While we’re on the topic of Halloween for the entire month, I want to know why vampire or werewolf stories constantly pit werewolves and vampires against each other? If I’m remembering it right in novel Dracula it’s shown or at least heavily implied Dracula can turn into a dog/wolf so the rivalry doesn’t make any sense. If anything vampires (or at least Dracula) should see a werewolf and say “oh sick me too”
It’s canon
the actual only difference between a werewolf and a vampire is if your a jock or a goth
A werewolf film written by a woman wouldn’t be as interesting because they know how unrealistic it is to be caught by surprise by something that happens regularly every damn month.
And then there’s that werewolf who goes three full moons without transforming, then transforms one night during a waxing crescent moon.
Now I’m imagining some on the werewolf form of the pill and having to regularly keep up their schedule and one werewolf telling another that they used to have such irregular changes but the pill now makes things so much easier and the other werewolves being like oh man I should talk to my doctor about this.
All i imagined is some poor fucker that’s like “you think you have it bad. I got my first change at 9 and change sporadically every 4 months or so. For 2 weeks. Sometimes it happens randomly so i just gave up.”
Wake up pissed and agitated with a headache and slam some aspirin with no real thought to the matter because it must just be a shit day. Halfway through the day they just “…oh shit that explains so much fuck fuck fuck”
Wired: Werewolf Karaoke, and all the locals are really invested in it. So the werewolf pack initiation ceremony is actually just singing “Bohemian Rhapsody.”
Have you thought of bulk club runs for giant jars of peanut butter and hotdogs by the gross? I know some werewolves who have.
Hunting licenses are great and deer are delicious, but city doggos can buy a whole cow and have it delivered already in eatable bits. (Sometimes your meat guy will call you and say “so a guy offered me some ostriches, how many do you want” and then family dinners are glorious.)
Don’t think about werewolves who take turns shifting so they can give each other belly rubs.
2. Not to got off on too much of a tangent but consider: At Costco (and probably other bulk stores with butchers but def Costco) you can call in and special order as much beef blood as you want*, so consider:
Werewolf at the checkout at costo with dog toys, a frankly suspicious amount of beef, carob because brownies are great but chocolate is not such a great plan, and an industrial-size lint-roller in her cart. And a giant thing of aresol cheeze whiz. For Cover. And definitely NOT for spraying across the room into her buddy’s mouth while he’s shifted.
And they look over at the cart behing them and it’s a lady with a drum of beef blood, a 12-pack of spf 5000, the order forms for a coffin**, and off-season halloween decorations and-
“Look, I get some cheez. Ya gotta have some cover.” Wolfie sighs. Must be new.
Vamp looks up at them from under thier broad-brimmed hat, and slowly grins, before picking up a high-end videocamera. “I’m shooting a movie, Don’t you know? this is all props and special effects. Your… dog can have a cameo, if I can have your number.”
“Fanged Flirtations” Doesn’t have wide distribution but it’s a cult hit on the cryptid circuit.
New skill: using sign language when mouth is not right shape for words.
ok but what if like. werewolves transform under the full moon but theres just this one and by day hes a big tough guy and then when he transforms hes a tiny dog. just fucking. just fucking turns into the tiniest, fluffiest dog
imagine that howling at the moon
imagine
Truly a ferocious predator.
And lastly: (He’s the pack leader obviously)
the big wolves are his younger sisters
Okay I’ve literally reblogged this prob a hundred times but it’s the best post ever so here we are again.
This story is one my best friend and I always end up telling to everyone we ever meet because we’ve legit been traumatized by it. I’ve told the Werewolf On The Cliff tale to pretty much every person I know IRL.
So, as some of you know, my best friend and I are idiots and obsessed with magic and the paranormal. We very often call each other on the evenings or at night to be like “hey, wanna go on an adventure and try to capture a ghost on camera in this creepy-supposed-to-be-haunted famous mansion?” or “hey, I made a list of all the creepy trails in the woods and the countryside around, wanna go there at 1am and see what happens?” or “hey, wanna drive up the hill to the corn field and watch the stars, see if we can see a UFO?” etc etc.
Anyway, we’ve seen a lot of weird shit and a lot of terrifying shit, but THAT ONE NIGHT ON THE CLIFF… that was something else.
