Teen Wolf meets North and South
Okay, so it has recently come to my attention that this guy:
And this gal:
have the same surname. And Derek is a werewolf by birth. And the Hales could possibly have a long bloodline, and Margaret is part of it. Which means Margaret might be a werewolf.
This certainly works with some of the themes of family shame and secrecy in North and South. For instance, Richard Hale isn't a dissenter to the Church; he's a werewolf, and his parish is close to finding out or something, so that's why the family has to go north. And Frederick didn't mutiny; hunters found out about him, so the Hale family can't talk about him.
And the night Thornton sees Margaret and Frederick, it's a full moon, and Frederick (or Margaret) kill Leonard because Leonard's a hunter. Which fits perfectly with what actually happens in N&S; Frederick accidentally kills Leonard, because he's trying to get away from Leonard, because Leonard knows his true identity.
But then I don't know what to do with Nicholas and Bessy. You could, of course, posit that they are neither hunters nor werewolves, that they have nothing to do with that plot. But if that's the case, the central social conflict in the novel (besides the romance) has nothing to do with werewolves, which is a shame.
So then I started thinking that they should be werewolves, because there's something inherently "low class" about werewolves to me, and I'm not sure why I have that stereotype. Because I also have the stereotype that vampires are upper class. They are, in a lot of texts, Anne Rice being a big influence, not to mention Bram Stoker. Plus, vampires, as immortals, sort of have time to amass social status--over centuries, potentially.
But you could also read other class stereotypes into the werewolves/vampires class divide. For instance, a lot of aristocracy and even many gentry types really were pale, because they weren't outdoor laborers. Also, blood-sucking has a metaphoric connotation as well as the realistic one when talking about vampires.
Werewolves, OTOH, are half men, half beast, who occasionally lose control of themselves. Even Gaskell and Margaret, whose sympathy is with the lower class and workers rather than the bourgeoisie, say that the mob of rioting workers are "out of their minds". If you wanted to, you could link the way werewolves lose control and are animals to characterizations of the lower classes as bestial, animal-like, allowing base needs and emotions to override intellectual concerns etc. Obviously these stereotypes of the lower classes were made by higher class peoples who generally didn't have to withstand back-breaking labor and constant privation to merely survive, so. You can guess how accurate these characterizations are.
And it was already icky, but thinking about this makes Stephenie Meyer's characterizations of vampires vs werewolves that much ickier. But anyway, my guess is that countless essays have been written about this; I just never really thought about it before.
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my_daroga said she thought it'd be cool if Nicholas and Bessy were hunters. I think it'd be cool too, and it made me start wondering whether there's a class niche for the "hunter" archetype in supernatural dramas. Because juxtaposed against werewolves, you'd suppose hunters would be the shiny rich ones arrayed against the downtrodden rag-tag werewolves, but I'm coming up short on uses of "hunters" as groups rather than individuals.
(For instance, Slayers are hunters, but since there's usually only one Slayer at a time, the class can be variable [and I think Whedon tries to show that it really is, though as always, his portrayals of low income families are sorely lacking in realism. But this is true of most tv]. Though now that I'm thinking about it, I'd love to see 100 years post-"Chosen", in which Willow's spell is still at work, so potentials are all Called when they come of age. So say you have around 5,000 girls in the world with super powers? Are they an elite class? THAT WOULD BE SO INTERESTING, because they could so very easily become the oppressors, instead of the vampires. Oh, Legend of Korra, why haven't I finished watching you?
In other news, it occurs to me that Watchers fit the "hunter" archetype I'm talking about, and they appear to be all upper class and British?)
Okay, anyway, so another hunter is Van Helsing, who is interesting, since he's a scholar. He's pretty solidly bourgeoisie, wouldn't you say? Which puts him smack dab in the middle of things. And obviously there's Supernatural, and while Dean and Sam's childhood home is quite nice, they read as an effort by CW to portray "low" class? Though actually, John Winchester is the car mechanic, which--hey, everyone in America is middle class, right?--falls pretty low on the totem pole (I'm talking stereotypes here; a mechanic is a perfectly acceptable and sometimes, quite lucrative, position), and the Campbells--the hunter family he marries into--seem quite well-to-do in comparison.
So anyway, which brings me to class on Teen Wolf. Whiiiiiich I don't really wanna discuss, since it's badly handled. But N&S really is all about class, and without some pretty complex class issues going on, you would not have the either the social plot or the romance. (At least, in the book. Margaret would not have been inclined to so "willfully misunderstand" [sorry P&P] Thornton if she hadn't been uppity about him being so bourgeois.) So I feel like if you cross N&S and TW, you have to talk about class at least a little.
