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.