Who Are The Main Characters In Wolves Of The Blood Moon?

So I’ve started reading ‘Wolves of the Blood Moon’, a web novel. I don’t know how I found it, but the first chapter was just so amazing and raw and feral. The protagonist, Fang Li, is an antihero – an almost-human half-werewolf outcast struggling to reconcile his human loyalties with his bloody werewolf nature. Fang Li is just so beautifully, messily flawed as he stumbles about struggling to find his place in the world. The other two main characters, Luna (the cold and calculating alpha female who has a rather complicated relationship with Fang Li – acknowledging the threat he poses whilst being obsessed with him) and Kai (a young, sorrowful human hunter searching for revenge against the monsters who killed his family – only to slowly find out that not all monsters are evil) are both just so incredible. The relationships between all three of them are just so delightfully complex and gray. None of them are purely good or evil.

One thing I really love is the supporting cast. So there’s Old Man Jiang who’s this retired werewolf elder and gives our protagonist all of this super wise and old and cryptic advice. And then there’s Fang Li’s human sister, Mei, who doesn’t know what’s going on but sort of gets pulled into it. The author takes all of these really common tropes and twists them in really unique ways. So Luna, for example, is not your typical ‘mate bond’ love interest. Instead she’s really manipulative and terrifying at times, but at the same time Fang Li manages to get her to be sort of vulnerable and weak at times too. And Kai’s hatred is slowly unveiled to be sort of tragic as he discovers conspiracies within his own hunter faction. The collisions of all of these characters is sort of like watching a bloody and poetic dance.

I really enjoyed Fang Li in this. He’s this character who struggles against his nature every moon cycle or so, and his interactions with Luna are tense and snappy – Luna comes across as icy and dominant, and it’s really great to see Fang Li bite back against her. But then there’s Kai, who is initially a rather straightforward villain, but whose scenes are always filled with moral doubt and he ends up being my favorite. The human-werewolf politics are also really great, and allow for a lot of the secondary characters to shine – Mei’s ‘normal life’ is especially heartbreaking in the context of the rest of the story, as it highlights just how mundane her life is compared to the rest of the supernatural world.

This supports my earlier observation about a strong support network outside of the core characters. Each of the main characters has others who would be affected by their decisions, such as Kaelen’s loyalists amongst the younger warriors, Sariel’s human correspondence (for better or worse), the handful of soldiers that Rhys trusts, the elder conservatives that Vorian negotiates with, and the last remnants of Elara’s splinter pack. The way that the opinions of these various support networks pull on each of the main characters in different ways and cause them a great deal of tension is also a real strength.