This is the place for discussion and voting on various aspects of werewolf life, social ideas, physical appearance, etc. Also a place to vote on how a werewolf should look.
Morkulv wrote:I think werewolves should be Satanic. Not evil outraged beasts, but just Satanic in a religious way.
Eh...hunh? Do you mean you would like to see A Satanic Werewolf, or that you think that all werewolves would convert to a satanic religion after being bitten?
According to THIS Website, "Satanism" (the REAL religions, not the demon worshiping faux religions), is basically a "law of the jungle" religion in which you are not obligated to worry or care about others...only yourself and those you CHOOSE to love and care about. Basically, one goes through life believeing they are GOD of their own world, and do whatever it takes within it to ensure ones own survival and satisfaction.
Is that the kind of "Satanic" you were speaking of?
Please Forgive the Occasional Outburst of my Inner Sage ... for he is Oblivious to Sarcasm, and not Easily Silenced.
well its not what I had in mind but I personaly like the idea a person would be condemed and have his soul tooken away by the devil just because hes been bitten by a werewolf. Its still a pretty cool concept though.
Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories. - Thomas Jefferson
To each to his own.
Wolf-folk and Vamps(as well) can be what ever religion they see fit. They can follow social codes that their kind entails. But wolf-folk can be Christian, Jewish or even Muslim. Same for Vamps. Infact my vampire character Andre is Roman Cathioc. Religion is flexable, A wolven could be kosher and a vampire can have a rosery.
Note I'm adding vamps in this since they follow the same Whitewolf thing.
Some wolves howl to the moon.
But I...howl to the Son.
Morkulv wrote:I think werewolves should be Satanic. Not evil outraged beasts, but just Satanic in a religious way.
Eh...hunh? Do you mean you would like to see A Satanic Werewolf, or that you think that all werewolves would convert to a satanic religion after being bitten?
According to THIS Website, "Satanism" (the REAL religions, not the demon worshiping faux religions), is basically a "law of the jungle" religion in which you are not obligated to worry or care about others...only yourself and those you CHOOSE to love and care about. Basically, one goes through life believeing they are GOD of their own world, and do whatever it takes within it to ensure ones own survival and satisfaction.
Is that the kind of "Satanic" you were speaking of?
That would be funny. Turning a Christian into a pure evil Satanic motherfucker.
Scott Gardener wrote:
I'd be afraid to shift if I were to lose control. If I just looked fuggly, I'd simply be annoyed every full moon.
Morkulv wrote:I think werewolves should be Satanic. Not evil outraged beasts, but just Satanic in a religious way.
Uh...I disagree. If I was bitten by a werewolf, and became one myself, I can say with all certainty that I wouldn't convert to Satanism. Werewolves still retain free will, and therefore wouldn't be obligated, simply by becoming a werewolf, to a certain religion.
I can, however, see werewolves as a subculture developing their own take on various religions. In my own storyline, for example, "therian Wicca" becomes a Pagan tradition shortly after werewolves reveal themselves openly and their population starts going up. Within Christianity, lycanthropy becomes the "new gay," in that the different denominations face internal and external conflicts over how to relate to werewolves--whether to consider them inherantly cursed and diabolical, like old times, or to consider them simply living with a genetic modification. It's not a big stretch of the imagination to see Fundamentalists afraid of the thing, or to see some more progressive churches saying "OK, whatever. As long as you're a good person."
Over time, there'd be at least a few aggressive radicals within the lycanthropic community who would feel that werewolves were superior to humans, and that humans were either cattle upon which to feed, vermin to exterminate, or those less fortunate who must all be bitten and assimilated into the collective. They'd probably put together their own paranoid world-view, complete with religious symbols. They might even take on some of the cheesy movie symbols, like the pentagram on the palm.
Which, as a bit of completely useless trivia, was how the members of an ancient Greek cult recognized each other--a cult lead by none other than Pythagoras. ("Welcome initiate. The sum of the square of the hypotenuse is equal to... dang; how does that go again?")
Taking a Gestalt approach, since it's the "in" thing...
That brings up a whole set of potentially prickly issues for philosophers like me, though.
It'd also be the same set of questions that humans have been asking themselves for millenia: 'Do we have souls?' 'Is there a God?' 'Can we truly know something or just our understanding of it?' 'What is it that makes us able to comprehend and understand things?'
