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Protagonists
Swiftkill
- Action Girl: Naturally, as she's half-dire wolf. She's able to beat two hyenas in a fight at the beginning without breaking a sweat.
- Adaptation Relationship Overhaul: In the original comic, she and Bloodspill were full-blooded sisters and had a close bond. Here, they're half-sisters with deep-seated animosity from Bloodspill's bullying of her when they were pups, and Swiftkill hates her so much that she initially tries to kill her.
- Early Installment Character-Design Difference: She had gray cream paws and hair tips in the original comic. These traits were carried into the reboot for a while before eventually being dropped, and her final design has red paws and no markings on her hair tips.
- Forced to Watch: She was forced to watch her dying mother be eaten by a hyena.
- Hates Being Touched: She appears to be like this, or at least hates affection. See her reaction when Cricket nuzzles her.
- Hybrid Power: Being part Rubicund (dire wolf) has made her larger and stronger compared to the regular wolves, though she's not as large as a pure dire.
- Jerk with a Heart of Gold: She is a grumpy loner with little respect for anyone but herself, yet she still goes out of her way to protect others - notably, she rescues Cricket from the hyenas before even knowing who she is.
- A Minor Kidroduction: The prologue begins with her as a small pup at her dying mother's side.
- Mix-and-Match Critters: She is half-dire and half-normal wolf.
- Parental Abandonment: Her mother is deceased and her father is missing.
- Red Baron: The hyenas know her as "the green-eyed devil".
- Strong Family Resemblance: She looks very similar to her mother, having her red fur and green eyes.
- Tempting Fate: When she boasts that the Inarians are too stupid to catch her, she doesn't even get to finish her sentence before running into one of Cricket's traps.
Cricket
- Cute Little Fangs: While all the wolves have fangs, Cricket's are especially adorable since they show as a neat little pair even when her mouth is closed.
- Early Installment Character-Design Difference: Was the one hit with this the most. Her design was played with for a while before it was settled on. Her pup design in the test comic was drastically different.
- Genius Ditz: Despite her general cluelessness (at one point not even realizing two hyenas were going to eat her and making no attempt to run away in time), Cricket is quite skilled at setting snares.
- Genki Girl: She is very cheerful, upbeat, and enthusiastic about proving herself to her peers by catching prey with her traps.
- Morality Chain: She serves as one to Swiftkill, bringing out her nicer side and keeping her from doing less-than-heroic things like hurting Sunstride or killing Bloodspill.
- Weak, but Skilled: She uses cunning and creativity to make up for her small size, including setting traps to catch prey that would be too big to bring down otherwise.
Sunstride
- Adaptation Name Change: His name was changed from Riptide (original comic) to Trip (in a test comic) and finalized to Sunstride in the reboot. There are no oceans nearby in either version so the former name, while nice, didn't make sense. The name "Sunstride" also reflects that he started out living in a desert.note
- Amazon Chaser: Upon hearing that full Rubicund Dires are even bigger than Swiftkill, the first thing he thinks about is flirting with them.
- Bullying a Dragon: He deliberately provokes Swiftkill when they first meet even though she's much bigger than he is. She nearly mauls his face off before Cricket stops her.
- Cowardly Lion: For all his bravado, he scares easily in the face of danger. This doesn't stop him from standing up to dire wolves or even Sabres when necessary.
- Early Installment Character-Design Difference: Riptide gained a comparatively more muted color scheme as Sunstride.
- Jerk with a Heart of Gold: He is introduced as cocky and snarky, to the point where he picks a fight with Swiftkill when they first meet. Once he warms up to her and Cricket, though, he's a rather nice guy.
- The One Guy: In both the original and the reboot, he's the only male of the four main characters.
- Rousing Speech: He tries to rally the Shadeless to defend their oasis from Swiftkill. Subverted when they give up without a fight anyway.
- Unrelated in the Adaptation: The appendix
◊ of the original comic listed Riptide (the old version of Sunstride) as Swiftkill and Bloodspill's cousin. In the reboot, he's part of a different pack called the Shadeless and doesn't seem to be related to either of them. - Urine Trouble: He attempts to do this to Swiftkill, of all wolves. Yeah, brave, but not a smart idea.
Inarians
Lady Zephyr
- Adaptation Name Change: Her name in the original was Whitewind.
- Adaptational Nice Guy: She's more fair and just than in the original comic, insisting on giving Swiftkill a proper trial rather than trying to execute her without one.
- Early Installment Character-Design Difference: Whitewind lacked the white streak on her back that Zephyr has.
- Meaningful Name: "Zephyr" means a soft and gentle breeze, and also is the name of a Greek god of wind. So in other words, her new name is close to the same thing as her old name.
- Reasonable Authority Figure: She refuses to let Swiftkill be executed without a fair trial. She also knows about and supports Cricket's efforts to befriend Swift, assigning the former to look after the latter.
- Related in the Adaptation: She and Greyback were mates in the original comic, but are niece and uncle here.
Captain Eclipse
- Knight Templar: He tries to have Swiftkill executed as a criminal without giving her a chance to defend herself. Zephyr calls him out on this.Zephyr: How strange that I'm reminding the importance of law and order to one barking monologues on the topic.
