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foxstride · 1 year ago

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Can you explain what is going on with Moonpaw? What happened in the 2 days since I finished Wind and was on Tumblr? I'm assuming I missed an official announcement after the initial one for Changing Skies that gave more info and prompted this.

This is a good opportunity to explain the full Moonpaw Discourse Debaucle, since seen a lot of people who're outsiders watching the WC fandom be on fire for the billionth time.

Here's a casual timeline of the Moonpaw Discourse, followed by the Controversy Hydra which has like 3-ish heads. I'm going to try and make sure this has enough context that even an outsider largely unacquainted with Warriors can follow it.

TIMELINE, preceding context.

We are currently on the second-to-last book of A Starless Clan (ASC), which is the 8th arc of Warrior Cats (WC).

Arc 9, Changing Skies (CS), is announced.

One of the protagonists of this new arc is a cat-teenager called Moonpaw, who "hears voices" and has some kind of connection to a sacred place called the Moonpool.

For outsiders: The Moonpool is basically like Cat Notre Dame. It's a sacred place that functions sort of like a cathedral where the cat-nuns go to talk to God.

The WC fandom is famous for making cool and recognizable designs of the characters... but the WC writing team is infamous for giving us boring, solid gray protags.

The fandom collectively goes on to have a lot of fun making designs for Moonpaw in various colors and patterns, hoping that she's not Solid Gray Protagonist 4.

We knew nothing about Moonpaw at that point, besides that the Moonpool was going to be threatened by human activity and she would have a connection to it.

Because of this, it became VERY popular to start suggesting stories about her literally falling in love with the moonpool, being able to communicate with it telepathically, becoming a martyr by allowing it to be reborn through the water of her own body, so on.

Speculation about the plot, who Moonpaw's parents are, and her design abound.

Then, we get an official announcement about Moonpaw's official design, more information about the plot of CS, and most relevantly, we learned who Moonpaw's parents are, and that she is explicitly a chimera cat.

While Bayshine had a few roles in ASC as the best friend and sort-of foster sibling (we dont have time to get into how bad wc is about adoption or The Sparkpelt Discourse again) of the main character, Thriftear was massively neglected by the narrative even when she was the sister of a protagonist back in Arc 7. She's had very few appearances or speaking lines, sans one notable interaction with another female character which caused a lot of fans to latch onto a sapphic interpretation.

We often call characters like Thriftear "background nobodies." There are a lot of them. Modern Warrior Cat arcs have become hesitant to kill off random characters so a few clans are "bloated," with character lists of 30+ names while only maybe 10 of them are ever relevant.

Thriftear and Bayshine are also first cousins. Two of their parents, Fernsong and Sorrelstripe, are full siblings.

This is especially insulting because is is the 6th instance in a trend where characters who are popularly interpreted by the fandom to be queer have their straight romantic relationships emphasized, carelessly added in without consideration to incest/inbreeding, or even see these mateships even retconned in over other existing scenes or paved over gaps in the canon.

that's me and my little tinfoil hat conspiracy. But we've got plenty of controversies, we can wriggle this one in too.

And speaking of controversies, from this point, there were essentially three overlapping conversations at once. Each one got a little more prominent from my perspective at various points, probably because I am a big fish in a small pond whose wake causes ripples, but I'll try to untangle them in a way that's more understandable.

The Chimera Controversy

A lot of people got mad that the writers stated that Moonpaw is a chimera.

There are several types of chimerism, but fusion chimeras are what results from two zygotes fusing together in early pregnancy.

An individual with fusion chimerism is usually indistinguishable from other people, but chimera cats are prominent in pop culture because of the dramatic appearance of certain "celebrity" animals such as Narnia, Venus, and Quimera.

This "split face" pattern does not have to be caused by Chimerism.

Split face fur patterns are actually not uncommon!

In the case of tortie cats like Venus, Quimera, and Moonpaw, it could naturally occur along with the random luck of also having heterochromia.

In the case of Narnia, it's likely to be mosaicism, as genetic testing has only found one set of genes present in his body.

"But, Bones, you said there's no difference between most chimeras and non-chimeras! How can we tell if a cat is actually a chimera, then?"

A lot of people who got mad didn't actually know what Chimerism is.

Some were annoyed about "misinformation being spread" via the conflation of a relatively common cat fur pattern to a rare genetic condition.

Which has validity. Chimerism is a lot more than a cool pattern-- and the pattern has almost nothing to do with Chimerism.

But others started making things up to turn this into a completely different problem.

Some did not know the difference between Chimerism (two full sets of genes) and Mosaicism (one set of genes with additional info) and began to claim that it was actually ableist for the writing team to casually give their character a cool fur pattern.

Demands for Moonpaw to be disabled in some way started to crop up

Which is offensive to ACTUAL people with Chimerism-- because what IS quite common in Chimerism, AND ONE OF THE ONLY WAYS YOU CAN ACTUALLY MAKE A GUESS IN A UNIVERSE LIKE WC'S, is intersex conditions.

If fusion chimeras are the product of an XX zygote and an XY zygote, the baby will usually be born with an intersex condition.