Werewolves throw a hell of a wrench into that. Now sentient thought is not limited solely to humans, but to a thing that's not quite human too that we can actually talk to, so the problem of epistemology or how we know things is going to turn, either taking a downward spiral or an upwards one.
To be perfectly honest, I especially can imagine werewolves not thinking of themselves as entirely human. Which is kinda disturbing for me when I take it down one particular line of thought: Nietzschian thought.
If y're familiar with Nietzsche, I can already imagine a shiver going down your spine.
If you're na, lemme break it down. Nietzsche essentially said that most humans these days are sheep, that can't progress the species. They're essentially six brands of useless, and they really need to be killed. Like really killed. Like jump up and down and kill. Worse, most things that humans have invented, like the whole 'treat others as you wanna be treated' and 'love thy neighbor' and ideas like compassion and love and mercy and stuff like that is essentially crap. It was developed in an effort for the weak to stop the strong from totally fisting them, and to help the weak come to grips with the fact that the universe itself is totally without meaning or purpose, that there really isn't any God, aaaaand yeah, it's kinda worked. But it's letting the weak multiply and get out of control. Not good. They're gonna wreck the planet and the species at this rate.
But Nietzsche said that things could go one of two ways from this point: One, we finally hit rock bottom and die out as yet another evolutionary dead end. Two, a new form of human develops: the Ubermensch, and yes, I know I'm missing an umlaut, but it means 'Overman', 'Superman', 'Ultra-Human' and a few other things all wrapped into one. It's a being that is superior in every way to humans: intellectually, physically, it knows that the universe is without purpose or meaning and it doesn't care, and it is out simply to bump off as many of the weak as it can. Not even really 'for' anything, short of making itself maybe a little more comfortable and liberating a whole load of resources or so.
So a religious werewolf really doesn't disturb me. With most humans, though, if by some fluke, they adopt Nietzschian philosophy, they turn into nihilists. Meaning nothing matters, so they don't care, and they don't believe in anything. Nihilism generally leads to depression, so it's easy to say, human Nietzschians don't last very long and generally wind up slitting their own wrists.
Yet part of Nazism was based on Nietzsche, although the man himself would have looked at Hitler and called him a wuss. Stalin, though, now there is an equal-opportunity herd-thinner!!
Still. It'd be easy for a werewolf to not look at themselves as entirely human. Meaning they could just as easily look at themselves as better than human. Meaning that, in some cases, they could even potentially think of themselves as der Ubermensch.
And think of the hell that'd be raised on that account!
Nietzsche, phaugh!
Really, don't get me started. Single part of my high school philosophy that I hated. There's only one good thing I got there, and that's the phrase:
"That which does not kill me, makes me stronger."
Do we really need the solution? Couldn't we just enjoy the problem for now?
DarkAries wrote:
...
Yet part of Nazism was based on Nietzsche, although the man himself would have looked at Hitler and called him a wuss. Stalin, though, now there is an equal-opportunity herd-thinner!!
Still. It'd be easy for a werewolf to not look at themselves as entirely human. Meaning they could just as easily look at themselves as better than human. Meaning that, in some cases, they could even potentially think of themselves as der Ubermensch.
And think of the hell that'd be raised on that account!
The problem with Stalin was that he was too good of a herd thinner, and he, for the most part, eliminated everyone he didn't like, or everyone a particular crony didn't like, and Russia suffered dearly for that, especially since he eliminated highly qualified people for suspecting that they may not totally mesh with the party doctrine, as well as literally depopulated entire reasons for lousy reasons..
Plus, neither Nietzsche nor Hitler was a very good observer of nature, nor natural history, as (species of) ubermensch come and go in a fabulous parade, only to suffer from a most horrifying turnover rate, while the untermensch either stick around for a long long time (like turtles or ferns), or become tomorrow's ubermensch.
Merrypaws wrote:Nietzsche, phaugh!
Really, don't get me started. Single part of my high school philosophy that I hated. There's only one good thing I got there, and that's the phrase:
"That which does not kill me, makes me stronger."
Actually, the only thing that Nietzsche said that made sense was "Life without music is a mistake."
