Charlaine Harris, Bob the Cat and the Origin of Shapeshifters

Charlaine Harris' Southern Vampire series (Sookie Stackhouse novels) is a fun romp into a world where vampires, werewolves, fox-women and fairies co-exist with regular folks, though it's weakened quite a bit by the author's habit of throwing in explicit sex scenes.

One book tells the tale of how telepathic barmaid Sookie's friend Amanda the witch unintentionally turns her boyfriend Bob into a cat during some 'adventurous sex' (not described.) Amanda and Bob the cat, New Orleans residents, go to stay with Sookie in northern Louisiana and have to stay longer than planned when Hurricane Katrina hit.

At one point in Amanda and Bob's stormy relationship Amanda goes out into the woods looking for Bob and finds him with a female cat who is nursing a litter of kittens. Said kittens all look like Bob.

Later Bob is changed back to human, but nothing more is ever said about the kittens. They are half-human after all. What will become of them now that their human parent has bugged out?

That makes me wonder about the origins of werewolves and similar shapeshifters. In most werewolf tales, a werewolf gets that way by being bitten by another werewolf. But who bit the first werewolf?

I like the idea that shapeshifters might arise when a witch transforms a human into an animal, and that animal reproduces in animal form. Surely the child of a human, even a transformed human, will inherit the human essence/human soul.

In Asian culture, by contrast, the fox people (gumiho, kitsune) arise when a fox, who normally live only 12 years, lives to the age of one thousand. There's also a magical being that arises when a household object such as a teapot or a sandal becomes one hundred years old.

In Wildmage, there are shapeshifters. What happened was this: the original settlers of the elemental world (Wildmage world) came through portals from our world. They came from different points across the scope of human history (and landed within a hundred year span of the elemental world's history). Among those from the latest period were some who were humans with animal DNA, or animals with human DNA. On contact with the mage energies of the elemental world's environment, they all became shapeshifters who can be full animal, full human, or take the change-form (like the Wolf Man in the movies, hairy man-shaped dude with claws).

Later on, the lizard-men who settled in the central region of Zmaray got stuck in their change-form permanently, but that's another story.

Wildmage: Insert war here

Characters from K-drama 'Dae Joyoung'

I'm from the 'no plot, no problem' school of writing which means I often have to do a little re-imagining of my story, or write a chapter that comes before my original chapter one.

In Wildmage I've come to the conclusion that a war that was a vague part of the backstory needs to come onstage for the first chapter. I did a little clustering on this idea and came up with loads of cool stuff.

The story now starts with the Battle of Kumori. Kumori is a border county of the Northern kingdom and the original home of the Wildmage Hana. The traditional enemy of the Northern kingdom and its three allies is the Zmaray empire, home of the part-reptile Zmaray people. The Zmaray empire is in the center of a large, pangaia-ish continent, is landlocked, and always wanted to conquer its way to a coastline, any coastline. So this time they invade the Northern kingdom at Kumori which is at the border between the Northern and Eastern kingdoms.

I'm also working with a new character, Geon, a wildmage who is part of an army hwacha crew and who discovers Hana, a five-year-old orphan girl who in the midst of war's chaos has ended up with some refugee fox-people (fox shapeshifters, gumiho/kitsune). Geon discovers Hana has an unprecedented mage-talent even at her tender age and sends her off to his old teacher.

It's kind of odd having to insert a war into an already started story but it's really helping to develop the core idea. Geon is going to serve a purpose later in the story as an intermediary between Hana and the Oraha (king)--- Geon meets the Oraha during the story and is later given a position at the Court.


Hwacha is a Korean weapon that fires exploding arrows. They tested one on Mythbusters.
Kumori was inspired by a Korean place name Gomori/Komori, and by the hill Cumorah which is a part of LDS (Mormon) history.

Worldbuilding: Using Other Cultures for Inspiration

How do you create a fantasy world with some interesting exotic touches? One way is to base your fantasy world culture in part on some culture other than your own.

