Were groups in general

[ad-kelley.livejournal.com]

I know I'm still new here, so let me know if I'm putting up too much stuff at once, but there was another point I wanted to make after my initial post last week.  After a couple of years of stewing about this author it's cathartic to finally have a place to post these things.  My bone to pick du jour is about the animal groups residing in the Lou.  While you could probably go on ad infinitum about how there are now far too many, my main concern is how they advance the plot (if at all).  
      The wererats, though underutilized now, fill a great niche in intelligence gathering and mercenary work.  The wolves work because how are you going to have vampires and not werewolves? After this, the relevance of the groups begins to dissolve.  It seems more and more (see a recent blog entry where she discusses cougars, I don't remember which) that LKH gets a passing interest in an animal and in the next installment Anita is boffing that particular beast and we're stuck with it forever mucking up the Anitaverse continuity.  To some extent the problem is just the same as it is in the rest of her writing in that she allows everything to become bloated and never thins the herd as it were, but that doesn't make it any more irritating.  I mentioned the werehyenas in my last post.  Where are they? They show up, posture, disappear again.  Their alpha NEVER shows up.  How many other groups are like that? This particularly gets under my skin because I considered the hyenas to be a really interesting idea until nothing came of them.
     The most persistent and blatant offenders however, are the wereleopards.  How can of the world's deadliest big cats become so flaccid and stupid in one woman's hands? Without exception (besides Merle and some new guy) they are sniveling children who can't move until Anita tells them to.  They do nothing to advance the plot (Nathaniel and Micah, in my opinion, are literally the worst characters created in modern fiction), and accomplish nothing in the narrative other than making you feel like you could probably beat up a wereleopard.  I know Gabriel was a pretty horrendous guy, but he was scary as hell, too.  I think LKH needs to drastically reduce the amount of shifters in her stories, or at least the ones that come onto centerstage, and focus on building those characters into something respectable.  Pathos is a wonderful thing, but at the end of the day these ARE supposed to be monsters, aren't they?

Anyways, i was basically wondering what everyone else here thought about the various lycanthropy groups (leopards in particular) , which ones could YOU do without? What do you want to see more of?

Comments

[daphne-gateau.livejournal.com]

I've always pictured this big traffic jam on that one night a month. Police don't notice a long string of cars going offroad to the woods every full moon? Yeah, right. ;)

Inheriting the leopards was just bad writing. I completely agree with you. I would have loved to see the leopards just disband and go their separate ways. What purpose did Anita serve in their lives? If anything she dragged them into more trouble than she ever protected them from.

[sehkmetschild.livejournal.com]

"I've always pictured this big traffic jam on that one night a month. Police don't notice a long string of cars going offroad to the woods every full moon? Yeah, right. ;)"

Too funny!! I always thought that was a little sloppy too.

When I write about the weres going to "celebrate" the full moon they all say their Wiccan and carpool out of town.**

That thing that didn't make sense to me about the books was that the weres can't reproduce without Deus Ex Machina help. LKH of the Biology degree should know that an organism's first priority is to gets its genes into the next generation. And if the disease really made it's host as healthy as possible to survive, wouldn't it then protect the infant from miscarriage?

Also, do you think, were lycanthropy real, people with HIV and AIDS virus would go looking for a were to infect them since in all the legends it kills any illness the host already has? Or am I just an insensitive dork?****



**I wrote about multiple were communities before I even read the Anita books. I hate when that happens!

****I vote insensitive dork.

[dwg.livejournal.com]

That conversation's come up before with okay, if lycanthropy is so awesome, why aren't people with terminal diseases lining up to get infected in order to be cured? Morally, there's nothing to really stop a doctor from injecting patients with concentrated lycanthropy serum.

The other part is that there's a serious neglect of shapeshifter culture because it's all so OMG SECRET. I mean, if you get infected with lycanthropy from a bad batch of vaccine, then what? Where do you go for help figuring out where to go from here? How the hell does the pack find you to induct you into their secret gatherings? Is there homework on the history and rituals? An instruction manual of "So You're A Werewolf: Things You Need To Know."

Vampires have a semi-structure in place when if you're going to be turned, the master would stick around to show the n00b the ropes, so what do werewolves do? Especially if you're a survivor of a genuine attack.

