters, and the audience, with a break in tension when they get up to their adorable little antics. Generally, they’re nonverbal, and gesture or mime to communicate.
Some examples include the niffler in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them; Bonedog and the hedgehog from T. Kingfisher’s Nettle & Bone and The Seventh Bride, respectively; and most animal sidekicks in animated Disney movies—Coco, Tangled, Moana, and on and on and on.
3. The Spectral Protector
The spectral protector fiercely defends the protagonist but is more ethereal in nature than the faithful companion. They are called to the protagonist by intangible mystical forces to aid them in times of great need: the fox who appears along Gawain’s journey in The Green Knight; Diana’s firedrake familiar in A Discovery of Witches; and Fanindra, the snake goddess disguised as a bracelet in the Tiger’s Curse series.
4. The Superior Nonhuman
The superior nonhuman is “not like other girls.” They seem to have human intellect and an anthropocentric understanding of the world, and they may even look down their snouts at other animals beneath their status.
The hen from T. Kingfisher’s Nettle & Bone embodies this superiority complex to a T:
“The dust-wife’s hen drew herself up very tall and glared down at her imprisoned sisters with something very like scorn.”
(Of course, she’s also possessed by a demon, so that may have something to do with it.)
Similarly, Leigh Bardugo’s short story, “Head, Scales, Tongue, Tail,” tells of a teen girl who falls in love with a nerdy part-sea serpent boy—Eli—who can only live as a human for three months each year. Eli laments his time in the water:
“‘There are no books, below,’ he said. ‘No words or language.’”
Though also an animal, Eli, being part-human, is intellectually superior to other aquatic creatures; they have no ability to communicate and lack any semblance of personality to engage his mind, even in his serpent form.
Sometimes, the superiority extends to an entire species, such as the beloved dire wolves in Game of Thrones, or when an animal survives disaster despite all odds. Leigh Bardugo returns to this trope in her sixth Grishaverse novel, King of Scars. While Matthias is apart from Trassel in books four and five, Trass is released into the wilderness to die. Somehow, he survives long enough on his own to be rescued, defying the lore established in the prior novel.
5. The Wise Mentor
The wise mentor is animal in body only. Their mind is human, or even godlike. They provide necessary guidance for the protagonist to achieve their goal by the story’s end. Unlike other, more mundane animals, they usually have a special rank within the human hierarchy that separates them from other creatures.
Some examples include Aslan from C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia; Chiron from Rick Riordan’s Greek mythology series (e.g., Percy Jackson and the Olympians); and Heimerdinger from the League of Legends show, Arcane.
6. The Sacrificial Animal
The sacrificial animal, as I’ve discussed before, appears across genres. They primarily take two forms: one, when a nonhuman intentionally sacrifices themselves to save a human character; and two, when the writer kills off a nonhuman purely to propel the plot forward.
An interesting example of this comes from the world of Harry Potter. Professor Dumbledore’s phoenix, Fawkes, throws himself into harm’s way in the Chamber of Secrets to protect Harry from a basilisk’s fatal gaze. Three books later, Fawkes intercepts a killing curse before it can hit Dumbledore, though, being a phoenix, he simply returns to infancy. His sacrificial tendencies crescendo in the penultimate novel, when his haunting dirge dissipates after Dumbledore’s funeral. Once Dumbledore dies, Fawkes does too.
With the additional lore from the Fantastic Beasts films, we learn that each phoenix’s life is tied to a human’s, stripping these creatures of any sort of autonomy or agency over their own lives. They exist solely to serve humans, something unheard of in the natural world.
More frequently now, sacrificial animals miraculously survive. In Troll, a dog is seen outside a home just before it’s demolished by the recently released mountain troll. In a wide shot of the destruction afterward, the dog can be heard barking, assuring the audience that he survived.
Like in Troll, a sacrificial animal can also be the story’s antagonist—or at least the monster that pushes the protagonist into action. Leading lady Nora makes a last-ditch attempt to save the troll in the finale, unsuccessfully. It’s not the happiest of endings. Rather, it’s a lesson about humanity’s destruction of the natural world.
7. The Burdened Beast
Creating thorough, logical magic systems is an essential element of developing fantasy stories, yet the parts of the world integral to basic survival are often overlooked. The burdened beast represents all the ways in which animals are used within human society to further anthropocentric interests, such as food, textiles, and transportation.
To further investigate this role, let’s break it down into five sub-categories:
the unfortunate foodie
Even in the most fantastical worlds, characters eat predominantly chickens, cows, pigs, sheep, and fishes. They drink milk when they’re ill and scramble eggs for breakfast. There is rarely any elaboration on the agricultural systems, acknowledgment of the “food” animals themselves, or even an understanding of how animal agriculture functions. Though, sometimes, that’s for the best, as some authors offer tone-deaf commentary on animal death, exemplified in this line from T. Kingfisher’s book Bryony and Roses:
“Pigs would be honored to die if they could be assured of turning into bacon of this caliber.”
