Annotated Raven's Children - Issue #1: Page 4
[<-- Previous page] | [Next page -->]
One thing that the dialogue on this page brings to mind ... I'm sure I'll talk about this quite a bit more in later pages, but one of the world-building problems that I created for myself was that I tried to have my cake and eat it too with the dogs. I wanted them to be sled dogs, and I also wanted them to fill the function of hunting/attack dogs (more like an Akita, say). And the traits don't mesh very well. Sled dog breeds in the real world are (for the most part) friendly, cheerful dogs that like people and are very pack-oriented, community-oriented dogs. Whereas I was also trying to graft some Akita-like traits on top of that ... I guess it's not completely impossible to have both sets of traits in one breed of dog, but I don't think I ever had a clear idea of their behavior as a breed. Looking back on it, I'm pretty sure that I was thinking "sled dog" most of the time, but then every so often, I'd have them do something that would have been completely uncharacteristic of a sled dog.
I grew up around sled dogs, so I really should've known better. Like a lot of things about RC, it wasn't really deliberate so much as not really thinking through the underpinnings of my world (and not paying close enough attention to the real-world antecedents that I was using as models).
This entry is also posted at http://layla.dreamwidth.org/186432.html with
comments.