In critique group this morning, I found myself twice explaining things in terms of social and pack behavior. (Both stories had characters whose roles in society were fairly unclear to the reader.) "We need to know their roles to know how to interpret their responses to events in the story."

This is both true and disturbing. The characters were human. Why did it matter to me what they did for a living? Whether they had authority over other characters? But it did, and it was an anxious itch in my brain while I was reading.

Of course, some of this thought process was affected by my adventures avec Will this week. Still, humans are social creatures, and we care about these things even when the humans we are thinking of are fictional.