#acornflower

I don’t want them to become a couple mainly because of the incest implications (see the image below 💀) and also because the Erins love giving us main character het romance, but I cannot deny their vibe based on names and colour schemes would be immaculate

"we loved her so much, it almost killed us to lose her."

"you've been our joy, but we should have brought you here before. even if you don't remember Morningkit, you have the right to say goodbye to your littermate. you lost your kin that day, too."

I imagine that having to tell Moonpaw about Morningkit was especially difficult for Thriftear. she lost her own sister and in Bristlefrost's absence, I'm sure she hoped that her own daughter would be able to grow up with a sister as she did 💔

This was genuinely a bit of a hard read emotionally for me, it’s handled really well.

Willowpelt is a character I think of often just because the authors accidentally gave her just so much going on. Like what do you mean both her eldest sons were fathered by two separate cats who are currently unidentified within the clan. Both her littermates died in the first book. Her baby daughter gets deliberately poisoned by her oldest son. Her middle son then kills her eldest son, in the same battle that kills her mate. Her daughter gets hit by a car. And then she dies to save her son from a badger, only for him to still get killed by a badger moons later. There is just quite simply so much going on.

Bristlefrost mention but at what emotional cost

I wish the Erins remembered drypaws existed it would be such a fun thing to have someone change clans for.

Stripebark is questioning whether or not he really loved Fogdrift but this is something that the readers were doing well before this moment. Never before in the history of these books has a cat gotten with their mate's killer. Whether their mate's death was accidental or otherwise, there is always an air of resentment towards the one that took their love from them.

Fogdrift hadn't even been dead a full day before Stripebark leaped to ally his Clan with WindClan. While standing next to Fogdrift during the final moments they'd ever share before her death, Stripebark's thoughts are wandering to Galestar and he describes himself as feeling giddy to learn that she and Pebblenose are no longer mates.

You know something is truly wrong when Galestar grieved Fogdrift's death on a much deeper scale than Stripebark did. I really like reading about whatever tf is wrong with this dude.

This is why he’s so interesting to me to and ultimately why I’m on the side of liking him just because he has such interesting characterisation.

thrush's call → thrushcall → thrushsong

raven's cry → ravencry → ravensong

hunting heart → huntheart → ____pounce or ____leap?

floating weed → floatweed → floatstem, floatbranch, etc

either way, i really hope that as the main series continues, we see suffixes like -call and -cry make a comeback to diversify bird names. i feel like we have an abundance of -wings, -flights, and -feathers. i also like the idea of -screech being introduced (ex: owlscreeh, crowscreech)

i also have a headcanon as to why cats like crowflight, alderbranch, and icefoot seem to have strange names in this era for their pelt descriptions. with the deforestation in skyclan's territory, the species of crows (brown in coloration) were driven out. i also like to think that alder trees with very dark bark existed in parts of all the clans' territory, but were predominantly based in skyclan's territory. also, i think that icefoot has white paws or some kind of prominent lower-body white coloration. i myself have an OC named frostfoot (a black tuxedo she-cat with ice-blue eyes)

→ as a side note, i am very excited that names i've used for OCs in the past (crowflight and mudsplash) have made their way into the main warriors series. i've been dying to see mudsplash in particular being used as a name since forever

Those are very good theories! And I also share your hopes about diversifying the names and those suffixes coming back.