Whether on a spiritual, or metaphorical, or whatever kind of plain, both regard their souls as being... different, from normal people's. Like being transgendered, only this is more transspecies -- though those who believe that their souls literally aren't human are few and far between, and who knows, maybe even those guys are just, starved for attention, or something. (Maybe not, but, maybe. Lots of people believe lots of things.) So, really, no, I guess it's nothing like being transgendered. But, yeah, exactly like that.
What we're talking about are therianthropes and otherkin. I've mentioned how interchanged the terms are, and how I don't believe they refer to precisely technically the same thing, and how I'm probably right because they're really not precisely technically the same thing. There are some great resources to look into this kind of thing, though, and how it looks so far: therians are more, souls-of-animals, people, while otherkin are souls-of-mythical-and-legendary-races-and-stuff kind of people. Blurry lines still, especially when dealing with dragons, and you do see a lot of intercourse between the (fandoms? subcultures? countercultures?)... but it's all wholly distinct from space aliens. Which is good to know.
AHWWoooo!
The board alt.horror.werewolves is so important in the therian community as to warrant an abbreviation! AHWW, or AHWw, as it's known. Darn impressive, though evidence indicates they've been abbreviating it more or less since its inception. They had a point; it's certainly a lot easier to type.
November 16th 1992- alt.horror.werewolves is created. I'm not sure if anyone could have predicted where it would go from there. We've got a fixed date on that.
The precise date when people actually started coming out of the closet, or woodwork, or however you'd prefer to picture it, as actually (believing/pretending themselves to be) werewolves, is lost to the murky depths of really spotty internet archiving, though it was sometime in 1993. My previous post may have given the impression that it was still in '92, the only thing we've got an actual date on, but with no real real dates past that and those starting out during AHWw's first shaky footsteps probably being the ones interested enough to be the ones who'd later announce themselves as werewolves, we can have the beginnings of the werewolf-ings be 16th Nov '92 as it is, with the precise date anyone speaks up about it be beside the point.**
All of this stuff I'm talking about and have mentioned so far is real and really happened in real life.
and now onto the fiction
None of the real therian stuff is going to hit until book 2, I realize, but it's helpful to have it down right now. With, OttO and Ron the Werebat and all these folks, remember, continuing to be real people out there somewhere, to depict them (fictionally) as being genuine fictional werewolves would come across... I'm not sure of the phrase, "bad taste" springs to mind, but-- we'll tread lightly here. (You can imagine if it were you; I'd find it awesome and offensive in perfectly equal measures, and I'd imagine I'd go around feeling paranoid for the rest of my life.) Real people, and, though we can stick some genuine werewolves in the middle there (if the people from AHWw aren't werewolves already in real life) (either way we can have fictional ones of those) it still feels kind of offensive and gimmicky. It's a problem, though, that every urban fantasy writer has to address at one time or another.
I've been thinking about this issue a lot this week-- Wiccans are real things, pagans are real things, and witches and warlocks have real power in Agent Moone's universe at least and it's impossible to say how much that extends into ours. An apartmentmate of mine I had once has dreams about people before he's met them, and once lived in a house legally recognized by the state of Pennsylvania to be haunted. Another apartmentmate of mine had a witch for a girlfriend once, but cut the relationship off when she offered to summon a demon so they could have a kinky damnation-based three-way. I'm Mormon, and can offer you some very compelling evidence regarding the circumstances under which seer stones can work. It's perfectly alright to throw your arms up in the air and say, shucks, I don't know, sometimes.
So, I don't know.
how are we going to handle this in TTDECBA?
Glad you asked, and it's why I'm super psyched that at least this is an espionage thriller. Spies have this thing called compartmentalization. Maybe you've heard of it. Beyond classifications of "secret" and "top secret," we have "eyes only." Nobody knows all the beans, so it's impossible to spill all the beans. We can say, in real life, "I don't know," and it's easy fictionalizing all this; just have Agent Moone not know either.
I think it's hilarious. The idea of compartmentalization over aspects of reality, what he's dealing with, whether his intel's any good or not even! If someone walked up to him and told him Dracula's compiled from actual accounts, he'd have no clue if it were true, if the person who told him that was being serious, or his leg were being yanked, or if the person were crazy and just actually believe that though it's not true. Or if it's some trippy realty-altered combination of any of those. It's funny, it captures the paranoia of espionage perfectly, and this uncertainty extends into real life, further blending fantasy with reality, which is sobering.
"I can't tell you, Finn," SMITH says, more or less. "I can't say how much of it is real and how much isn't. I can't say how much of that I know for myself. I can't even tell you which of all the religions is the correct one. But I can say this..." he leans in conspiratorially. "It's not the Church of the Invisible Pink Unicorn."
Book 2, Agent Moone has to run head on into that, I think. Meet (fictional) real-life (real-life) werewolves, while having no idea the lines between who's a genuine shapeshifting wolfman and who's just (?) a (real-life) therian.
I hope that sidesteps enough of the unfortunate implications in having such an urban fantasy be based so closely on actual happenings. Works for me.
bonus: ombudsing
The post from the week before last, I wasn't sure where to put this, so, here, bonus section. It regards the etymology of the qword "necronomicon." I translate it as Necro-Nom-Icon, dead-name-book-- The Greek necro- as the combining form works, and rendering "nom" as "name" from the Greek ónoma (or Latin nomen, if we want to mix tongues) might get a pass (though the "nom" part is generally taken to be from the Greek nómos, "law,") but my rendering of "icon" as "book" rather than "image" is really just inexcusable.
Also, I identify Necron as "death," while in reality it's the Greek neuter form of Necros "dead." Omni is from the Latin, as is Contra; so necron-omin-con(tra) would be the combining of two Latin words and a Greek one. Which, works, I guess. Mortuum-omni-contra, literally translating the first part (neuter "dead") into Latin. Which, I'd conjure, is hardly grammatical either, oh well?...
This is what you get for trying to have fun in a footnote.
oh and speaking of footnotes
* If anyone out there in internet land has any corrections and/or clarifications, it would be appreciated, as I would be the first to admit I'm by no means the foremost authority, though the furry fandom and related subcultures has kind of fascinated me since I learned of their existences. Go right ahead, there's no judgement here.
**Later on in 1993, alt.fan.dragons would be founded, which would grow to share the same function AHWw does for werewolves, as alt.fan.dragons does for... dragon people. Whichever category, therian or otherkin, they fall into (if either.) Oh, liminality!
Sweet! So when do I get to read a rough draft from the first book!?
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