Jun. 21st, 2019 10:04 am
Some thoughts about werewolves...
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thrillingdetectivetalesSo, in having C (from San Antonio) do a quick, non-fandom read over of the short werewolf fill I wrote for H/C Bingo, she mentioned an animated series of episodic shorts called Love, Death + Robots that features a story about werewolf soldiers in the modern-day American military. I watched it, because I have yet to be able to successfully turn down almost any media involving werewolves for reasons I still can't really explain, and it fucked me up but good.
If you want to read more, continue on, but beware that there be spoilers ahead:
It's a pretty straightforward premise as far as plot goes, following two werewolf soldiers as they struggle with the prejudices of the humans in their unit as well as a werewolf that's part of the local population in the area they're occupying who objects strongly to the military presence in their town for understandable reasons. This isn't really a review so I'm not going to pick it apart, but I did want to talk about some aspects of the social world-building that I found particularly satisfying in a couple of ways.
When I write werewolves, or other animal-based shapeshifters, I try to be conscientious of the different ways they might experience the world - relying more heavily on scent than sight for ambient sensory input, for example - and how they might interact socially with both one another and people who don't share their same social background. While the LD+R episode was a little heavy-handed on some of its thematic content, I really enjoyed the subtle nods they made toward a greater werewolf culture, like how Decker and Sobieski don't wear shoes and are significantly less armored than their fully human counterparts:
They're also more physically affectionate and in each other's space more than the other soldiers, which of course makes sense but was sweet and strangely poignant juxtaposed against the more brusque interactions of the surrounding characters:
Now for the spoilery bits - Sobieski (to the right in the GIF above) goes off on a mission with a group of soldiers and leaves Decker (on the left) and gets straight up murdered by another werewolf, who also gleefully slaughters everyone in their little makeshift camp. As you can probably guess the plot leans pretty hard into both Decker wanting revenge for his friend and the soldiers wanting revenge for theirs, so it's a nice little Venn diagram of bloody retribution that plays with the concept of vengeance (Decker wanting to slaughter this other werewolf as payback) versus "justice" (the Major of their unit demanding that he wants the werewolf alive). It doesn't do a whole lot with either concept that I haven't seen before, although the fight scene is pretty dope, but then this episode is just under 20 minutes so they didn't have too much time to get cute thematically.
Anyway, the important part here is that there's a scene at the end where Decker collects Sobieski's body and goes to take care of it via wolf custom and before he does, he unzips the body bag and brushes his fingers over Sobieski's face and takes in his scent one last time, which is witnessed by all the surrounding men who are all varying degrees of creeped out by it. Now, of course, from a human perspective it's a bit of an odd thing to do, particularly because half of Sobieski's face was missing at the time, but overall it was a really startlingly tender and well-imagined example of a social practice that might be taboo to humans but makes total sense as a facet of werewolf culture.
I couldn't tell you why I'm so thrilled by it, but even beyond the final scenting business there were so many tiny little things that went into this snippet of a show that made the world from the perspective of a supernatural being feel so rich and long-established. A lot of the fantasy media I consume (and frankly, a decent volume of the fantasy media I produce) doesn't put that amount of care or thought into the culture of a creature that's not human, or if they do they still build community values based on human principles so it feels like Humanity 2.0, Now with Bonus Wolf Pelt! more than its own, uniquely evolved thing.
I enjoyed it so much that I didn't even mind that the werewolves were legitimate like, wolf-men style monsters rather than just folks who become dogs, which I tend to have strong opinions about. It helped that the character design for the wolves and the animation of their transformations was fairly stellar, for all that it was also pretty classic. Also, they did the glowy eyes thing:
And I'm kind of a slut for the glowy eyes thing. I'm definitely going to have to give this a watch again to see if I can pick up on anything elseand try really hard to refrain from writing out a post-canon addendum where Decker walks out on the military and maybe has a brush with another (reincarnated?) soldier who might be able to relate to his unique circumstances.
I JUST HAVE A LOT OF FEELINGS ABOUT WEREWOLVES OKAY
If you want to read more, continue on, but beware that there be spoilers ahead:
It's a pretty straightforward premise as far as plot goes, following two werewolf soldiers as they struggle with the prejudices of the humans in their unit as well as a werewolf that's part of the local population in the area they're occupying who objects strongly to the military presence in their town for understandable reasons. This isn't really a review so I'm not going to pick it apart, but I did want to talk about some aspects of the social world-building that I found particularly satisfying in a couple of ways.
When I write werewolves, or other animal-based shapeshifters, I try to be conscientious of the different ways they might experience the world - relying more heavily on scent than sight for ambient sensory input, for example - and how they might interact socially with both one another and people who don't share their same social background. While the LD+R episode was a little heavy-handed on some of its thematic content, I really enjoyed the subtle nods they made toward a greater werewolf culture, like how Decker and Sobieski don't wear shoes and are significantly less armored than their fully human counterparts:
They're also more physically affectionate and in each other's space more than the other soldiers, which of course makes sense but was sweet and strangely poignant juxtaposed against the more brusque interactions of the surrounding characters:
Now for the spoilery bits - Sobieski (to the right in the GIF above) goes off on a mission with a group of soldiers and leaves Decker (on the left) and gets straight up murdered by another werewolf, who also gleefully slaughters everyone in their little makeshift camp. As you can probably guess the plot leans pretty hard into both Decker wanting revenge for his friend and the soldiers wanting revenge for theirs, so it's a nice little Venn diagram of bloody retribution that plays with the concept of vengeance (Decker wanting to slaughter this other werewolf as payback) versus "justice" (the Major of their unit demanding that he wants the werewolf alive). It doesn't do a whole lot with either concept that I haven't seen before, although the fight scene is pretty dope, but then this episode is just under 20 minutes so they didn't have too much time to get cute thematically.
Anyway, the important part here is that there's a scene at the end where Decker collects Sobieski's body and goes to take care of it via wolf custom and before he does, he unzips the body bag and brushes his fingers over Sobieski's face and takes in his scent one last time, which is witnessed by all the surrounding men who are all varying degrees of creeped out by it. Now, of course, from a human perspective it's a bit of an odd thing to do, particularly because half of Sobieski's face was missing at the time, but overall it was a really startlingly tender and well-imagined example of a social practice that might be taboo to humans but makes total sense as a facet of werewolf culture.
I couldn't tell you why I'm so thrilled by it, but even beyond the final scenting business there were so many tiny little things that went into this snippet of a show that made the world from the perspective of a supernatural being feel so rich and long-established. A lot of the fantasy media I consume (and frankly, a decent volume of the fantasy media I produce) doesn't put that amount of care or thought into the culture of a creature that's not human, or if they do they still build community values based on human principles so it feels like Humanity 2.0, Now with Bonus Wolf Pelt! more than its own, uniquely evolved thing.
I enjoyed it so much that I didn't even mind that the werewolves were legitimate like, wolf-men style monsters rather than just folks who become dogs, which I tend to have strong opinions about. It helped that the character design for the wolves and the animation of their transformations was fairly stellar, for all that it was also pretty classic. Also, they did the glowy eyes thing:
And I'm kind of a slut for the glowy eyes thing. I'm definitely going to have to give this a watch again to see if I can pick up on anything else
I JUST HAVE A LOT OF FEELINGS ABOUT WEREWOLVES OKAY
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