pondering

What do you think happens if a werewolf bites a wolf?

I mean, one assumption might be that the wolf turns into a person at the full moon, right? Presumably some of the more short-sighted among the person's acquaintances might spend a considerable amount of effort trying to find ways to keep the person (the wolfwere, I suppose) in their human form all the time, just as they'd have been doing with the werewolf in the first place. Because it wouldn't occur to people that this individual might (a) not consider that a "cure" but prefer to remain a wolf all the time, that is, not to be required to transform ever or (b) consider that both their wolf and human forms are valid and what everyone should actually be looking for is a way to make the transition not hurt rather than a way to make the transition not happen. The latter is the position I've taken wrt werewolves at least for the last couple of years, when I've been thinking about it; who'd tell a centaur or a faun or a mermaid or any other head-of-a-human-body-of-a-$nonhuman that making their lower half "match" their upper half should be their only (or even a single!) life goal? (Not you, Hans Christian Andersen or your Disney heirs. My issues with the Little Mermaid are increasing.)

But of course your fauns and centaurs and merfolk and whatnot are hybrids or chimeras or what have you all the time, rather than only at night or only a couple of nights a month or whatever. And they're Born That Way, aren't they, whereas your traditional werewolves have lycanthropy thrust upon them, often (usually?) without their consent. Much in the way that a superhero sometimes does, yes/no? Did Peter Parker agree to be bitten by a radioactive spider? Why is Finding A Cure For Arachnism not a thing? (I know Finding A Cure is a thing in some superhero situations, viz. the X-Men movieverse, and we're trained by the films to think "Have you tried not being a mutant?" is a bullshit question, which is why I'm here saying "Have you tried not being a werewolf?" is ditto.) Probably because Peter Parker doesn't go biting additional people and turning them into spider-men. Which, you know, okay, so again, the thing to do for werewolves who are prone to biting others—which may not be all werewolves, another thing that is seldom discussed—is to stop them biting people, not to stop them being werewolves.

Anyway, back to the hypothetical wolfwere: I have no doubt plenty of people would try to "help" by trying to find a way to keep that person in human form all the time, rather than reflect that they might feel like the human form is a prison they have to live in for a couple of nights a month, because people who are acquainted with magical transformations are still pretty human-supremacist, aren't they? But in what I feel like is a related question: Why did no one from Narnia ever manage to travel to England? Is there some sort of Brigadoon-like enchantment around the place so outsiders can get in and then out again but insiders can't ever get out without destroying it? Is that what happens to werewolves and centaurs and superheroes also—you can have the head of a man and the body of a horse, but not the other way round? You can be a human teenager bitten by a radioactive spider, but not a spider zapped by something that gives you opposable thumbs and bipedalism and a larynx and a brain that can process language? You can be a man who turns into a wolf under the full moon, but not a wolf who turns into a man?