You want to know what my biggest issue with the pups/cubs/etc? Far too many of them act like "infants" rather than children. Its like they go from "Im a baby and can be a pest because I dont know any better" to angsty teenager to "adult" [And from what I can tell for a lot of people, "mary sue adult" >_>]
Now, I can understand if you're RPing a very young cub or pup who can hardly walk and talk but how often do you see a 1 year old infant make a comedy-movie type of escape from its parents and into trouble? You don't. Yes, children can be a handful and can "disappear" but they're not ninjas at one year of age, which would probably be about even with a few-months-old cub character who can hardly communicate. In other words, your "infant" cub shouldn't be an escape artist! Now if your character is an older child but not quite a teenager and has some motivation to escape, THAT is another thing entirely, that is slightly different but still irritating when everyone does it at the SAME time.
This brings me to another thing....I've noticed most of the cub and pup character's Ive come across, the characters themselves have no aspirations or motivations. Children have motivation and aspirations of their own. Now, one could argue that's a little more difficult to come up with for an animal character but lets think for a minute. If you're being realistic, I think realistically a young animal's only motivation is to learn from its parent, stay where its meant to stay, and be quiet. Otherwise, guess what happens in the real wild if they don't? They get caught and they get eaten! As for semi-realism and unrealistic roleplays it is so easy to give your cub character something OTHER than harrasing mom, dad, and the "pack/pride" to do such as..... Welll lets say you have a "healer" in your group. Maybe your cub has an interest in that job and shadows that other character, going on trips to find herbs with them or something like that. Or have them ask an older member to teach them how to fight or use magic or something /other/ than "Ima run away YAAAAY 8DDDD" which is irritating for every party involved except you. And that's just not right.
I was RPing with a friend a few weeks back and one of the cubs in her pride escaped. My character was acting as a baby sitter, so she ran to fetch her and brought her back. Fine. Dandy. I can deal with that. Except after a while she does again and when no one pays attention to her, she remarks again that she ran off. I told her OOCly that I wasn't sending my character after hers again, that I viewed it like attention seeking and I doubted anyone else wanted to deal with it. Sure enough, she said "Nevermind I never ran off" (or something to that effect) and came back.
I don't tolerate that kind of behavior for very long.
