Boat Trolls planning thread! (full of spoilers, non-players enter at your own risk)

idk what bel's skill at socializing is, but for someone who hasn't been human in like two years, this erskin's pretty much just as charming in this shape as on all fours. i think he's a lot more of a socialite charmer in this AU. really ingratiating? knows all the social cues for 'look how cute and friendly i am, i can do tricks, i can gaze at you admiringly, give me a sandwich.'

i think the difference is earth is a much kinder world than alternia? there's a few countries where people hold dogs and young strangers in contempt, but in general erskin wouldn't be driven to defensive solitude nearly as often. he'd be a lot safer and happier learning to use charm in three or four different species' languages than relying on violent standoffishness like he did as a troll.

ETA: erskin's as cute and charming in human now that he's had about three days practicing on bel, to get back up to speed at things like 'language' and 'hands'. for convenience's sake i'm going to say it's like riding a bike. you're wobbly after a couple years of no practice, but it's not too hard to re-learn.

 

also i hope bel is enjoying his flawless cosplay

 

LATE NIGHT THOUGHTS: would it be interesting if it's harder to stay human around the full moon, and harder to stay wolf around the new moon? like, erskin was born an actual puppy and his default is wolf, so maybe for a week around the full moon he flat-out can't manage the change to human, or at least it's extremely difficult to get there and precarious to maintain. whereas bel would just find it increasingly easier and faster to change into wolf around then, with only the full moon night itself forcing him into it.

erskin's not compelled to change into a human on the new moon though, evidently. i wonder if he has a few cousins who can only manage the change into human right around the new moon— maybe that's the deal for the offspring of werewolves and wolves. i think both erskin's parents were werewolves at the time of his conception, though his dad contracted it and his mom was born with it. i think the general agreement among werewolves is that it would be fucked up and cruel to inflict lycanthropy on wolves, though having werewolf puppies with them is alright, so long as you don't ditch the puppies, which would be super fucked up.

wolf-werewolf offspring must be very interesting people to hang out with during their human-phase transformations. erskin's family probably reserves new moon nights for hard cider, fingerpaints, music, and duplex blocks. i like the idea that one of his cousins has some ongoing craft like a mural or quilt or woodcarving and then determinedly spends that one night each month working on it.

i am gonna say it's woodcarving and a lot of random pieces of the aspera clan home are filigreed all to hell and back with leaves and flowers and prey animals.

flowers might be really interesting to werewolves who spend most of their time as wolves— humans really like flowers, as well as the associated traits of sweet smells, radial symmetry, and bright colors. considering that pretty much every human culture likes flowers and thinks they're Good, it's probably wired into us to pay attention to where fruit is going to happen. but i think a wolf would be pretty indifferent. so like, you turn into a human and then, whoah, weird, suddenly this totally random inconsequential and pointless bit of the background is like A THING. A VERY GOOD THING. A THING YOU WANT TO LOOK AT. ALL THE TIME. WOW! A FLOWER. i like the idea that mostly-wolf family members will specifically choose to wave around flowers when they're trying to entice a bipedal family member into keep-away games. they are high-value items!

other things humans are very pleased to get hold of: string, fire, some but not all rocks, and long straight sticks. the sticks are not for chewing, they are for holding at one end and then swinging around. bonus points for sticks that make The Noise when you swing it. jackpot when there is something crunchy to swing the stick into and destroy it.

 

i wonder if the woof experience of raw steak is something like the equivalent of the human experience of a sushi bar

 

yeah i think that's the general scientific conclusion about dogs, too, who would be in a position to eat a lot more non-meat items due to being humans' garbage disposals. great sense of smell, very little sense of taste, hence why they will delightedly eat some putrid scrap of trash and then just as cheerfully barf it back up. dogs don't regurgitate for their young like wolves, but they've retained that ease of getting rid of disagreeable food, whereas humans find barfing to be more like I FUCKED UP! I FUCKED UP!!! rather than 'haha, whoops'.

comparatively, rats are really hard to poison, because rats will take a nibble of 'new' food, wait for awhile, then never touch it again if they get queasy. there was a study where scientists doped food that lab rats formerly loved, like peanut butter or apple slices, with emetics, then observed that after one single bout of nausea a rat wouldn't voluntarily eat the food ever again. and then if they were made hungry enough to risk it the rats would start the 'is it poison' test with it. omnivores have to be so smart to deal with the continuous question of 'can i eat that' it sort of makes you wonder if it's worth it.

apparently cats have a better sense of taste and are more finicky about bad food, hence a lot more studies having to be run by catfood manufacturers. i forget why.

