welcome, weary traveler.

warrior cats is so fucking buckwild because like. you have 3 - 8 authors working on this thing at any given time, and unlike other major series with multiple authors under one pen name, like nancy drew, there’s really no effort made to hide it and it’s just common knowledge that erin hunter is multiple women arguing with each other and their publisher and editor via their cat ocs. it’s basically game of thrones with cats. soap operas with cats. each arc is 6 books long and none of them are fully planned out or outlined in advance. the authors apparently never fucking talk to each other, because books routinely fail to agree on the characters’ ages, families, or appearances. there’s a grammar error in pretty much every book and continuity is tied up in knots. at some point you just have to quit thinking about the timeline. again, there are 3 - 8 authors working on this series and yet they have no series bible, and even the authors admit to using the fan wiki to fact-check details of their own series. virtually no fan has read every book and you’re not really expected to because between the “main” series and all the supplementary material, there are over 80 books and it’s still going. even most fans will agree it’s not exactly good writing, in terms of money, this is one of the most successful book series ever made. and it’s about cats.

hollyleaf is genuinely just a really good character though, i dont think theres another canon character that really matches her. like in the books when characters kill each other theyre either evil or good and theres no in between, the good guys usually kill obvious bad guys (unless its an accident etc graystripe or lionblaze), but hollyleaf is one of the only main characters who we see intentionally kill her clanmate and spends the rest of sunrise convincing herself she did the right thing, only to spiral after the gathering and finally realize she actually Killed Someone and has successfully broken the warrior code aka the one thing she NEVER wanted to do, right after learning that her very birth also broke the code that she believed in so much....like truly truly theres no one like her.

i think if you showed minecraft or fortnite to a little medieval peasant boy he would probably start writing parodies of church hymns. it’s human nature