The Melodrama of the Lone Alpha Wolf

The "lone alpha wolf" is the figure of the solitary, brooding tough guy who needs no one, and online it is now almost always summoned as a joke at that figure's expense. The archetype rests on the idea of the alpha wolf, the dominant animal that supposedly fights its way to the head of the pack, a notion borrowed from mid-century studies of wolves in captivity. The detail worth knowing is that the science was later disowned by the very researcher who made it famous, wild wolf packs turning out to be ordinary families led by the parents. None of which has troubled the young, who took the pose and ran with it.

The joke found its purest form in a strain of melodramatic werewolf roleplay, in which a tortured man mid-transformation warns away the object of his affection, addressed with grave tenderness as "kitten," so that she might be spared the sight of him. "Go away kitten, I don't want you to see me like this," he growls, and the comedy lies in the vast distance between the operatic delivery and the plain fact of a grown man pretending to be a wolf on the internet. The lines multiplied from there, printed on shirts and recited into cameras.

The figure now serves as an all-purpose target for anyone performing wounded, solitary masculinity a shade too earnestly, the sigma male and his relations included. What the young are laughing at is not solitude itself but the theatre of it, the suspicion that the loneliest wolf in the room rather hopes someone is watching. It is a gentle correction, delivered in the only register the age fully respects, which is the joke.