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fencesandfrogs · 3 years

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an abridged history/explanation of warrior cats if you didn’t read them as a kid and have questions (a primer)

welcome. i’m going to keep things to the point, this is not a plot summary, just, well, its a pandemic and people are seeking items of childhood comfort and its come to my attention that a lot of people didn’t read these books as kids and then they come up in conversation and they act shocked so! i felt compelled to write this.

[2.5k words, 10min read. section headers, no pictures. not a ton of helpful formatting. i don’t want to say don’t read this because obviously i wrote it and think it’s worth reading, but i’ll be honest, this is a lot.]

section one: about me

i was an avid reader as a child, most of which fits solidly into “stories for another time,” and some of which would necessitate me adding tags onto this post that are, well, not necessary. so i will skip over that backstory but for those aware of lexile scores, i had one that was too high for literally any book that was appropriate to give me. so reading in school was torture and reading for fun was excellent.

now because i was a first-ish grader and my mom was trying to keep the fifth harry potter out of my hands, she looked desperately for something else to pass to me. her friend, who had a daughter a year or two older than me, was into these cat books, and my mom was like “here honey you like cats” without thinking too much about it.

which is good, because as i’ll get into, it was a really good fit for me. but like a dozen books later she asked me about the plot and well. i think at that moment she realized that it might have been better to just let me read harry potter.

but yeah i continued to read them long past the recommended reading ages and still as a Young Adult will return to them for nostalgia, and also as i will get into, some really good books. (see a list of books for “morbidly curious but i don’t want to spend 56 to 168 hours reading this”)

i’m not fully caught up on the series but this is not a plot summary so that should not impact my ability to discuss this

section two: content warnings

these books (not this post) includes the following:

discussion of castration (1.1 series 1, book 1, i’m not including this on every item/discussion because this is a complicated series but i want to demo how up front some of this is)

teenage romance/sex/pregnancy (1.1ish-1.3 or 4, continues throughout the series quite a lot, comes up again in 3.4/5, 4.4-5, and a bit in 5)

death from childbirth (1.can’t remember which book, many others)

unwanted pregnancy (se super edition, or a longer one off novel, discussed in 4&5)

sex/implied, discussed, and very very very heavily hinted but never directly said/shown (1.1-3ish, se, other)

murder (constantly, 1.1, 1.4, literally every book, 3.5, i’m just listing the ones i remember off the top of my head that were particularly graphic)

disability/illness, esp. the debilitating and/or deadly nature of it (1.3-5ish, 3.1, but all of 3, 3.4ish)

dementia (1.3-5, i’ve heard in some of the later series?)

abuse (7/8 this is reported i haven’t read these books but based on what i know it’s def there)

child abandonment (1.4-5, 3.4/5, it’s also all over the place but i think those are the only major character incidents of it)

treason (1.3-5, all over the place)

the horror/tragedy of war (background, but pretty constant)

disagreeing with an integral religion/tradition (3, based on the series title, 8, and generally scattered)

the corrupting influence of power (1.4/5, possibly 7/8, others)

racism (1, 3-5, possibly others)

sexism (se, background)

patriarchal societies (se, seems to be somewhat softened based on what i’ve heard but i’m not entirely sure about this)

and more! but it starts to get stranger and this is enough to prove my point

basically everything that could go wrong does

oh yeah! child abuse also child abuse that’s a very major theme in the first series as well as during other points. and elder abuse in the first series.

okay i’ve made my point.

section three: the appeal

look. so. i think we’re kind of pastel-ify children’s literature based on movies. see, parents have to watch children’s movies with their kids, so they can’t be gritty and intense because a lot of parents will say “not for my nine year old! they can’t deal with treason!” and that seems to be bleeding into children’s literature.

but warriors is not that. it’s intense, it borders on “too gruesome for children,” and it’s from a time where kids books got to be serious and heavy and dark because they were about animals. which was great because i couldn’t find books at my reading level that weren’t too thematically difficult, so i got to read something below my reading level, but thematically too hard, so it kind of balanced out.

and then well. so. the series grows with the audience, but the books don’t grow in terms of like difficulty so new readers start deep into it and it’s a complicated thing, the fandom history is complex, but.

the appeal is that parents don’t usually read the books their kids read and so they see a book about cats and assume it’s fluff, and kids who are starved of complex content get to read hamlet-for-kids.

section four: worldbuilding/lore

oh yeah also there’s some really deep lore to explore. so there’s two bits of appeal.

i’m not doing a full world/plot summary, but i’ll explain some common elements here.

thunder/shadow/wind/riverclan: harry potter houses for cats (gryffindor, slytherin, hufflepuff, ravenclaw, except this doesn’t work for the last two but that’s fine because no one cares about them despite riverclan being pretty important in most of the books)

