So, one of my story ideas involved werewolves. In the setting, they were a minority, much like most non-human races.
Now, of these werewolves, turned (as in a human who became a werewolf) ones only go through the transformation once, later generations (werewolves can reproduce) are born as werewolves. The whole beast-side-aking-over thing is only true for the duration of the full moon.
Werewolves have more keen senses (especially their smell) and stronger and slightly more agile bodies, but it matters little in a world where the existence of artifacts easily levels these differences. After all, an explosive arrow can still kill them in a single hit, so...
Werewolves usually live in tribes (don't tend to move) or families (tend to move).
The story itself takes place during and the day after the full-moon festival. Simply put it's a social event with some eating and drinking towards the end, the food is spiced up with some anesthetics and the festival is geared towards calming down their beast-side by satisfying its needs beforehand. It works pretty well.
Now, the bad guys are a human terror group, the monster hunters, who are dead set on eliminating creatures like werewolves as they are "perversions of humanity". They're depicted as cruel, illogical, cowardly, and plain repulsive people with no redeeming qualities. They're basically the protagonists of the book The Camp of the Saints, but in a story that isn't grounded in paranoia.
You guessed, they attack the tribe when they're snoozing.
Sure, humans aren't depicted as monsters either. The nearby city which is very liberal by the setting's standards sends out guards to protect werewolves during the night of the festival, as the city regularly trades with them, plus the city council isn't a bunch of douchebags. The guards also get attacked by monster hunters, as they are "race traitors", and aren't reluctant to fight back.
As far as other elements go, we do hear about segregation (of most non-humans) and suppression of information on monster hunters by authorities to maintain a false sense of peace.
The monster hunters might look like caricatures, but the truth is that I'm having a hard time viewing these types of groups as anything more. If you've read The Turner Diaries or the aforementioned The Camp of the Saints, you know what I'm talking about.
Okay, simply put: they either enjoy killing those they consider inferior (the worst type) or live in a false dichotomy (something similar to the white genocide conspiracy), where it's either kill or be killed, something that can easily be disproven.
In paper, there is a werewolf group that does terrible things too, like biting people on purpose, killing innocent humans, etc... The problem is that in the story we only hear about them from the main character (a werewolf who is sympathetic to their cause) when he's having a quarrel with his grandfather over his views.
Now, his grandfather is described as a kind and intelligent person, but lore-wise, his daughter, (almost) his grandson, and a few of his tribe had died because of monster hunters. So it makes little sense for him to be so adamantly pacifistic, and the events make his ideology look dangerous. Sure, they're ultimately the right call, but that only becomes apparent in hindsight.
Still, it feels disingenuous to throw in a werewolf terror group to explain some of the racism, yet the only time they "show up" is when the mc talks about them, and even then, the most harm, he causes with it, is making his granddad cry, which is awful (gramps IS his only living relative) but he does feel bad about it.
I planned on throwing in an arc for the mc where he's injured and has to put his trust into a group of humans, but an individual's journey does little when the werewoof terror group is still out there.
So, is there any way to make a conflict seem more two-sided, even though one of these sides is almost completely irrelevant/inconsequential in the plot?