Crumb 4
Shadowclan and kittypets have a weird relarionship.
I've always imagined Shadowclan to be struggling non-stop. They live in an area that is already scarce of normal prey, the humidity must be unbearable in the summer, and they just keep getting hit with sickness outbreaks.
So, their clan struggles, loses cats, gets aggressive towards the other clans for resources, the clans keep denying help because "it's evil Shadowclan", they get offended and tell the other leaders to fuck off, so they keep struggling. It's a vicious cycle.
So I always imagined them as... prouder than other cats. Not in a "Riverclan boasting about how beautiful their coat is", in a more "I am so much better than these other toad-heads because I work thrice as hard and yet get shunned" way, and this mindset is just perpetuated by the cycle above.
So what do kittypets have to do with this?
Well, Shadowclan, for generations, has their borders very close to Twolegplace. And I bet they lost many, many warriors during their time, to the point that sometimes the clan was waaay too small.
So I can see a Shadowclan warrior going there to grab some food during a famine and meeting some handsome street cat, or a patrol meeting a kittypet that takes pity on them and offers a hand.
I imagine at this point, half of Shadowclan (if not more) has kittypet blood in some way. But they'd be the disgrace of the Clans to admit so, and so it is kept hush-hush, and of course, used as leverage.
"Your littermate must be more kittypet than you, since they keep lazing about and sharing tongues."
"No, you may not be a Medicine Cat, your ancestors do not reside in the stars."
"I'm telling you, I can see that your kits look nothing like their parent, shut up before I make it real obvious to them too."
Silverflame joined only after hearing her youngest daughter Brightflower, who left their home not long before, was kitting. Archeye ran out of a hoarder's house and sought refuge. Nobody knows who Dawncloud's partner was, but she hung around Twolegdens a bit too much during her apprenticeship. Raggedstar killed his own father to bury that secret. Foxheart and Lizardstripe both ran away from their owner when they got big dogs.
It's an open secret, but the Clan is tired of hiding it, they do not want to be ashamed at the very least of where they actually belong.
So when Brokenstar begins to cast away some cats, he starts with the elders, considered useless in a preyless Leaf-fall. But then more and more are sent away, citing their kittypet blood as part of it. He sends into battle kits to see if they are truly more than their cursed blood. He claims land and drives out Windclan, pushing his cats further away from the town. He realized that there are few apprentices, and he has to act fast...
But he needs Clan blood, not kittypet blood. But the Clan does not always matter...
When he is overthrown, many cats could take the leadership role. Nightpelt was a popular choice for sure, he'd been the leader of all the elders and had immediately begun to rebuild camp as soon as Brokenstar was out. But deep down, maybe a lot of the cats, when choosing him, know that he comes from a line of purist cats, who never once intermingled with Kittypets... as far as they know.
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It appears that this is a pretty controversial take as I've seen people arguing about it recently. Even so, I think Brokenstar could have been redeemed and I dislike how the Erins decided to make him the big bad villain of the dark forest.
On a similar note, the way that the dark forest villains were behaving was out of character. I don't think any of them would have worked together or listened to each other. Their personalities were changed for the worst and I hated reading it.
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