 

oh also i meant to say, male wolves are as involved in child-rearing as female rearing, wheras specifically-paternal instincts have been largely bred out of dogs, because the less dogs interested in guarding puppies from humans the better. female dogs also care for puppies less intensely, less protectively, and for shorter periods, compared to wolves, and even the puppies start preferring human company over their mother or siblings at a certain development period. it's kind of creepy if you think about it.

anyway, bel is very likely to have a full compliment of ferocious paternal instincts all lined up and ready to go, on top of his already existent nature to be a protective and conscientious leader type. he might have a problem not stealing puppies, should he ever be exposed to one. maybe there could be an adventure where they run across a working multi-generation werewolf family and bel gets clubbed upside the head with feels. like, hey, this is why werewolves get so obsessive about forming families and creating puppies, it's all the drive to group up and reproduce from two species at once, you are double not supposed to be a loner.

 

also i bet the chernobyl pack has been interbreeding with the local wolves for years. the military tried to send out a bachelor pack just to make sure there wouldn't be puppies but it emphatically didn't work. they keep having to file fake backdated birth certificates for puppies that turn out capable of a human form and cognition. probably two or three of the kids are old enough to enter service themselves, considering they'd have been born mid-late nineties. in another decade the population there might be entirely self-sustaining. not exactly an intended effect.

this might, actually, be one of the american military's reasons for booting werewolves out of service.
humans and wolves can socially suppress reproduction among their own kind with a pretty high degree of success, but i bet it would be significantly harder to keep werewolves from it, especially since deploying them together would make them stop feeling socially accountable to any outside group.

so short of neutering everyone there's no way to prevent them from having kids while deployed somewhere on active duty, then throwing a shit fit if the kids get taken away. if just one member of the group isn't neutered, that one will be elected to reproduce. if they're on birth control, the ones elected to reproduce will go off of it and everyone else will cover for them. if the entire team is neutered, they'll adopt, and probably at a more frantic rate than if they'd just been let to have their own biological kids. if a unit-turned-family is broken up and reassigned, and the kids or canines returned to original locations, i suspect they'd all suffer from incapacitating grief and anger, and be at a really high risk for treason. you don't exactly want to keep working for the organization that widowed you and orphaned your kids.

i'm also put in mind of how american units, at least, aren't allowed to have pets or mascots. it's great for morale because human men have strong paternal instincts too, but if the animal gets killed everyone flips out and goes on a vengeful rampage. if the dog was like the team's actual child, i would think that a group of grieving werewolf soldiers would level an entire fucking village to sand.

 

Maybe Bel will run across some gangly juvenile dog at a dog park and be 1000% smitten, and come up with all these reasons why they should adopt it, and then be really crushed when the dog goes off with their owner at the end of the day and Bel just has to stand there and watch. Erskin would be very sympathetic. But also, privately, like 'yep, this is a family man. we won't be traveling together more than a year.'. Bel's a loner due to trauma, which is necessarily going to heal, not a quirky lifestyle preference like Erskin.

 

also re: that lady soldier dog. it seems to me that dogs 'seem' smarter when they're around working groups of humans, even when they're not trained to be working dogs themselves, than when they're kept as pets. makes me wonder if pet dogs just have their potential really wasted, because they're treated like toys and children all their lives. so they can be disruptive or selfish or inert or a big nuisance, because there isn't really anything important for them to do, and the work a lot of human families perform is usually conducted outside the house, away from the dog. so as far as the dog knows, all the humans do is eat, sleep, and fool around, too.

as an anecdotal thing, rizzo doesn't bark at other dogs when he walks with blair, because she works with him on it and is very aggressive and confident. i'm very amiable with rizzo and defer mostly to what he wants to do— since i'm only outside on the walk for his sake anyway— and i'm also wary and cautious around big dogs, which can and do startle me when they come up suddenly. so when i walk him, rizzo is viciously hostile to other dogs, especially big ones, and pretty much never listens to me when i give the same commands for him to leave them alone and move on. blair is like 'you have to be the boss!' but i am actually sort of touched that rizzo has taken it upon himself to defend me.

 

erskin is probably just gently tipsy, but gets wobbly a lot earlier than most people would, since 'walking upright' counts as 'fine motor skills' for him.

 

whether or not Bel's getting any better at Werewoof Talk, Erskin's probably Cartoon Dog levels of communicative when he's on all fours. I think a lot of people don't know that dogs don't really act like that and hence don't get weirded out that Erskin is 'too smart' when he's hanging around human spaces and being manipulative. though, Bel's got such a sharp, analytical eye for detail, i bet even without spooky werewolf senses he would have twigged pretty quickly that Erskin was too cleverly expressive to be an animal.

now i want a werewolf au-au where bel isn't a werewolf and just figures out fast that erskin is, then grills him on it.