#Warrior Cats discourse

[clanslist]

[w1ldfeatherxx]

Scourge in his manga:

Scourge in Leopardstar's honor:

Like, why would Scourge of all characters give a fuck about some clan cats being half-clan?? Scourge himself was treated poorly by clan cats twice (Tigerstar & Brokentail) because of his kittypet / non-clan origins. In the manga he clearly did not appreciate Tigerstar's contempt towards Bloodclan cats. Tigerstar's & the clans' hatred towards any cat usually stems from their xenophobic ideologies, so it should be pretty obvious Scourge held a grudge against them for their xenophobia and overall racism.

So again, why the Hell would Scourge take part in Tigerstar's racism, a product of the toxic aspects of clan culture which, by the way, almost resulted in Scourge's death in his kithood??? O_o'

Make it make sense lmfao

[bonefall]

Bones someone made a "Squirrelflight is worse" document on Twitter and people are defending him because "evil squilf fans" or whatever I feel like I'm going mad

Can't say I'm surprised. Bramblestans are so whiny they could rival Italy's yearly chianti exports.

Honestly I'd just dismiss them as contrarian. Especially when they're young, people feel special for arguing their unpopular opinions. Add that to a mix of this fandom being pretty notoriously sexist against female characters (like when they just make shit up about Nightcloud) and I think this sort of discourse becomes predictable.

Let me guess though; the claim is, "Squilf is rude sometimes which means she deserves to be abused by her husband/boss?" I wouldn't expect much better from a document that can't even think of an original title.

[jayfs-feather]

Me watching proshippers compare saying “hey it’s weird to ship adults and children” to StarClan rules against interclan/medicine cat relationships

[crystals-warriors-rewrite]

PPL R USING DA R-SLUR???!! I THOGUGJT WE STOPPED BEINF ABLEIST !!!!!

I thought so too :/

Apparently there are a few people using it against Moonpaw

[sapphic-catz]

Idk this is purely based on my opinions okay? Understand that? Okay then

I’ve seen a lot of au’s and rewrites for warrior cats. We all know how sexist this series is. A lot of people try and fix this and that’s awesome. But like. Idk.

Every time I see a swiftpaw lives instead of brightpaw au it just irks me. Why not Bright? Why can’t you just explore the trauma and life of Brightheart? She has so much potential that isn’t shown that you can use. Or even worse when both live and she’s made into just a love interest for Swift or or or given a automatic healing arc just so she can help Swift deal with the trauma they both share.

Another thing is how overlooked still a ton of female characters are instead of male characters. Even if they’re like shown often. Like cmon we need more Sandstorm as deputy or Sandstars. Why does every other deputy choice under Firestar never women. Like cmon. It’s always Longtail, Brackenfur, Whitestorm (canon but in these he lives instead), or some other dude.

How about Morningflower??? Not as a deputy under Fire but as a bigger character instead of grieving mother who talks to Fireheart like twice. Make her the deputy before Mudclaw and Onewhisker where she retired now and the two fight over the next role. Works great for drama still and patches the Deadfoot being already dead thing.

Russetfur is also sitting right there y’all. She should get more!!!! Give me mroe of her!!!!

[lander64]

Friendly reminder that liking a character is not the same as defending them, especially if that character is a villain or otherwise antagonist.

[rookflower]

whichever one of us is a person first

[myfandomrealitea]

Oh yeah the WC fandom is fucking insane.

There's a very popular fanartist who has an OC that's a villain and people were harassing her because her villain is a white cat in a clan of black cats, and she was bullied and abused by them for her fur color.

People were literally accusing her of being a racist because "The white cat is being abused by the black cats, the artist is clearly saying that black people are evil and violent and want to victimize white people!"

The artist literally based the dynamic on how crows will ostracize birds in their flock that have albinism and people were going, "Why did she have to do this story with cats? Why not just do it with crows? Kind of sus :/"

Like,,, hello? What? It's fine if the story is about birds, but if it's about cats, it's racist? How does that make any fucking sense.

