If you want to see Elias's post-transformation look, vote over at TWC today! Well, part of his look. It's hard to fit a whole werewolf into some of these tiny panels. Oh man, I'm not awake at all. By the time my change-of-season insomnia for Fall resolves, it'll be winter! At least it's easy to sleep in winter. I'm like a bear, hibernating under a million blankets. And cats. Werewolf transformation party part two! There's a method to these transformations, if that's not obvious. Starts in the hands, works up the arms, then the feet up, then the head. Face takes the most work to rearrange, and hands and feet are the first weapons of defense, so that seemed like the logical place to transform first when I sat down to think about all this. Also why binding his arms in silver and wolfsbane helped prevent the transformation, because that's where the transformation starts :). I feel like Ginger is just going to slooowly recede into the woods and hope no one notices her. I realized that compared to all the other werewolves, she's generally useless. She's not interested in being werewolfy, she's not comfortable being violent, and probably more than the rest of them, Ginger wants to be a normal person. (That sounds familiar...) Then that spawned a bunch of other thoughts about her character and Connie, and now I've got a whole damn arc for her somewhere down the line. I find that if I write around a character long enough, I eventually figure out where to go with them. Now I just gotta figure out Marcus's deal more clearly. Vincent took me awhile, too, and they're very similar in nature, so I imagine I just need more time to think about him. At the end of the day, if you can figure out what a character wants, even if it takes awhile, that'll tell you their whole story. Meanwhile, Vincent is feeling some things. What kind of things? Shock and awe? Fear? (Latent arousal?) IDK, he's a little stunned. Shuffle that thought into your brain files for later. He's seen Malaya in her giant werewolf form, but actually seeing the whole process is probably a bit mind blowing. In TV news, Xena is kind of a fucked up show. I feel like I could just end my thoughts there, but really, watching shows from the 90s makes me realize how far we've come in not telling stories that raise my hackles. Like, season 3 has kind of been a weird damn mess? Spoilers! But there's an episode where Xena's kid and his...centaur guardian...are killed by Gabrielle's kid who she was magically impregnated with by like, the devil or whatever. Then Gabrielle has to kill her evil kid. Okay, that's pretty messed up, and Xena's obviously pissed about this whole situation. So the next episode, we've got Gabrielle naked going through a purity ritual to cleanse her of her guilt or something (why naked??? why always naked??? as we pan across her legs and ass sensuously as we get to her blank, grieving face...inapprops), then Xena storms in and then ties her to the back of her horse and drags Gabrielle around (while she's wearing a sheet...dress...thing) in what would normally amount to torture or at least enough contusions to kill a person, before almost throwing her off a cliff. OKAY. Then, we both end up in the water and finally in some weird fucking afterlife where shit is REALLY FUCKING WEIRD and then we sing about our feelings because SURE I'M STILL TRAUMATIZED and then we communicate our feelings and overcome some shit and things are back to normal, better than ever. I get that in a serialized show in the 90s, you have to resolve things quickly. I get that. You have to reestablish status quo because this shit is going to syndication where it'll be played out of order because TV is ridiculous. BUT...I would argue that from a writing perspective, if you can't fucking resolve a situation like kids killing each other and the devil being involved and matricide...then don't go there. If you don't have the time, if you don't have the episodes...then you need to make your story work a different way. Because that's a cheap use of high drama to just let it be resolved in the strangest, most trippy way possible. Fun writing tip: the intensity of the damage done in any given situation demands just as much effort put into the resolution. If you kill a character, that needs to have lasting impact. If it doesn't have lasting impact, that lack of impact should be addressed. If you tear apart a whole city to save the world, that demands a lasting impact. If you can't write a good story featuring lesser stakes, that you can actually resolve and explore in their due time, then you're kind of a shitty writer.