Power of Three AU

interesting....... many places for different powers........... eyes emoji

I get why he was welcomed back at the lake - at that point, most of the cats that were around who actually knew him were too young to know what he did/really understand it. For a lot of them, he WAS just their deputy/best friend of their leader. But I wish he had actually worked to earn back everyone's trust and was shown gaining back their respect instead of... just being handed deputyship as a gesture from his buddy.

Beetlewhisker’s death was actually really good, in my opinion - stupid or not, I really appreciated that he got up and said “Nope, thanks for training me, but I’m out.” Killing him showed the other trainees that they couldn’t leave, regardless of what they wanted. But now Beetlewhisker still gets listed in allegiances, lol, so it’s both narratively and otherwise underrated.

Spottedleaf. Her novella did nothing to actually help her character and if anything, made her ‘romance’ with Fireheart even creepier. I wish her constant meddling in Clan life had been actually properly explained besides “she lurves Firestar”, because some of what she did was actually... really damaging, like nagging Jayfeather to become a medicine cat or telling Leafpool to be with Crowfeather. I think either making her some kind of an unintentional villain, where she causes trouble but is doing it because she’s obsessed with Firestar and his kin, would have been more interesting than just... nagging overused dead medicine cat from book 1 that was alive for all of five chapters.

Canon Lionblaze isn’t my favorite, to be honest. But... I would actually say Graystripe. His personality isn’t annoying, but the way the first series handled his character was... annoying. As a kid, I was all, “Yeah! Make Graystripe deputy!”, but after re-reading... it was a bad choice. Graystripe (while his reasons were good as a father), betrayed ThunderClan by leaving them for RiverClan. Then he couldn’t actually commit to RiverClan and was exiled, and only really let back in because Bluestar believed everyone in ThunderClan was a traitor.  He just didn’t really DO anything or have the time to properly earn back his respect and trust, and was essentially handed deputyship because Firestar was his friend, not because he had shown that he was going to stick around and could be responsible. Sandstorm, Mousefur, Dustpelt, or hell, even LONGTAIL would have been good substitutes, and Longtail could have been really symbolic of the progress made between him and Firestar in getting along and putting aside their differences to work together!