Where Are All the Female Werewolves?

Werewolves have never really been the most popular monster; they’re usually second fiddle to vampires or zombies. I suppose there’s some sense to that. Vampires are sexy romantics and zombie hoards are harbingers of the apocalypse. Werewolves usually act alone, and, outside of Twilight and Teen Wolf, aren’t typically portrayed as having much sex appeal. In 1941, The Wolf Man became the first successful werewolf film. Our monster has a furry face, spreads his affliction through biting others, kills people, and is ultimately killed by his own silver walking stick. He’s monstrous, not sexy.  We can understand why vampires and zombies scare us, too. Vampires might represent a powerful person draining us of our own power for personal gain. Zombies drawn on our fear of pandemics and the ignorant masses destroying those of us just trying to survive. But what about werewolves? The most common answer I find is that werewolves speak to the changes a teenager experiences during puberty. Pisces already explored how this dynamic works in Teen Wolf. But if that’s the case, then where are all the female werewolves?

Sexualized Saturdays: The Path, an Indie Horror Game about Women

The Path is one of those games no one quite understands, including myself. I’ve tried watching different Let’s Play videos and reading up on the development of the game, but nothing eased my countless queries. During my research I found this quote from one of the producers of the game, Auriea Harvey, which says:

…The Path doesn’t just give girls a female avatar to play boy games with and it doesn’t paint everything pink with smiling faces and hearts. The Path is a game that is about things that can be deeply important to women and it is played in a feminine way. (source)

While making a game for women might have been the developers’ intention, I’d argue that anyone can relate to this game, regardless of their origins.

Spoilers and a trigger warning for rape and murder after the jump.

Sexualized Saturdays: Teen Wolf and the Turmoils of Male Puberty

Uncontrollable urges, animalistic appetites and aggression, hair growing in new and unusual places: these are the trials and struggles of any nascent werewolf. Or teenager. In my eyes, the young lycanthropes of Teen Wolf provide a metaphor for the trials faced by any young man going through puberty, both socially and physically.

Manga Mondays: Plastic Girl

In my journey for a good horror manga for today, I came across a trend of others labeling manga with any horror elements as a horror manga. I love vampires and monsters as much as the next person, but spooky monsters do not a horror manga make. Shifting through the miscategorized, I finally came across a manga that, fair enough, I also wouldn’t call horror, but was much too interesting to pass up.

In the same way that a Salvador Dalí painting causes the viewer to contemplate its meaning, so too does Usamaru Furuya force the reader to look beyond the surface with Plastic Girl. Much like art, though, I don’t believe there’s one correct interpretation of the piece. On the surface, Plastic Girl feels like an exposé of a young girl’s madness. Each couple of pages is a different topic which only adds to the disjointed feeling despite the main topic largely remaining the same—the topic being herself. This is complemented beautifully by the changing art styles with each turn of the page. Furuya moves from dark pen scratches, to bright pop images, to even woodprint design. The story, in this case, is not only about what is written; the story and the message depend more on the art and design choices than any other manga I’ve read.