As we do, my best friend and I called each other and decided to have a mini road-trip around the surrounding region at night on the summer of 2013. We drove around filming random stuff and having a fun time spooking each other like the idiots we are (the video is still on my laptop somewhere). Then around 1am we decided to go up a cliff in a city by the coast we often go to because it’s pretty. It was very windy and dark so we took our flashlights and I stopped recording because the wind was messing up the audio (and because i didn’t trust myself not to accidentally drop my camera down the cliff). It’s a populated area, there’s buildings a few meters away, a lighthouse, old bunkers from WWII, and apparently a weird facility we never knew about. We first saw the “Private Propriety” and “DANGER do not enter” signs leading down the cliff after a few minutes up there, so we didn’t go that way because we aren’t that stupid. My best friend looked up and said “oh that’s weird, the night’s super dark but it’s a full moon” and indeed the moon was full and gigantic but the light wasn’t that bright. Knowing my crippling (and weirdass) Werewolf phobia, he joked about werewolves being out that night and I whacked him on the shoulder to make him shut up.
We went to the end of the cliff and directed our flashlights down to check if we could see the waves crashing down, but it was too dark and all I saw instead were glowing red eyes reflecting my light back at me. It was a few meters back down, the cliff wasn’t a sharp drop and had a slight tilt to it so it’s not like something was climbing up the side. It was just there. I called to my best friend and told him to look down, asked if he saw what I was seeing. He did. The eyes kept looking at me, slightly moving. We thought it was a cat or maybe a fox, startled by the light and scared to move too much, until it swiftly disappeared to the right. We didn’t think much of it, like I said, a bit spooked but convinced it was a cat, even if the eyes seemed a bit big and too red.
Not even a full minute passed until my best friend shakily grabbed my arm and said “someone else is here”. I looked up, and at our right, up the cliff at least 30 meters (98 feet) away from us, I saw a very tall humanoid figure appear from behind some shadows. “Apparently we aren’t the only ones going for a walk at 1:30am in this area” I thought, until my best friend (who has a much better vision than me, that’s worth mentioning, i’m fucking blind y’all) said “I think it’s coming towards us”. And at that moment the figure started fucking running EXTREMELY FAST in our direction, and we didn’t think twice before running away back to the car. My best friend looked behind him while running and the figure was still running towards us, which.. if you’re a well balanced human or a human at all, you probably wouldn’t do to people already screaming and running away from you. Its running was messy and weird.
Still screaming like babies, we made it into the car and of course he fumbled to find his keys while I was yelling “THIS IS HOW THEY GET US IN HORROR MOVIES, THE CAR NOT STARTING AND THEN THEY JUST JUMP ON THE WINDOWS OUT OF NOWHERE”, I still restarted the camera around that time. I still looked up to see where the figure was right as my best friend managed to start the car and drive away. It stopped, still in the shadows, so much closer and still impossibly tall. (edit: rewatching the videos, it apparently disappeared just like that and I didn’t look to check). We just drove back down the city. We puzzled every pieces of what had just happened together and like normal, well-adjusted adults, we came to the conclusion that a werewolf just chased us. Because fuck logic and also, full-moon and glowing red eyes, duh.
And that’s the story of how we almost got murdered and totally deserved it for being idiots. A week later we walked through an entire forest at night. We’ll never learn.
Okay, found the videos. Again, it’s only the before and after and there’s not much to see. I had to DL a shitty editing program real quick so because it’s the trial version there’s a shitty banner on it. I did what I could and it’s not much but for everyone who asked, there you go!
So many books and tv shows about werewolves worship this dominance culture, especially a male-centric dominance hierarchy, and sometimes it drives me nuts because it’s regarded as the default. That if humans transformed into beasts, of course most of the survivors would be men, and of course they’d be violent and territorial and murderous, and of course they’d be vaguely chauvinistic because ‘they can’t help it that’s just how werewolves are’.
It’s this idea that the metaphor for a beast as one’s inner nature is reserved for male characters and male violence, tossed in with frequently-inaccurate anthropomorphic assumptions about animal pack culture.