Greyback
- Age Lift: He has been aged for the reboot. Accordingly, his relationship with Whitewind/Zephyr was changed to uncle and niece instead of them being mates.
- Grumpy Old Man: He's shown to be rather curmudgeonly and tends to grouse a lot.
- Mythology Gag: He is introduced trying to convince Zephyr to go to war with the Rubicund, and she mentions that he always has had a lust for war. In the original comic, he died fighting in a war with the Smilodons.
- Related in the Adaptation: He was Whitewind's mate in the original comic, but is her elderly uncle in the reboot.
- Spared by the Adaptation: He dies really quickly in the original comic, but in the reboot he has made it into old age.
Rubicund
Rubicund in General
- The Worf Effect: They're built up to be extremely powerful, dangerous, and feared by normal gray wolves, with Swiftkill oozing power just by being half Rubicund, but when Swiftkill and the others find their territory, they discover they have been completely taken over by the Stoneclaws. Justified, these are Smilodons we're talking about.
Bloodspill
- Accessory-Wearing Cartoon Animal: In the old comic she wore a mysterious rope collar that was eventually to be explained by the Blackbloods' former contact with humans, but the old comic never got that far, and the collar appears to have been dropped for the reboot, assuming it doesn't eventually make a reappearance.
- Action Girl: She's a bulky dire wolf capable of taking down two saber-toothed tigers, even while injured and weak.
- Adaptation Relationship Overhaul: She and Swiftkill were full-blooded sisters in the original comic, and Bloodspill was highly protective of her to the point of saving her from being killed by Whitewind. Here, they're half-sisters with a lot of hostility between them from Bloodspill's bullying of her in the past.
- Badass in Distress: She's a big, powerful dire wolf, but when she first appears, she's trapped in a deep pit.
- Big Brother Bully: She was Swiftkill's half-sister and used to bully her a lot when they were younger. Swiftkill still remembers it and carries enough of a grudge because of it that when Blood comes after them, half-dead and badly injured after fighting more Stoneclaws, she gleefully takes the opportunity to finish the job, and would have if Cricket hadn't stopped her.
- Dumb Muscle: Rare female example.
- Facial Markings: She is shown with these, though it remains to be seen if they indicate the same thing (rank and being a Blackblood) they did in the original comic.
- No Party Like a Donner Party: She's introduced trapped in a pit, and surrounded by the skeletons of her packmates that she was forced to eat to stay alive.
- The Quiet One: She doesn't talk a lot in either the original comic or the reboot. In the latter, she has yet to even speak a word in the present, even though she's shown talking normally as a pup in a flashback.
- Related in the Adaptation: Well, partially. She's Swiftkill's half-sister in the reboot, whereas in the original, they were full-blooded sisters.
Swiftkill's Mother
- Maligned Mixed Marriage: She had to dig a secret tunnel to get past her pack's guards to meet with Swiftkill's father.
- No Name Given: Currently nameless. Her name was Fleetfoot in supplementary material for the original comic, and
Word of God once gave her name as Breeze during the early stages of development for the reboot, but it's unclear as to whether either is still her name here. - Secret Relationship: With Swiftkill's father.
The Hyena Clan
The Queen of Thorns
- Heinous Hyena: She destroys Swiftkill's den and sends her lackeys after her in the beginning.
- Obviously Evil: She's an hyena with a spiky collar.
- Orphaned Etymology: Apparently, she knows what a excavation crew is.
- Paid Harem: She has a harem of male hyenas (referencing that real life hyenas are matriarchal). If you pay close attention, she appears to be pregnant when Swiftkill encounters her (she has a very slight belly bump), which may possibly be why she sends her male servants after Swiftkill instead of attempting to fight her herself.
- Spikes of Villainy: She wears a collar with large sharp spikes, all from some kind of plant.
The Shadeless
Shadeless in General
- How the Mighty Have Fallen: The Shadeless was a pack of "ultimate badasses" that gathered together to prove themselves by taking down Broadhorns (giant rhinos.) Now all that remains of them is a pack of lazy losers who lay around a tiny watering hole all day, fight over bones, and only get up to eat the bats that fly out of the nearby cave every night.
Boy are they all lovable, though. - If You Die, I Call Your Stuff: When Sunstride leaves the oasis, the rest of the Shadeless assume he won't survive and start fighting over his things.
- Proud Warrior Race: The Shadeless were very strong in their heyday, but things changed when their territory became a desert.
- With Friends Like These...: When Sunstride decides to go off on his own to find the Rubicund, a dangerous pack of dire wolves, the rest of the Shadeless are more concerned with bickering over who gets the bone he left behind, including Hearsay, his half-brother.
Anyway
- Ambiguous Gender: Their gender has not been revealed, and they look androgynous.
- Emo Teen: Has this aesthetic.
Hearsay
- Pretty Boy: Is a wolf version of this in-universe.
Longshot
- Grumpy Old Man: Living in a desert with a bunch of jerks all your life will do that to you.
The Stoneclaws
Stoneclaws in General
- Cats Are Mean: The first two shown force Bloodspill to eat her dead packmates out of sheer sadistic amusement, and they attack Cricket afterwards.
- Panthera Awesome: They're powerful enough to easily take over the Rubicund, the largest wolves there are.
