Alphas

I had a first reader note at one point that my character Silver didn’t act very “alpha”, in the way that most urban fantasies used the term. To her credit, she was checking to be sure I was aware of that, not implying that it was a bad thing. She wanted to make sure I’d done it on purpose.

Done it on purpose? Boy howdy, had I.

There are few urban fantasy werewolf tropes I hate quite so much as the idea that alphas must be inflexible bullies. Every so often I ponder doing a long post about the topic, but there’s not much more to say about it besides that. Wolves in the wild don’t work that way, it’s an ineffective leadership strategy among humans, and I discovered a cool article the other day about how it’s terrible for training dogs as well. Even if you’re not a dog owner (I’m not) the background in the article about wolves is nicely succinct, and I love the illustration of yet another way in which bullying in the name of being “alpha” is just an all-around TERRIBLE idea.

But the urban fantasy trope seems to still manage to take a recipe like:
X proportion wolf behavior + Y proportion human behavior = werewolf behavior
And come up with one for alpha bullying like:
Wolves don’t don’t actually work that way + it’s an ineffective leadership strategy for humans = I MUST DRINK FROM THE SKULLS OF ALL WHO DARE TO QUESTION ME OR ELSE MY AUTHORITY WILL CRUMBLE INTO DUST ARROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO *bares manly chest*

Does not compute!