While staying at Wright's uncle's cabin, Shori realizes she's in need of more blood, so she feeds on other inhabitants in the town and develops a relationship with an older woman named Theodora.

[7] In fact, as Pramrod Nayar notes, Butler creates an alternate history where humans and Ina have always coexisted in "non-hierarchic, interdependent and unified ecosystems".

[5] Some critics view Butler's decision to endow her protagonist with a larger dose of melanin than what is normal for the Ina as a metaphor for how the concept of race is created.

As Sanchez-Taylor explains, "[t]he displacement of the notion of race into a species conflict allows Butler to have a black protagonist and have a discussion of intolerance without the need to partake in the history of human racism".

While the Ina are stereotypically white, as is traditional for vampires, Shori's genetic makeup includes human melanin, which renders her skin brown, a necessary trait for her kind to be able to survive exposure to the sun.

[9] Sanchez-Taylor suggests that Butler's choice in making Shori dark-skinned aligns Fledgling's narrative with the Afrofuturist idea of defying the predominantly white vampire stereotype, such as those represented in Bram Stoker's or Anne Rice's novels.

[10] In fact, as Shari Evans notes, the racial insult Russell Silk hurls at Shori during the Council of Judgment ("murdering black mongrel bitch") negates the Ina's avowed difference from human prejudice and instead evoke white supremacy.

[13] These human-hating Ina, therefore, commit the equivalent of a hate-crime by destroying all of Shori's family, fueled by an ideology of racial purity and superiority that is not much different than that of Nazis or the Ku Klux Klan.

[8][11] As Ali Brox explains, Shori's hybridity becomes the focus of their hatred because it exposes the falsity of their claims to purity and reminds them of their past abject condition at the hands of humans.

[8] In addition, Shori's hybridity also symbolizes an enhanced or "correct" type of mutualistic symbiosis, as she literally embodies human and Ina DNA working together.

As Pramrod Nayar contends, in Fledgling hybridity means to take on the qualities of the other race and thus becomes a "companionate species" of others in order to survive.

In Fledgling, humans and Ina are bonded into a form of mutualistic symbiosis, a type of relationship that Shari Evans connects to the concept of "partnership" as defined in Butler's Parable of the Talents: "offering the greatest possible benefit while doing the least possible harm".

[5] As Susana Morris explains, even though the Ina can satisfy their need for companionship, physical contact, and sexual pleasure with one another, they also must have a deep emotional connection with their symbionts in order to survive.

[5][7] Nevertheless, Fledgling is the first time that Butler illustrates a co-dependent relationship from the point of view of the dominating partner, unlike in previous works such as her novel Dawn or her celebrated short story "Bloodchild".

[9][14] Joy Sanchez-Taylor and Shari Evans recognize it as a form of social commentary: human beings must move away from parasitic, hierarchical relationships and toward symbiosis with each other and other species.

[5][13] Critic Susana Morris connects Fledgling's symbiotic relationships to the Afrofuturistic feminist desire to portray liberation from current forms of hegemonic dominance.

Thus, the "cooperation, interdependence, and complex understandings of power" that mutualistic symbiosis represents becomes Butler's "futurist social model, one that is fundamentally at odds with racism, sexism, and sectarian violence".

[7] Wright, to Shori, when she commands him to seek safety for himself and the rest of her symbionts even if it means leaving her in danger: "That is the most unromantic declaration of love I've ever heard.

[7] Fledgling is typical of Butler's work in that her protagonist's difference from the Ina norm marks her as an evolutionary step in the right direction, both in biological and in cultural terms.

Biologically, her dark skin and ability to stay awake during the day allows her to save herself, her loved ones, and an entire Ina community from a series of attacks occurring during daylight.

As Florian Bast argues, Butler's novel is a typical African American narrative where the victim of a racially motivated crime is in a quest for the truth about her former self, about the agony that she has endured, and about her assailants' identity.

By the end of the story, Shori has conquered both her own ignorance and the speciesist discrimination that seeks to define her thanks to her personal strength and the help of her symbionts and Ina family and friends.

Her petite stature is constantly articulated throughout the novel, potentially raising discomforts for attentive readers as pedophilia might come to mind---particularly when she has sexual encounters with her adult human symbionts.

Ibrahim tells us, "The relegation of all slaves to the ranks of quasi-childhood was part and parcel of the Enlightenment-era tendency to distinguish reasoning subjects from irrational beings" (320).

In an interview with Juan Gonzalez and Amy Goodman for Democracy Now!, Butler explained that she had written Fledgling as a diversion after becoming overwhelmed by the grimness of her Parable series.

As she explained in an interview with Allison Keyes, it took her a while to find the focus of the novel until a friend suggested that what vampires wanted, besides human blood, was the ability to walk in the sun.

Novelist Junot Diaz declared it his "book of the year", calling it "[a] harrowing meditation on dominance, sex, addiction, miscegenation and race that completely devours the genre which gave rise to it".

Susanna Sturgis from Women's Review of Books pointed out that "[t]he vampire premise is perfectly suited to themes that Butler has been exploring since her earliest novels: interdependence, freedom and unfreedom, and the cost of human survival".

[21] Susan Salter Reynolds of the Los Angeles Times praised Butler's ability to address controversial topics in a way that leaves the reader open to them: "[t]he idea of an ordinary man picking up an apparent 10-year-old girl, taking her home and having sex with her is beyond the bounds of civilized behavior.

"[23] The Octavia E. Butler Papers at the Huntington Library include multiple drafts for potential sequels of Fledgling which continue to follow Shori and her growing family as they navigate their relationships and both human and Ina societies.