The Chameleon: A Review

The world is being very rough on us, these last few weeks, and I need a break. So instead of talking about the news, I'm going to indulge myself and talk about something else that's been weighing on me of late. Can we do that? Can you cut me some slack on that? Just for the day?

Specifically, I want to talk about chameleons.

Chameleons: A Review

Of all the animals on this planet, the humble chameleon is, I believe, the one that most understood that the game of evolution is a role-playing game. Not only did chameleons realize it, in fact, but they leaned into it. They leaned into it hard.

The chameleon is a what's known in role playing and videogaming circles as a "minmax" build. It chose Lizard as its race; it chose Thief as its class; as its sole magical ability it chose the Camouflage spell.

It then put all of its remaining points into Tongue. All of them. Every single point. The stats of a chameleon would, if you could see them, look like this:

STRENGTH: 1
DEXTERITY: 1
INTELLIGENCE: 1
WISDOM: 1
CONSTITUTION: -5
TONGUE: 60

And that is really all you need to know about chameleons. They don't have anything else going on; they're devoted to just that one thing.

The single-mindedness is amazing. There are many animals who try half-assedly to develop unique quirks; the elephant has its nose, the giraffe has its neck. But those animals are not just the one thing. They still have power. They still can kick you to death, or run much faster than you think they could, or survive on meals that you or I couldn't begin to digest. Not chameleons. They are not "basic animal, but with unique traits." They are "the minimum possible animal it is possible to be without immediately dying, with all evolutionary points instead put into Tongue."

Every once in a while chameleons win the opportunity to further evolve, and they still choose Tongue. Not just once, but every single time.

GOD OF REPTILES: Good news, you've leveled up! How would you like to spend your new skill points?

CHAMELEONS: Mor tung plz.

GoR: I notice you have trouble walking on flat surfaces. Maybe we should fix that?

CHAMELEONS: No thir, mor tung plz.

GoR: Most animals know how to run. You could go for a light skitter, perhaps? Something to evade predators? Just enough to make it from one tree to another, even.

CHAMELEONS: I lik tung.

GoR: Look there. There's a bug six inches from your face, but in the time it takes you to move six inches to eat it that bug will have moved on, started a family, and put a down payment on a small boat. Don't you want to eat it? What if—

CHAMELEON: THWACK CHEW CHEW CHEW.

GoR: ...

CHAMELEON: SWALLOW

GoR: Okay. But what if the bug was seven inches away, not six? Then what—

CHAMELEON: YES, MOR TUNG PLZ.

You can't condemn commitment like that, or mock it. You can't call it foolish, or shortsighted. Yes, chameleons are nearly defenseless against predators, have difficulty moving at any speed, and are of such weak constitution that merely seeing another chameleon nearby may cause them to spontaneously die—but they continue to abide by their original evolutionary choice with a stubbornness that makes every other animal look like a coward. They are the embodiment of "glass cannon" design—almost literally, in fact.

I've met a lot of people who have wanted to keep chameleons as pets, in my years, and I have always done my best to warn them off. I know a few things about them, you see, and it's not that I dislike them. No, if anything I admire them.

But if you look at the character sheet of any pet store chameleon, you will note that they are alone among God's creatures in having a negative constitution. The chameleon, as a design, is constitutionally incompatible with life. The reason it almost never moves is because it risks immediate catastrophic death every time it so much as looks around; it must make a saving throw every time it moves a leg.

I'm being perfectly sincere here. If you are looking forward to having a pet chameleon, you need to understand just what you're signing up for.

• If you touch the chameleon when it is not expecting to be touched, it will die.

• If you put a grey branch in its terrarium but it wanted a brown branch, it will die.

• If you attempt to feed it a cricket but the cricket is the wrong shape or the wrong color, it will die.

• If the temperature is not within a tenth of a degree of what the chameleon currently wants it to be, it will die. It will give you no indication of what this preferred temperature might be.

• If you turn up the volume on your television set without giving it written warning at least two days in advance, it will die.

• If you have one of those "animal of the month" calendars, and on the first day of each month flip the calendar to reveal an animal that is looking directly at the camera, the chameleon will immediately see it and it will die.

• If your chameleon makes a social media post but receives less than 5 likes in response, it will die.

If you own a chameleon, you are consigning yourself to a life in which you can never flip a light switch after 7pm, or listen to any music that includes percussion instruments, or read any book with a subplot. You must never have guests and must always dress in monochrome.

All for the sake of placating a creature that refuses to evolve even a self-sustaining nervous system.

Chameleons do not make good pets, because chameleons are incompatible with the process of being observed. That is why they chose their one and only spell, Camouflage, and I imagine that the God of Reptiles gave it to them for free out of consternation and pity. Chameleons exist inside a Schrödinger's box, always simultaneously alive and dead until an observer arrives to open the box, which causes them to immediately die.

In the chameleon's native jungle homes, it can just barely manage to scrape by with these strategies. It weaves its camouflage spell knowing full well that the first time any other animal sees it, it will probably die—not too different from many other animals of its size. It instead lives the life of a flytrap or pitcher plant, sitting motionless for hours until one of the five or six varieties of bug it can eat crawls into tongue range, at which point it THWACKS, swallows, and then has to rest. Not so much because it is exhausted, but because the motion of opening and closing its mouth has now filled it with an overwhelming sense of ennui.

Can I truly count myself as an exemplar of the animal kingdom, it asks? I am tongue, but there are parts of me that are not tongue. I am too many eyes and too many feets and not enough tongue.

And that is why its tail curls, bending into an oh-so-graceful spiral. It is beautiful, but not intentional; the chameleon is having a moment of ennui, and as it thinks its body cannot help but contort into mathematical shapes, shapes abstract but rigid.

And then it either wakes from its thoughts or it dies, dropping with a thunk so heavy that it becomes clear that it actually died two days ago, the damn thing, and only rigor mortis was keeping it on the branch.

You can criticize its life choices. You can wonder at what motivates it, in its evolutionary drive to have sixty points of tongue and the minimum possible points in every other life-sustaining attribute. But the chameleon, alone among higher-order forms of life, has remained so true to its role-playing beliefs that this pretense, this fetish, has been engraved into its DNA and crosses from generation to generation.

Sharper claws? More dangerous teeth? A thicker hide? No, no, and no. The chameleon has needed none of it. It has two eyes, two eyes that can see into God's own plans and desires, and to its creator's pleas and queries it remains dauntless, defiant, and reptile-cold.

More tung plz, it says once, and if its God refuses the request then it leans gently to one side, ever so slowly, its gaze never leaving its immortal architect, and it dies.