MOST fusion chimeras, especially of XX/XX and XY/XY fusions, will live their entire lives never knowing that they have a rare genetic quirk because there is no other way to tell without genetic testing!

Ergo, most fusion chimeras that are discovered are identified BECAUSE THEY WERE BORN VISIBLY INTERSEX.

So to demand that Moonpaw should "be disabled" to make her canonical, authorial stated Chimerism more clear in-universe was DEEPLY offensive.

This type of intersex condition is not a disability. To call for Moonpaw to "be disabled" to make her chimerism clear is saying that you consider an intersex body to be a disability.

That said... this one was mostly just ignorance.

People getting mad without knowing what they should be mad about, thinking of some sort of nebulous unknown health condition, and saying something intersexist as a result of ignorance.

I handled an anon like this with education, and they apologized. Since then, I haven't seen people repeating this.

What we WILL see though is that in every one of these controversies, people with chimerism, who are usually intersex for reasons I already explained, always seem to end up being the ones who end up catching strays.

You might balk and feel like that doesn't apply to any real people. But apparently when one of the members of our fandom who is a fusion chimera tried to express discomfort about one of the later controversies, someone told them to their face that they were probably evil as a result of "killing their twin in the womb."

The Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) Controversy

The MINUTE it was dropped that Moonpaw's a chimera, suddenly the tone about the "voices in her head" changed.

The conversation began with an excited, fantastical cadence about shipping her with a sacred swimming pool, saving it from humans, and having a connection no one else has...

Over into implications she "killed" her twin in the womb, and that she's being haunted by a zygote that resents her for being alive because it never got a chance to be born.

TO BE FAIR: A fair amount of this discussion is coming from speculation about what the writing team will do with this plot thread, given their horrific track record with their... stance on pregnancy.

FOR OUTSIDERS: this writing team is infamous for giving one of their worst characters a "heartwarming" moment where his dying brother witnesses the ghosts of his nespring, who were tiny fetuses when their pregnant mother was ripped apart by birds.

we sardonically refer to them as the Dead Angel Fetus Children

FOR OUTSIDERS, CONTINUED: no, we are not ok, these books are awful and the writing team rideshares to work in a clown car

But, digressing,

The way that the conversation's tone changed was whiplash to people in our fandom who have DID.

While previously the "voices" in Moonpaw's head had been something much more gentle, sympathetic, and unique, the new conversation was dangerously close to the "evil split personality" trope that's very common in horror movies.

The trend was that the external object's voice was collectively framed as mysterious, or even positive. The internal voices coming from within Moonpaw are collectively framed as spooky and evil.

(TREND. I'm not accusing any one person of anything. TREND.)

I want to be upfront that this is part of the Mooncourse I haven't been a large part of until now. While I understand the concerns, I have not been approached to explain this aspect nor have I directly seen anything that "goes over the line," so to speak. At most, I've gotten some asks just asking what my opinion is and expressing unease.

So I'm not going to say that offensive conversation doesn't exist right now; but what I AM saying that everyone who has approached me to comment about this has phrased it as more of an "apprehension." Like they're more worried about what this COULD become rather than what the fandom conversation currently is.

And that's a good thing. Let's keep it that way. No one wants Moonpaw's plot to be free of conflict or supernatural intrigue, these are just calls to be more mindful of the tropes at hand. Remember that if the Erins did Dead Angel Fetus Children but EVIL this time, that would be bad. Please don't do it for them. Having a voice in her head that makes her do evil things is going to make people think of one of the worst ableist tropes. PLEASE be careful.

(and, if i can be bold, maybe... examine that trend a little? Why the external object's magic voice is generally seen as more kind than Moonpaw's internal voice/sibling/headmate? Is there perhaps an unconscious bias here?)

AND PLEASE REMEMBER THERE ARE ACTUAL PEOPLE WITH CHIMERISM, THEY DID NOT KILL THEIR SIBLINGS IN THE WOMB, YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND HOW CHIMERAS WORK AND ARE CONFLATING IT WITH VANISHING TWIN SYNDROME. VANISHING TWIN SYNDROME WOULD ALSO NOT MEAN THEY KILLED THEIR SIBLING. EDUCATE YOURSELF.

The Incest Controversy

This is the really big one that is making up the bulk of Mooncourse.

IMPORTANT CONTEXT FOR OUTSIDERS: The Clans of cats in this series have a strong emphasis on having "clan blood" and viciously discriminate against outsiders. The books are also very bad at addressing this. A lot of what I write on this blog is in-depth breakdowns of how the narrative has a MASSIVE problem with reinforcing the in-universe xenophobia of the cast.

And when we're talking about the inbreeding problem we're going to get to, I am known in this space for my free-to-use reworks of the family trees. I create "diagnosis" posts for canon's issues meticulously mapping out every ancestor, explain the problems within the five Clans and what makes each one uniquely bad, as well as suggestions for how to fix them in your own fanworks.

I need you to have the context that I am one of the most outspoken voices on this issue within this part of the fandom, people come to me with questions about this topic and I answer them with lots of research, and I have the hand-written charts to prove it.