Notice that I said 'in part'. This is for two reasons. One is that to base your fantasy culture 100% on some other culture, you would have to know a great deal about that culture. That's fine if you are bicultural, or lived in some other land for most of your formative years. But for most of us, getting enough knowledge of another culture to do this would be much too time consuming.

The second reason is for the comfort of the reader. If you are writing a book in English, your reader base is in contact with English-speaking cultures--- either British, American, Australian or one of the other English speaking lands. If you wrote a fantasy world that was 100% based on a culture foreign to the reader, they might find it confusing and difficult to understand. They may need to have a few elements that are a little more familiar.

In practice, a writer will probably add elements of his own culture without even being aware of doing so. But I think it's a better idea to think about these things enough to do at least part of it on purpose!

In Wildmage, the setting is the Northern kingdom. The ancestors of the people there were Koreans. But they were heavily influenced by some aspects of European culture, particularly Christianity.

This is how it happened. There are connections between our world and the Wildmage world. These portals were in the hands of Christian monastic orders. These portals have been used to send people under threat of persecution for their Christian faith out of harm's way.

In the case of the Northern kingdom, Korean converts during the early period of missions to Asia went through the portal to escape threat of execution or war dangers. On the other side of the portal, in the Wildmage world, the refugees were taken in by monasteries for a time, and gradually left to build their own homes in the new world. Since the majority of those in these monastic establishments were ancestrally from Europe, this was the base for a somewhat blended culture.

Names for the two worlds? Our world is called the Old World or the Christus-Benedictus World. The Wildmage world is called the Elementals World or the Seven-Elementals world, based on the presence of seven types of beings, called elementals, which aid people in the Elementals world in developing magecraft-skills.

One of the best aids I've found in working the Korean culture into my Northern kingdom is a small Korean English dictionary. When I need a name for something quick, I can look up a Korean word to create a name. So I've used 'sori', meaning frost, as a name for a mage tower built of white stone, and 'koa', orphan, as the name of a cloister where the sisters run a school and an orphanage for girls.

The Problem of Prince Majun

In the first chapter of The Wildmage of Balhae Woods, the wildmage Hana is consulted by a messenger of the king. The king's only son and heir, young Prince Majun, has been examined by the court healers and mages and it has been discovered that prince is not capable of siring children. No healers or mages known to the king can cure the problem; it is hoped that Hana's outstanding scrying ability may help her locate some obscure little-known bit of magecraft that can do the trick.

In the world of Wildmage, there are many more girls born than boys, about 7 to 1. There have been historical incidents where tyrant kings have drafted scores of young women into the military to use them as shock troops in their wars against their neighbors; the women's lives were expended just to soften the enemy up for the 'real' soldiers. Because of that the idea of women soldiers is NOT considered a respectable notion and women most of all rebel against it, seeing it as an attack on their rights. So in most of the kingdoms, the Northern kingdom (where Hana lives) among them, the idea of a princess inheriting the kingship is not acceptable since the king's function is to lead his men into battle.

There are complicated rules of inheritance to help ensure male heirs. Most men have a concubine or two in addition to their wives; kings have several concubines as well as having queens. Sons of concubines can inherit from their fathers if there is no son by the Queen to take the throne. But things can get complicated as one goes further afield for heirs.

In the particular royal family we are talking about, the closest blood heir after Prince Majun is the son of a concubine, while the next closest is the son of the lawful wife. So there are two heirs with about the same level of rights. The king finds it imperative that Majun be made fit to inherit.

Hana, as a mere wildmage rather than an Order mage (who are trained in the special Order schools or in associated monastic establishment), sees this as her chance to make a name for herself. She must find a work of magecraft that will fix the problem, and resist the temptation to resort to the evil, demon-touched form of magic called sorcery.....

Notes: Prince Majun's name comes from the character Majun in the Korean drama Bread, Love and Dreams (AKA The King of Baking). Hana was a character in another Korean drama but I don't know which one. The king of the Northern kingdom also has the title "Oraha" which is a title of the ancient Korean kings of Balhae. And Balhae Woods is taken from the name of Balhae an ancient Korean kingdom.