Entry tags:
Psychic Wolves!
The Psychic Wolves for Lupercalia stories are up!
There are about 23 stories in 22 fandoms, and they are all good, and almost all small fandoms, interestingly - I think my story and the Star Trek one are the largest fandoms in the fest. The only duplication is two Eagle stories, but c'mon, when you've got a canon wolf cub... there's also an amazingly amazing Frontier Wolf story (have I mentioned recently how much I love that Sutcliff's Roman Britain has a fandom now? And that it has the soulbonded wolves it's always cried out for?)
Anyway, here's mine:
The Proper Study of Wolfkind by![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
melannen
Length: 4763 words, 3/3 chapters (for now)
Fandom: Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Notes: I really really wanted to be able to tag this Watson⋄Holmes, Holmes♣Watson♣OWC, which probably says all sorts of bad things about me. You give me a challenge which comes down to "psychic soulbonds make them have sex" and I write a story where psychic soulbonds make them not have sex. Also, this follows canon pretty closely (with the addition of Watson's soulbonded psychic she-wolf, obviously) including a fair amount of direct quotations. The three chapters up occur during STUD, SIGN, and SCAN; I have chapters outlined for alternate HOUN, FINA and EMPT (which really covers all the essential Holmes & Watson canon) but may or may not ever write them.
Summary: Often, strangers would look at me, with my cane and my wolfsister, and either understand nothing about us at all, or think they understood far too much. The young man with the test tube only shook my hand, with a strength I should hardly have credited him, and said, "You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive."
...Should I mention how deeply saddened I am that none of the proposed BBC Sherlock + soulbonded wolves stories came through? I mean I figured my story would be buried under at least three modern-day AUs. It really is odd how heavy on small fandoms the collection currently is. Awesome, but odd!
(I have another soulbonded wolves story about 1500 words in, all written in the last three days since I suddenly found myself hijacked by my latest fannish enthusiasm. We'll see if that one gets finished, either. I'll just mention that I may possibly be the only person who has re-written the 1929 Geneva Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War to take into account soulbonded wolves.)
ETA: Also, if you read the SH story when it first went up on the Archive, I added another chapter of ~2000 words after it went up last night, so it comes to a bit more of a conclusion now.
There are about 23 stories in 22 fandoms, and they are all good, and almost all small fandoms, interestingly - I think my story and the Star Trek one are the largest fandoms in the fest. The only duplication is two Eagle stories, but c'mon, when you've got a canon wolf cub... there's also an amazingly amazing Frontier Wolf story (have I mentioned recently how much I love that Sutcliff's Roman Britain has a fandom now? And that it has the soulbonded wolves it's always cried out for?)
Anyway, here's mine:
The Proper Study of Wolfkind by
melannenLength: 4763 words, 3/3 chapters (for now)
Fandom: Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Notes: I really really wanted to be able to tag this Watson⋄Holmes, Holmes♣Watson♣OWC, which probably says all sorts of bad things about me. You give me a challenge which comes down to "psychic soulbonds make them have sex" and I write a story where psychic soulbonds make them not have sex. Also, this follows canon pretty closely (with the addition of Watson's soulbonded psychic she-wolf, obviously) including a fair amount of direct quotations. The three chapters up occur during STUD, SIGN, and SCAN; I have chapters outlined for alternate HOUN, FINA and EMPT (which really covers all the essential Holmes & Watson canon) but may or may not ever write them.
Summary: Often, strangers would look at me, with my cane and my wolfsister, and either understand nothing about us at all, or think they understood far too much. The young man with the test tube only shook my hand, with a strength I should hardly have credited him, and said, "You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive."
...Should I mention how deeply saddened I am that none of the proposed BBC Sherlock + soulbonded wolves stories came through? I mean I figured my story would be buried under at least three modern-day AUs. It really is odd how heavy on small fandoms the collection currently is. Awesome, but odd!
(I have another soulbonded wolves story about 1500 words in, all written in the last three days since I suddenly found myself hijacked by my latest fannish enthusiasm. We'll see if that one gets finished, either. I'll just mention that I may possibly be the only person who has re-written the 1929 Geneva Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War to take into account soulbonded wolves.)
ETA: Also, if you read the SH story when it first went up on the Archive, I added another chapter of ~2000 words after it went up last night, so it comes to a bit more of a conclusion now.
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Which is a very strange thing to be sorry about.
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Dira's stories assume they have pretty good 'heat suppressants", and isolation chambers that can mostly block out the pack-sense, enough to keep a bitch in heat from disturbing the rest of the wolves unduly. But it's hard to imagine they'd have that technology back in the World Wars, you know? Also Dira's stories are mostly set among special ops teams, who are mostly working in vaguely wolfpack-sized groups anyway; it really doesn't make sense for infantry units which might have thousands of men in close quarters to have wolves at all. But it's a lot more fun if they do...
I've been assuming that, without the techonological aids, they mostly went for physical isolation - when a wolfsister starts showing signs, she and her brother would be moved away from the front lines whenever possible, far enough back to isolate her from the pack whether there was going to be a breeding or not. And when not possible, they... make do. In whatever way they have to. Depending on how much you want to torment your characters.
Though you could also say that it's very rare for a wolfsister in an active combat situation to go into heat at all; most mammals, like humans, will skip or delay estrus cycles in situations of high stress, poor living conditions, severe crowding, and/or short rations - also female wolves don't reach maturity until about their second year, so sisters newly bonded for American soldiers in WWI probably wouldn't have gone into heat for the first time until the war was over. But then we get back into biological reality pointing out how silly the whole conceit is.
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(I'm thinking possibly the actual basic military organizational structure is set up differently, if your military evolved over centuries around the wolfpack as a basic unit. But here again I run into a research wall.)
And just sigh. I've worked out what I think is pretty plausible SOP for wolves going into heat in a military hospital, but on the actual ground there are just way too many contributing factors for me to be entirely comfortable...
... yeah, basically, too much overthink for something that would end up being backstory, but -- these fuckers need wolves, dammit, and I need to know what the hell they're flashing back to.
(They need wolves as in, their lives might actually be saner with wolves, because I have to believe any sister of Jimmy's would be able to tell him that his mother is funny in the head and also he's being an ass, and if there's cultural space for Jimmy to have a wife and a shieldmate, then just possibly they can actually talk about said wife having a husband and a girlfriend, and Richard would just be so much happier all around, and -- oh, you know, all kinds of things.)
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And yeah, I think the secret is to not think about it very much. Or at least, only think about it just enough. It's not, like, completely unreasonable - after all, horses in the wild have a social structure not entirely unlike wolves', and there were entire mounted militaries for much of history - but making it work the way Dira's stories did, i.e. everything is the same except there are wolves, requires a lot of just not worrying about it. And not asking "why?" I am kind of going with the idea that the wolves are so much a part of their brothers that for most organizational purposes you can treat wolf+brother as one soldier. And then it sort of almost works, as a metaphor if nothing else. I'm actually pulling in a lot of aspects of Daemon AUs, too, where the wolfbrothers are in a lot of ways a cultural blind spot - nobody in canon asks about this stuff because it's literally unthinkable when you're embedded in the society.
(I've decided that in this WWII, the SS don't have wolfbrothers, (because a variety of reasons starting with no wolf pup will go within twenty feet of Himmler or Eichmann), and this is so disconcerting and freakish to regular military that a lot of them just can't deal with the Waffen-SS. Which they of course use to their advantage.)
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Anyway, um. I was wondering if you would mind if I added you, because you sound awesome. :)
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(Frontier Wolves *yay*!)