Shapeshifter AU
Fuzzy isn’t that weird.
Okay, so today’s installment of ‘elaborate AU I hadn’t bothered to make a post about previously’ is shapeshifters! More clearly stated, it’s the human to animal shapeshifting community as it pertains to my view of how an AU like that works.
In this world, Tony is a European Lynx shapeshifter. Now, most everything else is the same, mostly, but for a few pivotal details.
Shapeshifters are actually only about a fifth of the human population, and some people have throwbacks all the way to extinct lines of animals (such as Rhodey being a European wolf, which are huge by the way) or end up a blend of multiple lines if their family kept relatively to one species through marriage and such. Some families end up with kids who are all different species just because there were that many lines of animal types in the family.
The shapeshifter gene is recessive, and animal types are denoted by dominance within those. For instance, mammalian shifters are more common than birds which are more common than reptiles. Nobody is a fish shifter as it’s suspected that aquatic types died out fairly early in the evolution of humanity due to being unviable on land. Among mammals, feline and canines are the most common, just as raptors are predominant among birds, and predatory lizards are most common in that class of shifter. It’s been determined that, overall, prey animals only make up perhaps a fifth of all shifters, and only a third of those are not omnivores.
Now, as for how all this affects humanity as a culture, well, people are people. Shifters get discrimination heaped on them, so it’s not uncommon for those who are such a thing to keep it to themselves unless they’ve determined that the person they’re telling can either be trusted with it or is a shifter as well. Often, shifters don’t really get a choice about coming out in their adolescent years, as from the point of childhood to as far as late teens, a shifter might be unable to control when they turn into a stage-of-life similar variation. Which means that at least a couple times Howard and Maria had to rush in and scoop up tiny kitten Tony before anyone got a good look at him and realized what was what.
It wouldn’t have done for the press to figure him out. It’s also to be noted that shifters under heavy stress or ill health will at times also revert to their animal form and remain so until this has passed. Returning to human form when the stressor still present is not only difficult but often unwelcome and unpleasant as well. Suffice to say that college, for many shifters, is a minefield of negotiating being outed.
But, in terms of how discrimination works, it’s often a mess of people assuming things, and passing on those assumptions. Stories like werewolves and the like still exist, for all that shifters don’t in any way crave human blood, and while having animal instincts, do, in fact, maintain their human intelligence and ability to think in their animal form. There have been issues of people not trusting shifters in certain professions and even, once upon a time, having them banned from medical practices as a ‘safety procedure’. It also means that shifters were both coveted and targeted by the last world war’s conflict, both as attack animals, and as people to get rid of when they wouldn’t bend to such demands.
These days, many of those prejudices have been overturned in studies, but people are still cruel, and things like turning young shifters feral after a kidnapping isn’t unheard of. People like to forget that such a thing would apply to any human, and that shifters are simply more vulnerable due to their stress responses. The battle for equality, in the United States at least, has come incredibly far, and many practices once considered common or acceptable are illegal.
And this is the world Tony was born into, which he’s never squandered. His parents were both shifters, two different lynx lines from different parts of Europe, but Howard did his level best to keep that from being found out and affecting the business, which Tony did his best to do as well, until his late twenties. After that, it was less about trying to keep it a secret, and more about making it not a big deal.
Really, the biggest change it made for Tony is having yet one more cause to keep an eye on and champion, and the way he did his architecture. Let’s just say that Tony has shamelessly made sure to have heated floors near really dramatic sunlit windows, shall we? And said floors have ridiculously soft plush carpeting to boot.
As a last sidenote! It takes a lot of skill to only shift partially, and many shifters either never learn, or never bother. Added to this, it’s almost unheard of for people to be able to speak in their animal form though there are stories of the rare, old shifter who has learned some form of animal-form-only telepathy through sheer overwhelming amount of time spent in said form. Such a skill can be taught, should it exist, but most people believe that it is, in fact, just a myth.
Tony, of course, totally knows how to partial shift, and did you know Lynxes can both roar and purr? Because they totally can. And Tony is not afraid to purr when he damn well feels like it either.