#beta mudlore

(in reference to this post)

anon you sent this ask back in may of 2023. I am. so sorry. it took me this long to respond

please, as a token of my apology, take this very late art

OH also, warning!! I made this before i learned to edit audio, so the song is unedited and the weird racist line is still in there :/ it jumpscared me when i rewatched it

THANK YOU :D

the Bird Symbolism™ is definitely true where Wrentail is concerned, and i do have a plan for how it will tie in with Owlpounce, but honestly tons of cats in Micaclan have bird prefixes!

This is partially because I was naming the cats before I had fully fleshed out the story (in the beginning, Mudpaw was going to be a lot more violent of a character than he ended up being in the present version), so a lot of characters were given bird names to reflect their position in the story as things to be hunted. This is no longer accurate to the story, though!

I have a few! Usually I end up tweaking designs little by little until I like them and THEN I use them, but some characters had designs that started out fairly different from how they are now!

These were the first iterations of Mudpaw and the rest of the apprentices! I've talked a bit about them in the past on this blog (and also I think in my commentary video?). Mudpaw started off with a slight greenish tint to his fur, with bolder stripes and different overall shapes and proportions! Whitepaw and Puddlepaw both changed a lot, and Hawkpaw was initially a bit rounder in her face with lighter gray spots instead of black!

These were the designs I ended up using in Johnny, though if you pay attention to the designs in that video, you'll see that they change subtly as the video goes on lol. Wrentail used to be a lot more angular, and his colors were a higher saturation (though you wouldn't know from the video, since it's in greyscale lol)

The mentors don't look too different from their current day designs, but some of the proportions and shapes are a little different!

I once considered giving Wrentail stripes... don't like this very much now

That idea came from an old video idea that I ended up scrapping! It was actually the old version of the events told in "The Accident" if you can believe it. I wanted to use the song "Lullaby" by American Horror Song as a backstory for Mudpaw

Warning for some dark themes in this alternate story. darker than usual lmao.

In the first version of the story, neither of Mudpaw's parents were from Micaclan. The fire still happens, but it's a really big apartment building, and lots of cats are displaced. Possum (idk if I had thought of a name for him at this point) says he's heard of some cats living deep in the mountains, and the huge group goes off in search of the clan. However, as time passes, cats start dropping off; some succumbing to the cold, others getting lost in the swirling wind and snow. Mudpaw's mom ends up collapsing, and Possum can only take her so far. He can't carry both Mudpaw and Sweetpea. She basically tells him to go on without her, but Possum can't bear to leave her to die a painful death alone in the cold.

From here, I had two ideas, and one was significantly darker than the other. In one, Possum stays by her side until she dies, and gets left behind by the larger group. In the other, he basically performs a mercy-kill, so that she doesn't have to keep suffering. Possum end up unable to leave her, either way. When he stays, he grows too cold to move. When he does the mercy-kill, he finds that he can't even bring himself to leave her body, not even to save his kit. He takes her collar and puts it on his kit (who is a fair bit older than he appears in The Accident, old enough to walk on his own), but can't move himself after. Eventually, baby Mudpaw has to try to find the group that left them behind, leaving behind his dead mom and near-catatonic father. He can't find the group, and ends up collapsing in an icy mud puddle. But before he meets the same fate as his mother, a clan cat, wrentail, finds him. He's taken back to the clan and nursed back to health; his only connection to his old life being a dirty and mangled kittypet collar that's far too big for him.

The framing for the story in the video was going to be mudpaw telling his story to pearfur's kittens. If you remember the mudpaw trauma dump video, that's what it was going to be leading up to haha

I don’t think I’ve talked about this in depth before! Pearfur was originally going to be an older warrior, and she was going to be Whitepaw’s mom and Snaptail’s sister! This was waayyy before the current version of the story so lots of characters and storylines have changed pretty drastically.

Snaptail was originally designed as a younger warrior, and she was Mudpaw’s mom. Mudpaw’s dad was going to be Foxjaw (who, for all intents and purposes, was a completely different character at the time; he got a drastic design and character overhaul, so the only similarity is literally the name lol). However, Foxjaw ended up being unfaithful and was also in a relationship with Pearfur at the same time. So there was gonna be drama about Snaptail having to raise Mudpaw by herself with all her anxieties and Pearfur not realizing that her mate was a garbage guy who left her sister for her, and Whitepaw and Mudpaw would be half brothers but also kind of cousins??? So. Yeah. That storyline didn’t ever end up going anywhere so I scrapped it lol

Pearfur didn’t have too much to her character in this storyline but she was pretty different I think, a bit of a colder personality but still very protective of her family.

Foxjaw used to be just Generic Douchebag, his character is infinitely more interesting to me now haha

Poppypaw: *cleaning the elders den*

Wrentail: Back in my day we used to punt little kids like you—

Mudstripe: Shut up grandpa

mudstripe hearing old man wrentail be horrible to an apprentice

Also, that early concept Puddlepaw is so interesting to me. Could you tell us a little more about that?

HELLO sorry I forgot this was in my inbox </3 I would say they're pretty close in age! Maybe a few months gap between them, with Possum being a smidge older??

And early Puddlepaw's concept was VERY much unfinished, basically I wanted to make an animatic with the song Skin and Bone and just. inserted them into it with a backstory that would fit. In the Early Days of the mudpaw story development, the apprentices were all in one of the canon clans (I think I was doing shadowclan??), but like an alternate universe? the book events weren't making an appearance but bloodclan was there so idk lol.

so Puddlepaw's story would have been that they were a bloodclan kit that went to join the clans when they were very young (maybe they're were forcibly adopted?? like a clan cat found them on the edge of the territory and was like 'who is this small malnourished child' and took them home with them) and they saw that life was much better under clan law and in the forest territory. So once they grew older, they went back to their old bloodclan friends/family to try to convince them to either make a pact with shadowclan or to join up with them or something idk. I think it was supposed to be post-scourge bloodclan?? like I said it was very much an unfinished idea. but anyway, puddle basically tries to convince the bloodclan leaders/elders to give the clans a shot. And that would have been the events of the hypothetical Skin and Bone PMV!