[w1ldfeatherxx]

Things wrong with Warriors - Foxes vs Cats

There's lots of things wrong in the Warriors books, one of them is how foxes are portrayed as german shepherd sized monsters that shred full grown cats to pieces with ease. In reality, they're only a little bigger than your average cat and are no match to cats in fighting most of the time. Here's pictures of real cats and foxes together:

Cats are known for their ability to defend themselves against much bigger animals. In Warriors, they should be even better at it, because they get combat training for Hell's sake! So why don't we see more of cats beating the crap outta foxes, dogs, badgers etc. in the books? It makes zero sense to me...

[ersh-ova]

"Oui, tell him that, like him, I choose to burn out rather than fade away!"

there are members of the dark forest who will never ever fade because their memory will live on forever, their crimes so notorious that their legacy will not die... and there are members of the dark forest who will fade after just a couple of generations, a blip in time, because despite their "eternal damnation" they never committed a crime great enough to be remembered for much at all

[valhallasoutlaw]

Let me know if I'm being a bigot but I think that the Owls of Ga'Hoole could reduce any Warrior Cat Clan to paste.

I haven't read Warrior cats so I might be talking out my ass, but as much as I love that Scourge cat with the claw collar I don't think that they can compete with like...steel? I can't begin to tell you how batshit insane it is that the birds have extracted raw iron, purified it and perfected the art of metallurgy to forge it into their weapons. Like. Boron wears GOLD. I'm not even sure OoGH and Warrior Cats are in the same league?

An elite cabal of ancient warriors with high grade metal weapons and armor that are capable of silent flight and mass combat logistics...and a bunch of (really angry) cats?

[nathisabitscared]

Everytime someone says that age gaps in warriors arent real I just know they didnt read the books, or just read them without paying attention

Into the wild's, the very first book, main plot its about why child labor is wrong, if they didnt care then they surely wouldn't care about brokenstar's methods, or tigerpaw almost killing tiny, both issues go hand in hand, you cant be moral about one and not the other

Also in spottedleaf's heart, and I quote, there was this dialogue;

' Spottedpaw nodded. "Yes," she whispered. "But you're a warrior, and I'm only an apprentice..."

"You won't be an apprentice forever! I've watched you train, and I know you'll pass your assessment with no trouble at all." Thistleclaw straightened up. "There is no harm in thinking about the future. Our future." '

Same thing happened with ferncloud and dustpelt, leopardfoot and pinestar... The only ones that didnt do the whole "I'll wait until youre legal" thing? Moonflower and stormtail, the ones that in an irl escenario would count as child on child grooming, gee I wonder why! But even then stormtail held back, just not in a subtle matter

They clearly have a moral regarding ages, but also an issue keeping on track that some dont violate it, which I can also see why, they can only mate with cats from the same clan so every pairing will be creepy to an extent, for example bluefur and thruspelt, did he watch her grow up? Surely, but did he pursue her as an apprentice? Not once, he didnt even get close until she was like 20+ moons olds, and also didnt try to control her or have any kind of power over her, a normal age gap between two adults who can mentally respect each other and didnt need to hide, ofc older cats will use this and exploit it, like again, pinestar and dustpelt who got their victims into a "relationship" once they turned "adult age"

Grooming and pedophilia in warriors its very real, you're just too lazy to think about it and look past the character's species

[goldenflowerceo]

pigeonpelt? are you okay? you keep talking about defending sunningrocks... it's been 20 years. we're at the lake now. you need to let go.

[gutterclan-after-dark]

‼️‼️I am gay and transgender ‼️‼️ I am not criticizing anyone just mentioning some stuff I've noticed in a literary analysis sort of way I am not trying to start discourse‼️‼️

Anyway. One of my clangen cats just rolled as trans (yay) & it's got me thinking like.

What is it to write cats with gender variance in a world that is essentially post-gender (to the extent that any of us, having been raised from birth saturated in the unconscious stew of gendered thinking, can write something that is 'post-gender').

I've noticed that the vast majority of work in the warrior cats space does seem to strive to have complete equality between the sexes- and not just equality, but complete indistinguishably. I've even seen audiences routinely forget what gender a character even IS (which is kind of delightful). Toms raise litters, mollies become leaders, there is no friction, commentary, noticeable difference.

