Writing Anthropomorphic Wolf Characters: Almost Human — Who the Lupenites Are

Part of the Anthropomorphic Writing Series — The Lupenite Deep Dive, Part 1 of 3

Picture a Volorsky family dinner in Brooklyn.

Boris is at the head of the table. Larissa is next to him, the way she always is. Eight children are arrayed down the long table — twin sons Dimitri and Vladimir at the older end, the triplet brothers next to them, the two daughters next, then Sergei at the youngest end — and right now, all eight of them are talking. Or at least, all eight of them are trying.

Dimitri is telling Vladimir he's wrong about something. Vladimir is interrupting him to explain why he's wrong about being wrong about it. Eugeni and Arseny are laughing at both of them. Ilariy is passing a platter of pelmeni around the table for the third time. Natasha and Alisa, the only two daughters in the house, are leaning toward each other in the middle of the table, having a conversation neither of them is willing to share with their brothers. Sergei — thirteen years old, the youngest, the one who is currently the smallest person in this entire room — is trying to land a joke and getting talked over by his five older brothers and two older sisters, all of whom are louder than him by several decibels and several decades.

There is a second table next to the first, because three of Boris's seven siblings came over for dinner and the regular table doesn't fit them all. The other four siblings live within a five-minute walk and will probably wander in for dessert. Boris's parents live next door — literally next door, the apartment one over from his own. Larissa's parents live four floors up, in the penthouse of the same building, because Larissa would not have it any other way. The Volorsky web isn't a family. It's an ecosystem.

The room is loud. The room is warm. The room is impossibly full.

From the outside, a stranger watching this dinner through a window might think they were looking at chaos. Maybe at an immigrant family that hasn't quite figured out how to live in America yet. Maybe at a household where nobody is in charge.

From the inside, this is the most stable, most cohesive social unit on Earth.

It is also the most ordinary scene in the world. Because somewhere, right now — across thousands of cities and dozens of countries and almost every nation that has ever existed — a few hundred million Lupenite families are sitting down to a version of exactly this dinner.

This is The Family — capitalized, because at this density and this scale, that is what it becomes. The most distinctly Lupenite thing in the world.

A Lupenite would never call this a pack. They would call it what it is. A family. Their family. The Family. Father, Mother, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives — the same words you and I would use, because that is what these people are. But underneath the language they reach for, the architecture that holds the whole thing together is the architecture of a wolf pack. The structure is the structure. And once you see it, the entire shape of who the Lupenites are starts to make sense.

That deep dive into the architecture is the next post in this series. This one is about something simpler and more foundational. Before we go inside the family, we have to know what kind of person sits at that table — and why the Lupenites, of all the species I have built in my world, demand to be understood on their own terms.

Not Animals

In the last post, I told you why I call them Lupenites and not wolves — the Latin root, the demonym tradition, the fact that "wolf" is a word my characters use only when they're describing how someone ate their lunch. This post is about who they actually are. What's underneath the name. What lives inside the coat.

And before we go any further, let me say the thing that all of this rests on. The Lupenites are not animals.

They are not wolves who learned to talk. They are not evolved canids who developed culture. They are not anthropomorphized beasts in any sense that actually matters. They are people. They are made in the Image of God. They are possessed of souls, of reason, of free will, of conscience and moral capacity. The wolf-shape they wear is not what they are. It is the lens through which you, the reader, are being asked to look at them — and through them, at yourself.

The fur coat, in everything I write, exists to illuminate the human condition. Not to obscure it. The species I have built in this world are humans wearing animal forms, and the animal forms are doing real thematic work — they exaggerate, refract, clarify, and amplify aspects of human nature that would be harder to see on a purely human page. Lupenites in particular do this work better than almost any other species in my world, because Lupenites are so close to ordinary humans that the lens barely curves at all. Looking at a Lupenite is, almost, looking in a mirror. And the small distortions of the mirror — the slight enlargement, the slight intensification, the slight tightening — are exactly where the insight lives.

That is the framework. Hold it as you read. Everything else flows from it.

Who the Lupenites Are

Before we get to the architecture or the costs or the inversion, you need to understand what you're actually looking at. Because the Lupenites are, in many respects, the most easily underestimated species in my world.

They are everywhere. In every nation on Earth, the Lupenites are one of the largest population groups — and along with Vulpens, Leonites, and Ursinians they form what is sometimes called the Big Four. In most countries, they are the largest of the Big Four. They are the demographic anchor of human civilization. And here is the strangest thing about them: they have never, at any point in their long history, acted like it.

The Lupenite walking down the street in Moscow or Tokyo or Brooklyn or Lagos does not carry himself like a member of the majority. He doesn't think of himself as one. The fact that nearly every room he walks into contains someone who looks like him — a little taller or shorter, a little leaner or broader, but unmistakably the same kind of person — registers as ordinary, not significant. Lupenites are the species that has been everywhere so long that being everywhere has stopped being a fact about them. It is just the texture of the world.

They are the closest thing in my world to ordinary people.

That is the first thing to understand about them. Of all the species I write, the Lupenites are the one whose internal range most closely mirrors the human range. A Lupenite can stand five foot two or seven feet tall — Vladimir Volorsky, at just over seven, is at the upper end of his species, but a small female Lupenite at five-two is just as Lupenite as he is. Lupenite families can have one child or twelve. Lupenite builds run from lean and rangy to heavily muscled. Lupenite temperaments run the entire spectrum that humans recognize as familiar.

