Werewolves have been mentioned in literature since at least the fifth century BC, in the Histories of Herodotus. in the first century AD, in the Satyricon of Petronius, a soldier takes off his clothes and lays them down, then urinates in a circle around his clothes, transforms into a wolf, and runs off to kill a bunch of cattle. He sustains an injury as a wolf, and still has that injury when returning to human form.
Werewolves have been in popular mythology since ancient times. Werecats, on the other hand, only started appearing in literature in the 1970s, although there have been references to humans who can shape shift into cats as long as there have been stories about werewolves.
For reasons mainly having to do with the stories I have yet to publish, I've used South America as the source for my werecats, as opposed to central Europe for the werewolves. The werecats are, therefore, jaguars when they transform.
There are many variations on the theme of werewolves. In some stories, they are seen as social animals, as wolves are, but mainly they are seen as solitary. Sometimes they are represented as being able to shape shift at will, but mainly they shape shift only when the moon is full, and do so involuntarily. When a werewolf bites a human, that human becomes a werewolf, in a transformation that is excruciating.
I have taken an amalgamation of werewolf mythology that includes the above points, as well as a few more, mainly because the mythos seemed incomplete to me. That mythos has been expanded in a way that made sense to me, then balanced with a werecat mythos. In doing so, I tried to account for differences between cats and dogs.
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About Werecats (Essay)
FantasyThis is a discussion of how I adapted werewolf and werecat mythology to develop the creatures in my werecat stories.
