#tascloudedmoon

You saying that wildfur & wolfthorn have basically the same backstory (tragic death of a loved one leading to feeling rejected by the colony) made me realize something. for both of the main relationships in this book (spooty x wild & dawn x wolf) it's the female character who's the one constantly making sacrifices for the male character they're in love with. When wolfthorn left to find a new home, he wasn't really sacrificing anything cuz he wanted to leave river colony anyways (except but really apparently? his character goes back & forth a lot) meanwhile dawnfrost is the one who has to sacrifice her dreams of becoming leader & her standing within her colony if she wants to be with wolfthorn. wildfur doesn't care about marsh colony & always does the bare minimum so he's not sacrificing anything to be with spottedshadow, meanwhile spotty also has to sacrifice her standing within her colony, to the point where half her colony thinks she's a dangerous traitor who will cause trouble for all of them, in order to maintain a relationship with wildfur. isn't that interesting.

Dawnfrost & Spottedshadow actually do feel like the most fleshed out characters to me. I like how they're in similar leadership roles but the way they got those roles is completely different & so it affects the decisions they make. Spotty has a "the spirits choose me, so that must mean I'm making the right choice" attitude while dawn is moreso "I trained for this my whole life so I must make the right decision" which is very interesting to me! but unfortunately they're both held back by their respective boring romances & the fact that so much time is taken away from them in order to focus on more of the unnecessarily large cast. it's like every time either of them are going somewhere interesting the book decides to focus on wolfthorn or wildfur instead.

My issue with grey's backstory is that it's so tragic yet it doesn't seem to affect him in any way because the book doesn't let him react to it or talk about it because it needs to focus on moss instead, which is why they should've given that backstory to moss since she's the one that matters. I also don't really see why rockyshore not believing the allegations matters cuz it doesn't go anywhere. How about we have lakespeckle die when moss was still a young kitten, & since she needed milk whoever her parents were in the book (I forgot their names) adopted her after they lost their own kits. rockyshore tries to maintain a relationship, but the adopted parents don't trust him & decided to keep moss away from him, & rainfall decided that rockyshore made a mistake in loving lakespeckle & the colony can't afford to allow his mistakes to influence moss, so moss should go to the other parents. moss knows about lakespeckle & the rest of the colony always seems suspicious of her & her adopted parents are secretly afraid that moss might develop magic, so they raise her to follow rainfall unconditionally so that there's no chance she could ever betray the colony. They don't want to lose another kit, after all. Which leads to moss being assigned to wolfmask, who knows what happened to her birth parents but doesn't know how to bring it up, if he even should. He sees this young kit who's been lied to & manipulated her whole life, who doesn't trust him b/c she's been told that he's a danger to the colony, & he takes pity on her but also realizes that he could put both of them in danger of he steps out of line. meanwhile moss is desperate to prove herself. she doesn't know why she was assigned to the cat who everyone suspects is a traitor, but if he steps even a toe out of line she'll be the first to tell rainfall so she can prove her loyalty. it would be a much better dynamic than what the book gave us, & moss having that baggage of her mom being a traitor would give her reasonable motivation to spy on wolfmask. Much better than the "moss is easily manipulated cuz she's a naive child & rainfall is just so good at being evil" stuff that was in the book.

Moss ratting wolfmask out in the end would've been so neat. The book portrays her as "this poor innocent naive child is being manipulated by a monster how sad!" but what if moss was given a little bit of agency & decided to do a bad thing? maybe actually show rainfall's manipulation pay off instead of just using it to make her look evil without it actually going anywhere? wolfmask tried so hard to get moss to trust him, but in the end rainfall was the one who won her over, and now moss has to live with the consequences of what she did. I would've made it to where moss saw wolfmask using magic & due to her own fears of magic & wanting to prove that she herself won't be a dangerous mage like the one she believes her birth father was, she tells rainfall. it can happen after she started opening up to him, & maybe she actually started to question rainfall, but now she thinks it was all an act in order to get her to help him betray the colony. yet moss feels guilty about it & wonders if she made the right choice.

