Users/User_Essays/WickedWitchOfTheWeb/TheGarou
This essay is something I'm writing to try to explain and justify the Garou (which is what werewolves call themselves - no, I don't know why they use French, rather than some mystical spirit tongue or Sumerian or something). I'm hoping to make it fairer and more useful than Dr_Brilliance(Son_of_Ether) 's thing, which is pretty Technocratic on how "werewolves are the enemy", but I'm also going to not pull my punches.
Werewolves Are Dangerous. I'm putting this on its own line. If you don't know how to interact with them, don't go alone. They go from zero to murder in three seconds. If you find your paths crossing with them, do your research, talk with other people, and make sure other people know what you're doing. I want to get this out first, because I'm going to spend some of the rest of this telling people that they're not as bad as some other people - like the 'Crats - say they are. They are fluffy, but they are not friendly. I have Garou friends, and even then it's been touch and go sometimes, especially with their extremists.
First things first.
The Garou are fighting for the right side. That's something I can't emphasise heavily enough. For all their flaws (and they have lots of flaws), they're fighting the good fight, just like us. They realise that the forces of international capitalism are evil and that there are a bunch of doubly evil companies which are actually controlled by evil spirits. Like, even eviller than your average Syndicate executive, which is pretty amazing when you consider that the Syndicate has assholes like Donald_Sykes(CoX_Defector) in it who dump you and go off and become a banker. What I'm saying is that you have to keep in mind that the people in charge of the things the Garou fight against are totally evil, and that even if they're dysfunctional and destructive, their enemies are worse.
This is where the problems sort of come up. Because the thing is, a lot of Garou were never human. That's a really big problem. This is something you have to keep track of. There are three kinds of Garou, in where they come from. There are the Homnids, who were born human, and... well, mentally they're mostly like very angry humans who can turn into animals and tear things apart.
Then there are the Lupus, who were born as wolves, and mentally they're more like smart wolves. That means they don't think properly. A newly changed Lupus Garou is a two-year old wolf which is suddenly human smart and doesn't know shit about human society. One of the unpleasant things about werewolf society is that... okay, you know how wolves breed? They have lots of pups and they grow up fast? Yeah. That. Something I can't approve of is how they use these fast-breeding wolf pups as cannon fodder. And the ones who survive are usually traumatised and hate humans for how their packmates got killed.
Finally, there's the Metis, which are what you get when both the parents are werewolves. They're born in their giant killy wolf-man form, they're all deformed in some way, they're sterile, and they're raised in the werewolf culture which is pretty toxic.
Basically, culturally, the problem with the Garou is the one so common to patriarchal warrior cultures. And the Garou do that despite being pretty egalitarian in theory. But they're all so fucking macho about things that they all act like they're mainlining testosterone. They define themselves as warriors, they live to fight, and a lot of them are like "I will die in battle. I hope for a good death". Their culture has no room for weakness, and they're expected to throw their lives away before they get too old to fight.
It's really, really toxic. But there's a reason it's so toxic, and that's because they're in a life and death struggle with evil spirits and evil megacorps.
Don't trust Pentex or List_of_Pentex_Subsidaries. Seriously, if it's a choice between Technocrats and Pentex, side with the Technocrats. It's got a lot of Nephandi among its ranks, and systematic possession by wicked spirits and the like. Ever seen Captain Planet? Yeah, Pentex is like that. It's a worm which takes advantage of the rotten, corrupt world that the Union has made. And the way the 'Crats haven't wiped it out yet shows how corrupt or negligent or whatever they are.
Point the second.
The Garou are pretty badly educated about the world and how it works. They're creatures of the spirit world, almost as much spirit as flesh, but they don't really understand the Umbra at all. They don't grasp the Dimensional Anomaly, they can't leave the Near Umbra, and they fail to understand that spirit and flesh are just manifestations of the universe's desire for life. The universe wants to live, and they do recognise this as 'Gaia'. However, they claim that this is just the spirit of the Earth, rather than something more cosmic.
This is a pretty common thing they do, prioritising the spiritual above everything. It explains a lot about them. I'm a pretty passable witch. I invoke spirits quite a lot, drawing on the life which exists within even inanimate objects, but I don't pretend that they have primacy over everything else.
Moreover, their religion holds that the cosmic principles of Stasis, Dynamism and Primordialism are actually great spirits, the so-called Weaver, Wyld and Worm. No, the fact that they're WWW doesn't mean you can email them easily. It's not surprising that they get it backwards, but their 'Weaver' is just a spirit which draws its nature from life's desire for constancy.
Worse yet, they also don't understand the consensual nature of reality at all. Believe it or not, but they actually think this 'Weaver' is chaining reality, rather than it being the product of the Technocratic Union enforcing its women-hating patriarchal ideology which unfortunately infects lots of men on our own side too. It's bad enough that there are Technocrats who claim that they're the ones who are responsible for feminism and point at the misogynist extremists on our side as proof. And werewolves have no idea how much of society the Union controls, even when we warn them.
