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I've never understood why werewolves had to have their skin go completely grey for no good reason. I think it's kind of dumb, even if it's reasons like designers getting around the budget of fully-furred bodies or "MY ARTISTIC VISION!!!111".

But to that trope's credit, it actually got me thinking about a werewolf's skin simply darkening when they change. However people try to spin it, I think darkening skin could be understood as basically the skin "growing" as an organ, so that it can stretch more, to accommodate the change or growth in physical build.

It's such a trivial thing at first glance, but I think this could be an important thing to keep in mind when people design a werewolf.

Well for starters dark skin could be sign of sickness witch in some way its kind of logical if they are Virus based and not magical. As for fur its designers choice and not allways budget issues for example(Please do not kill me):

In Underworld Lycans were intentionaly without the fur becouse they wanted its body attonomy is shown plus we humans also lack fur, but Underworld Werewolfs are fully furred.

"A sign of sickness" would imply that the skin also has a lot of other awful symptoms, like black spots, eczema-like rashes, or just excessive dryness of the skin, which could potentially run contrary to interpretations on how lycanthropy makes people "feel really really good". The point I brought up would be more akin to how rubber works, because our skin is similar to rubber in that the more it stretches, the lighter the color due to tensile stress or general thinness.

for sickness i was refering to virus gray skin could be side effect of active virus or planed skin color change

I don't know about a relationship between transformation related skin growth patterns and resulting skin colour, but I've heard that , for example, a tiger's skin is striped like its fur, albeit not as vividly coloured. I'd hazard a guess this goes for wolves too (I searched around, there aren't too many furless wolf reference pictures, but I did find a bald bear with somewhat gray leathery looking skin). If we presume the classic shadowy black wolf started the werewolf lineage then perhaps the transformed werewolf would have dark skin by dumb inheritance (it inherited wolf shaped bone and soft tissue deformities after all). Then there's lighting conditions, which I won't go into because we could be here all day trying to grasp perceptual eye responses to skin lit by moonlight (The spectral colour ratios...The multiple pigment layers...The sub-surface scattering. Oh my!).

I like Lovec's point, the look of a disease racked animal was there in the underworld werewolves, my only gripe with that is how perfect the human form is, surely the disease cuts both ways. If vampires have the complexion of unbaked pastry dipped in candle wax, then in the light if a diseased marked werewolf form why should the werewolf's human complexion look positively radiant?

On a side note, as I said I'm not sure about the premise of skin colour changes based on skin tension, I mentioned multiple pigment layers in jest, but one of those layers is blood, the red stuff that is squeezed out of the underlying tissues when the skin is pulled tight (ala "white knuckles" of a tightly clenched fist). Sure this certainly can and would affect skin colour, it's hardly unique to werewolves, but I guess it could be still be a trademark trait, at least during transformation, but persisting into the end form? I don't know about that.

I need to do something about my rambling .

The Meeper.

At least your rambling has more words and is generally more educated and coherent.

The point about tiger skin is interesting. Kind of amusing, actually, I'm picturing a werewolf with human skin that very barely resembles wolf markings. Or husky markings, you can never know if you actually *look* like a wolf when you change.

Joshua just one comment: Try too look for preexisting topic that has talk about issue you are intrested in or need an answer.

For example for Werewolf skin:
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=8147&p=215002&hilit=skin#p215002