Nightpool

-Field Colony Ranger

Kittens: Sky, Spot, Hunter, Berry

Mate: Catcher

Nightpool doesn’t remember life before Field Colony. She knows she wasn’t born in the Southern Base’s cave, but her first memory is opening her eyes and seeing the beautiful cave paintings she would later learn was called the Legacy Weave and everything around her smelling of minerals, herbs, and other cats. Most importantly, she knew she was warm and dry. 

And soon after she awoke, she got her first bite of a fresh kill. Something in her brain rejoiced at how fresh it really was. This place was new and different…but new and different from what? No matter how she tried she couldn’t remember.

As time passed, Nightpool spent less and less time trying to remember. It took a while to get used to being around so many other cats, but she soon found that she actually enjoyed their company. The feelings of Mistysnow licking dust from her fur, Spottedshadow bumping her head with hers and purring a warm greeting, Timberleg and Lilyfire inviting her to play their games. How could she have ever lived without them? 

When Nightpool became a Ranger, she did feel the call for a little solitude from time to time. There were just things that the rest of the Colony didn’t understand. They were her family. Her home. But sometimes it didn’t feel like the feeling was mutual. How could they ever understand just how much they meant to her?

Yeah I agree with you. I will admit that it is pretty impressive how far they've come with what was originally an online roleplay, but the fact that it was a roleplay with several characters written by different people is very obvious, which isn't a good thing. It makes the end product feel really muddled and confusing. everyone in the original rp had their own visions for their own characters but they didn't exactly fit in one cohesive story. I also think the original rp caused clouded moon to have a "too many important characters" problem. There's so many characters that the authors wanted to focus on because they were all characters individual people were roleplaying as their own individual "main" character, but there's just not enough time to focus on all of them. They really needed to cut down on the POV characters. There is no reason for an introductory book to have, what was it? Like, six or seven main POV characters? That's way too many. Imo they should've cut the POV characters down to just spottedshadow dawnfrost and pool. That would've made things run a lot more smoothly.

As for peach, I'm not really against her dying. I'm moreso against how she died from injuries in an off-screen battle (which happened like a whole month priar I'm pretty sure? which makes NO sense how peach was bleeding out for that long) and how goldenpelt is just so stupid about siding with the cat who admitted to causing her death. Also the fact that peach was just completely absent from the story for several chapters. I almost forgot she existed because she didn't really seem to matter to the story that much, but according to tennelle the story would've fallen apart without her death, and if that's the case then the story didn't have good ground work to begin with. peach is just too much of a generic background character to meter that much to the narrative. If her death really was that important, she should've been a more important character! same with stone. He's too unimportant to justify spottedshadow making him her second.

I seriously do not understand why swiftmask even exists, other than because he was someone's rp character. swiftmask is honestly so boring and doesn't really bring much to the story, which is odd since I'm pretty sure they still plan on making swiftmask captain since he became leader in the rp. if they're still going with that plan they're not doing a good job of building up to it. I do think merging swiftmask and wolfthorn together would be a good idea (wolfmask would be a cool name) and making him an actual important part of the colony with cats actually supporting him would make so much sense. In shifting roots it makes absolutely no sense why wolfthorn is so insistent on staying in river colony. nobody seems to like him or listen to him and everyone seems suspicious of him and he doesn't even like being in river colony anyways, he's just there because "memories" or something. I also don't understand why rainfall doesn't just kill him. everyone already thinks he's a traitor so why not just kill him? or banish him and then send iceclaw to kill him? It makes no sense. Make it to where the colony still likes him and doesn't think he's a traitor and boom! fixed! it would be a bad idea to kill someone who would make half the colony revolt because they see it as an injustice! But they didn't want to combine wolfthorn and swiftmask because they were two people's rp characters or whatever, so now we're stuck with two supposedly important characters who the narrative is constantly struggling to decide which one is actually important and they both come across as very weak characters as a result.

I have no idea why moss is swiftmask's new-claw and not wolfthorn's. gray adds nothing and is even more of a generic background character than peach. the book tries to force some unearned relationship moments between him and wolfthorn, but it falls flat because there was no build up to it. moss is the important one, so why was she given to the boring character instead of the more important (but honestly still pretty boring imo) character? rainfall already wants moss to spy on wolfthorn, just make her his apprentice and it would be so much easier instead of the flimsy way the book tried to have rainfall manipulate moss into spying on a non-mentor by asking her to keep an eye on the mentors (did the authors forget wolfthorn isn't a mentor or something???)

