I may or may not have a reputation around here for being a communist, furry, and someone who does a lot of fiction writing and worldbuilding (which has largely been the last thing keeping me on Reddit because there isn’t a large enough writer/worldbuilder community on Lemmy.)

Well, this is something I’ve been thinking about this on and off about some of my works. Generally I try to put some socialist or leftist elements into my story premises since it’s something I care about so much, but I also rarely have normal, human worlds where the ideology can be seamlessly fit into the setting without some heavy modification. Since I write mainly sci-fi and fantasy with non-human characters, it seems that since those premises are so far removed from reality, readers tend to almost instinctively draw tons of implications paralleling human society (I definitely do this as well whenever I read someone else’s sci-fi or fantasy work), and to be honest I’m worried about people looking at my works, and thinking I’m trying to send a message that I absolutely didn’t intend to.

I write a lot of things that involve intelligent animals, especially predator and prey species trying to live in harmony despite their history. I’ve already gotten a few comments asking if my characters of different species represent human races or predator-prey tensions is akin to racism, which I never intended for these things to be interpreted this way (in fact, I’ve been interested this animals living harmony concept since I was a kid, long before I even knew what race and racism was). I think it also doesn’t help that the well-known pop culture thing my world is compared to the most, Zootopia, does actually attempt to compare different species to human ethnicities and failed pretty hard at it with tons of bad implications in its message. But I’m not trying to do that at all, I genuinely just wanted to create a world where different species of animals live together and I just think it would make sense if different species of animals had their own culture, ways of doing things, governments that represent their unique interests, politics and political interactions with other species, etc; since different species obviously do have real biological differences that are relevant to how they live their lives (also, it should be noted that I’m also not claiming that the characters in this are infallable or live in a society that does everything right, but I feel that too many times when a story has a “good guy” organization or country/society that is seen by the characters as a good place to be, readers think the author wrote it that way because that’s their idea of a perfect society with no major issues), which human ethnicity obviously do not have such differences since we’re all the same species. Again I bring this up because I’ve literally been asked if this is trying to parallel real human racial issues which it is not (cause if it does, the unfortunate implication would be that human ethnicities do have differences and should have separate governments and). I just really love animals and want to use them in a meaningful way in my writing, and I don’t even think comparing different species of animals to human ethnicities even makes sense precisely because different species have real biological differences, but it’s not like I can make that known to the reader.

What do you think of all this? Is unintended implications/interpretations of fictional works something to actually be concerned about? Do you concern about it when doing worldbuilding of your own? I’m mainly worried that people are going to assume that because I wrote a fictional story whose message was interpreted in a certain way, people are going to think I personally hold those opinions. Which, especially as a socialist who shouldn’t be tolerating any form or degree of racism, do you think a risk of unfortunate race-related implications in a (somewhat overtly) leftist story would be problematic?