Yeah, for me, I still feel a lot of hesitancy in deciding where the spiritual ends and the mundane begins, basically. Even if non-humans weren't second-class citizens in canon, they're still, in a very fundamental way, mundane. You go out in the forest, you find some centaurs. You see someone die, you get to see thestrals. That kind of thing.

Figuring out where Raven and Bear fit in there, or whether the akhlut is going to be a mundane creature like a werewolf or a more spirit-based creature . . . those distinctions are actually important to the people I worked with. And how these stories are dealt with by white authors was a major part of what the people I worked with viewed as damage white people did to their communities, so I'm really hesitant about working with it in context of a basic worldbuilding that announces that non-humans are THUS, they are either real and follow X kinds of rules or they're made up, when . . . in many cases, that entire view of REALITY isn't actually applicable.

And I'm mostly hesitant about it because it's identified by the people I knew as part of their oppressive context, how their stories were dealt with and handled by white people/white-dominated culture. Which, again - my issue, not one I'm projecting at anyone else.