#cloudpelt

Cloudpelt.

cattober days 7-12:

Daily Warrior Cat

Realizing with slowly dawning horror that Yellowfang's Secret is by far the Warriors book I'm the most invested in emotionally. It's one of the books I owned as a kid, so many of my favorite characters come from it, Jay's group of Twolegplace cats first appeared in it, and it's not great. There's some cool stuff like the parallelism between Raggedstar's attack on the rats of the Carrionplace and Brokenstar's, Raggedstar is actually a decently nuanced abuser even if a lot of the steps of his evolving relationship with Yellowfang feel really rushed and they could've done a better job of making it clear to the small impressionable children reading at home that Raggedstar is in fact an abuser, and obviously I love Jay's group even if the way they're presented in the narrative is pretty bad and xenophobic. But also oh my god the relationships feel so shallow, like Rowanberry apparently being Yellowfang's best friend when they've barely interacted and her friendship with Cloudpelt only being developed through a few conversations and her relationship with Raggedstar having what feels like below the bare minimum of interactions to convincingly pull off anything without just stating it directly in the narrative. Also all that stuff a lot of people have brought up like Yellowfang's personality being off and her power being a stupid retcon and her being punished more in comparison to cats like Raggedstar and Crowfeather being misogynistic, and Brokenstar's rise to power is rushed and has some weird unclear parts. It feels really convenient that his plan to attack the Carrionplace ended in Foxheart's death and that attack on Windclan he caused ended in Cloudpelt's death but I don't know how how he would've specifically caused the current deputy to die on both occasions. I liked the part where his grief and regret over killing Raggedstar seemed to be genuine though, it added a bit of nuance to the guy who's just supposed to be a born evil curse upon the clans. But also Yellowfang girlie come on how are you not even a little bit suspicious that Brokenstar might be lying about how his father and your siblings died. You're smart in Into the Wild and you seem too attuned to the tragedy around you to selectively go into denial about some of it, c'mon.