Similarly, when the protagonists of Colleen Houck’s sophomore novel, Tiger’s Quest, visit Shangri La itself—a utopia for all beings—the pacifistic people living there consume dairy and honey.
Stephen King’s Fairy Tale stretches the limits of believability, as prisoners in the fantastical city of Lilimar are fed only undercooked meat (and an occasional carrot). Seeing as the city and surrounding areas are virtually uninhabited, where is all this meat coming from? Who’s growing the crops and raising the livestock? Who’s killing and butchering them? How is the meat preserved? Questions abound.
On rare occasions, magical beasts are consumed: Neil Gaiman writes of a group of gastronomes who travel the world to eat the rarest of mythical creatures in “Sunbird.”
The use of animals for food extends even beyond human consumption. In A Discovery of Witches, The Vampire Diaries, and Twilight, vampires hunt animals. To appease their consciences, drinking the blood of animals is considered the most ethical, least conspicuous option. Being of inferior quality to human blood, it’s portrayed as a noble sacrifice that human-loving vampires make.
the cart carrier
Rachel Kapelke-Dale writes in The Ballerinas—decidedly not a fantasy story—“Ballerinas are like pointe shoes: you have to break them down before they're of any use.” The same can be said for horses. Before the Industrial Revolution, horses were primarily ridden by aristocrats, and they came to symbolize wealth and power, unlike lowly oxen, donkeys, and mules. Yet in many stories set in a fantasized Middle Ages, horses are ubiquitous, dragged back in time and tethered to carriages or saddles for transportation by paupers and royals alike.
Some universes fill this role with other species: Thestrals pull Hogwarts carriages. Several League of Legends champions—like Sejuani, Kled, and Nunu—sit astride other creatures. Darcie Little Badger’s protagonist in Sheine Lende meets a team of ghostly sled dogs to carry her through the underworld; even in the afterlife, they have a role to fill for humans.
the defeathered fowl
Segmented into parts, animals can become useful pieces of material (primarily textiles). But those materials vary very little from those of the modern world in which we already live.
Leather’s plastered over everything, from scabbards and satchels to boots and books. Characters pen letters with quills, circle their throats in strings of pearls, and snuggle up in woolly blankets. A witch from Hogwarts uses horns or scales to brew potions, and the time-traveling witch hunter of 1989’s Warlock wears furs throughout the film, despite the temperate climate.
Some stories find more creative uses for animal body parts: Like an alternative version of a lucky rabbit’s foot, the protagonist in Rachel Gillig’s One Dark Window carries a crow’s foot charm.
the useful brute
A jack of all trades, animals fall into this category when used for entertainment, education, and myriad miscellaneous endeavors.
In the spirit of the traveling menageries of centuries past, the magical beings of Circus Arcanus are caged and forced to perform for jeering crowds in Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald. A group of highfalutin hunters pay a quarter-million dollars to enter a mystical realm and kill mythical creatures in Joe Hill’s short story “Faun.” Students are required to perform spells on non-magical creatures in Hogwarts’ Transfiguration classes, often to disastrous effect.
the deadly dragon
Dragons hold a special place in fantasy, simultaneously charismatic megafauna and beasts of burden. They’re much like cows in the nonfiction world, though generally more respected and revered. They can be ridden, as in Fourth Wing, Game of Thrones, Eragon, and How to Train Your Dragon; used for protection, as in both classic fairytales and the satirical Shrek; and used for entertainment, meat, skins, and fire, as in the Harry Potter books.
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The burdened beast is a trope rarely subverted (or even addressed), though Christian McKay Heidicker does so in Scary Stories for Young Foxes, a children’s novel told in short stories. Written from the perspective of a fox kit, “House of Trix” details how a villainous Beatrix Potter traps wild critters and steals their essence to craft her children’s books. Once her tale is woven, she skins and eats them.
Darcie Little Badger takes a more subtle approach in her debut novel, Elatsoe. Protagonists Ellie and Jay, though not vegetarian or vegan, frequently consume plant-based meats:
Exceedingly rare is the story where animals are legally protected within their magical universes, but that’s what T. J. Klune does in The House in the Cerulean Sea:
“Many considered [wyverns] to be nuisances, and for a long time, they were hunted down, their heads used as trophies, their skin made into fashionable shoes. It wasn’t until laws were enacted protecting all magical creatures that the barbaric acts ceased, but by then, it’d almost been too late, especially in the face of empirical evidence that wyverns were capable of emotionally complex reasoning that rivaled even humans.” [emphasis added]
8. The Mythical Monster
Perhaps the most deindividualized animal, the mythical monster casts terror into the heart of our hero. These are killing machines with no conscience; they cannot be bargained with, and they feel no remorse. They often pose an existential threat to the protagonist, causing them to continually look over their shoulder for when the bloodthirsty demon will strike. Some examples include The Lightning’s Thief’s minotaur; the Jabberwock and bandersnatch from Through the Looking-Glass; and the hollowgasts in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs.
