#i am *still* very emotionally invested in the desk lamp i got for my fourteenth birthday

[turnips-dont-grow-on-trees]

There’s a trope in werewolf fiction wherein the concept of Pack is profound and sacred, possibly even metaphysical, not to be entered into lightly. But what if we took it in a different direction?

As the saying goes, “Humans will pack-bond with anything.” To that I would add: “Werewolves doubly so.”

Sitting in silence next to someone on the bus for half an hour. #Pack Passing someone on the street who’s wearing the same shirt. #Pack A stranger complimenting one’s hat. #Packmates for life

Picture Jack Russell with a hair-trigger packbonding instinct. As a kid, he had a favorite everything. Favorite cup, favorite pair of socks, favorite pencil. Got really emotionally invested in a desk lamp once.

Jack crashes a bachelor party and scores an invitation to the wedding because he befriended the groom-to-be. Jack Russell makes friends so quickly, is the thing. There’s a line from Dirk Gently: “I think we’ll be great friends. I can already tell we’ve got oodles in common. We both like, um, eating. Breathing. We both can walk. Listen, there’s an ocean of commonalities here for us to draw on.”

Again, these bonds are not deep and profound. They are not capital-P unbreakable Packbonds. It’s more like what Tajfel’s Minimal Group Paradigm study found, that the threshold for forming a group identity - and exhibiting ingroup favortism and outgroup prejudice - is really quite low. One of his experiments told participants they were being sorted by how well they counted dots flashed on a screen, and surprisingly they formed a group identity around that. But those groups that had been created by the research study were not enduring bonds of lifelong brotherhood. It was just enough to get people to think, subconsciously or not, that ‘these are my people.’

Jack, pack-bonding with everything, thinks this constantly.