Vote over at TWC and you can see a werewolf commission I just finished for Joseph! It's the appropriate time of year for werewolves, finally. I suppose any time is appropriate for werewolves, but Halloween helps even more.

I need to throw in some stuff to clarify the whole enthrall thing, though I think it can wait until I can shove it into some dialog in the next chapter. I've gotten a few complaints over the years that there's too much exposition, or I explain things too much, or whatever...but I do try to take into account where those conversations will feel the most natural. You CAN tell a story where you explain absolutely nothing, but that's not the style I'm going for here. I like a story that feels like it's easy to read and makes sense and flows logically from one step to the next, without having to throw in an unreasonable amount of interpersonal drama to keep things spicy. So anyway, that's how this story is going to go, and you have no room to complain because I'll never change lol

One of the more interesting theories I've read about the original Star Wars trilogy, which I remember very little about, is that Luke ultimately "lost" by fighting Vader in the end. There might not have been other options, but the fight itself wasn't a solution. (And you can debate the shit out of all that in the comments, but I will NOT know what you're talking about, because I haven't seen the original Star Wars in...almost 20 years.) But anyway, having read that series of tweets regarding Star Wars that I can't remember any more about, it clicked with me why I don't like to throw gratuitous fights into this story. For one thing, I'm not a fan of violence. I don't like watching a movie that's plot interspersed between lengthy fight scenes. I don't like movies where people get mowed down left and right and the scenery is crumbling all around them. None of that does anything for me other than make me impatient for the actual movie to continue. And if you look back through this comic, the fight scenes have come to nil on the whole: usually something changes that ends the fight other than fighting, like Malaya turning into a giant werewolf monster, or everyone fainting, or it's just training, etc. The only fight that really ended conclusively was when Tom beat up Connie, and that's because that fight was meant to be brutal. You're supposed to understand that leaving a pregnant woman to bleed out alone in a forest wasn't a brave or good thing to do -- the fight was a means to an end in regards to Tom's emotions, but not a solution. 

So here is the solution, which is just Malaya being herself. She's not fighting back against Ginger, she's calming her down using plain old leadership, patience, and some latent werewolf abilities. And for the people yesterday who thought she was looking at something: no, she was just very confused, which Malaya will continue to be in next week's pages. Mal wasn't in the woods in Chapter 7 when we learned about enthrall. 

And that's the ultimate thesis of this story: solving a problem by using your power against those around you only creates more problems.