so... cats, huh?

i am an adult and i use she/they pronouns. yes i like this book series yes i hate this book series.

very very sorry if you don’t want people ranting abt wc in your inbox!! I like to debate cars but I don’t want to bother anyone 😓

(cw: grooming mention, I’m very sorry if that’s too heavy for you so feel free to skip/ignore this ask)

I think it’s completely fine and good to find age gap relationships in wc and to explore the implications that would have:

BUT

I think people need to remember that I’m pretty sure the majority of those were just like the authors didn’t give a fuck about the ages and were an accident. Again, completely fine to explore but I just think it should be kept in mind it’s not usually intentional

TO REMEMBER ACTUAL ON PAGE VICTIMS OF ABUSE AND GROOMING

as an example:

pinestar and leopardfoot have an appalling age gap. Pinestar *is* toxic to her, but I don’t think the extreme age gap was an intentional part of/used overly in the text of their relationship or why he was portrayed as a bad partner (in the text of their book specifically)

Spottedpaw and thistleclaw is a very overt example of grooming that, on page and in canon, the age gap is vital to why that relationship is deplorable. Another example is ivypool and Hawkfrost, which while unlike the other 2 is not implied romantic books, is stillan example of grooming

Again I do like how people explore the bad implications created in the text, but I just have seen a lot of people try to deny characters like spottedleaf or ivypool are victims, while at the same time making hcs for how other characters are, and I suspect it’s because they are flawed and have their own faults which I think is a bad mentality to have about victims and it bugs me how often I’ve seen it but idk maybe I’ve just gotten a skewed perspective on how often I see this 😭

this is just a discussion/debate topic from me so curious on ur thoughts LOL (sorry I’m very paranoid to be interpreted as trying to fight 🥲)

yeahh partially agree. i think a lot of people tend to either dismiss the possibility of the writers accidentally creating unhealthy relationships outright, OR take everything extremely literally without accounting for weird cat aging rates or timeline inconsistencies and then apply a strict moral judgment on that. the "apprentice = teenager, warrior = adult" thing is something i don't think is universally and consistently accurate through all of the series, especialy earlier on. i think the naming system and how fast cats age flag up a lot of alarm for some people but to take a canon relationship as an example i don't think, say, feathercrow are written like or intended to be a grown ass woman hanging out with a teenage boy, despite the technicalities of the timeline pointing to that being the case.

there is nothing wrong with picking up on details like age or power gaps and exploring that in your own interpretations or opinions, but with the way a lot of these things are written there clearly isn't any intention for most contentious relationships to be predatory/unbalanced and this tends to reflect in the narrative and characterisation that form the canon so i don't blame anyone for engaging with these things earnestly. "authorial intent" is not the end all be all to be clear but yknow what im saying? i think a lot of takes on the topic are made in bad faith or come off kinda silly

mixed feelings!

on po3 revisit, i do quite like him in that arc. i like that he has a distinctive personality. i like that he's prickly without necessarily being unreasonable. i like reading his struggles with disability in an evidently ableist society, i can relate to him having a temper when he feels condescended to and needing to learn to measure an appropriate response. i like his relationship with leafpool in theory, how there's a deep care for each other there even though they're not always a great mentor and apprentice to each other and i find that relationship very tragic if i apply enough headcanon and personal reading to it

following po3 however i think jayfeather falls off pretty hard. he gets into situations through the series where his abrasiveness stops feeling reasonable given his circumstances and rather that he's just being written as mean because he's jayfeather and that's how he is which i personally find frustrating particularly in certain scenes where he does actually have power and responsibility over the situation (how he treats twigkit, how he talks about leafpool at her funeral, i swear there's scenes where he just. mistreats patients for the hell of it ???) and it's hard to talk about because his initial characterisation comes from that place about ableism and i know he's a pretty personal and relatable character to a lot of people for that reason. but alas. personally i tend to really dislike snarky asshole type characters when there isn't enough to make them interesting outside that facade and theyre not ridiculous enough with it to be funny instead, and jayfeather kind of loses a lot of the parts that make him interesting over time and he also sure isnt funny.

truth be told i don't think about him much. i don't hate him? i find a lot of the minor bully/arrogant/just an asshole for no reason characters (foxheart, skyheart, socks & ruby, shrewclaw etc) kind of funny honestly because of how one-note black and white dislikable they're written, which is amusing next to warriors' tendency to have their protagonists accidentally come off as kind of mean and judgy themselves sometimes so when a character is SUPPOSED to seem like an asshole they really hammer it in. it's also nice when a side character has a set, consistent personality. berrynose is kind of like those guys i think, you're supposed to either be annoyed by him or find him funny, and i toe the line between the two a bit, depends on the scene. he's also part "stock background conservative" especially in the later arcs from what i remember, and i appreciate when that role is filled in a consistent way by a character who has nothing better going for them i guess. i'd like him less if the series or fandom played up how he was Actually Really Deep And Sympathetic but they don't, really, from what i've seen so he's inoffensive to me.

i love hollyleaf but she's one of those characters whose fanon is often frustrating to me. i'm not really fond of takes on her that interpret her as this noble seeker of justice, that blame leafpool for hurting her or that inexplicably frame her killing of ashfur as something she did to defend squirrelflight. she's a tragic character to me but not a positive one- clinging to a system that hurt her and wildly swinging it around to hurt others in response. just doubling down and spiralling worse and worse until all she can do before being able to perceive the consequences of her own actions is run away. yes girl !!!

