Q: Turning into an animal and losing your humanity

 Q: Hello. I have two characters that slowly going crazy due to the powers and they are sacred of that happening since they could lose control of their powers and hurt the people they care about.

Would this fall under, the trope of “turning into an animal and losing your humanity”?

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A: Hey there, and thanks so much for asking this question! I’m going to assume you mean this under the Indigenous umbrella, and the short answer is no, as the humanity thing is more specifically about getting turned into (physically) animals, beasts, or monsters.

Remember, many people don’t see us as humans, so a human losing their mind is still a human. A human who gets turned into another creature they’re no longer human and is dangerous. If you have a character who gets turned into a ‘savage beast’ that needs to get put down, it's the same belief when colonisers saw anyone with a different shade of colour.

However, I think you might need to speak with folks in the disability community because the trope of a character going crazy over time is more inclined to characters such as the Joker from Batman or even Handsome Jack from Borderlands.

This is outside my expertise, so I can’t help you with much on that front, but you should be fine as long as they aren’t physically changing.

But what if they are physically changing?

If you have physically transforming characters, I highly recommend that you make it clear that just because they transform, they don’t lose their ‘humanity’. As harsh as it is, it’s easier to genocide a bunch of people if you no longer see them as people. (*cough, Israel, cough*)

Characters who transformed are still people. They had a life before they transformed, and their lives and identities shouldn’t be stripped away just because they’re no longer human.

Let’s step back and talk about the Dark Spawn from the Dragon Age games. Every Warden fears the “Calling” because the calling means they’ll die and be transformed into Dark Spawns, and the Dark Spawns are monsters of pure evil. The Wardens lose their mind and are transformed, and I don’t mind this.

I don’t mind this because once a Warden falls to the Calling and is now a monster of pure evil, the story and characters still treat them as who they were, a Warden, and give them respect. They don’t like killing a fallen Warden, but nothing can be done. Once you become a Dark Spawn, that’s it; you can’t come back.

Losing your humanity and transforming can be done, but you must give the characters who transform respect—the same thing for most zombie stories. No one wants to be a zombie; when someone becomes a zombie, it’s shown as a devastating event. Jarled the Warden will always be Jarled the Warden, even after he becomes a Dark Spawn. The same thing goes for Tobey before he gets turned into a zombie; he’ll always be remembered as Tobey.

Suppose your characters lose their humanity and are physically transformed into creatures. In that case, I hope everyone will remember them as who they used to be instead of what they are now. I hope the other characters won’t be happy to kill the monsters because of what they are and will instead be upset that they can’t be turned back.

I hope this was helpful. Please let me know if you have any more questions, and I’ll try my best to answer them.