Mind you, we might be lucky there. Because...
Third item.
Do you know, most werewolves come in tribes? They're not real tribes, of course; they're more like a mix of weakly bloodline-linked groups and religions. Well, if you look at their distribution, the tribes are disproportionately European. It's pretty disgusting, actually. There's a German tribe, an Irish tribe, an Italian tribe, a Russian tribe, a Greek one, a Baltic one, a Middle Eastern one, an Egyptian one, and there was a Scottish one. Meanwhile, there's a grand total of one tribe for all of Asia.
Pretty racist, really.
And because most of them are Europeans, the Garou are really good at cultural oppression and genocide if you look at their history. Like, they're Technocrat-good (no wonder one of their tribes, the Glass Walkers are in a friends-with-benefits relationship with the 'Crats). And that's a real tragedy, because they often did it with good intentions, unlike the Union. But they did it all the same. They killed off most of the other werecreatures, and worse, they killed lots and lots of humans.
Watch out for Technocrats rubbing this in your face if they know you associate with werewolves. Oh, the Union doesn't care about the millions and millions of people they've killed, but they will point out that there are archeological records which show that there were thousands of years where the Garou murdered vast numbers of people trying to keep the human population under control. And not in sensible ways, by birth control and education. Nope, just fangs and claws and murder.
Well, amazing, isn't that? Badly educated peasant farmers at the Dawn of Agriculture who didn't have reliable contraceptives had more children than they could handle, and - worse - the werewolves killed people when a new child was born. And it's like "Uh, hello, do you know the infant and maternal mortality of agarian societies?". No, of course they don't. Because werewolves have a militant culture with little time for sociology. Which explains a lot of their problems.
I'd try to argue that the archeological records are Technocratic lies, but then one of my werewolf friends was all "Oh, that is a shameful period in our past indeed. The sins of the Impergium haunt us still. There are those among us who long to return to those days", which was pretty awkward. Because, well... it's kind of hard to accept that people you know who are pretty decent have people on their side who want to do it again.
Yeah, there are werewolf extremists who want to kill... like, 99% of humanity and reduce us back to the stone age, like some cliched strawman of the kind that the Technocrats tell new recruits that we do. A lot of these extremists are the Lupus or Metis Garou, because they aren't human and never were. And they blame the self-destructive quasipatriarchalism of Garou society on humanity, and so lash out.
This can and will make problems for you, if you're a known associate of the Garou and you're lucky enough to have the local Technocrats not be hardliners. See, this is the usual chain of events.
1. Some Garou hardliners go and attack a 'Crat facility screaming "Die Weaverscum!". If they succeed, that's usually when things go bad.
2. The 'Crats go and retaliate. There are a lot of 'Crats who hate werewolves, so if there's an attack on one of their facilities, you have a bunch of hardline loonies with computers in their heads or Progenitor fanatics screaming "I SENSE ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE! SEARCH AND DESTROY! GO BIG PHARMA" all coming to your area. And a lot of them go and hunt down us when they can't find werewolves.
3. The werewolves, of course, naturally step up their assaults.
4. The local 'Crats go and pass your name to their hardliners, who then try and pick you up so they can brainwash you into working for them, and use you to hunt down the werewolves who're your friends.
Basically, fanatics are assholes.
Now, what I've just been saying may make it sound like werewolves are a bunch of dangerous maniacs who are on our side, but only just.
And in some ways, that's true. There are plenty of werewolves who are just homicidal maniacs, even before you get to their Nephandic werewolves, who call themselves the Black Spiral Dancers. That's why I have to warn you about them. Because if you treat werewolves like they're well-balanced human beings, or even like they're 'Crats (who can usually be trusted to be cold fanatics rather than hotheads), you'll probably get mauled.
But there are plenty of werewolves who are fairly decent people who've been caught up in a transformation which is traumatic, and then brought into a toxic and militant culture which takes advantage of them when they're vulnerable. Or they're born as wolves, and so as soon as they become self-aware, they're fed this toxic cultural brew.
And all this culture is only a reaction to the extreme circumstances they find themselves in. It's understandable, even if there are raving lunatics who want to kill almost everyone on their side.
So, in conclusion, the Garou are very, very dangerous, and their culture is seven flavours of fucked up. I've had Garou threaten to kill me for 'consorting with Weaver spirits' because I invoked the living essence of my phone to help me black out communications over an area. But there are also Garou who are heroic brave warriors fighting constantly against very nasty things. Just make sure you can tell the difference between them before you try to associate with them.
...
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention. Being bitten by a werewolf does not turn you into a werewolf. It merely gives you horrific mutilating wounds.
Do not let werewolves bite you. Or claw you.
