I have a small problem with the state of current Urban Fantasy. It is all shifters all the way down!
Here’s an exploration into why that particular myth is a strange choice to go viral.
Chaste sexy monsters?
Sexy monsters have been around forever from Beauty and the Beast to Frankenstein. (Though if you want to dig deeper, just be prepared when googling sexy monster!) It seems to have really taken off with the film era and Bride of Frankenstein. But even so, until Teen Wolf, Vampire Diaries, and Twilight, werewolves were not a part of global pop culture, and if they did get in, they were firmly bad guys and mostly there for the ick factor. Now we get swoony werewolves aimed at teenagers. What?
Before the aughts, werewolves were bad guys; subprime mortgages were a great investment, and social media was young. The worst thing that happened on a platform was living vicariously through the juice cleanse of your junior year prom date.
Just me?
I’m saying that it was a more innocent time without these deeply weird myths about former monsters now insisting on marriage.
Alpha wolves are not a thing.
In the modern stories about werewolves, it’s almost impossible to find a story that doesn’t include an alpha werewolf with dominance over other poor wolves and fights to the death to maintain the hierarchy and take mates, whether they want to be taken or not. Which is a whole different newsletter.
Real wolves don’t have alphas. It was all a mistake.
Researchers studied wolves in captivity, and what they were taking for dominance was actually territorial instinct. Wolves have hunting grounds, and if you put a bunch of them together, they can’t establish their grounds and compete for the tiny real estate they have. It’s a behavior totally unseen in the wild.
The idea was popularized by researcher David Mech, who has repudiated his own book and research and asserts that the term alpha is incorrect. When he studied wolves in the wild, he realized what he took for “alpha” was just the parent. Left to their own devices, wolves live in family groups and tend to avoid other families so that there’s enough food for everybody. The parents control their children so the kids, you know, grow up competent, not so they can dominate them.
Deer fight, not wolves.
There are dominance fights in nature and strict hierarchal groups, but we now know this behavior is common in prey animals, specifically herd animals like deer, not carnivores. Which is an image I just can’t get out of my head: the majestic alpha werewolf acting like a deer. It’s also common in our primate cousins, which may explain the appeal to us.
Since we are unlikely apex predators whose original place in the food chain was probably scavenger, it makes sense why we would glorify a true apex predator acting as a herd animal. That’s a lot closer to our experience than I think we want to think about.
It’s a weirdly popular European myth. There are other people. And other carnivores.
Many different European cultures’ fidelity to werewolves as their main monsters is kind of unusual. Japanese myths include a pretty much endless list of scary creatures and there are shape-shifting legends all over the world, but Europe loved their wolves.
It may be because it’s the main predator most villages would interact with. Europe has bears, but they are much shyer of humans than wolves, and there’s really nothing else to compete with them. Unlike other continents with much scarier carnivores.
Or it’s all one story that we only saw as different European myths because of when it got written down?
The idea of a wolfman seemed to spring up all over Europe in the Gilgamesh epic, Nordic folklore, Greek mythology, and Old German and French stories all at once. But maybe it’s all one older story, and the Proto-Indo-European civilization that birthed all of those languages also birthed these myths.
That’s kind of cool to think that somebody somewhere in southern Europe or the Northern Middle East in 1000 BCE told a story about a guy turning into a wolf and that has metastasized into a dozen epics, and, eventually, Taylor Lautner running around without a shirt.
The glorified blood and the bite.
There are lots of arguments that myths are our instincts, and werewolves speak to some super squicky ones. One of the key parts of the werewolf myth is the bite, the infection, and the horror of the change. Even in shifter novels divorced from the monsters as much as possible, usually still keep this one. It’s an instinctive fear, one that we’ve gotten really familiar with in the last couple of years. They are a really bloody part of our history.
Wolves I like:
All this being said, it doesn’t stop me from reading a lot of werewolf fiction, since there’s just a lot being published. Here are my favorites:
- Audrey Faye’s Ghost Mountain Series – which is also the best book I’ve ever read about trauma, fiction or non. The author describes it as warm, furry belonging. The Body Keeps Score is in second place. Third place is Widen the Window, but that’s another postcard.
- Gail Carrigar’s Parasol Protectorate, author of The Heroine’s Journey and steampunk, victorian werewolves. Just hilarious.
- Patricia Briggs and her Mercy Thompson series, which is one of the originals and still holds up.