When I started writing the Lointaine books I had two things I was clear on:
- All the magic in my world is actually explainable by science, we just don’t necessarily understand science enough to do so. Although Connor, my quantum physicist, is working on it! (This is sort of the reverse of Clarke’s third law that says, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”)
And,
- Therefore, Magic has rules – even if my characters don’t completely understand them. They are at least sure Magic is definitely influenced by the collective unconscious. So, tropes and other trends in pop culture matter.
This is all well and good until I run into tropes that get the science all wrong. Take for example werewolf packs. If you’ve read urban fantasy about werewolves, chances are near 100% that you have come across pack alphas and dominance fights. The problem is, that doesn’t happen in actual wolf packs in the wild.
Also, since werewolves in the oldest folklore are basically allegories for disease there are a lot of weird rules about them that don’t make scientific sense – like werewolves being affected by silver. There have been some recent problematic usages of that historical link, so that was something I needed to be aware of too.
These issues were easy enough to sidestep in Sub Rosa because the Pack was peripheral to the main story, but the main character is different for Lointaine book 2. The Pack is much more central to the plot, and I really needed to resolve some of these conflicts.
The idea of the alpha wolf is based on studies done on wolves in captivity. It was popularized in the 1970s in a book by wildlife biologist David Mech. Dr. Mech tried to replicate his findings in the wild and realized packs look very different there. Basically, it would be the equivalent of studying how people interact in prisons and deciding that is how society at large works.
Wolves in the wild live in packs of related family members. The “alpha male” is dad and the “alpha female” is mom. Scientists mostly use the terms “breeding male” and “breeding female” now. Wolf packs consist of the parents and generally no more than one or two litters of pups. Packs tend to be small, usually with no more than 12 members. Once a wolf reaches maturity it disperses to look for a mate and start its own pack. (Occasionally, like in Yellowstone, there are more complex pack structures where there is more than one mated pair in a pack, but those are the exception rather than the rule.)
But the alpha male concept stuck around in pop culture. So, what’s a writer to do? I felt like I was going to have to break one of my rules. The melding of reality and tropes about werewolves was one of the harder things I did in creating Lointaine.
It would be easy to make the argument that the wolf packs in most books aren’t family units and are therefore more similar to the artificially created packs in captivity – that they should have an alpha, beta, and omega. Except, the Magic is very concerned with family lineage and the werewolves in my book were part of family units. So that dodge didn’t really work.
So, I decided that there needed to be a structure for when the families come together – and that perhaps that’s where the politics come into play. And since the Magic is always changing Lointaine based on the collective unconscious, well, it makes sense that the Pack is being changed by the Magic too – and maybe they don’t like the direction things are going…
To maintain my writerly sensibilities, the werewolves of Lointaine are currently walking a fine line between biology, historical tropes, and where the Magic is taking them. They have embraced some parts of the evolution of the werewolf archetype and tropes such as having packs over lone wolves, having control over the change, and being able to change more often than just during the full moon. They are actively resisting other tropes: dominance fights, what has come to be known as “alphahole” leaders in the urban fantasy reading community, control through savagery, etc. I hope you will be amused at how some of this plays out and the tools Lointaine’s Pack ends up using. After all, who would have thought that Robert’s Rules of Order would be a weapon in a battle against Magic?
P.S. – If you’d like to learn more about wolf packs I suggest:
Dr. David Merch: Wolf News and Information
Adam Ruins Everything — Alpha Males Do Not Exist