Hey @Leucrotta, is An American Werewolf In London any good? We saw it at the library and I was like "oo werewolves" but the box just had pictures of boring humans (and said it was a horror movie of some kind).

@frost only kinda. This is the age before digital effects so the transformation sequence might be kinda clunky now but it's impressive for the time (1981), and he winds up as a quadruped, which you might like. There's a lot of the hero's guilt and upset about being a werewolf - he sees ghosts and there's an ethnic subplot which is borderline offensive in its clumsiness.

I liked it, but I honestly don't think you would, since most of the movie is about him as a human, and he dies at the end.

@Leucrotta Huhhh! Interesting.

@Leucrotta Yeah, I much prefer werewolf stories where the wolves are treated sympathetically instead of "ooo scary monster".

Whether that be "werewolves are headmates" (:3 ! ...sucks that the only book series we've seen like that took it into an absolutely /horrifying/ direction worldbuildingwise) or "it's just a single person who can shift to wolf" (Garou style).

@Leucrotta I still can't believe they took werewolves-as-headmates and veered STRAIGHT into "oh yeah most werewolf humans slowly kill their 'wolf sides' as a matter of course". What the virtual fuck.

And then in a spinoff series actually explored the "they're headmates" idea in a lot less disturbing fashion, where the protagonist's love interest's wolf is, wild yes, but also an actual person (...still capable of thinking for himself...) who does the right thing, while the protagonist's wolf is traumatized but also still herself (and doesn't show up much)

but I still can't get over the original worldbuilding nastiness of "oh yeah most of the time they get slowly beaten down until they're not people anymore". That's... that's one of the most horrifying ways to die I can think of (though not as bad as what happened to our last partners) and it's WAY less fictional than the author probably thought.