The giraffe horse (although nobody claimed that the dog Leslie was played in the movies by the cobbels simply because the cobbles are more hairy and gentle) and the historical figure is not of the same gender - here it is understandable. But don’t try to pull this out of your ears for an entirely different occasion. But the world of the towers is a post-capapaleptic blend of worlds and times, where the hero can look as comfortable without any default setting.

There was such a characteristic story in fiction - two children sit in a sandbox, unexpectedly aliens land on the site. Only after the plot has actually ended, the reader is made to understand that these aliens - strange and strange to the eyes of children-heroes - actually looked like ordinary people, but the children were just exotic alien beings that people visited. Something like that at the end of the original "Planet of Monkeys" - there on the principle of "letters in a bottle" in space find the diary of the main character, then the main story - in the diary itself - and in the epilogue it is discovered that the ones who found the letter - intelligent monkeys, considering the story of an intelligent man someone's strange joke. A very characteristic indication of a reader’s mistake is to give characters the “default” qualities that were actually absent in the description.