An Anti-Typical Werewolf

I grew up on horror movies.

The classic Universal Monsters were my babysitters.

And tied for first place (beside The Creature from the Black Lagoon) was The Wolf Man.

Curt Siodmak's poem from the opening still lives in my head rent-free:

"Even a man who is pure in heart
And says his prayers by night,
May become a wolf when the wolfsbane blooms
And the autumn moon is bright."

The way Lon Cheney Jr. played the titular character - a good man who had something terrible happen to him. He did not revel in this curse that was inflicted upon him; he was beaten down by it.

It caught my imagination.

But I was a kid; I wasn’t allowed to watch more modern werewolf movies yet. Well, not the serious ones.

The original Teen Wolf movie was… very different. Not at all tragic. Funny. But it was the first time I saw a werewolf that could control what they were and embraced it. That was a fun idea.

Over the years, I found more movies to watch. More books to read.

The Howling. Wolfen. American Werewolf in London. Underworld. Dog Soldiers. Ginger Snaps.

I could go on and on.

But in watching them, I noticed certain patterns.

Firstly, most werewolf movies followed a trend that Lon Chaney’s character set: werewolves were the tragic monsters. Often, the titular characters were easy for me to empathise with and watching them slowly devolve into something they couldn’t control, but being equally afraid of ☠️ themselves to end the curse was… moving.

Even werewolves that could control the change, like the Lycans in the Underworld series, were tragic characters. Brutal, sure - but tragic. I understood why they were brutal.

And then, as I grew older, I noticed a new trend enter the werewolf world: the Alpha.

This idea that surrendering yourself to chaos and savagery somehow made you a superior man just struck me as… weird.

Why would you want that?
To have no control over what you do? To hurt those closest to you?

And let's not even get into the fact that the biologist who popularised the term “alpha” in his early work, L. David Mech, later spent decades explaining that the concept didn't accurately describe a natural wolf society.

Except no one would listen to him.

And the term persists in popular culture and werewolf stories to this day.

I don’t like it.

Anyway.

All that was kicking around in my head when I started thinking about Blood in the Dust.

I had Yip. I had Pia.

I wanted a werewolf.

Why?

Because I really like werewolves, okay?

Anyway. I’d been thinking about werewolves, the way I’d seen them portrayed, and what I wanted mine to be like.

I already knew he wasn’t going to be the only werewolf. I knew there would be loads of them, and not all the same kind. But I needed to figure out this werewolf.

Fortunately, I’ve been burrowing in folklore rabbit holes for as long as I’ve been watching horror movies, and I happened to know of a legend that didn’t paint the werewolf as the bad guy.

The Irish Faoladh. Protectors of the vulnerable. Rarely seen in fiction, but a seriously awesome myth and one that had fascinated me for years.

That was easy!

The rest… that was messier.

Because I was thinking about the tragedy of werewolves, this trend toward them always being “alphas”, heightened senses of werewolves - and that weird phenomenon where someone becomes a werewolf and magically has these amazing fighting skills!

I mean, what’s with that?

Obviously, I wasn’t doing that.

No, sir.

My werewolf had a military background, so if he got in a fight, there was a reason he knew what he was doing.

He has heightened senses, so tracking seemed to be the logical fit for him.

That makes sense, right?

I already had Pia, the anti-Goth, ray of sunshine vampire - and I wanted the werewolf to be her opposite in as many ways as possible.

Which is why the werewolf is a “him”, incidentally.

Pia was cheerful? He’d be grumpy.

She was colourful? He dresses like a lumberjack.

She has excellent style? Flannel shirts.

Pia was Scottish?…. He had to have brown skin. Obviously.

But… that didn’t gel with being an Irish werewolf.

Oh! What if he was half Irish, and that’s part of his tragedy: his family struggled because one parent was Irish and the other was… South Asian. Or something.

Which made my brain think of the way Americans sometimes proudly declare themselves “Irish American” … what if he lived in America?

I’d recently been to Portland. Beautiful city. Embraces the weird.

They LOVE flannel there.

Oh! And man-buns.

Yep, that’s how the man-bun came into being. Portland.

Right.

So I had an Irish/Pakistani/American with a military background, who wears flannel and a man-bun. What now?

Now we address the alpha in the room.

I wanted him grumpy - but only on the outside.

I did not want him to be a representation of toxic masculinity. The opposite: I wanted him to represent healthy masculinity.

So he's a badass. He can fight. He can track. He can do all the things fiction tends to tell us make a man “manly.”

But I gave him a secret.

He’s a dork.

I gave him a library full of everything from anime graphic novels to the classics, and I gave him a hobby.

At first, I was going to make him play an instrument. But that’s… been done. Lots of male characters play instruments.

I wanted to give him a hobby that made him noticeably different, something men don’t often do for no other reason than it isn’t seen as masculine - while there’s absolutely no reason why they shouldn’t.

And then in 2020, the answer came to me via the Olympics.

Tom Daley, a super fit Olympic diver, calmly sitting in the stands… knitting.

Oh yes. YES!!

That was it. The key to this character!!

And from there, a whole society emerged: one that was matriarchal, one that rejected the term “alpha” for the same reasons David Mech did.

From there, all I needed was a name…

Now, this may surprise you (or not😏), but I’m a big fan of the series Supernatural. In Seasons 12-15, there was a character in that show called Arthur Ketch.

That in itself isn’t that important - but the name is.

Because I watched all of Season 12, 13, and most of 14 before I realised his name was Ketch.

I thought they were saying “Catch”.

And I thought - that’s a really cool name for a character! What a pity they’ve used it.

But they hadn’t.

Mwahahahahahahahaha 👿

Which just left the first name.

And that’s where I drew a blank. Everything I came up with… well, it sucked.

So I asked my poor, long-suffering sister, “What should I call my werewolf?”

And she replied flippantly. “I like the name Thadian for werewolves.”

I’d never heard of a werewolf called Thadian, but Thadian Catch definitely sounded like a werewolf name!

Of course, she’s completely forgotten she made that suggestion, and to this day, when I ask her, “What should I call this character?” Her first response is always “I like the name Thadian.”

And I have to remind her that’s Catch’s name.

I blame myself. He uses his surname more than his first name.

For now.

And that is how Thadian Catch—the cranky, intimidating, protective, gentle, respectful, knitting dork of a werewolf—came into being.

My anti-typical werewolf.