"I was all of history's great acting robots: Acting Unit 0.8, Thespo-mat, David Duchovny!"
-Calculon
Nietzsche's philosophy in the hands of werewolves is scary, plain and simple. And, it's a plausible scary--far mor so than the drooling monster or the lumbering gorilla that is DarkWolf. (The movie, mind you, not our own Pack member DarkWolf. He must get a lot of undeserved hate mail by accident. Kind of like how some guy named Albert Brownrigg probably wonders why so many people think he's making this movie about werewolves.)
Nietzsche philosophy is actually painfully human. It thinks it isn't; it thinks it's getting out of the "good" and "evil" mindset and getting back to nature. But, it really just reinvents what counts as "good" in a way that looks decidedly evil to everyone else. It's also a plausible guiding philosophy of a group of werewolves who are less than nice towards everyone else.
Taking a Gestalt approach, since it's the "in" thing...
Scott Gardener wrote:Nietzsche's philosophy in the hands of werewolves is scary, plain and simple. And, it's a plausible scary--far mor so than the drooling monster or the lumbering gorilla that is DarkWolf. (The movie, mind you, not our own Pack member DarkWolf. He must get a lot of undeserved hate mail by accident. Kind of like how some guy named Albert Brownrigg probably wonders why so many people think he's making this movie about werewolves.)
Nietzsche philosophy is actually painfully human. It thinks it isn't; it thinks it's getting out of the "good" and "evil" mindset and getting back to nature. But, it really just reinvents what counts as "good" in a way that looks decidedly evil to everyone else. It's also a plausible guiding philosophy of a group of werewolves who are less than nice towards everyone else.
That, and Nietzsche never stopped to realize how big a role worms play a part in the lives of wolves, were or otherwise.
"I was all of history's great acting robots: Acting Unit 0.8, Thespo-mat, David Duchovny!"
-Calculon
I should think that a human half-way transforming into an animal would more like a human than just a gigantic, bipedal version of the animal in question. And I should think that the opposite is true (That if a wolf were to transform into a were-human, then he would look like a gigantic, bipedal version of a wolf).
If I am correct, the origin of werewolves came from ancient history, right about the time where you were considered to be consorting with the devil for doing almost everything, even eating cheese the wrong way. Right alongside the folktale of the crossroads mythos (being that the walking dead will appear at crossroads in the countryside) resides the folktale of the werewolf.
Back then, witch-haters were quite abundant, and as thus blamed many things on magick, as people are often prone to put the blame on the most likely scapegoat, though there is no proof of it. By rumor (I speculate on that part, see, for I was not there myself) it became knowledge that witches could, by way of flaying the skin off a wolf as well as performing a ritual unto the devil or nine, disguise themselves as such. Silly Dark Age peoples.
Of course, it would seem that Therians prefer a much nobler influence, which might or might not come from the Native American god, Wolf. Or, what have you. And there's always blaming the japanese hengeyokai for the bipedal thing. I guess.
Don't take any of this seriously if you don't want to, or if it interferes with something you believe in. After all, I could be full of it. I bet you you couldn't find the information I just told you in the larger paragraph on the net. Probably not even the crossroads myth.
Okay, I've said my 2 cents.
Of course I'd like to sit around and chat.
Of course I'd like to stay and chew the fat.
The eastern Native American tribes thru the Cherokee were a lot
cooler with the idea of what we would think of as a werewolf
than the western tribes thru the Navajo.
To them, there was a more respectful attitude towards animals,
not so much a fear reaction towards animals they didn't control.
Therefore, they respected them, and some of that reflected in their
spiritual beliefs. The idea that a human could embody what they
saw as the animal's virtues was, therefore, a good thing-a noble
thing if it's a complimentary quality. If the animal had a bad
reputation, that would be a different story entirely.
So, there would have been a positive reaction towards such a
creature.
=====
Frightened Europeans often claimed ANYTHING different was
evil, and thus werewolves would be seen as so.
As we discussed in a lower forum, the werewolves of Livonia,
however, considered themselves not only good Christians, but
champions of Christianity. That's why Jacob Thiess refused to
see a priest, since he considered himself holier than the priest.
"I am as good a Christian as any of you!" -Jacob Thiess.
So, it's not quite so absolute.
