hihi, i have a more like. advice question
i want to show how horrid the clans are when looked at with an outside lense, thank you discord friend that made me realize i should not be this desensitized, and i was wondering if you had any advice on that?
like. i have some characters im thinking abt, but it's hard to actually use my brain to compile it into a story, yk?
if not that's totally fine!! love your work and i wish you the best <:]
Hello to you! This is an interesting question, and one I'm not completely certain I'll be able to answer satisfactorily, but I'll do my best.
The best way I've found to explore faults in a society is to have the POV character be designed to contrast against that society. For example, Fireheart and ThunderClan are very much meant to oppose each other; ThunderClan is apathetic to outside concerns and Fireheart finds it impossible to not care about everyone he meets, even if he doesn't like them personally. It's black-vs-white, and the entire arc of ThunderClan is about shifting into grey as that overpowering white bleeds into the pool. Having Fireheart affect the Clan that strongly also helps with making the narrative interesting as conflicts arise and there are different ways the characters deal with them, causing smaller conflicts on their own. It wouldn't work as well if Fireheart just accepted what the Clan tells him and went along with their behavior. Conflict matters greatly in making a story interesting.
As a side note, I think an important and very intriguing aspect of this kind of thing is nuance. That is, exploring why the culture has these faults - how they developed and why anyone keeps them going. You don't have to justify them at all, just give some insight into the lore and the common mentality of the cats in this culture. Very few real people are 100% evil - even kindhearted and genial folks can believe in racial superiority, simply because they were born into a community that pushes this notion and they don't know anything else. There are so many stories that show, for example, slave races being "content" in their position with no one questioning the status quo, because it's the status quo. Writing about that mentality and taking a magnifying glass to it, and possibly changing it over time, is a great deal of fun. Even if you get some idiots thinking you're defending such a position because some folks lack critical thinking skills.
It's necessary to note that cruelty never makes sense. Sometimes we go along with bad things for no good reason. Fictional cultures are like that, too. Encouraging questioning of their baseless awfulness is the best part of writing about societies like this. Give them hypocritical beliefs, have the POV argue about how stupid those beliefs are, have their opponents rise up to shout them down or sit back to analyze themselves. It all makes the markings of a damn good story, in my opinion.
