Meandering

I do wish I has spent more time on River’s exile, if I could go back I would make that part a fair bit lot longer. When I first started making the comic, I didn’t really realize how long it was actually going to take… so some part of the beginning are more rushed than I would prefer.

There are also a lot of changes I wish I could make to the PondClan subplot. In retrospect, that subplot probably could've been cut or trimmed down a lot, it was mostly a holdover from an earlier draft of the story and I don't think it was fully necessary to include. But oh well, I think I've managed to make it work.

As for Stonestar's homophobia and misogyny, for context for my tumblr readers: a while ago on comicfury someone commented that Stonestar across as misogynistic with how he treats his daughters and Pinefoot/star. I'll paste my original reply here. "He is meant to come across that way, although it's not the only reason for his behaviour towards them.

In the original version of the story he was actually much more explicitly misogynistic and homophobic, and so were the clans in general. I ended up toning it down a lot (which honestly I regret in hindsight, I think it was a cowardly writing choice on my part, but I can't exactly change it now) but the undertones are certainly still there."

It would be a bit of a different story had I kept those elements. In the final version, the clans are still somewhat patriarchal, although it's not as in-your-face as it was in the original drafts. I think I would’ve ended up toning it down regardless (the earliest version of the story would've been a bit much) but I wish I hadn't gone as far as I did.

When I first decided to make this comic a reality in 2020, the culture of the Warriors fandom was pretty different. Or maybe it was just the (rather immature) circles I was in at the time, but regardless... People used to get upset and angry whenever anyone would engage with homophobia, misogny, transphobia etc within the context of warrior cats. Simply having these elements in a story would easily start all kinds of discourse.

I think the fandom has changed a lot since then, and people acknowledge the underlying politics of the books as well. The writing in warrior cats is misogynistic in many ways, and the cats have a heteronormative society. (AFAIK the the lack of gay characters was partly due to publisher censorship. But when looking solely at the text itself, we still have a society where queer people simply don't exist. And what does that say?)

But for a long time it wasn't uncommon to see people getting upset at others for merely depicting topics such as homophobia and misogyny in Warriors fanworks, regardless of what the story was actually saying about it. To be fair, I'm sure a lot of the depictions people would get upset about were genuinely in poor taste, because they were written clumsily by teenagers. But even if there were valid criticisms to be had, what was actually posted would often boil down to "this [fanwork] depicted homophobia/transphobia/misogyny/etc and those are bad, so the author is clearly a bad person." No engagement with what the story was trying to say, just a kneejerk reaction towards having to read something uncomfortable.

The only "acceptable" way to engage with it was by writing stories where no one had gender-based prejudices. It was like this from the mid-late 2010s on tumblr (when I was a teenager), and during the early pandemic era on twitter, since twitter always seemed to be reheating half-baked tumblr discourse years after the fact. From what I’ve seen, it seems like this attitude has died down a lot now. Although I don’t really engage with the WC community in the same way I used to, so who’s to say. Maybe it’s still the norm for some people and I’m just in different circles now.

At any rate, this is what influenced my decision to tone it down to the degree I did. I tried to tone it down a degree where I’d have plausible deniability should someone get upset (at least, I did at the start, lol). This is why I think it was a cowardly decision on my part. I think I should've just written it anyway, and I think the story would be stronger and more cohesive if I had made it a bit more explicit.

(For the record, I don't think there's anything wrong with writing worlds where queerness is the norm, or escapism in fiction. I do think it's really important to have those stories. But I also think it shouldn't be the only type of queer story that people are allowed to write.)

With all this in mind, I also wish I had handled Skipper and Lichentail being trans a little differently. There will be some scenes that rectify my regrets here a bit eventually, but I still wish I had addressed it earlier on in the story. But that's a whole other can of worms, and a kind of personal can of worms at that.