The primary difference between Pack and Family deals with that choice issue.
See, here's the thing.
For a werewolf, there's a degree of how personal or impersonal action towards or against any action is dealt with. However much pack matters to werewolf, some people aren't pack, and therefore is personal.
A Beast is Not Free From That Distinction (on the monster side, at least, but for everyone at most).
A question can exist on how the mechanics of Beast reflects on this, but here's the devil of the details for a Beast: it's always personal.
That's the point of family.
Like, on the one hand, family is the great facilitator to interaction of others. However much any one particular's actions are, you have an excuse so long as that person is yours.
On the other hand.
You know everyone's bullshit.
And because of that, you know when a line is crossed.
I feel like it's important to iterate that Kinship is a cause of violence as much as it is a deterrent from violence.
The keypoint of Kinship is that the externals fade away, and the personals come straight into view.
Kinship is not a lovey dovey, all thing are good point of view. At least, not wholly.
Kinship is a pressure cooker.
And that's something Pack can't provide, because Pack is chosen.
Kinship is felt.
A Forsaken can look at the Pure, and be driven by the ideology between the two of them. It doesn't matter that one side allegedly killed Wolf and one didn't. It's not that they are, respectively one and the same. It's that one believes in the balance attained, and the other in a more atavistic world.
But a Beast looking at a Insatiable (or, fucking hell, a Hero) in that same context?
NO. FUCK NO. HELL FUCKING NO.
A Beast feels the betrayal to themselves, to their Mother, to their family, both as monsters and as humans.
And monsters outside of a Beast's Legend?
Like, it'd be easy for anyone else, but for a Beast, who feels every vampire and werewolf and mage and Created and changeling and Deeply Supernatural Enough hunter and Bound and mummy and demon and deviant as family, as someone who should fucking get it? Who feels, on the archetypal level, which is honestly how even our own resentment towards our fellow kids is articulated even though individual kids in a family are allowed to be despite coming from the same source, that you should get it?
Like, this simultaneously is one of the virtues and vices of Beasts-they both probably get it better than anyone else on the inside who might otherwise be biased from being inside and don't understand why your intricacies on the matter deviate from their broad understandings? That being of the kid who knows where you're coming from but not the exact whys of the matter?
Kinship isn't just the reasons why you feel like family, it's why you would kill your family when you wouldn't kill anyone else.
It's a feeling Pack doesn't tap into because it's more complicated, more frustrated, more wholesome and at the same time more infuriating than any other relationship.
Pack doesn't quite tap into the same " I will kill you because you are mine" and "I'll never kill you because you are mine" Kinship does. It is infuriatingly binding, that makes any action towards or against way more personal that any logical point of view could conceive.
That's (part of) the drama of Beast.
You came from the same Mother. (Maybe not directly, but the Dark Mother has some measure of mechanism in any other monstrosity if by no other method than being a Form and Definition of Monstrosity that intrudes and facilitates Forms and Defintions of Monstrosity)
So why the fuck are you like this? (to all personal defintions of "like this")
So, five years after the matter of pretending this was a coherent argument, let's kindly stop pretending this is a fucking thing.
Comparing Pack to Kinship doesn't work.
See, here's the thing.
For a werewolf, there's a degree of how personal or impersonal action towards or against any action is dealt with. However much pack matters to werewolf, some people aren't pack, and therefore is personal.
A Beast is Not Free From That Distinction (on the monster side, at least, but for everyone at most).
A question can exist on how the mechanics of Beast reflects on this, but here's the devil of the details for a Beast: it's always personal.
That's the point of family.
Like, on the one hand, family is the great facilitator to interaction of others. However much any one particular's actions are, you have an excuse so long as that person is yours.
On the other hand.
You know everyone's bullshit.
And because of that, you know when a line is crossed.
I feel like it's important to iterate that Kinship is a cause of violence as much as it is a deterrent from violence.
The keypoint of Kinship is that the externals fade away, and the personals come straight into view.
Kinship is not a lovey dovey, all thing are good point of view. At least, not wholly.
Kinship is a pressure cooker.
And that's something Pack can't provide, because Pack is chosen.
Kinship is felt.
A Forsaken can look at the Pure, and be driven by the ideology between the two of them. It doesn't matter that one side allegedly killed Wolf and one didn't. It's not that they are, respectively one and the same. It's that one believes in the balance attained, and the other in a more atavistic world.
But a Beast looking at a Insatiable (or, fucking hell, a Hero) in that same context?
NO. FUCK NO. HELL FUCKING NO.
A Beast feels the betrayal to themselves, to their Mother, to their family, both as monsters and as humans.
And monsters outside of a Beast's Legend?
Like, it'd be easy for anyone else, but for a Beast, who feels every vampire and werewolf and mage and Created and changeling and Deeply Supernatural Enough hunter and Bound and mummy and demon and deviant as family, as someone who should fucking get it? Who feels, on the archetypal level, which is honestly how even our own resentment towards our fellow kids is articulated even though individual kids in a family are allowed to be despite coming from the same source, that you should get it?
Like, this simultaneously is one of the virtues and vices of Beasts-they both probably get it better than anyone else on the inside who might otherwise be biased from being inside and don't understand why your intricacies on the matter deviate from their broad understandings? That being of the kid who knows where you're coming from but not the exact whys of the matter?
Kinship isn't just the reasons why you feel like family, it's why you would kill your family when you wouldn't kill anyone else.
It's a feeling Pack doesn't tap into because it's more complicated, more frustrated, more wholesome and at the same time more infuriating than any other relationship.
Pack doesn't quite tap into the same " I will kill you because you are mine" and "I'll never kill you because you are mine" Kinship does. It is infuriatingly binding, that makes any action towards or against way more personal that any logical point of view could conceive.
That's (part of) the drama of Beast.
You came from the same Mother. (Maybe not directly, but the Dark Mother has some measure of mechanism in any other monstrosity if by no other method than being a Form and Definition of Monstrosity that intrudes and facilitates Forms and Defintions of Monstrosity)
So why the fuck are you like this? (to all personal defintions of "like this")
So, five years after the matter of pretending this was a coherent argument, let's kindly stop pretending this is a fucking thing.
Comparing Pack to Kinship doesn't work.
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