Ugh, sorry to babble at you, but you're not alone in being an insensitive dork that thinks too much about these things.

[leggomylegolas.livejournal.com]

Doesn't Anita have like a degree in "preturnatural biology" or some such nonsense, even?

I always found that sort of ridiculous. I mean, everyone knows there are wereanimals, correct? And yet no one knows anything about them or how they work? I just find that ridiculously hard to believe. If it became known in the real actual world that goddamn werewolves existed for real, EVERYONE WOULD TALK ABOUT IT NONSTOP for like YEARS.

And I have to wonder what exactly WAS covered in those preturnatural biology classes. Maybe she just boffed the professors for four years.

[dwg.livejournal.com]

IDEK what she did at college, because it's clearly not getting drunk or higher learning. Or both, as there were a couple of times when I got drunk in my lunch break and then turned up to prac where I'd get to handle dangerous chemicals.

There's talk in...Blue Moon, I think? About Richard going off to study trolls with his new girlfriend and Anita's musing about how she wanted to be a Jane Goodall for this sort of thing. So...it's okay for people to go off and live in the wild to study trolls, but not somehow get themselves intergrated into a wolf pack (even thoug humans are allowed, like Marianne) to study them, or even get themselves wolfed in order to be accepted? Whaaa. Or even vampired to study their internal political hierarchy, because Anita's meant to be an expert in the field, lives with the undead, and still has to get things mansplained to her.

There's very little thought gone into how the world is affected by having this one simple thing of werewolves exist, everyone knows about it. I'm pretty sure that even once it was understood that some of the mysticism is dispelled with science to reveal that it's a disease, there's still all the folklore surrounding werewolves and that's been around a hell of a lot longer. It doesn't make sense to even treat it with the same stigma as HIV/AIDS. Schitzophrenia would be more appropriate, perhaps? Given that Anita's got all these animals inside her that seem to have independent wants of their own that she fights against, or perhaps are a magnification of her own baser instincts and this causes her to act inappropriately toward others and not realise what she's doing because it's not her it's her "beast."

[leggomylegolas.livejournal.com]

Wasn't there one - something Ashes? No, Burnt Offerings, I think. Where there's like, a pyromaniac vampire and at one point this lady sets a vampire on fire and Anita instantly knows that this lady knows a lot about vampires - such as, that they're flammable - and she must be part of that anti-vampire church or cult or something. And she explains to one of the policemen that vampires catch on fire. And he's all "Damn I didn't know that". There's a college program about the biology of these things, but no one ever thought to tell the GODDAMN POLICE that vampires CATCH FIRE PRETTY EASILY? This really strains credulity.

Like, who the fuck wouldn't/doesn't know that? It seems pretty goddamn basic to me. I think Laurel just needed Anita to know lots of things about vampires that other people don't, but couldn't be assed to come up with something that would make sense for that purpose.

[sehkmetschild.livejournal.com]

Glad I'm not the only one :P.

[amamelina.livejournal.com]

[b]That conversation's come up before with okay, if lycanthropy is so awesome, why aren't people with terminal diseases lining up to get infected in order to be cured? Morally, there's nothing to really stop a doctor from injecting patients with concentrated lycanthropy serum.[/b]

Not to go too far back, but read this and had to respond. I have in my "future writings" notebook a plot like that. Except it was vampires. In the future, vampires are known to exist and have made a name for themselves as a medical miracle. They claim that they are free from human sufferings like cancer and aids. To prove it, they infected a few patients and - wham! - said patients appeared cured. Slowly, they start changing people and keeping others as slaves and food supply (they need to breed humans to continue having food). The hero or heroine of the book used to have cancer and became a vampire under the program. S/he finds out that it was all a lie and the infection is still there, it's just growing at a much slower rate and surgery is out of the question because it could kill him/her now. Also, all the infected were slated for death so the secret can't be made known.

I think it's between the pages of the ghost psychic plots and the vampire lawyer story.

[lady-fellshot.livejournal.com]

That's OK. This insensitive dork agrees that at least some terminally patients would likely be just fine with a side effect that manifests once a month.

[roguetailkinker.livejournal.com]

A talented fanfic writer wrote about a living will giving permission to do this in case of serious illness or injury. She called it the "Bite Me clause". :-D