Hey casual inspiring authors out there!  Do you want to add a character to your storyline to spice things up but not have to bother with that nasty characterization?  Fear no more for I have the solution; Animal Sidekicks!  Adding an Animal Sidekick to your cast of characters is a guaranteed trick to appeal the animal lovers from your audience.  They will be flabbergasted with adorableness with every scene you decide to add your cute original animal into.  The best part of Animal Sidekicks is that you can make them become spotlight stealers without any consequences.  Simply just chose an ordinary animal and spice them up a bit.  Just DM Timegear33 at Watt Pad in order to fulfill your cliché, unnecessary desire...

  And that my friends is my attempt at humor by turning the beginning paragraph into an informercial-styled parody.  Mixing things up a bit once in a while is good for the creative juices inside of your head.  Even if you do not succeed to get the intended response from the audience, you went right outside of your comfort zone to do so.  That is one of the many joys that comes with writing.  Animal sidekick characters, as I ironically hinted at a paragraph ago, are outside of most manga and a few noteworthy examples a terrible thing to add to a story.

  Animal sidekicks are in a sense a cheap copout when writing a story.  Sure, they are adorable, but what is their role besides being a center of cuteness?  Can they help the main character out on their heroic quest through some unique ability?  Does this character have a deeper symbolic meaning to the storyline, or helps to better create a realistic atmosphere for the setting?  Are they useful to the cast and do not just sit around being cute all day?  If none of these answers applies to the animal character, they are a part of the problematic cliché.

  Animal sidekicks nine times out of ten are cardboard cutout characters that do not add anything to the plot line.  You could replace them with anyone, perhaps even a well fleshed out human character, and no one would mind.  A character like that defeats the whole purpose of writing in the first place.  Stories are written to take the audience away from the cruel reality of the real world and transport them to an intriguing world with endless possibilities.  You can be imaginative, preachy, or informative.  The possibilities are endless for any type of storyline.

  If you want to add an animal character to your cast, please give them a purpose besides being cute.  The best types of animal sidekicks in these cases are the fantasy based kind, such as fusing two different animal species into one or giving an existing animal supernatural qualities.  Of course, they still must be in some way important to the story.  To break the cliché, you need to make the animal character have equal grounds like the rest of the main cast.  Otherwise, what is the point of their existence?