The “elect”, a group invented by certain religious types, are the section of the population predetermined to be saved. They’re god’s best friends forever. Thing is, some of us, the “preterite”, just got overlooked. Lots of fiction obsesses over the damned – frankly, as a concept, the damned are melodramatic (read, goths). It’s easier to feel for the preterite, the ones who just didn’t qualify.

I went to the zoo recently (take that coherent thought!). Zoos are cool, you should give one a try. Because seeing an animal can remind you why we mythologised them the way we did. You can look at a raven in the eye and know why we say it’s so cunning. There is something undeniable about the experience of seeing these creatures in the flesh, a lion roaring is very near to a monster. It reminds you of the silliness of many fictional heircrchies, reminds you that superhuman means ‘it really isn’t human at all’.

The divine is pretty much the top level of superhumanity. More common in anime shows, when they produce a superhero/villain, is elite superhuman achievement as a product of exceptional effort, self-belief, love. For an elect the divine isn’t a hope, a possibility – it’s destiny. Understanding an elect means we, the preterite, are left out, looking on at the marvel. Often we invent tales of the amazing only to populate them with people much like ourselves made better. Dressed up in a robot suit, a ninja headband, period dress. It’s only when you feel that the special few are moving in their own direction that they become an elect, and really put the rest of us us in our place.

The elect aren’t actually angels, they’re people. In fact one can borrow this elitist construct and make an ideological elect that doesn’t even have to be holy. Think of eugenics. Think great men approaches to history. Ivory tower academics. Human, but better. The religious elect are picked out to move into the divine on their own trajectory, but your god might be science of race or whatever.

Lots of anime use such groups in their plot (often the baddies following a false god), because lots of anime are about being/becoming/meeting the special people. And what characterises the special people can be quite instructive. I just started Wolf’s Rain – I don’t know if it’s gonna push itself on in the direction of great win (the language we use for our masterpieces could do with some interrogation). It is pretty, but with sometimes leaden dialogue and a not particularly subtle approach to most things. It being quite cool is enough to get me past that, and at least it engages with the role of the extraordinary in an interesting way. It’s the elect as part of the natural order. For in Wolf’s Rain the animal is a step closer to god.

That’s an animal I didn’t see on my day at the zoo. The big myth, the wolf. What’s in a wolf? It’s werewolf, lone wolf, big bad wolf. It’s almost the definitive wild. We get on fine with dogs, and the wolf is the next step away from the domesticated into ‘will eat you’ territory. It’s the nature that lies within, waiting for the moon. That lurks outside the town walls.

In an action-based series one naturally gets the lone wolf myth at work. But in Wolf’s Rain there are 4 characters and 4 ways to be wild – the leatherclad toughie, the joker, the missionary, the kid aspiring. What matters is that they’re like us but different. This is a world of domed cities, steel locomotives, miniguns. The elect move in another way to the dupes of civilisation – puritanical, spiritual. Perhaps that’s what our pseudo gods need most – they have to be moving in a direction all of their own.

In the internal mythology of the show the wolf was created first, man and his civilisation came next. That doesn’t just set up the plot of the series, it sets the tone for the wolfman as a sort of elect. They’re the mark between us and paradise. But then, unlike the christian elect, they’re closer to angels, to man pre-sin, to spirit ancestors. In a fantasy world you don’t just divide into human and not, you can blur the line. That’s what wolves do in this show, they operate between the human and the superhuman – the position we might normally assign to a (human) elect, only closer to the spirit.

The wolves in this show walk among us in human forms, and when they go hairy you don’t see horrorfilm transformation scenes, they just cut to a new body between shots. They’re human and wolf at once – because the wild walks among us. There’s already been a play on perspectivalism with this – when our cast were seeing each other as people, and the death machine chasing them saw them as wolves.

When they walk among us in this dystopia they’re criminals. Unable to live alongside us, they belong to the realm of the mad. Humans raze the wilderness into a dead winter, we make a barren preterite city for drinkers and scrap merchants.

To the credit of the show, the preterite matter too, they’re cast in big roles in Wolf’s Rain – because without the tangible presence of a lower humanity the elect become a simple fantasy, they stop being the chosen among us and just become a more flattering mirror for humanity. This variation in wildness levels (A,B,C,D…) is present within our group, with one wolf a lot more wild, instinctive and proud than the others.

But at the same time there’s somebody else in the picture, a masked mysterioso – the guy with the Flower Maiden. Somebody with more knowledge, more distance from the viewer. A step closer to god on the scale of ‘not us’. Yet the wolves are never operating as a preterite to these higher forces, because we in the true preterite don’t even have the wild. We just have whatever’s on our mind right now and the slow easing off into emptiness. We can pick up jobs and roles, but the wolves have destiny – even if they aren’t in on all of the story, it’s still their story.

Odd how so often in fiction destiny is empowering. It’s the idea of destiny as one’s own. After all, mystical destiny is a product of illsuion, it’s taking a real story and imagining it replayed as a succession of inevitable cause and effect relationships. In identifying a set course for this we paint predestination as something owned, as a freedom from wider coercion.

Destiny says of us that we are not driven by a collection of miniscule and enormous impetuses dropped by chance upon each person. It’s saying I have one meaning, that is me, and that decides my tale. Picked out. Chosen. It’s the stuff of fiction. We say in praise, ‘you are a hero’. But that’s for the heroes who’re just us writ large, not for the elect. For them we send out a letter from the preterite, and it doesn’t mention the ‘h’ word at all. It just says ‘you are the protagonist’. The one in tune with what matters, the real story. Overlooked, we can wait and watch, and maybe imagine being a bit closer than we are to things far above us.