About the «strange animal stories», more in detail (apart from my other comments): a story transmits a number of mental tracks and developmental inputs - from quality inherent in activities to structures inherent in the world, with parallel meta-justifications for its form ("telling this to suggest that").
Speaking of strange, let us remember the dall-e images that mix credible features and completely hallucinated unstructured blobs (e.g. "top shelf: soap, mirror, towel, alien excrescence"). Questions: why is that specifically, why is that complexively; what justifies that specifically, what that complexively... Intelligence. That model, translated into stories, would be "teaching oniric randomness" - plausible at low attention level but recognizable through detail and global scope.