Compare that to the species above them in the sizing system. A Leonite is, with very little variation, about nine feet tall. A Leonite family will, with very little variation, have between seven and twelve children, with nine being typical. The larger species cluster tightly around their species norms because their biology demands it. The Lupenites do not. They vary the way humans vary.

This is not an accident, and it is not a coincidence.

In a world where every species is, at its core, a Human in a Fur Coat — a being made in the Image of God, possessed of free will and an immortal soul, the same as you or I — the Lupenites are the species whose coat hides the least. They are bigger than us. They are stronger than us. They are bonded more tightly than us. But the range of who they are, the breadth of variation across their population, looks the way the human range looks. They are us, slightly amplified, slightly enlarged, slightly more tightly bonded — but recognizably us.

That is what makes the wolf-coat such a useful lens. It is just enough difference to let me say things about people that I could not quite say if the characters were straightforwardly human. The Lupenite's hyper-loyalty to family lets me show you what loyalty actually costs. The Lupenite's pack-bonded marriage lets me show you what monogamy actually is. The Lupenite's anxious extraversion — the discomfort of being alone, the need for the room to be full — lets me show you something true about the human soul that you would dismiss if I tried to argue it directly. The animal form does not animalize the character. It humanizes the reader. That is what anthropomorphism, done correctly, is for.

They are also, almost universally, monogamous. Real-world wolves mate for life, and that biological reality translates into the Lupenite person with extraordinary fidelity. Lupenites have the lowest divorce rate of any species in my world, by a margin that is not even close. When a Lupenite picks a partner, that is the partner. The instinct runs deep enough that even Lupenites who lose a spouse early in life often never remarry. It isn't a social rule. It is a biological orientation that the soul has chosen to honor.

They are warm. They are extraverted. They are the species you are most likely to find at the center of any social gathering, not because they are loud — though many of them are — but because they cannot be alone for very long without something in them starting to fray. Lupenites are at home in groups. They are at home in families. They are at home in any cluster of people that can plausibly be called ours.

That is the coat. That is the species.

The Volorskys at the Table

To make any of this concrete, you need a family to look at. So let me introduce you to the family the rest of this series will keep coming back to.

Boris and Larissa Volorsky. Russian Lupenites. Brooklyn. Forty-three and forty-two years old. Married since they were teenagers, with a fierceness that those who don't know Lupenites tend to underestimate. Eight children, born across the twelve years between 1988 and 2000, in a sequence that ran like this. Dimitri and Vladimir came first, fraternal twins, now twenty-five. Eighteen months later came Eugeni, Arseny, and Ilariy, fraternal triplets, now twenty-four. Five years after the triplets came Natasha, who is twenty. Two years after Natasha came Alisa, eighteen. And five years after Alisa, finally, Sergei. Thirteen.

That cadence — five children before Boris was twenty-three, three more between twenty-five and thirty — is, by Lupenite standards, not unusual. Lupenite couples tend to start young and stay together. Children come early. Children come often. Children come into a family that already had room for them before they arrived.

Around this nuclear family is the wider Volorsky web. Boris's parents in the apartment next door. Larissa's parents in the penthouse upstairs. Boris's seven siblings within a five-minute walk. The cousins, the in-laws, the friends-who-might-as-well-be-family — all of them woven into the same Brooklyn cluster, in and out of each other's apartments without knocking, drawn into the same dinner whether or not they were technically invited. The Volorsky family is not a household. It is a neighborhood operating on a single nervous system.

This is what a Lupenite family looks like when it has been allowed to develop naturally. The Volorskys are not unusual. They are simply Lupenite, in the most ordinary and complete way the species permits. There are tens of millions of families like this living, right now, on this Earth — the same tight-clustered, multigenerational, hierarchically-organized, perpetually-arguing, fiercely-loyal social unit that has been the Lupenite norm for as long as Lupenites have existed.

How exactly that family works — the architecture underneath the noise, the hierarchy that nobody planned but everyone follows, the way each child finds his place in the order without ever being told — is the subject of the next post. There is more going on at the Volorsky table than the volume suggests. The whole structure of a wolf pack is alive in that room, translated into human words and lived out by people with souls.

That is what we're going inside next.

The Lupenite, Almost in Focus

For now, here is what the Lupenites are.

They are people. They are made in the Image of God, possessed of conscience and reason and free will, capable of love and capable of sin and capable of choosing one over the other every day of their lives. They are not animals, and they have never been animals, and the writer who treats them as animals in fur is missing the entire point of the species.

They are the most numerous people in my world, and they have never thought of themselves that way. They are the closest thing my world has to ordinary humans, and they have never thought of themselves that way either.

They are bigger than us, and stronger than us, and bonded more tightly than us. The range of who they are looks exactly like the range of who we are. The variation is what tells you the truth. They vary the way persons vary, because that is what they are.

And the wolf-coat they wear, far from animalizing them, is the lens through which you can finally see them clearly — and through them, see something true about yourself that no straightforwardly human character could quite say to you.

The Lupenite is the species closest to the mirror. Almost human. The slight curvature of the lens is exactly where the insight lives.

Next time, we go inside the family that proves it.

— Eric Flegal

Next in the series: "Writing Anthropomorphic Wolf Families: Inside the Lupenite Pack Hierarchy" — the deep architecture of the Volorsky table, where the wolf pack becomes a household.