killing her to then bring her back to then kill her again like a book later in a self sacrifice for the clan after a hasty make up with her family sucked real bad LOL. what a waste of a character. there's definitely an argument to be made about the misogyny of it but i've known the whole picture of her character for so long that its hard to envision it as a real time accidental sequence of events (with shit like them having her snap and die because they couldnt think of a power for her or whatever) which is where i think most of those issues exist, at least when it comes to hollyleaf specifically.

i think i have the standard consensus on her, very concise and unique and enjoyable character in the first arc who has since been recontextualised as far less likeable in her post-death cameo appearances. i don't think starclan being deeply shitty and messy and inconsistent and unethical is even necessarily a bad thing textually. but it's both a shame for every character who gets dragged into being a part of that, and it's endlessly frustrating that the books dance around the idea of starclan being flawed without ever doing anything too meaningful to address it, because of the series' whole general "radical change to the status quo is Bad" ethos defeating anything more thematically interesting or progressive it might possibly ever have to say.

love sorreltail! but she's very much a supporting character to me so i maybe don't have the most interesting or insightful thoughts on her LOL. i like her friendship with leafpool a lot, i miss when protagonists had more solidified and dynamic social lives and the conflict with them naturally drifting apart a bit and leafpool feeling isolated and depressed about it feels very real. i can easily admit that her relationship with brackenfur is pure cardboard but it is one i inexplicably have a bit of a soft spot for because they're both pretty generically nice characters and i like the idea of this one fairly genuinely happy and consistent relationship amongst all the other drama and toxicity going on in the clans- i also think it makes the aforementioned conflict with leafpool more interesting if she wants to be happy for sorreltail but cant and simultaneously wants to resent her or her stupid boyfriend but doesnt have a good reason to without feeling guilty about the jealousy

For sure fond of him, though nostalgia's a big factor. His SE was my favourite book in the series when I was younger, and it wouldn't be anymore but I'm not sure what is. I've been soured on a few aspects of it like the whole dead wife thing or general overabundance of suffering just due to how prevalent certain patterns are in the series, but it still makes me very emotional nonetheless. I don't think the Amen MAP's ever not made me tear up?

I like that he's a relatively well meaning leader and on the kinder end of things (by wc standards) but he's still flawed- he can be cowardly, he can be vindictive, he can be selfish and these things don't necessarily contradict who he is, in either political or interpersonal relationships. I think his range of characterisation is a good balance compared to a lot of modern leader writing which can often be either much more flat and boring or frustrating and inconsistent. Or maybe I'd find out he is actually like that too if I were to reread everything he's in, I dunno it's been a minute.

ok where to start. i kind of temporarily fell off of reading WC after starting TNP, but when I stopped I looked Cinderpelt up on the warriors wiki to see how much further she made it into the books because she was my favourite. i was sad to see she died soon, breathed a sigh of relief to see she never got a male love interest so my lesbian headcanon could stand uncontested (i didnt know about the cinderfire stuff) only to be BLINDSIDED with "she was then reborn again as Cinderheart" and opening up this new wiki page to find this character who lived way longer and had a whole different life. my gut reaction was "THAT'S NOT CINDERPELT WHO THE FUCK IS THIS" and once I started reading again it took me a couple years to become accustomed to her.

In the big picture, on paper, I do not like the Cinderpelt reincarnation plotline. I think it's stupid. I think it's ableist to take a disabled character who all things considered appeared to live a pretty happy if short life and say "no she was constantly miserable actually" and in fact so miserable that she's "awarded a second shot at life" that pretty much no other character is given, as though the first life didn't count. I've seen some people express confusion or disappointment that it shifted from being direct reincarnation into more of a possession deal but I much prefer them being separate characters and the reincarnation ultimately being temporary. I find the idea of Cinderpelt's entire erasure in favour of Cinderheart upsetting and strange, especially since I prefer the former LOL.

That being said, there are elements of the whole thing that I find really interesting, on both -pelt and -heart's ends and I've come around to enjoying her quite a lot over the past few years. I don't think the way canon does it is always good but I enjoy the idea of Cinderheart coming to struggle with the identity of her life being predicated on someone else entirely who she never even knew in life. I like the theory/interpretation of StarClan only really doing this as an apology for effectively manifesting Cinderpelt's demise in order to keep Leafpool in ThunderClan and fulfill the prophecy because I think it's a delightfully fucked up and messy thing to add to the already fucked up and messy situation. I like the idea of Cinderpelt regretting her participation but not really being able to do anything about it and having to double down about possessing her niece and somewhat hijacking this baby's life.

Any thoughts on Monkeystar?

<3

I have nothing bad to say about Monkeystar! I think Warrior Cats is often at its most charming when it's exploring a closer proximity to the world of humans and kittypets and I think WarriorClan is a very fun example of that! It always kind of requires the writers to step away from the overly anthropomorphised and black-and-white world that exists in the clans sometimes when they write characters who DO like being around humans, who do appreciate the benefits of being pets, who view the clans from an outsider's perspective. and "group of young kittypets who are into Live Action Roleplay about pretending to be clan cats" is just such a wonderfully novel concept and feels like a love letter to fans of the series in a genuine and creative way.

Not to bring up gender like usual but I do also like that Monkeystar is a girl because I feel like that silly and rambunctious type of role is often reserved for male characters. A lot of the way she's written has to do with her being characterised as someone who is very young and enthusiastic so I do wonder how they'll choose to write her if they ever visit WarriorClan again, seeing as she'd be a grown adult by now. because of the fact that the impression in Graystripe's Vow is surprisingly strong I kiiind of hope they don't come back just out of worry they mishandle things somehow? like oh god i hope they never come and join the real clans no girl stay out of here they suck please enjoy your social freedom and warm dry home and cat biscuits. live it up on sunningrocks and then go home for dinner and be very careful about being an outdoor cat ok