Lycanthropy treated in a positive light - not a curse

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Re: Lycanthropy treated in a positive light - not a curse

Post by blackwolfhell »

In todays society, if it can't be proved with science, it is deemed un real
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Re: Lycanthropy treated in a positive light - not a curse

Post by Wingman »

blackwolfhell wrote:In todays society, if it can't be proved with science, it is deemed un real
As contrasted to the last era of history, where anything your local priest vouched for was taken as being absolute truth.

Though, in regards to the topic at hand, lycanthropy has an inherent disadvantage when dealing with mainstream society and trying to portray itself in a positive light. Society has a very vague, very straightforward viewpoint. Something is either Good, Bad, or Strange. A general rule of thumb is that strange is bad. Lycanthropes are therefor doubly disadvantaged, regardless of what sort of person they might be, because they are Strange. Not comfortably human or animal, they break all sorts of boundaries and play havoc with people's grasp on how the world works. It's an animal with a human mind, so is it an animal or a human? It's human with animal traits, or is it an animal with human traits? Where lies the boundary between animal and human, between thing and person? Do the laws for people now apply to animals? Werewolves, for good or (usually) ill are stuck right in the middle of this mess.
Imagine that suddenly every lifeform above bacteria became sentient, even if only at a rudimentary level. Are they still "just animals", should they be treated like people? Are they people, are we animals? In my experience, not many people enjoy asking themselves these questions, as all they're left with is questions and "Just Because" answers.

Pretty much everything has gone through this exact same process of being demonized and exalted, often at the same time. It rarely ever ends well or neatly, since few definitive answers are available.

Suppose that a cow, while en route to the slaughterhouse, became sentient and transformed into a human. Suppose he then took legal action and demanded that cows be treated as any other oppressed and mistreated minority. Is the cow now human, and thus able to benefit from and utilize human laws? Or is he just an animal that can change his form? Is sentience what makes something a person, or is it form? If one, then deformed cripples hardly count as people anymore, though perhaps a subspecies, and if the other then those suffering from brain damage aren't people any more than rabid wombats or carrots are. If both...well then that's a whole different can of worms in and of itself.

It's one of the reasons that vampires have an easier time gaining acceptance, since they're essentially just humans. Strange ones, but humans nonetheless, they just have less Strangeness for you to ignore in order to classify them as People. For this, I'm using the base essence of vampires:bloodsuckers, and the base essence of lycanthropes:shapeshifters
My intent isn't to make this a vampire versus werewolf debate, I'm merely trying to illustrate a point.

In order to gain easy acceptance by society, there's two main paths you can take. Make it comfortably human, or comfortably inhuman. You can see this in the trend of modern supernatural fiction, the creatures are either becoming weirder, or more human. An increase in Strangeness or a decrease in Strangeness. However, as humans ourselves, not a whole lot of us can imagine things from the perspective of a nonhuman, and so there's a natural trend to seek out human characteristics or comparisons in order to understand and accept things. Werewolves just don't have a whole lot of human characteristics. They're just plain Strange.

Sure, you can keep making werewolves increasingly Human, trading a full animal form for a hybrid form, and then just a slightly animalistic form, and so forth. But then you come to a point where they stop being werewolves and are just humans. For many people, such "watered down" werewolves ruin the entire purpose of them being werewolves, they're no longer unique, they're back to being faces in the crowd once again.

Forgive me if I made no sense at all, I'm not even really sure what I'm getting at here.
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Re: Lycanthropy treated in a positive light - not a curse

Post by heartlessfang »

^ personally that whole thing would be fixed if more stupid humans admitted that they are animals too. And weird ones in our own right. But they feel as though they are degrading themselves......ridiculous. :|
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Re: Lycanthropy treated in a positive light - not a curse

Post by blackwolfhell »

Humans should admit that they would be humans. I totally sgree!
"Humans aren't the only species on earth, they just act like it."
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Re: Lycanthropy treated in a positive light - not a curse

Post by Terastas »

Wingman wrote:In order to gain easy acceptance by society, there's two main paths you can take. Make it comfortably human, or comfortably inhuman.
Actually, there are two more steps you can take:
3) Surround the werewolf with an equally surreal environment.
4) Deliberately downplay the surreality of the shapeshifter.

For an example of #3, you need look no further than Harry Potter. A man turning into a wolf is still pretty fantastic, but so is everything else that happens at Hogwarts. Compared to everything else that you'd have seen or read in the previous two books/movies, it isn't that strange at all.

Same thing with Night Watch -- Bear only says he gets his name from the fact that he can turn into a bear and never actually transforms in the movie, but after you've seen everything up until that point, it's a lot easier to just take his word for it.

#4 is when something appears just as strange and surreal, but nobody ever regards it as such, and in fact are more likely to consider you to be strange and surreal for drawing attention to it. It's the approach I'm using in both of my projects. In Night Life, the werewolves are just as fearsome as one would expect them to be, but they typically only ever appear in gestalt form in the presence of other werewolves, or of humans sympathetic to the werewolves; either way, only the protagonist ever even so much as bats an eyelash at the sudden appearance of a werewolf, and whenever he comments on the surreality of such, the typical reaction of everyone else is to shoot 'what's his problem?' glances in all directions.

The other is The Noctem, where the werewolves have their own entire country, into which a detective-slash-bounty hunter from a 100% human nation has to travel. Between the various variations of werekin, the many other humanoid minorities that also live in the werekin nation (gnolls, minotaurs, centaurs, etc.) and their various cultures all rolled into one, the entirety of the nation makes for a trippy/twisted Wonderland. And again, nobody seems to pay the various oddities any mind, but they always notice whenever he or another human immigrant is staring slack-jawed at one of them.
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