The Argents have this great big huge house. Chris Argent also seems to have a lucrative position. They read as really privileged, but of course, the entire show reads as really privileged. The Hale house looks really big, even though it's burnt down, and since Derek is biologically a werewolf, it was a werewolf family who initially had that huge house. No clue as to their professions.
But money in general is just really weird on the show. At one point, Melissa tells Scott that she can stand to miss a paycheck, but then she adds 'sort of' or similar. She's a single parent; she's got a tough but respectable job, probably a tough but respectable paycheck. Still, their house seems really big. Don't even get me started on Isaac, Erica, and Boyd.
So anyway, back to the point, if Nicholas is a hunter, I don't really see how it folds into the issue of the riots. I suppose being a werewolf has its equivalents to being privileged, especially in the TW universe. Scott's a social reject who's always on the bench, but when he gets wolfed, he's the star player and gets a pretty girlfriend. So Nicholas could be a hunter who resists the mill owners and their crappy wages, but also unfair advantage? Idk. That doesn't really make much sense, though it would be cool if Nicholas tried to get Bessy the bite to save her, but it kills her instead. And Boucher goes for the bite to save his family, but it kills him instead.
I thought about making Thornton a hunter, but if Margaret and Frederick are werewolves, and that's their whole big secret, it makes sense for Thornton not to know about the world of werewolves at all. And it would make it really interesting if the Hales and Higgins know, but the Thorntons don't, because yeah--insofar as social structure, Thorntons really exist on that middle rung between gentry (the Hales) and working class (the Higgins), even though the Thorntons are so much more well off financially than the Hales. In some ways, you could parallel that social structure to a scale of knowledge--Stiles, as a human who knows about werewolves but isn't one, is also right in the middle between hunters and werewolves. He's the "regular" one, neither at the top nor bottom. (Which is top and which is bottom is up for debate. And for once I'm not even talking about that type of topping and bottoming.)
Anyway, there's no way on Earth I'm gonna write this. So why did I just talk about it for who knows how many words? Hell if I know. But if you have thoughts on this I WANNA KNOW.
And this gal:
have the same surname. And Derek is a werewolf by birth. And the Hales could possibly have a long bloodline, and Margaret is part of it. Which means Margaret might be a werewolf.
This certainly works with some of the themes of family shame and secrecy in North and South. For instance, Richard Hale isn't a dissenter to the Church; he's a werewolf, and his parish is close to finding out or something, so that's why the family has to go north. And Frederick didn't mutiny; hunters found out about him, so the Hale family can't talk about him.
And the night Thornton sees Margaret and Frederick, it's a full moon, and Frederick (or Margaret) kill Leonard because Leonard's a hunter. Which fits perfectly with what actually happens in N&S; Frederick accidentally kills Leonard, because he's trying to get away from Leonard, because Leonard knows his true identity.
But then I don't know what to do with Nicholas and Bessy. You could, of course, posit that they are neither hunters nor werewolves, that they have nothing to do with that plot. But if that's the case, the central social conflict in the novel (besides the romance) has nothing to do with werewolves, which is a shame.
So then I started thinking that they should be werewolves, because there's something inherently "low class" about werewolves to me, and I'm not sure why I have that stereotype. Because I also have the stereotype that vampires are upper class. They are, in a lot of texts, Anne Rice being a big influence, not to mention Bram Stoker. Plus, vampires, as immortals, sort of have time to amass social status--over centuries, potentially.
But you could also read other class stereotypes into the werewolves/vampires class divide. For instance, a lot of aristocracy and even many gentry types really were pale, because they weren't outdoor laborers. Also, blood-sucking has a metaphoric connotation as well as the realistic one when talking about vampires.
Werewolves, OTOH, are half men, half beast, who occasionally lose control of themselves. Even Gaskell and Margaret, whose sympathy is with the lower class and workers rather than the bourgeoisie, say that the mob of rioting workers are "out of their minds". If you wanted to, you could link the way werewolves lose control and are animals to characterizations of the lower classes as bestial, animal-like, allowing base needs and emotions to override intellectual concerns etc. Obviously these stereotypes of the lower classes were made by higher class peoples who generally didn't have to withstand back-breaking labor and constant privation to merely survive, so. You can guess how accurate these characterizations are.
