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troutfur · 6 months ago

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Rise of a Genre? - Ramblings on "Shifting Roots" (The Alliance Saga - Clouded Moon, book 1)

From a Warriors OC indie animated series to its retooling into an original fantasy story and now with the release of the first novel in a planned trilogy, Star Cat Studios' Clouded Moon has had quite the tumultous history. Having released December 23rd, 2024 and available not only on the author's Ko-Fi page but also on Amazon and Barnes and Noble, this seemingly not-quite-indie title is particularly interesting to me as a Warriors fanfiction author steeped in the rewrite side of the community.

Throughout my time in the fandom I have seen many rewrite projects grow more ambitious. Eventually many of these have diverged so significantly in terms of plot and especially worldbuilding to the point it made more sense to spin them off into original fantasy stories. Here in the Tumblr space, the word for this emerging genre is xenomoggy, a portmanteau of xenofiction (fiction written from the perspective of a non-human character) and moggy (an unremarkable non-pedigree domestic cat, feline counterpart of the word mutt).

Shifting Roots is far from the first ever Warriors fan project to have found new life as an original propety. In the videogame world, Cattails and its sequel Cattails: Wildwood Story precede it, having been developed on the basis of the fangame Warrior Cats: Untold Tales. However it IS, to my knowledge, the first ever comercially published xenomoggy novel.

I originally envisioned this post as a review of the book, but the more I wrote the more I found myself just rambling about my thoughts on the book. To concisely summarize my thoughts, this is a 6.5/10 book. Definitely above your standard Warriors book, a series which is a very consistent 5/10 read, but still somewhat missing the mark. Regardless, I'd recommend any Warriors fan to check it out and any aspiring author of xenomoggy fiction to study it in order to take advantage of its strengths and avoid its faults.

So, without further ado, my somewhat rambly thoughts on the book below. Beware of spoilers.

The Setting

Right away, Shifting Roots shows its origins as a Warriors OC story. Alliance Lake is very transparently just the Lake Territories featured from arc 2 of Warriors onwards. And the four cat colonies that live on its shores, Oak Colony, Marsh Colony, River Colony, and Field Colony, are very transparently just ThunderClan, ShadowClan, RiverClan, and WindClan respectively. The territories may have been spiced up a little, in particular River Colony's lush tropical paradise and waterfalls, but it's not substantially different.

What really sets this setting apart is the world beyond the colonies of the Alliance. Firstly there's no humans, and thus no cities, roads, cars, or anything of the sort to threaten our cast. This world is for the most part a scorched wasteland, known to the Alliance as the Unbound-Lands. Here, magic users fight for their life in the unforgiving environment.

According to the origin myths of The Alliance, the world is like that because magic users made it like that through reckless use of magic. According to the telling by Unbound cats, however, the source of this bounty is a spell The Alliance placed that seals away magic powers within Alliance territory and redirects it towards the land and the Captains of each colony.

The change of no humans alone is a huge paradigm shift. The core premise of Warriors has essentially always been "What would your cat be up to if they ran into the woods?" Thus, even as the series has introduced more and more fantastical elements, it has had to remain relatively grounded in terms of how much elements of human society these cats can have. Asking the reader to buy into all the other fantastical elements further ungrounds the setting and raises the bar of willing suspension of disbelief required.

Thus it strikes me as supremely odd how the society of the Alliance Lake colonies still sticks so close to the mold of Warriors. Keepers --equivalent to what in Warriors fandom we'd call a "permaqueen"-- and mentors --not the same as a mentor in Warriors, those are called teachers, these are rather their overseers-- are the only new formal jobs introduced. Politically the only rank added is that of envoy, cats that along with elders, herbalists, the second in command, and the captain form a ruling council and have a vote in colony matters. And in terms of material culture there is a mention of a bag once as well as mentions of torniquets and stitches, but not really anything extreme.

Additions to the material culture and division of labor in the Clans (e.g. tool use, crafts manufacturing, and cooking) are easily some of the most elaborate elements of Warriors rewrites and AUs I see around nowadays. Though I don't like them very much at all (at best I put up with them as a concession to the premise for the sake of an interesting story) because of how they clash with the intended feel of Warriors as a semi-grounded story, their ubiquity and popularity clearly shows I'm in the minority. Thus it feels unnecessarily austere from the authors to add so little when their world's premise alone bought them a wide latitude to make worldbuilding additions to their heart's content.

