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[bookelfe]

2013 booklogging catchup! A good fifty percent of my backlog is that headfirst plunge I took into Kelley Armstrong's Women of the Otherworld series, which is urban fantasy that starts out as pretty straightforwardly about werewolves and is then like "actually, also EVERYTHING ELSE

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[dramaturgca]

YES, THANK YOU, CLAY IS SUCH A BUTT.

I've only read the short stories that lead up to the first book, then my tablet went haywire and I lost all the short stories and never got them back oops and went on to reading other stuff.

[marfisa]

The two other best-known series focusing on female werewolves, Carrie Vaughn's Kitty Norwood series ("Kitty and the Midnight Hour," followed by something like eight sequels so far) and Patricia Briggs' Alpha and Omega series, also start out with the heroine being nonconsensually turned into a werewolf, then suffering what amounts to domestic abuse at the hands of the pack leader (among others) for a significant portion of the first book before finding a way out of the situation with considerable help from the only gay male werewolf in the pack (Kitty) or being rescued by a more civilized and much more powerful male werewolf sent to check up on her pack by his father, who is essentially the head werewolf of North America (Alpha and Omega). So yeah, the popular idea of real-life wolf packs as rigidly dominance-and-submission-oriented under the iron rule of a tyrannical alpha male (a notion which wolf biologists have recently begun to dispute) does seem to lend itself to use as a metaphor for rape, stalker-esque relationships, and

[marfisa]

And then there's Charlaine Harris' Sookie Stackhouse (of the True Blood/Southern Vampire series), whose telepathic abilities--which don't work on vampires--are usually pretty useless in physical confrontations. In the HBO TV series, Sookie eventually discovers that her part-faery heritage also enables her to zap assailants with bolts of magic, but this development occurs much later in the books, if it ever does. (Alan Ball made a lot of changes when he adapted the novels for TV.) Even in the HBO version, the physically flimsy Sookie manages to survive and (sort of) prosper primarily because her telepathy and its accompanying resistance to vampiric mind control makes her fascinating and/or politically useful to a succession of powerful supernatural males jockeying for position in the elaborate vampire and werewolf hierarchies of Louisiana. Basically, it seems as if paranormal romance/urban fantasy heroines whose natural abilities could be construed as falling closer to the traditionally feminine category of witch or sorceress fare