Thriftear is the daughter of Fernsong, and Bayshine is the son of Sorrelstripe. Fernsong and Sorrelstripe are full siblings.

That makes Bay and Thrift first cousins.

It doesn't end there either; they're related in several places.

Bayshine's paternal grandmother, Brightheart, is Thriftear's great-grandmother.

Jake shows up in their shared lineage three times. Frostfur shows up even more.

This happens a lot because the writers are EGREGIOUSLY careless with picking random ships for next-gen characters out of a hat.

Their rules are inconsistent to the point of it being a plot hole in ASC, where the main character is "grappling with the legacy" of being descended from an ancestor that nearly half of his Clan is ALSO descended from.

It's not even the first time they accidentally paired up first cousins by sheer incompetence. There was even an instance where they quietly tried to walk back from it later. (FANS: look at the absolute squiggle they drew on the official family tree so they didn't have to show Pebbleshine or her parentage.)

It didn't take long for the fandom to realize that the writing team had, once again, carelessly inbred their characters.

(and early on before this exploded into a big controversy, me and the followers were just having fun groaning about it and choosing who the parents should be instead, for a project I like doing)

But at first, it was small. Just scoffs and eye rolls, the occasional poor taste "joke" that isn't funny but most of us are sadly used to.

Then, some people started crunching the Coefficient of Inbreeding (COI) and returned with a calculation higher than 10%-- the point where the children are at high risk of rare birth defects.

There was a chronic failure to be normal about this. A predictable, disappointing failure.

Every Appalachian in a 500 mile radius heard the Lion King Stampede Music kick in, looking up with horror as a herd of so-called free thinkers scrambled to be the first jackass to make The Banjo Joke

The kneejerk reactions of others was to just insist that Moonpaw should be born "fucked up and (R-SLUR)"

Since "chimerism" was dropped by name, but you had to think about ThriftBay to realize they were 1st cousins, several people learned the news of Chimera Moonpaw before they heard she was a product of incest...

...And the tune immediately changed when it hit them.

Before realizing: "Wow cool! Split face Moonpaw!"

After realizing: "EW! NO WONDER SHE LOOKS LIKE THAT!"

Because of the fact that ThunderClan is "bloated" with those "background nobodies" I mentioned earlier, it is a common desire in the fandom that some sort of "mass death" storyline happens at some point.

Usually, this is because people think it would be an exciting story or help cut down the amount of characters who do nothing.

However.

Some people were responding to "ThunderClan has an inbreeding problem" with "THEY NEED TO DIE, WE NEED TO KILL THEM OFF"

as if making the "gene pool" EVEN SMALLER would fix any of this

but. we're not going to pretend that the impulsive response to "kill it with fire" was logical.

There's a MASSIVE difference between "I want the story to be exciting and see excessive characters die off" and "the inbreeding disgusts me so much that I want to see all of its products die immediately"

And then...

People started "jokingly" drawing Moonpaw with physical deformities, where the butt of the joke was her being twisted, misshapen, and ugly.

In the span of a few days, she was given a "hapsburg jaw," compared to an infamously inbred breed of dog, and given unfocused, asymmetrical eyes.

This all got a significant amount of engagement, most disappointingly from people in this fandom I otherwise respect greatly and expect to know better.

USUALLY people in this fandom are good at recognizing when it's fucked up to make fun of a disabled person, or a person with an obvious physical abnormality, since we talk a lot about the severe ableism in the book series that unites us...

...But sometimes that seems to just go out the window when you're talking about a victim of incest, as if that makes a baby "deserving" of being laughed at for what its parents did.

Or, worse, what was done to one of its parents. Because the REAL people who have such high COIs irl are nearly always children born of rape-- NOT people from (insert poor or low class geographical region you need me to know you don't respect here).

but you forget that when you're wrapped up in the euphoria of The Banjo Joke and scrambling to draw an offensive caricature of strabismus to get engagement while the topic's still hot.

SO this is where I came in and said something about it.

to put the kibosh on the "jokes" before they got any bigger.

In the few days since I've done that, the jokes have absolutely fucking died. I hope they stay dead. So help me god I will dig a grave 7 feet deep just so I can have the pleasure of throwing 12 more inches of dirt on top.

Sometimes it takes someone pointing and saying "This is fucked up" before people realize it.

The discourse looks especially big now because, since I put my foot down, it's become a thing we're all talking about. Dozens of people who were affected by the "jokes" and offensive discussion surrounding Moonpaw came out to share their experiences with me, even just to thank me for saying something when no one else would. Moonpaw's just a character-- when you turn incest into a joke, you're doing NOTHING but hurting several different kinds of people

If this discussion is bringing up bad memories or feelings for you, please know that the I in RAINN stands for Incest and their website has lots of resources for members of ALL survivors of sexual assault. They also have a hotline, so please reach out to them if you think they could help you in any way.

And that's The Mooncourse summarized. You're all caught up. Welcome to the Warrior Cats fandom, where the only thing we hate more than the books is each other <3 <3 <3

#wc discourse #erin hunter discourse

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