Sometimes a monster’s just a monster, but they can have a deeper purpose too, attacking the protagonist both physically and emotionally. Before Percy Jackson learns he’s a demigod in The Lightning Thief, he tries to protect his mother from an abusive partner. Though he slays the minotaur, he fails to protect her. His quest throughout the novel is to recapture Zeus’ lightning bolt, sure, but what he really wants is to rescue her from the underworld. The minotaur comes to symbolize his failure—and the overcoming of it.
Depending on the story’s tone and subgenre, the mythical monster trope is frequently subverted when a large beast ends up not being so dangerous, as in The Water Horse.
9. The Spooky Symbol
The spooky symbol serves as a way to let the audience know something ominous is afoot. They may appear as a screeching cat when a dark wizard enters town or a murmuration of starlings swirling across the sky when a film’s protagonist discovers a long-lost dark object. In other cases—as with the “grim” from Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban—a creature appears before a character to warn of impending danger.
Sometimes, these animals have a special association with the antagonist and give the heroes a moment to prepare for a fight, like the spiders fleeing after a basilisk attack in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.
This trope can also appear as an invitation rather than an omen. Morozova’s stag visits Alina in dreams throughout the first episodes of Shadow and Bone, as if the mythical creature is beckoning her to kill them and wear their antlers to amplify her powers.
10. The Masked Metaphor
The masked metaphor is the most difficult type of creature to pin down, as they come in countless forms. They could be the cryptid of childhood imagination in Joe Hill’s “By the Silver Water of Lake Champlain”; the three little pig masks worn by bank robbers in the first season of Fairy Tale; Guillén Santángel’s nickname—the Scorpion—in Leigh Bardugo’s The Familiar; or women’s spontaneous reptilian transformations in Kelly Barnhill’s When Women Were Dragons.
This trope calls on our cultural perceptions of animals and uses their symbolism to help the audience relate deeper to the story’s themes. It offers a larger commentary on human nature and our relationships with different kinds of animals.
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These ten roles frequently overlap and intermingle to form new variations. Alli, for instance—the grotesque avian creature in the 2022 Finnish film Hatching—is born from the trauma of the sacrificial animal’s death and embodies the roles of mythical monster, faithful companion, human hybrid, and masked metaphor. Strong stories break boundaries between what is normal and expected, offering audiences new narratives to sink their teeth into.
The Storytelling Human
The fact that such a variety of nonhuman characters exist—from villains to victims, survivors to heroes—shows how integral animals are to human life. They play vital roles in stories across time, language, age, and culture. They teach us about the world, about ourselves, but they can also teach us about themselves.
Too often, animals exist in stories simply to fill roles and tropes. And though tropes are essential to meet audiences’ genre expectations, they easily become clichés if they aren’t consistently reimagined or subverted. I hope to continue seeing stories that break the barriers between humans and nonhumans, stories that radically change the perceptions of animals that we’ve had for millennia.
That’s the potential fantasy has. Literally anything is possible, if only we have the imagination to create it.
On my mind: The Soul Thief by Beth Lyons
I’ve been swimming in the cerulean (fanta)sea for the past couple weeks, and while my tastes trend more toward darker tales today, I cut my teeth on fantasy. When reading Ashland Creek Press’ essay collection, Writing for Animals, I was captivated by Beth Lyons’ essay, “Real Advocacy within Fantasy Worlds.” It’s been marinating in the back of my subconscious for years, taking a spin around my mind each time I delve into a new fantasy story. Her novel, The Soul Thief, unlike the vast majority of stories, was written from an animal rights perspective.
What do fantasy worlds look like when animals have autonomy over their own bodies? I haven’t read the book yet, but writing this post has made me desperate to find out!
Spoilers:
“By the Silver Water of Lake Champlain” by Joe Hill; Fairy Tale by Stephen King; Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (film series); Harry Potter (book series) by J. K. Rowling; Hatching (2022 film); Horns by Joe Hill; Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan; Scary Stories for Young Foxes by Christian McKay Heidicker; Shadow and Bone (book/show), Crooked Kingdom, King of Scars, and “Head, Scales, Tongue, Tail” by Leigh Bardugo; Sheine Lende by Darcie Little Badger; “Sunbird” by Neil Gaiman; Tiger’s Curse (book series) by Colleen Houck; Troll (2022 film)