The difficulties of writing non-human characters as such in fanfic

One fascinating thing about fanfiction is how much harder it seems to be to write good fanfics if the main characters are nothing like the author, and the setting is nothing like what the author is familiar with. That's how many fanfics accidentally end up AUs without being intended as such.

A good example is My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic fanfic of which there's a whole lot. So much that the bronies have had their very own and not exactly small fanfic site for quite a long time already.

In general, it's difficult enough especially for beginners to keep canonical characters in-character. But ponyfic adds another level of difficulty. And that's to write the characters as actual ponies. Not petting zoo people with pony heads and pony tails. Not even My Little Pony Tales ponies who always walk on their hind legs and use their forehooves in the same ways as humans use their hands. Including doing things that require opposable thumbs. Yes, G4+ ponies do that occasionally on-screen, but not all the time, and if they do, it's either Sunset Shimmer returning to Equestria after a while of living as a bipedal human or a sign of less-than-stellar writing.

But some fanfic writers can't write ponies as such. Especially in earlier years, it was a popular style element of ponyfics to make the characters humans and have them live in the real world in the early 2010s. But then, in 2013, came Equestria Girls and Killed The Fandom™ (except it didn't). Making the ponies into humans for the sake of writing convenience suddenly became Equestria-Girls-ification. This was the case particularly with fanfics that didn't mention the characters' skin tones; the writer assumed them all to be white, but the audience assumed them all to be the same as the Equestria Girls. And all of a sudden, human AUs became targets for Equestria Girls haters.

So writers who couldn't write ponies as ponies had a choice. Either they could embrace Equestria Girls because that's easier to write, especially since Twilight had gotten used to being a human and stopped showing the quirks of actually being a pony. Or if they couldn't for the lives of them write the ponies as ponies, but they also loathed Equestria Girls with a flaming passion, they could declare that this is not an EqG fic and give the characters realistic skin tones. Result: Their fics were either not diverse enough because everyone was white, or the diversity felt forced because one token character wasn't. Oh, and dark-skinned Twilight was a dead horse trope now.

Or they could play it safe and write the ponies as ponies anyway. Only that these ponies still act like humans all of a sudden. Like, how in Equestria is an Earth pony supposed to handle a gun?

But even more anthropomorphic characters can be hard to write.

Most furry characters are quite easy if they stand in for humans in a purely anthro world which is just like our world otherwise, only with different places, and if they don't have any species-specific traits. But as soon as they do, even furry settings need much more attention. I mean, in how many Zootopia fanfics is Judy Hopps actually portrayed as significantly shorter than Nick Wilde? And how many of them play out typical rabbit or fox stereotypes, not to mention those of other species?

Anthropomorphic animal characters in the human world can be even more of a challenge. I'm quite familiar with pre-movie Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers fanfic. The difficult part in CDRR fic is not so much to write the characters as animals but to get their size right. Chip, Dale, Monty and Gadget are rodent-sized rodents, Zipper is a housefly-sized housefly and so on. Granted, the show takes some liberties here, and chipmunks are the same size as mice, but still.

However, it's easy to get carried away and forget about this, in fact, forget about the Rangers actually living in the human world. After all, the Rangers themselves are pretty anthropomorphic. Also, the majority of CDRR fanfic doesn't feature any human characters at all, especially no human villains. I mean, this isn't unjustified. The heyday of CDRR fanfic was from the late 1990s through the 2000s, the era of dark fic, and the very premise of CDRR practically begged for fics that are much darker than the source material. In comparison to the nearly always original villains, Professor Norton Nimnul would fall under comic relief. And pitting the Rangers against original human villains in dark fic requires very clever writing for the villain to be defeatable in the first place without being ridiculously underpowered. Thus, anthro animal villains are actually easier to write.

But once you write CDRR fanfic as purely anthro, and if almost all CDRR fanfic you're exposed to is purely anthro, and if you don't even have access to the show itself and only memories and other fanfics as reference, you start seeing CDRR itself as a purely anthro franchise. And before you know it, you write the Rangers and the other anthro characters human-sized, and you might even abandon the Scavengedpunk elements along with what makes the source material Mousepunk.

If you feel desperate to slap a name on this phenomenon, I hereby suggest "Redwall Syndrome". After all, the first of Brian Jacques' Redwall novels features animal-sized animal characters living in the human world, but hidden from human sight. Everything afterwards takes place in a purely anthro world with human-sized furry characters in place of the humans, probably because that was both easier to write and easier to comprehend.

At least, Jacques still gave his animal characters species-specific traits. But even that isn't a given in CDRR fanfic that has forgotten its roots. And before you know it, Foxglove uses her wings just like hands. Or she even wears clothes that she couldn't possibly wear with a pair of wings on her sides. Or she ends up a bat-headed gargoyle with both wings and arms because the writer absolutely could not write her without hands, or because the writer simply doesn't know what bats actually look like. I've actually seen the latter in a comic.