And it was already icky, but thinking about this makes Stephenie Meyer's characterizations of vampires vs werewolves that much ickier. But anyway, my guess is that countless essays have been written about this; I just never really thought about it before.
my_daroga said she thought it'd be cool if Nicholas and Bessy were hunters. I think it'd be cool too, and it made me start wondering whether there's a class niche for the "hunter" archetype in supernatural dramas. Because juxtaposed against werewolves, you'd suppose hunters would be the shiny rich ones arrayed against the downtrodden rag-tag werewolves, but I'm coming up short on uses of "hunters" as groups rather than individuals. (For instance, Slayers are hunters, but since there's usually only one Slayer at a time, the class can be variable [and I think Whedon tries to show that it really is, though as always, his portrayals of low income families are sorely lacking in realism. But this is true of most tv]. Though now that I'm thinking about it, I'd love to see 100 years post-"Chosen", in which Willow's spell is still at work, so potentials are all Called when they come of age. So say you have around 5,000 girls in the world with super powers? Are they an elite class? THAT WOULD BE SO INTERESTING, because they could so very easily become the oppressors, instead of the vampires. Oh, Legend of Korra, why haven't I finished watching you?
In other news, it occurs to me that Watchers fit the "hunter" archetype I'm talking about, and they appear to be all upper class and British?)
Okay, anyway, so another hunter is Van Helsing, who is interesting, since he's a scholar. He's pretty solidly bourgeoisie, wouldn't you say? Which puts him smack dab in the middle of things. And obviously there's Supernatural, and while Dean and Sam's childhood home is quite nice, they read as an effort by CW to portray "low" class? Though actually, John Winchester is the car mechanic, which--hey, everyone in America is middle class, right?--falls pretty low on the totem pole (I'm talking stereotypes here; a mechanic is a perfectly acceptable and sometimes, quite lucrative, position), and the Campbells--the hunter family he marries into--seem quite well-to-do in comparison.
So anyway, which brings me to class on Teen Wolf. Whiiiiiich I don't really wanna discuss, since it's badly handled. But N&S really is all about class, and without some pretty complex class issues going on, you would not have the either the social plot or the romance. (At least, in the book. Margaret would not have been inclined to so "willfully misunderstand" [sorry P&P] Thornton if she hadn't been uppity about him being so bourgeois.) So I feel like if you cross N&S and TW, you have to talk about class at least a little.
The Argents have this great big huge house. Chris Argent also seems to have a lucrative position. They read as really privileged, but of course, the entire show reads as really privileged. The Hale house looks really big, even though it's burnt down, and since Derek is biologically a werewolf, it was a werewolf family who initially had that huge house. No clue as to their professions.
But money in general is just really weird on the show. At one point, Melissa tells Scott that she can stand to miss a paycheck, but then she adds 'sort of' or similar. She's a single parent; she's got a tough but respectable job, probably a tough but respectable paycheck. Still, their house seems really big. Don't even get me started on Isaac, Erica, and Boyd.
So anyway, back to the point, if Nicholas is a hunter, I don't really see how it folds into the issue of the riots. I suppose being a werewolf has its equivalents to being privileged, especially in the TW universe. Scott's a social reject who's always on the bench, but when he gets wolfed, he's the star player and gets a pretty girlfriend. So Nicholas could be a hunter who resists the mill owners and their crappy wages, but also unfair advantage? Idk. That doesn't really make much sense, though it would be cool if Nicholas tried to get Bessy the bite to save her, but it kills her instead. And Boucher goes for the bite to save his family, but it kills him instead.
I thought about making Thornton a hunter, but if Margaret and Frederick are werewolves, and that's their whole big secret, it makes sense for Thornton not to know about the world of werewolves at all. And it would make it really interesting if the Hales and Higgins know, but the Thorntons don't, because yeah--insofar as social structure, Thorntons really exist on that middle rung between gentry (the Hales) and working class (the Higgins), even though the Thorntons are so much more well off financially than the Hales. In some ways, you could parallel that social structure to a scale of knowledge--Stiles, as a human who knows about werewolves but isn't one, is also right in the middle between hunters and werewolves. He's the "regular" one, neither at the top nor bottom. (Which is top and which is bottom is up for debate. And for once I'm not even talking about that type of topping and bottoming.)
Anyway, there's no way on Earth I'm gonna write this. So why did I just talk about it for who knows how many words? Hell if I know. But if you have thoughts on this I WANNA KNOW.
no subject
(This is, incidentally, a huge reason why I love your fic Before and After Stanford so much - because it highlights that gulf of understanding between Sam who went to college and Dean who got his GED, which are significant class markers.)
The werewolves we've met on the show, OTOH, tend to higher in class: we have Madison, who's a law secretary - a thoroughly respectable career choice - and Kate, who's a college student. But then again the vast majority of our victims of the week are also in that broad middle-class bracket, so I'm not sure there are any particular conclusions to be drawn there.
Speaking of Buffy, there was that one dude, Kane, who came after Oz in season 2. I've seen him described as being the Buffyverse equivalent of an SPN-style hunter: a manly loner type without much concern for the monsters he killed (although he appeared to be hunting for profit more than anything).
So, um. There's some data for you, I guess. :)