#gdm-b

So the thing with Darkstripe, as Fireheart pointed out, is that he’s always miserable. And he’s been that way his whole life. From the womb, he came out unhappy. I don’t think he ever really experienced true joy the entire first six months of his life. Why? I can’t say. I never wrote him with a specific personality disorder in mind, but it wouldn’t shock me if he had one.

The important thing is that this King Haggard-esque joylessness caused him to act out in the vain attempt to feel something other than anger and misery. He bullied the other kits, he got into fights, he threw tantrums, everything, all in the hope that it would bring him any kind of release from the vice grip his negativity had on him. It didn’t. There was no satisfaction in his behavior, except perhaps the small feeling of power he got by eliciting an angry reaction from adults and a fearful one from younger kits. His family loved him, but I don’t think anyone liked him, including them. He isolated himself socially, making himself more miserable and angrier, and he scorned affection from anyone. It wouldn’t do anything for him. Why bother?

So why did he cling so hard to Tigerclaw, then? There’re a couple reasons.

For one, though he isn’t aware of it, he saw Tigerclaw as an ideal self: stoic to the point of coldness, strong and fearsome and distant, and completely loved by everyone in the Clan, and even highly respected outside of it. Tigerclaw was everything Darkpaw wanted to be in the deepest recesses of his fantasies. Darkpaw admired him for that to the point of hero-worship, and that was the main thing that kept him in line when Tigerclaw was around to tell him to stop being a dick.

Secondly, when he did chastise him, it wasn’t with anger. Darkpaw couldn’t see how embarrassed he made Tigerclaw when he acted out because his behavior would shift the instant he was aware his model was around to watch him and judge him. He also didn’t see it because Tigerclaw, as he so adored, was stoic and didn’t give off a vibe of “by the Three, my apprentice is awful” the way another mentor likely would have, even if he was thinking it to himself. As far as Darkpaw knew, he was just as loved by his mentor as any other apprentice and mentor loved each other (which, as we’ve established on this blog, is like family most often). He wasn’t, but he didn’t realize that at all.

Third… well, honestly, because of those two first factors, Darkpaw felt something akin to true joy when he was around Tigerclaw. He felt lighter and stronger and more determined with his mentor. He felt like he wasn’t just hated and disregarded and avoided (not that he wasn’t these things out of his own making, but he lacks an incredible amount of self-awareness). Here was the cat who shone a light in the pitch-dark of his world, who made him feel something positive. He almost mourned when he got his name, because he couldn’t just be with Tigerclaw 24/7 for the rest of his life. This cat was admirable. This cat was amazing. This cat gradually became, in his mind, his true father. Patchpelt didn’t matter. His brother didn’t matter. Tigerclaw was the only cat worth following in the territories. He was everything to Darkstripe.

And then here comes this kittypet, with his stupid naivety and his stupid scrawniness and his stupid, stupid, stupid ability to hypnotize everyone into liking him. And here he is, stealing what’s rightfully Darkstripe’s: Tigerclaw’s love for a son. Here Darkstripe has to sit, seething as Fireheart is looked at by Tigerclaw with fatherly pride and fondness, and here Fireheart is, so smug and sincere and idiotic, looking back at Tigerclaw with immense love.

And then he fucking murders him.

Now, to be clear – Darkstripe knows, objectively, that Fireheart did not physically kill Tigerclaw. That wimp is too weak to do anything but sit there sadly and watch his father go to his grave. He knows that he wasn’t at the lead of the investigation into Tigerclaw’s crimes. But his sheer hate and resentment over everything else about Fireheart is so powerful that he genuinely forgets that, technically, it was his nephew that did this to him. Ravenwing is the source of his pain, and yet it’s all Fireheart’s fault.

It's Fireheart who stole Darkstripe’s father away. It’s Fireheart who everyone loves when he didn’t do anything to earn it. It’s Fireheart who everyone comforted and cared about after he fucking murdered Tigerclaw.

And it’s Fireheart, the one who ruined his life, that has the brass to try and make friends with Darkstripe, tries to extend sympathy and understanding like he could ever grasp just how much pain Darkstripe is in.

And the most ridiculous thing about this whole insanity is that Fireheart gets rewarded for his crimes! He gets to be leader! He gets everyone’s support! He gets to be close to Tigerclaw’s real family and let his apprentice run around in the Houses and be listened to despite how young he is and be loved by everyone and-

Stars above, Darkstripe hates him.

How can he be at fault for that? How can everyone be so angry at him for lashing out, when he’s suffering more than they could possibly understand? It’s not fair! It’s not right! It’s bullshit!

All Darkstripe has at this point – the one thing keeping him sane and his overwhelming fury barely contained – is the belief that Tigerclaw loved him. He’s managed to convince himself that he was Tigerclaw’s son and Tigerclaw was his father, and what they had was perfect until a kittypet came along and ruined it. He was loved. Tigerclaw loved him. He was proud of him. He cared about him.

