Board Thread:WARNING ALL USERS False Info\Spoilers/@comment-10280603-20140114090029/@comment-19765459-20140114190038

Grahamburglar wrote: Werecoyote really isn't a stretch. In real world mythology, there's more than just werewolves -- most notably there's werecats. There's myths of therianthropic (that any sort of lycanthropy that isn't wolves) of virtually every sort of wild feline and canine. I've even read about werebears and wererats, but I'm not entirely sure if those come from actual myths or are just actual myths extrapolated into fiction.

So, yeah, if you're willing to accept werewolves and not other animals you probably should avoid the supernatural/horror genre altogether.

Werebears, at least, were supposedly the result of deliberate action, and not a curse. The word "berserker" is literally Norse for "bear shirt". It describes warriors who tried to call upon the power and ferocity of a bear, often by wearing a bear skin. There are myths of people transforming into bears through magic.

Dungeons & Dragons kind of standardized all of this under the category of "lycanthropy", even though the proper term is "therianthropy" (since the root "lycan" refers specifically to wolves). They also made it so that all therianthropes basically followed similar rules to the popular werewolf myth (i.e. get bitten and become one, change on the full moon, etc.).

Many cultures had myths about shapechanging animals. But in a lot of cases, they were often not humans. Sometimes they were intelligent animals that could assume human, or nearly-human, forms. In other cases they were spirits or demons that could assume both animal and human forms, but were not really either.

However, enough fantasy/sci-fi writers have a background in D&D that you see its subtle influence throughout media in those genres.