And the thing about wolfthorn witnessing his father's murder is that it lacks substance because the book doesn't give it substance. We have no idea what wolfthorn's relationship with his father was like. wolfthorn is a main POV character, we're literally in his head for a large portion of his book, yet he doesn't even think about his father once except to tell the reader "yep, this thing happened and I saw it!" If he was always thinking about his father and how much he misses him and how much he wishes he were here to help him figure out what to do, then it would actually feel like it means something, but these authors seem to think that slapping "dead dad" on a character's backstory without actually exploring it is enough to make the reader understand everything.

Patch 

Marsh Colony New-Claw

Parents: Blueflower and Crowstalker

Sibling: Wildfur

“C’mon, Wild! Follow me!”

Patch and Wild were a problem from the beginning. That much they both knew. Blueflower, their mother, was very sick. And it was their fault. They knew that as well. Patch couldn’t really understand how, but no one had really tried to explain it either. It was just a known fact. Wild was especially affected by how other cats would look at them. Every disappointed sigh, every glare, every time a cat would hiss and swat at them when they crashed about the camp. Orchemantis would hiss some particularly rude things if they got anywhere close to her precious kitten, and Shrewbelly had his paws full with Frost, the half drowned kitten that had recently been found in the swamp.

No one seemed to bother themselves with them. Not even Crowstalker, their own father. They would just have to take care of themselves until…well, Patch wasn’t really sure when. Maybe when they were New-Claws? Proper New-Claws! With the Mentors and allowed to leave the base! For now, they were supposed to be learning from the Keepers, but since the only Keeper was busy, Patch and Wild mostly spent their time play fighting, getting in trouble, looking for sunbeams to lay in, and generally causing mayhem.

Maybe they could prove themselves ready to be proper New-Claws? Then they wouldn’t be in the way! That gave Patch an awesome idea. Wild would need some convincing, but if there was one thing Patch was good at, it was egging his brother on.

Orangebrook 

-River Colony Herbalist

Kitten: Silverblaze

Mate: Blazeheart

A change in a Path is not something most cats as old as Orangebrook do, but when your Captain says it’s where you are needed…It’s impossible to argue. 

Orangebrook curses himself for not listening to his mate, Blazeheart, closer when she would talk about her herb stores. And now she was with the Spirits and Orangebrook had no one to ask. 

He would grumble about his predicament more but really, what good would it do? The job needs doing, regardless if he is any good at it. He’s been able to get a few scant, precious tips from the other Colony’s Herbalists, but there’s still herbs Orangebrook isn’t sure about. How long do they last? What is the best way to apply them? It’s enough to give an older guy like him a headache.

At least Orangebrook understands enough about how to stop a wound. Any cat can at least do that. He’s pretty good at telling cats to get some extra rest as well. Nothing a little rest can’t usually help. And he’s been alive long enough to know a few things about helping a pregnant mother with her kitting. 

Timberleg

-Field Colony Mentor-in-Training

Parents: Amberyes and Volefur

Siblings: Lilyfire and Peach

Timber and Fire were the first litter that Ambereyes and Volefur had together. While Ambereyes decided to stay with her kittens as a permanent Keeper for the colony, Volefur couldn’t have shown much less interest in his newborn kittens if he had tried. Timber was sad to not have his father around much, but at least there were so many other wonderful cats to look up to! Timber was much like any kitten, playful and curious, but even from a young age, he enjoyed watching and learning from what he observed adults doing.

When little Night was found on the edge of Field Colony territory, Timber was the first to make friends, at least, after she was no longer confined to Mistysnow’s den. Night had a lot to catch up on to be a New-Claw with him and his sister, Fire. She didn’t know anything about being in a Colony! But that was okay, because it meant that Timber could show off all his favorite places to play, and tell Night all his favorite stories, and show off how fast he could run and pounce things! Becoming friends with Night, and teaching her all the things the Keepers had taught them, was perhaps the first time Timber considered making Mentor his future path.