And as if he was psychically aware of what would hurt the most, Fireheart takes that one shred of hope and comfort and rips it away from him. Tears it into pieces. Stomps on the tattered remains. Forces him to acknowledge that it’s not true. That Tigerclaw was embarrassed of him. That he didn’t love Darkstripe at all. He loved Fireheart.

Objectively, on some level, I’m sure Darkstripe knew this too. But his lack of self-awareness and desperation to cling to his only source of semi-joy convinced him otherwise. To have realty confirmed by the cat he hates the most was just too much for him.

So of course he leaves. He has to. There’s nothing in ThunderClan for him. No friends. No family he could win the love of. No Tigerclaw. He just.

He has to go.

Does he think there’ll be anything out there? No, probably not. But it’s infinitely worse to live in the same space as the architect of his misery and see that piece of shit be rewarded for everything he’s done. And he’s not going back, ever again. Not to those idiots, not to their murdering, stupid, ugly, cowardly little leader. Let them all starve to death. Let them all die of a torturous disease. Let more dogs show up and snap all of their necks. He doesn’t care what happens to them.

When we first meet Princess in Chapter 20, she's 7.5 moons old (the same age as Firepaw), give or take a moon or so given that we don't actually know for sure that Rusty was actually 6 moons old when he joined. They're both bright-eyed young cats for whom the world can be anything, and I think at this point their personalities are pretty similar. Granted, Rusty's encounter with Graypaw ended in a brief fight, while Princess simply ran off back to her housefolk: however, Rusty was also going to run until he realized Graypaw was gaining on him, whereas Firepaw didn't bother chasing Princess until he realized she was his sister.

We even see that Princess loves the idea of the forest! Quote from Chapter 20:

"Living in the forest all the time… that must be nice." [Firepaw] perked his ears, unable to ignore the wistful tone in [Princess'] voice.

She wants to be in the forest as much as him! So why doesn't she? Again, quote from Chapter 20:

"I wish I could. I love being in the forest, and I'd like to get to know you better. I really would." [Princess] admitted, brushing her tail against [Firepaw's] paw. "But my housefolk… she needs me. She's alone in her nest all day, until her mate comes home, and sometimes she just sits and stares at nothing all day when I'm not around. She needs me to keep her functioning." The tawny molly looked away with a heavy sigh. "I'm not sure what she would do if I just left."

I think a lot of people overlooked this dialogue - maybe because it was early in the series, maybe because it wasn't that important (in the grand scheme of things), maybe because they didn't understand what it was getting at. This is one of those things I left implicit, both because cats don't really understand how humans think and because it's one of those things that would definitely dampen the relatively light-hearted mood of Fire and Ice at that point. However, since we're getting into the nitty-gritty here, I'll explain what this means and why it's an ample part of Princess' reasoning - enough that she wouldn't follow her heart to get to know her brother and live in the forest.

Princess' female human has severe depression. It's not entirely clear whether or not her human is treated for it or not, but it doesn't particularly matter. She and her 'mate' (again, a cat's way of looking at them) had heard of emotional support animals to help combat depression and decided to contact a local Somali Cat breeder at the behest of their neighbor after asking around about kittens. Their neighbor would have been one of Rusty's owners, who told them that the breeder currently had five kittens and they were looking at picking one out. This is how Princess and Rusty ended up being so close geographically, even though their siblings and mother aren't!

Princess can sense that her human has depression, even if she doesn't fully understand what that means. And she does indeed help support her human! She makes sure that her human eats food at a regular time, does the laundry when it's needed, and she's there to cuddle with her on her worst days. She's needed, so she can't leave to fulfill her heart's wishes. Instead, Princess lives vicariously through her brother's tales of the forest, and telling all her friends about her strong wild cat brother.

In canon, Princess is scared of the wild cats. She doesn't understand why her brother left his housefolk. She can't handle the sight of Brightheart, because she's just too soft as a kittypet. Hell, when we meet her for the first time, she's already pregnant! Her sole reason for being is to give Cloudkit to Fireheart, so that he can have a relative in the Clans.

Given that she's Fireheart's sister, and therefore his equal (more or less), this has always read to me as misogyny from the Hunters. Why can't Princess join to be his relative in the Clans? Sure, it could be to give him a replacement apprentice, not just a relative, but back then kits just kind of showed up out of the ether. There's no reason he couldn't have been Fernkit or Ashkit's mentor, or some other sudden apprentice! She could have even been his apprentice if she joined, and he taught her how to be a wild cat (bonding moments)! But no; the only female relative of Fireheart's we see in the first series is pregnant, serving solely as a mother to his Clan relative, too scared/soft for the wild, and then just disappears after the first arc.

I wanted to show that she is his equal in my canon, and that means that she wants to be wild just as badly as him. She would be, if she didn't have someone that was already reliant on her as an ESA. Instead she remains; but she's still not soft, or scared of the forest. She loves seeing Fireheart, she worries for him, she even wants to learn battle moves from him in Chapter 47! Every time she's portrayed as soft, it's because Fireheart is handling her too gently; because he's trying to protect her from his own imagined fears. Whenever she reacts negatively, it's always to things that Clan cats themselves react negatively to (such as Spottedleaf dying, or the kits getting stolen).

