The Man Behind The Curtain Speaks

Good evening. I'm Bruce Bethke, and I'm going to step out of character tonight and spend a little time answering one of the questions that's kept coming up ever since we first launched this site in June of last year. The question, in its least profane form, is:

What the heck is the Curse of the Were-Weasel all about?

The short answer is: fiction. Elaborating on this admittedly rather terse answer, it's about exploring the question of whether a blog engine can be used effectively to construct a serial fictitious narrative, and along the way to develop, over time, a corresponding collaboratively designed fictional universe.

In a sense, things like this are already being done. There are plenty of blogs out there right now that contain nothing but the purest fiction, although most of the ones we're aware of purport to be the non-fictional chronicles of the narrator's sex life and/or political activities—or all too frequently, both. We already know that a first-person blog describing, say, the wild and uninhibited sexual adventures of a beautiful young bisexual female advertising copywriter turned pole-dancer and political campaign web 2.0 consultant would draw a large and loyal, if perhaps completely irrational, readership. Probably even land us a movie deal, too.

But we are not interested in trying to pass our fevered prurient fantasies off as realities. And we certainly are not interested in producing any kind of porn.

Hence, Curse of the Were-Weasel: an intentional attempt to develop, over the course of two years, a shared universe populated by fascinating characters, and to use this universe to present a story in weekly, serialized, interactively developed, and not necessarily linear installments.

But why this particular story? We considered a number of other potential story lines first, but this one seemed to provide us with the greatest possible openness and require the least guidance. (This latter assumption turned out to be dead wrong, but more on that in a bit.) The market category of "paranormal romance" is unbelievably hot right now, as evidenced by the collected works of Laurell Hamilton, Yasmine Galenorn, Kim Harrison, or my own personal favorite, Ronda Thompson—


Ah, the giants.

—and it shows no signs of dying off any time soon. It's tempting to blame Joss Whedon and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992) for this, but I'd put the point of inception at least five years earlier, with Ron Koslow's 1987 TV series, Beauty and the Beast.

Never mind that now. The decisive points were that vampires are horribly and heavily overused in gothic serial romances (Dark Shadows, anyone?), but the conventions of the werewolf trope are equally widely known and were not, at least a year ago, so heavily overused. Besides, there are a lot of variations on the were-creature trope, and the genre is not without its opportunities for humor.

So were-critters it was.

But then the question became, how do you free the werewolf trope from some of its more inconvenient conventions? (Only in full moonlight, deathly allergic to silver, tendancy to black-out and experience periods of bestial homicidal insanity followed by amnesia, etc.) How do you turn were-creatures into intelligent, articulate, and sympathetic first-person narrative voices? In short, how do you bring them out into the light of day?

The answer came to us in a flash. This is the 21st century. What if were-creaturism was now known to be a disease: a terrible, communicable, debilitating disease with potential deadly outcomes, true, but nonetheless, only a metaphorical curse? Why, that would make the people who contract this disease victims, deserving not fear and scorn but sympathy and understanding—and all the manifold services of the entire Victim Support Industry! Why, we realized, if such a thing as were-wolfism were real, werewolves would be covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act, and not only could you not fire a werewolf who went feral in your office, you'd be required by Federal law to accomodate his disability!

And thus was born ALPS: Acquired Lycanthropic Polymorphism Syndrome. A retroviral disease passed by exchange of bodily fluids (usually, but not always, via the blood/saliva interface involved in "biting" behavior), ALPS by some not-as-yet-fully understood mechanism activates dormant sequences in the victim's DNA, resulting in a so-called "transformation" into a temporarily altered physiognomy and accompanying reversion to primitive, predatory, carnivorous behaviors. Given that this transformation usually involves changes to the mandible structure and hair-growth patterns, the conventional (if distasteful) expression is to say that the victims have "turned into wolves..."

But why stop there? World folklore abounds with tales of were-bears, were-cougars, were-jaguars, were-tigers, were-badgers, and many, many more—including, yes, were-seals. So on further reflection we decided our ALPS victims should be capable of changing into a very wide variety of forms, according to the nature of their character, and all of which resemble various large, carnivorous mammals. (We decided to make a sticking point of the large, carnivorous mammal requirement, so no were-tuna or were-banana slugs or anything really silly like that.) Further, we decided it would make them more interesting if their transformations were not slaved strictly to the lunar cycle but rather erratic, hormonal, and in some cases, possibly even voluntary, and more akin to getting really in touch with their inner animal avatar than with reverting to mere mindless bestiality.

With those basic rules in place, all that was left was to come up with some excuse for our ALPS victims to get together on a weekly basis, in order to interact and tell their stories. Once we couched it in those terms, the answer was obvious: Were-Creatures Anonymous. Because here in Therapy Nation, what else would werewolves do but form 12-step self-help groups to help them deal with their issues, their feelings of alienation, and that ever-present urge to solve their interpersonal problems by ripping some jerk's throat out, tearing open his ribcage, and feasting on his still-beating heart?

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The Curse of the Were-Weasel launched on Sunday, June 8, 2008, with "The Were-Weasel's Tale". Results in the first few months were promising, but to be honest, wildly erratic. This randomness was the natural result of the lack of structure and guidance I mentioned earlier; trusting to spontaneous invention was not working, nor was the lack of an overarching plot line. I've worked from rigid series bibles before and didn't enjoy it, but I made the mistake of going too far in the opposite direction.

Fortunately Henry and Vidad rescued the thing by staging a coup and assuming control over ramrodding the show from week to week. Since then we've introduced vampires, in a controlled fashion and subject to similar strictures as our ALPS victims, and developed a larger plot, initially centered on the Reverend Riley and his anti-ALPS movement but now grown to embrace "Dark Life" and the emerging struggle between the new breed of out-of-the-closet were-beasties and the older and more traditional cryptids.

The one thing that remains disappointing is the audience-participation angle. We chose to use the Google comment engine specifically because it enables readers to enter comments under any screen name they choose; we encourage readers to adopt a new identity (or many new identities) and participate in the commentary as if they too were members of WCA or one of the affiliated support groups. This is the area where we're watching for tryouts and prospective new posters.

Any more questions?