And that's fine- I'm more or less going that route with Gutterclan- but in a world where this is no social or material difference between the sexes- what does gender variance mean? How does it function? Where does it come from? What does being transgender mean in a world where gender identity does not really exist (or at least is not differentiated- there is One gender, and it is warrior cat*), and physical transition is not possible? Is it just a matter of pronouns?

What need for gender neutral pronouns in a world where essentially all things are already gender neutral? Is it just dysphoria? Do trans tortoiseshell toms hate their orange patches, or do trans mollies feel self conscious about their stud jowls? That's sort of miserable, if the only thing that being trans is, is having a problem with yourself that can't be solved.

And what does sexuality mean, when gender barely exists, and sex essentially doesn't? There is romance in warrior cats, for sure, but sex doesn't really... exist in most warrior cats works, and it definitely doesn't exist in the canon books. Which is absurd to say, because people are always having kittens, and accidental litters are a constant plot tangle, but there is never a sense of how these things occur. Being mates means you sit together at mealtimes and rub cheeks and get sad when the other person dies, and sometimes kittens appear after a timeskip.

This is of course due to the age range of the books, and because the main characters are animals. And I don't think it's a problem in need of changing, but it does make trying to conceive of sexuality strange in this world.

What does being asexual mean when no cats ever really display a sexual desire? What does being a lesbian mean where there functionally is no difference between mollies and toms? (Aros get to stay, the WC conception of romance ports more or less 1:1 from our world).

I do believe that sexuality and gender are to a certain extent innate, but they are also deeply, deeply shaped by our society's conceptions. Which is to say, eg, only desiring relationships with other women is perhaps innate, but the identity of Lesbian is constructed (which is not to say it isn't real- like, currency is a social construct, and we wouldn't say it's fake, or that it lacks power over us, etc). So what does it mean to have those labels in a world that- ostensibly- lacks much of the very human, very 21st century, very western, social baggage that creates them? And the answer is basically one of two things:

you do a lot of baroque gender worldbuilding. For your warrior cats fan work (which! Honestly kind of bangs and I would like to see).

People like to see themselves reflected in fiction, and the reason that we have pansexual cats and grey-ace cats and demi-boy cats is more or less because we have those things in real life, and we say the cats are those things and so they are, even if their history & context of gender and sexuality are completely different from ours, and likely wouldn't have created the same labels.

And there's nothing wrong with either of those approaches! I'm more or less going to go with approach 2 in Gutterclan, which just small switches in terminology, but I find it sort of... unsatisfying, the more I turn it over

*I put this question to my buddy Goose & he posited that the space that gender roles serve for us are, in warrior cats, essentially occupied by narrative roles. Leader, warrior, med cat, even things like villain or loner. I am nodding at this proposal very vigorously. In a world without gender, is the angst of a medicine cat apprentice longing to be a warrior not a sort of transgender longing to fit a different societal role than the one you are coercively assigned?

Anyway. I still don't know how to make my cat trans.

[lander64]

It really disappoints me how the folks at wc confessions have been treating the Squilf design drama, as someone who’s been following them for a while, since before they switched ownership. Usually their takes are pretty good and I’d come to respect them for it. Hell I’d even posted my own confessions there too.

When those first Squirrelflight Design confessions where posted, I understood where the anons were coming from in not babying abuse victims, but their ‘criticisms’ were targeted at the wrong places. (ie drawing Squilf as short when she is literally described as short in the books) But I didn’t worry about the WCC personal thoughts on the matter. This is a confessions blog after all, not all the confessions that are posted are what the blog runners believe (especially since there are multiple people running the blog now)

However after seeing their response to the criticisms of these posts and the comments of others on their views, I’ve changed my stance on the matter. As I’ve stated, WCC takes are usually good on these kinds of things. It’s a shame really. I’m not a victim of abuse myself so I can’t say anything personally, but reading about the opinions from people who where makes these confessions from the blog owners even more awful.

I will not be unfollowing the blog yet, as to see if they make a statement about the situation. However it is something I will be thinking about and will do if the double down on their views.