I’m reading “Silver Moon” by Catherine Lundoff rn bc it’s one of the only queer werewolf books I can find, and I guess I’m gonna make a working review thread on it so I can provide ya’ll with some Quarantine Entertainment while I work on comms in the meantime.
(SPOILERS!!!)

I’ll get to the actual story critique a bit later but I just wanna say that I’m really entertained by the sheer amount of growling people do in this book. Like our protag growls at her friends, her enemies, her friends growl at her, they growl at everybody!

There’s also a lot of biting back of growls too, like I’m almost a quarter of the way through at the moment and I’ve read the phrase “Becca bit back a growl,” like fifteen times now.

The thing that annoys me most about about werewolf fiction (or fiction that just features werewolves) is the fixation on the Alpha pack model, the idea of there being one wolf who bested others in aggressive combat and therefore leads the pack.

This line of thought about how wolves behave was popularized by Dr. David L. Mech, he published a book citing research that at the time seemed to confirm that standard wolf packs used aggressive tactics to determine who would lead.

but this research failed to account for the fact that the wolves studied were wolves kept in captivity with no familial relation, like the vast majority of wolf packs found in the wild. the vast majority of wolf packs are FAMILY UNITS, not packs of strangers.

Dr. David L. Mech realized this later on in his career, and then spent the entirety of his scientific career afterward debunking the misinformation that he himself helped to spread. here's a short video of him discussing it himself.

Packs found in the wild are comprised of family units, so of course, the breeding pair would be most likely to lead. they're the parents, after all. in groups containing more than one pair, there may be hierarchy, but that's not at all the same to what the alpha theory implies.

So why does the Alpha mentality bother me so much in werewolf fiction? well, aside from being a janky theory based on incorrect science and then applied to human characters as if humans and wolves are in any way similar in how they organize social systems...

I have never seen Alpha theory applied in a way that isn't just an excuse for characters to be inanely passive aggressive if not outright hostile to their fellow pack members because "i'm the alpha so do as i say" or "i wanna be the alpha so we're gonna fight to the death"

like I've seen werewolf stories where they're like "we're a FAMILY" and then every other page is just a constant battle of everyone fighting for dominance with each other, everyone growling at everyone else, barely holding themselves back because "they're half wolf" or whatever

like there's a word for families that constantly fight and don't communicate and every conversation is a fight for dominance and there's an uproar at the *slightest* hint of disrespect, that word is "shit" if not "abusive".

the research shows that wolf packs behave like regular ol' familial units instead of Eternal Fight Club so just ONCE I'd like to see a werewolf book where the characters are NICE, and LISTEN, and SUPPORT each other instead of fighting tooth and nail about who gets to be "ALPHA"

Amendment to earlier tweet in this thread:

it's supposed to be "but this research failed to account for the fact that the wolves studied were wolves kept in captivity with no familial relation, *UNLIKE* the vast majority of wolf packs found in the wild"

of all the typos to make