1) There are not a lot of women werewolves. It's established pretty early on that werewolves almost never give birth, because the power that lets them heal quickly tends to re-absorb the blastocyst before the pregnancy can progress. (There's one werewolf we meet who, as far as we know, is the sole exception: he's Charles and he's the male protagonist of the Alpha and Omega series.) So practically every werewolf in existence has been transformed, and to survive the transformation and control your wolf, you have to be... of a certain toughness? Compassionate people make terrible werewolves, evidently, because the wolf wants to hunt and kill things, and people who can't roll with that can't control their wolves and end up having to be killed. Now. This should not necessarily translate into a lack of gender parity, but it does. There are generally only one or two women per pack, IIRC, and they get ranked as less dominant than the men because they're women. Which is not to say they're not dominant: there's a fight in one of the later Mercy books that turns on whether or not a woman has the right to challenge another wolf. The traditional ranking says no, but everybody knows the traditional ranking is BS. On the other hand, there isn't really a feminist werewolf movement. I wouldn't say Mercy's an alpha. It's more that all of the werewolf rules simply don't apply to her because she's not a werewolf, which leaves all the werewolves sort of at sea about how she fits in.
2. The rape. Oh gosh. What do I want to say about the rape.
On the one hand, I completely get the argument for it being gratuitous and unnecessary and oh DID YOU HAVE TO GO THERE. More frustratingly, it's happened to both Mercy and Anna, the protagonist of the Alpha and Omega series. I really wish that once Briggs'd decided that was Anna's background, she hadn't done that to Mercy, because it ends up feeling like that's what happens to women in her books. (I kind of want to go, "But she's writing about hierarchical dominant predators who also happen to be mostly men and well, there you go," but that's not really fair to men.)
On the other hand... I do think she does a fairly good job of not sugarcoating it. It's traumatic for Mercy. It's still an issue for her at least two books after it happens. It's not something she just shrugs off. She does get into a relationship with the guy she's been dancing around with for a while at the end of the same book, but she has to put real effort into being intimate with him because she's still not over it. (There's a period of recovery time that gets elided over a bit; it's not like she gets raped and then hops into bed with Adam the next day. Well, she does, but it's for sleep.) Anna is raped before her series starts, and again, a lot of what we see in her is her working through that to grow closer to Charles.
I guess what I want to say about Mercy's rape is that I do think it was a bit gratuitous but it made sense in the context of the book, and that she tries to handle the aftermath of it with the seriousness it deserves. On the other hand, she does seem to keep doing this to her female protagonists which is annoying and I wish she'd stop. I'll shut up now.
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1) There are not a lot of women werewolves. It's established pretty early on that werewolves almost never give birth, because the power that lets them heal quickly tends to re-absorb the blastocyst before the pregnancy can progress. (There's one werewolf we meet who, as far as we know, is the sole exception: he's Charles and he's the male protagonist of the Alpha and Omega series.) So practically every werewolf in existence has been transformed, and to survive the transformation and control your wolf, you have to be... of a certain toughness? Compassionate people make terrible werewolves, evidently, because the wolf wants to hunt and kill things, and people who can't roll with that can't control their wolves and end up having to be killed. Now. This should not necessarily translate into a lack of gender parity, but it does. There are generally only one or two women per pack, IIRC, and they get ranked as less dominant than the men because they're women. Which is not to say they're not dominant: there's a fight in one of the later Mercy books that turns on whether or not a woman has the right to challenge another wolf. The traditional ranking says no, but everybody knows the traditional ranking is BS. On the other hand, there isn't really a feminist werewolf movement. I wouldn't say Mercy's an alpha. It's more that all of the werewolf rules simply don't apply to her because she's not a werewolf, which leaves all the werewolves sort of at sea about how she fits in.
2. The rape. Oh gosh. What do I want to say about the rape.
On the one hand, I completely get the argument for it being gratuitous and unnecessary and oh DID YOU HAVE TO GO THERE. More frustratingly, it's happened to both Mercy and Anna, the protagonist of the Alpha and Omega series. I really wish that once Briggs'd decided that was Anna's background, she hadn't done that to Mercy, because it ends up feeling like that's what happens to women in her books. (I kind of want to go, "But she's writing about hierarchical dominant predators who also happen to be mostly men and well, there you go," but that's not really fair to men.)
On the other hand... I do think she does a fairly good job of not sugarcoating it. It's traumatic for Mercy. It's still an issue for her at least two books after it happens. It's not something she just shrugs off. She does get into a relationship with the guy she's been dancing around with for a while at the end of the same book, but she has to put real effort into being intimate with him because she's still not over it. (There's a period of recovery time that gets elided over a bit; it's not like she gets raped and then hops into bed with Adam the next day. Well, she does, but it's for sleep.) Anna is raped before her series starts, and again, a lot of what we see in her is her working through that to grow closer to Charles.
I guess what I want to say about Mercy's rape is that I do think it was a bit gratuitous but it made sense in the context of the book, and that she tries to handle the aftermath of it with the seriousness it deserves. On the other hand, she does seem to keep doing this to her female protagonists which is annoying and I wish she'd stop. I'll shut up now.