Cherokee werewolf? Good guy.
Navajo werewolf? Bad guy.
Mesoamerican nahual? Bad guy.
South American jaguar knight? Good guy but homicidal.
Not certain on this. I'd think they'd look similar to either they way goldenwolf or the whitewolf team has portrayed them. But as far as religion, I'd think that'd be up to the individuals themselves. Maybe larger packs would have their own reglion, but those who lack that option might go with their own viewpoints.
Terastas wrote:I just can't stress this enough: There are no right answers. Goldenwolf's werewolves and the White Wolf versions certainly are well-thought definitions, but until a real life werewolf comes out of the closet about his problem and gives us a full definition, all we can do is speculate and/or fantasize.
And considering what happened between White Wolf and Underworld, Freeborn really would be better off with its own unique version. There's nothing actually written that says if werewolves exist, so must vampires.
I think you are quite right. One reason why Goldenwolf's werewolves and the White Wolf werewolves have received so much admiration is because they are so well-thought-out (Goldenwolf's especially in terms of anatomy, and White Wolf's in terms of all sorts of things). Still, neither of these is entirely satisfactory to me. But they are pretty darn good.
I think the lesson to be learned is that:
1) Any well-thought-out werewolf (a labor of love, sweat and intelligence) will stand a fair chance of being extremely interesting to potential fans and viewers.
2) There are quite a number of possible scenarios that could fall into #1.
I tend to hate werewolf fiction in which the werewolves seemed slapped together. And, I sometimes love werewolf fiction in which the werewolves are very different from my usual preferences, IF those werewolves were designed according to #1.
I made up a few different types of were-creatures in my time. A lot of them are based on biology and science, such as physics and chemistry, but not overly so. Really we barely understand the world as it is today anyway. Going overboard with that confuses people. A bit of fantasy never hurt ;) I mean if they want to regenerate limbs, maybe they take a bit of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, a bit of other elements and just run the reaction who knows? In Animorphs (WHEN I WAS A CHILD!!!! Haha!) they 'borrowed' mass to become larger and when they grew smaller, their mass hung in some space area. I forgot. But anyway Im not sure where Im even going with that...!! I think for religion a werewolf would follow what they want. Just like the human race, werewolves could be very varied too. Just like humans also, werewolves might wish to conform to some sort of werewolf thing, and others might not. You'd get those typically selfish, greedy werewolves...those evil bloodthirsty ones...and all those traits are because they are half human not because they have a wolf in them...the wolf doesn't think that way. The wolf simply lives. I feel like writing now. I've always sort of been a fan of really different things, instead of really cliche. Which is why I'm here I suppose.
<b> Pack Drunk</b>
"Animals were not made for humans, not anymore than black people were made for whites or women for men" -Alice Walker-
personal openion...
-not gargantuan monsters (goldenwolfen=good)
-no specific religous affiliation (can be aligned to w/e)
-mabie some local organization (a town has a pack, but it doesn't get any bigger)
-some wolf intinctual influance, but not a brainwashinng amount (Lycanthrope = good)
yea... thats about my only constraints...
(this is my general openion, and for the most part, any werewolf is a good werewolf. ...well, except the mindless, ape-looking ones....)
Kirk Hammett wrote:In Animorphs (WHEN I WAS A CHILD!!!! Haha!) they 'borrowed' mass to become larger and when they grew smaller, their mass hung in some space area. I forgot.
Zero-space. In fact there was a whole book with a plotline based on that fact.
I don't suffer from lycanthropy, I enjoy every minute of it!
I would think that werewolves would be very slim, agile, and wiry because of their lifestyle.
As for religion, I would think of them as having a Pagan religion, because they are more in tune with the natural world than humans and their are many wolf/wolfish gods in any of the pagan pantheons.
Morkuluv: The belief that werewolves are of the devil is the mistake the Church Fathers made. Then the Benandanti came along, showed them how wrong they were, and they whipped and banished them to cover their own a** so they wouldn't have to admit to it.
So who's more screwed up? It ain't the Goodwalkers — they went home to Apollo and Artemis.
That would be funny. Turning a Christian into a pure evil Satanic motherfucker. 
I feel like writing now. I've always sort of been a fan of really different things, instead of really cliche. Which is why I'm here I suppose.
