ThunderClan are based in the deciduous woodland in the northeast of the moor territory, though their territory stretches out to meet the low moorland and the high heathland. They are neighbours with WindClan to the west and ShadowClan to the south. 

ThunderClan’s camp resides in a natural dip in the forest, surrounded by large, moss-covered rocks. They make their nests in the roots of a gnarled, ancient oak, and the leader makes their announcements from Mossbranch, a jutting branch.

Click below for more information on TFD ThunderClan!

The Tightrope of Respect And Rejuvenation

So the Warriors editorial just confirmed that Frecklewish was deliberately placed in the Dark Forest for, um… leaving kits to drown because the river was flooding and she didn’t know how to swim and er… not showing remorse in front of Mapleshade, who she had cause to be mad at? I’m not gonna analyse this in particular detail because I know the fandom will be tearing this article apart without me, but I am left wondering where the hell we are in terms of the Warriors world.

I think this is the first time I’ve sincerely felt like the world is now in wholly unfamiliar hands. Not just that but clumsy hands that are eroding at the franchise piece by piece.

I have noticed the word ‘retcon’ flying around a lot recently in respect to the New Family Tree and Warriors’ general attempts to establish new details on top of pre-existing framework. Let’s settle this really quick, retconning is fundamentally a neutral concept. Sometimes it’s benign, like when Mapleshade’s appearance was changed from ginger to tortoiseshell in her first appearances back in 2012. Sometimes it’s appropriate, like when some cats get caught up in the sprawling family connections and end up dating blood relatives and the writers have to intervene. Sometimes the writers even dance around continuity errors with love, like they did by reaffirming Rowanstar’s gender transition two years ago. These are all fine and dandy! There are also bad things, like some of the broken continuity errors in some of Clarissa Hutton’s early attempts at novella writing after Vicky’s departure, but these are ultimately errors and soft changes, and this article is about intentional and hard changes. 

Warriors can be divided into two editorial eras. From 2003 to 2013, ending with The Sun Trail, the plots, characters and world of the Warriors series were written by one person: Victoria Holmes. She would write the outline of each novel, and then based on that outline the manuscript would be written by either Kate Cary or Cherith Baldry. Vicky would also write the field guides and novellas alone, and continued to do so for a few years after she stopped working on the main novels. Since her soft retirement in 2013, her job has been taken over by a team of editors, called the ‘story team’. As of the 2017 publication of the novella collection Legends of the Clans, she is now fully retired. Finally, as of the new site launch in 2019, the site is managed by a team of content editors, who work in the same physical location as the story team and can generally be considered part of the same editorial body despite differing jobs. For clarity, the Frecklewish article was written by the story team, not the content editors.

We don’t have many names and faces for this editorial team. We know among them is HarperCollins executive Erica Sussman. Novella writer Clarissa Hutton no doubt has some involvement too. Our lack of personal connection to this team compared to Vicky definitely makes their decisions more nebulous and harder to justify, but it also makes them harder to analyse, which is what I’m trying to do here. To the best of my ability, I’ll be avoiding analysing character with the intent to just discuss the effects of their narrative decisions. 

I believe there’s been a certain amount of overzealousness being employed in the worldbuilding of this current ‘era’ of Warriors (which I will be calling the Editorial era to contrast the Vicky era), especially since the new site launch and the start of The Broken Code arc. 

And, yeah, I think The Broken Code has broken Warriors.

oh man the first design on this account folks