by Kris@WLP » Sat Jan 28, 2006 8:08 pm
Or perhaps Sarah being unusually huge and strong is something that just -happened.-
There'll be more on this in chapter four, but nobody (in the PitW universe, anyway) really knows where weres come from or how the transformation really works.
There are two theories in play among weres. Jean, like her mother the pharmacist, follows the scientific theory: lycanthropy is a viral disease transferred when some portion of a werewolf comes into contact with the internal fluids of the victim. There are enzymes in lycanthrope body fluids which don't occur in humans, so that theory has that much behind it... but no actual virus has been isolated... no other known virus can rewrite a cell's entire DNA and leave that cell functioning...
... and most of all, the very transformation itself breaks all known laws of both biology and physics. Additional mass does not come from nowhere... hair, bones, and flesh do not grow and shift in a matter of seconds... EXCEPT in lycanthropic transformations.
The other school of thought is the mystic theory, to which Peter's parents belong, although Walt has never really talked about it with Peter. Simply put, this theory holds that lycanthropes are descended from humans who tapped deeply into the spirit of certain wild creatures, gaining strength and wisdom from both human and animal. The main problems here are that there are HUNDREDS of competing religions or myths within werekind as to how this came about and how it works, and that saying something is magic doesn't explain a damn thing about how it works.
As for genetics are concerned, there's no such thing as a recessive werewolf chromosome. Any human who has procreational sex with a werewolf becomes a werewolf, so there's no possibility of a "cross-breed." All children of werewolves are themselves lycanthropes. There are two reasons werewolves haven't outbred or infected humanity into extinction: werewolves almost never have more than three children (and not often even three), and a lot of werewolves get killed without reproducing.
There may well be some reason why Sarah is as large as she is, but the honest answer is, "She is because it amused me to make her so."