Where are the stories about the werewolf packs that are mostly female? Where are the stories about the fact that women who’ve born children have a higher pain tolerance than men and would better survive the bite? Where are the stories about the women who spend so much time controlling their passions and their emotions and their desires to navigate in a man’s world that they adapt all to well to controlling their mystical transformations too?
What does a pack of all female werewolves look like? Is there a hierarchical structure, or something else? Does it mean the same thing to be an alpha, a beta? What does it mean to be a lone wolf?
I want the stories about how men who are bitten are more likely to go mad from trying to keep a duality in their minds instead of coming to consensus and sharing space with their wolf-spirit. I want stories about the female alpha wolf who only offers the bite to other girls, because dudes have already fucked up ruling the human world, let’s not let them have the supernatural one too.
I want the story about the trans girl who’s trying to change her outside to match her inside, but all of a sudden has to deal with physically transforming her body three nights a month, because hell if you ever wanted a metaphor about not fitting right in your own skin, werewolves are a good option.
I want the story about how the hedge-witches took wolves as familiars and gave them human souls, turned them into human girls, and forced them to give up the wind and the snow and the grass for a life trapped in human flesh.
I want the story about the teenage werewolf girls who hunt down other monsters while they try to find the right shoes for prom and study for their written driver’s test. And when people joke about them going to the bathroom in a pack, it’s not really a joke. Because girls know a journey is not an adventure unless she brings her friends, and when they travel in packs, they travel in packs.
I want more female werewolves.
BLESSINGS BE UPON THIS POST AND ALL OF ITS BEAUTIFUL WORDS.
This concept of violently-enforced rigid hierarchy within werewolf (and plain old wolf) packs is not only overdone and uninteresting, it’s just plain incorrect. A lot of where this idea comes from is really just profoundly bad science from back in the day, when scientists were studying wolf packs and making sweeping generalizations about what they were seeing. They were in fact studying CAPTIVE wolf packs made up of unrelated adult individuals who had been forced into proximity and confinement… so what they were observating as “natural wolf dominance behavior,” was in fact trapped territorial predators reacting aggressively to the stress of forced socialization and imprisonment. It’s a lot like thinking you’re going to study human social family behavior by going to your local prison and observing the interactions of the human beings present in the prison yard.
Actual wolf packs are generally composed of a breeding pair of adult wolves and sometimes several years’ worth of offspring. There might be aunts and uncles and other non-breeding adults in there, who are usually relatives of other wolves in the pack. The concept of “alpha, beta, and omega” is a profoundly flawed one that has really been thrown out by modern wolf researchers, though you’ll still see it cropping up all the time as we try to explain wolf socialization to ourselves. (We’ve also used this model for other animals, like horses, and you’ll often hear about a “lead mare” and you probably have a concept of stallions who direct every movement of their herd and I could give you a ten-page sermon on why I think that’s all wrong, too.) A wolf pack is a family, not a military structure, and families have all sorts of nuance in their dynamics, not to mention a diversity that goes beyond the nuclear. When writers go straight for this hyper-masculine, hyper-aggressive idea of what werewolf pack dynamics should be like, they’re imposing human behavior on the animal, not the other way around.
Like, speaking of female werewolves, can we all become more familiar with and embrace the legend of Yellowstone’s 832F, a wolf who should be a hero to us all? She led her own pack. She could take down a fucking elk single-handed. (Single-pawed?) She had TWO MATES because one wasn’t fuckin’ enough so she was like “oh, you’re brothers? I like you both, let’s all shack up.” They apparently weren’t very useful (I’m sure they were super pretty though from a wolf perspective) so she handled mmost of the pup-rearing, and hunting for those pups, on her own too. And she didn’t rule her pack with an iron fist, though she undoubtedly ruled it because she was the most competent leader they had and surprise, animals recognize and reward competent leadership in ways we humans only wish our jobs could manage. I MIGHT CRY FOREVER OVER THIS FUCKING BAD-ASS OF A WOLF. Let’s have more of THAT and less of the “oh rar the moon is full that means my latent asshole tendencies come out but it’s the wolf I swear!”
I s2g I am not here for dudebros using their lycanthropy as YET ANOTHER REASON why they can’t just fuckin control themselves.
Wolf rants are my favourite rants.
@jolantru has a werewolf series in which the leader is a woman and a mother of two.
Steel Phoenix Studios 