Now that we've covered her character in Fire and Ice, it's time to get to how I've been developing her in Forest of Secrets. Obviously, the first chapter we see her in is Chapter 7, and it's not great. Her long fur is ungroomed; her tail is low, and she doesn't respond very much to Fireheart's prompting. She is deeply upset and clearly in her own head. We find out this is because she was bred with a cat she didn't know, and she didn't entirely want to do it, but did so out of fear of making her owners mad.

At this point, she is about 12 moons old, again give or take a couple of moons. I want to state that this is young. I know how early a cat's puberty can begin, and it's much earlier than this, but these are sapient cats and as such that doesn't really apply. Still, even by living cat standards, this is young; responsible breeders state that a cat should never be bred before their first year, and it should ideally wait until they are 18 months or two years old.

(This is made even worse in canon, because she's actually 10 moons at this point. Seriously, Erins, what the hell?)

From her point of view, her housefolk have betrayed her. She loved them and cared for them, but she wasn't enough for them. All they see her for is a potential baby factory, not for the value of their bond on its own. She thought they loved her for her, and now she's wondering if they love her at all. Will they love her kits at all? How can they, when they don't even seem to love her?

Also to be clear, her humans are definitely in the wrong here. This is made even clearer when we think about who Princess was bred with, Oliver. He's mentioned to be a white tom, but... there's no white in the Somali Cat breed standard. The only crossbreed allowed by the standard is to Abyssinians, and those also don't allow white. Her kits won't be able to be registered Somalis, even if they meet all the other classifications (they won't). This means that they were breeding her just for the sake of breeding her, which is a huge no-no.

I come from rescue circles, so I'll admit that the idea of willingly breeding cats is foreign to me anyways. There's so many cats out there that need good homes besides purebreds! I can't even begin to fathom why Princess' humans bred her; maybe the female wanted something to do all day and thought taking care of kittens would be good? I don't know. Regardless, they bred her to the first tom with papers whose owner would accept the cash and not question anything else. In my head, Oliver is probably a Turkish Angora, though that's not terribly relevant to this conversation.

Getting back to Princess: Even though Yellowfang and Dewpaw and all her friends did their best to comfort her, at the end of the day she was still home with her housefolk day in and day out. The more she helped her, the angrier she became. Despite all the love she'd given her, her housefolk had still forced Princess to carry kits for her own amusement. She would likely make Princess' kits carry kits for her own amusement - and that, more than anything, scared Princess to her core. She didn't want anyone else to go through what she did. Especially not the kits growing inside her, which despite it all she was growing to love. (This is also why she turned down the opportunity for an abortion from Yellowfang - even though she hated how she had gotten pregnant, she loved the idea of her own kits.)

Then she thought of her brother, Fireheart. She thought of how she'd first met him, and how he'd offered to let her join his Clan. That made her angrier, too. She should've accepted his offer. She should never have stayed with housefolk that didn't care about her. Then she wondered; why couldn't she join him now? The wild was dangerous, though; wouldn't it be safer for her kits to stay with housefolk?

But the more she thought about it, the more that she wondered how the Clans could survive out in the wild if it wasn't mostly safe. After all, Fireheart mentioned kits and queens all the time! She resolved to learn more about the nursery when he came back. And she did just that, as we see during his visit in Chapter 20. Quote again:

“Really?” [Princess] was leaning into [Fireheart] now, as though she needed to hear every word he said as soon as it left his lips. “How does one become a nursery queen, then?”

"Maybe it’s nice, in the nursery.” Princess whispered softly, so much that for a heartbeat [Fireheart] thought she was talking to herself. “What do you think?” She asked him, speaking louder now.

“Do you think the queens are happy in the nursery?” [Princess] wondered out loud, looking over her shoulder into the forest for a brief moment before gazing back at [Fireheart].

[Princess]: “That’s lovely to hear. And the kits, do they like it in the nursery?”

For most of the conversation, she's probing him for what it's like in the Clan; how queens are treated, how kits fare. It's subtle - subtle enough that Fireheart barely catches onto it - but she's already imagining her own life in Thunderclan. She's not sure whether she wants to be a warrior anymore, but she does want to join - and being a nursery queen sounds like the perfect role for her. She loves her kits now, and she loves the idea of getting to care for many kits, even if they aren't her own.

Princess makes up her mind sometime over the next half-moon, and resolves to ask him to let her join when Fireheart comes back. But he doesn't, too involved with Graystripe and Tigerclaw to think about his sister. As her belly grows even larger, her housefolk starts closing the catflap; just at night, usually, but sometimes throughout the day as well. It's only through Princess' desperate begging to see her friend in the garden that her housefolk relents, and that's the final straw for her to leave instead of waiting for Fireheart like he ordered. She doesn't tell Fireheart about this because she's afraid he'll order her back to her housefolk for her own safety, or the Clan's safety. She won't tell anyone until after the kits are born (and it will take place off-screen regardless), but it will be enough to cement her decision as the 'right' one in the eyes of the Clan.