In terms of presenting the information to the reader, it can be argued that a lot of the legwork has already been made by the Warriors novels and given the primary audience for this book has already read them there's very little need to present the world beyond the additions.

I have to admit that as a Warriors reader, I greatly appreciated that we dove right into seeing daily life in the alliance without having to explicitly exposit it, and I particularly appreciated the fact the author did not insert an outsider protagonist to exposit it to. However, I'm not quite sure this set-up will be entirely intuitive to unfamiliar readers. Perhaps if the xenomoggy genre gains traction and some ground ground level tropes come to be accepted as standard in popular consciousness this will not be an issue for future writers.

With regards to introducing worldbuilding elements not familar to Warriors, althought the first few pages of the book with its maps and glossary of terms and list of characters and laws of the Alliance could be considered an info dump, the relevant parts are still introduced well in the text proper.

The Characters

The book follows a core cast of four characters, one from each of the colonies around Alliance Lake, Dawnfrost from Oak Colony, Wildfur from Marsh Colony, Wolfthorn from River Colony, and Spottedshadow from Field Colony. These four are established from early on to be a friend group going back to their adolescent days, as well as there being two sets of cross-Colony partners: Dawnfrost & Wolfthorn and Wildfur & Spottedshadow.

With the use of these relationships as drivers of the interpersonal conflicts for these characters, we once again see the fingerprints of Warriors. These are no bland repeats of forbidden love tropes seen in its source material, however.

The two mollies of the group, Dawnfrost and Spottedshadow, are an exploration of themes of ambition. The former is currently an envoy and leading candidate for Second in Command once Oak Colony's Captain, Elmtail, dies and his Second, Redleaf, assumes the position. The latter, however, is a mentor who rejected the position of envoy, precluding the possibility of ever becoming Second and thus abandoning previous ambitions for leadership, due to the realization of how it would affect her relationships outside Field Colony.

The two toms of the group, meanwhile, are an exploration of themes of social alienation. Wildfur is a social outcast in Marsh Colony and although his Captain seeks to integrate him by giving him responsibilities, such as the training of the new-claw Pool, he resents these attempts and longs to live in Field Colony, a dream he knows is impossible as it's Field Colony policy to only admit outsiders before adulthood. Wolfthorn, meawhile, is a tom that had previously ran away to wander the Unbound-Lands but returned due to homesickness, only to find that under Captain Rainfall's leadership his home colony has turned to a brutal dictatorship and no longer feels like home. Despite Dawnfrost's pleading for him to come live with her in Oak Colony and Wolfthorn's attempts to convince her to run back into the Unbound-Lands with him, they both know they are too attached to their home to ever leave.

Although the four of these are presented from the very first chapter as the protagonists, the point of view character jumps all over the place between characters of all four colonies and even to members of a group of cats from the Unbound-Lands they come to meet later in the story. Arguably, though, this story belongs more to Spottedshadow and her Field Colony friend turned political rival Goldenpelt. She is even the eponymous character of this trilogy as a whole, as when she ascends to leadership she comes to be known as Captain Spottedshadow the Clouded Moon.

Goldenpelt is a very fascinating character and foil to Spottedshadow. As her childhood friend who once dreamed of leading Field Colony alongside her not only as Captain and Second, but as mates, he holds bitterness and suspicion towards Wildfur and the rest of Spottedshadow's cross-Colony friend group for their role in her giving up her ambition. While she is optimistic about cross-colony cooperation he's distrustful and guarded, both attitudes being validated at different points in the story and driving their tension.

This is only amplified when following the deaths of Field Colony's Captain and Second, after he was left as the only envoy, the Spirits Beyond (which I don't think I have to mention are the StarClan equivalent, but just in case...) chose to appear to and bless Spottedshadow instead of Goldenpelt. When she decides to snub him further by appointing a new envoy to make into her Second for fear that him having the position would undermine her newfound power, their rift only grows.

I will say more about this in the plot section, but suffice to say I think that focus on these two as the primary or even solitary PoV characters could have helped to smooth out a very huge plot issue and really zeroed in what was the emotional core of this story. Interesting and compelling as the other characters and perspectives are I do feel very strongly the multi-PoV format was a misstep.

