The Beer Garden

A lot of SF and fantasy stories have companion "animals" of various shapes and levels of intelligence, a good number of which are emotionally bonded to their humans, and vice versa.

This is all well and good — I like such stories, and wouldn’t at all mind having one of those friends!  I’ve noticed, though, that with a very few exceptions, they are treated as nothing but an appendage of the human.  That is, even those that are supposed to have distinct personalities don’t show it much, if at all.  And most aren’t even given living conditions (by humans, anyway) that reflect their true intelligence.

Let’s take the Companions of Valdemar as an example.  They’re horse-shaped, so by necessity, they share a lot of equine attributes … but the reader knows, at least in the later books, that Companions are deceased Heralds who chose to come back in that form.  They deliberately keep it from their Heralds, but even so, they have human desires and tastes, not just equine.

Even in the early "Last Herald-Mage" books, there’s a bit of understanding of that; Vanyel teases Yfandes, in one spot, about her vanity, and grooms her and puts on her dress tack so she can flirt with another Companion.  At his parents’ home, she attends his mother’s outdoor sewing circle/musical recital, and is referred to as a "great lady".

But she is still housed in an ordinary stable, from all descriptions, even at the Palace, except that the Companions can come and go as they please into Companions’ Field, rather than being secured in their stalls.  There’s also repeated comments of, "She’s not a horse!"

Most of the time, though, that’s exactly how the Companions are treated, like horses that happen to mind-talk to their Heralds.  There’s almost nothing that shows individual personality, taste, or the like.  Yfandes is at least a little vain; might she not care to wear jewelry, or "civilian clothing", at times?  I bet she did as a human, and since Companions retain their personalities, I’d like to see something on that order.

I won’t accept that it would take too much extra wordage, either, given the pages and pages of clothing descriptions in at least some of the later books!

If I didn’t already have so many things on my plate, I swear I’d be doing a fragment or vignette about some sort of Partner for my Imperial Rangers — gods know, they need something like that! — just to show one possible way to demonstrate that companion "animals" can be true individuals and still work that closely with a bonded partner.