Plot

The plot follows a series of mysterious attacks on Marsh Colony and Oak Colony cats by an unidentified beast that doesn't even eat its victims. After failing to track down its den and suffering serious losses from Oak Colony, Marsh Colony, and Field Colony during an encounter in the heart of the Oak Colony base, the three colonies above agree to send a party into the Unbound-Lands to the presumed source of these attacks and to gather intelligence in how to face it. The questing party consists of our four protagonists (Wolfthorn sneaked out again, of course, as Captain Rainfall of River Colony refused to help) as well as the new-claw Pool from Marsh Colony, the ranger Shrewpelt from Oak Colony, and the ranger Goldenpelt from Field Colony.

After saving an Unbound-Lands wind mage while in the Unbound-Lands, and in gratitude being led to the rest of their group (called a gust), the group finds out that the creature in question is a bear and her cubs who has been using magic of their own to cloak their den. At this point Wolfthorn also fills them in on the Unbound-Lander's more accurate account of the origin myth of Alliance Lake. (As a side note, the bears can use magic because apparently whoever placed the enchantment that limits the magic of other cats within Alliance Lake territory didn't even know other creatures could wield it too. Thus they didn't cast to bind them as well.) Although the wind mages are unwilling at first to follow them back to Alliance Lake to help with their bear problem, as they don't want to give up their magic NOR die, as killing mages is the policy of the alliance, Captain Spottedshadow promises them sanctuary in Field Colony.

Once back in Alliance territory, the party finds out that River Colony has encroached on Field Colony territory in a bloody battle while Spottedshadow and Goldenpelt were absent. In a single scene, Goldenpelt rallies his group of supporters that believe he was cheated out of captainship and they are promptly and swiftly exiled.

This is where I pause and explain my big plot gripe. Though I definitely see where the author was going with regards to Goldenpelt resurrecting his claim to captainship following the revelation of what Spottedshadow's decision to go in the journey caused, it is very important to note this is right after the two of them had an "arc" in the Unbound-Lands to reconnect as best friends. (Arc is rather too generous. It was a bunch of set pieces not too unlike how Warriors travelling books are a series of loosely connected "quick time event" type scenes.) The immediate U-turn comes across as if their previous relationship development was completely wasted time as we are right back at square one just after it resolved.

If Goldenpelt had stayed in Field Colony and rallied his supporters while Spottedshadow was away OR the last 20% or so of the book that we were at by the time this one scene happened was dedicated to Goldenpelt regressing a bit more gradually, I think it would have been worth it. But both of these ideas I hold would work for the best if Goldenpelt and Spottedshadow were the sole PoVs instead of the constant jumping across so many characters. Capitalizing on these two as the emotional core of the story would have greatly elevated the book.

Anyway. After a disastrous Moonlight Meeting in which Oak Colony, Marsh Colony, and River Colony soundly reject Spottedshadow's plans to use the Unbound-Land mages to fight the bears, Spottedshadow takes it upon herself to break the echantment that binds the magic and which is located in the oak tree in the center of Moonlight Island. Oak Colony and Marsh Colony meanwhile set up bait and ambush the bears. Anticipating this move, Spottedshadow moves to bring unwanted reinforcements and with the help of the wind mages they manage to kill the mother bear and one cub, chosing the take mercy on the second cub and simply chasing it out of Alliance territory.

Thus, we end the book with a new status quo. Wildfur gets to live in Field Colony as the mate of Captain Spottedshadow. Dawnfrost is set to take leadership in Field Colony. Captain Hawkshell of Marsh Colony is frustrated in his attempt to take revenge on all the bears. Wolfthorn is being held prisoner in River Colony for his repeated violations of their curfew policy and suspicions of treasons. And in the Unbound-Lands a group of exiled River Colony would-be rebels hear of Goldenpelt and his supporters, who have taken to calling him Captain after a dream visit of the late Second of Field Colony, Forestleaf, that granted him a leader blessing.

I have all voiced all my plot complaints and I can only say that for the rest this is perfectly fine. I would have preferred for there to be more of a murder mystery element with regards to the bears rather than the answer being handed to our protagonists. But I can see why it wasn't and what we got is serviceable enough, really.

Conclusion

Shifting Roots is better than Warriors but not mind-blowingly good. I am certainly interested enough in continuing to read, but I can see how this would be a one and done for a lot of people. I do recommend it to other Warriors fans, if only because it's likely to be of interest and better than the usual Warriors book, and to aspiring xenomoggy writers I once again urge them to study it. But it's not exactly a read I would recommend outside this fandom. I personally think that for the moment we are still awaiting on the seminal classic of this genre.

#shifting roots #clouded moon #the alliance saga #xenofiction #cat xenofiction #xenomoggy #not wc

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