-kit/-paw/-star: naming conventions. everyone has a two part name. (we’ll use cinder as an example because i like the two cinders we know, even tho neither of them get to be cinderstar.) babies are -kit (cinderkit), then when they’re apprentices, which is like being a student, you know, elementary through high school, you’re paw, so cinderpaw. then you get an Official Name from ur clan leader (cinderheart). if you become clan leader, you get to be -star (cinderstar). i know i haven’t explained clan leaders bear with me. this is kind of important because i have the names burned into my memory so i cannot simply always call firestar firestar if he was firepaw at the time of the events i’m describing. it won’t be ambiguous, cinderheart/cinderpelt are a special case. if this is tricky for you it’s fine just only read the first part of the name.

clan (leader, deputy, medicine cat, elder): roles with in the clan. leaders literally have nine lives. deputies are next in line and chosen by the leader. leaders usually go through several deputies, because deputies don’t have nine lives. medicine cats are doctors. they also have an apprentice. those are all one per clan. elders are just retired cats. they’re not a special category per say, but i wanted to mention them.

warrior: adult.

warrior code: laws.

star clan: dead cats. this ties into the religion which is pretty important to the books but for the most part if you understand that dead cats get to give guidance and send their approval, you have the gist of it.

section five: so um, what the fuck

so we start with a cat named rusty who runs into the woods to join thunderclan and then his name is firepaw and we all forget that he’s named rusty except for like that one time it comes up again. bluestar is a great leader with some corrupt deputies but fireheart eventually takes care of it and becomes clan leader which is a big deal.

then a bunch of other shit happens and suddenly ashfur is possessing brackenstar and being (more) abusive to squirrelflight (who is on the outs with brackenstar anyway for lying about their kits jayfeather, hollyleaf, and lionheart because they’re actually the children of firestar’s other daughter leafpool who had them with crowfeather after she fell in love with him but he’s from windclan and she’s a medicine cat so that’s double illegal and apparently hollyleaf is alive even though she yeeted herself into a pit and died because she killed ashfur when he threatened to reveal this but couldn’t live with being the product of an illegal meeting and then it was all pointless because leafpool stopped being a medicine cat out of guilt anyway and jayfeather is just an ornery bitch about everything but especially all of this)

i’m not explaining any of that.

section six: i repeat: so um, what the fuck

so the thing about these books is they’re soap operas and dramas about cats and that means they get just as strange and chaotic as anything else in the genre. i think a lot of people like me, who read them as children, regard the series we knew as a child (usually either the first three or the first five, plus super editions) as something good and warm and comforting (despite being dark and gruesome) because they made us feel good.

they were also a breeding ground for young fandom because of all the the drama that exists and the nature of the books providing that.

section seven: super editions

the simple answer to what a super edition is has already been given (it’s a novel length one-off about a single character, and its usually either a side character - bluestar, crowfeather - or a event/perspective we don’t get to see - firestar, skyclan, greystripe - and they’re generally more mature)

my favorite super edition is bluestar’s prophecy. i read it at like 16, slinking into the children’s library with a stack of other ya fiction and a “children’s book” which dealt with unwanted pregnancy, grief, forbidden love, and more. still not sure why that’s in the children’s section.

section eight: about the drama

so there’s been a lot of fandom drama about these books. i can’t tell you about the nuances, because i am an old fan, so i watched but didn’t partake. the highlights reel that i can recall goes as follows (please note i will refer to characters by name without explanation. it’s fine. the point of this section is to convey the pettiness of this drama):

tigerstar: did he do anything wrong? (the answer is holy shit yes, this isn’t discourse, it’s okay to like a villain)

scourge: did he do anything wrong, also what color is his collar? (also yes, doesn’t matter)

was the new prophecy (2)/omen of the stars (3)/etc good? (yes, eh, no, yes, no comment, no comment)

should jaypaw or hollypaw be medicine cat apprentice (neither of them, but jaypaw’s employment opportunities are limited because he’s blind, so its gotta b him)

uhh a massive tangle around this parentage drama between squirrelflight, leafpool, brackenfur, and crowfeather, which i used as the crux of humor for how batshit the plots can get, so i’m not even going to pretend i can make it funny, but just know that it’s batshit and the correct opinion is as follows: no one is right, but squirrelflight has done the least wrong, brackenfur is an asshole to her where it’s unwarrented, and hollyleaf is an idiot

and the current drama centers around brackenstar and ashfur and is tied directly to the point above, which is why i’ve kind of given up trying to make jokes about this because this is the culmination of like 35 novels.

section nine: i feel like i need to have some conclusive point to justify writing all of this

but i don’t have one, because this was really an excuse to ramble about an old passion for like half an hour. i mean i guess i can say, like, i think younger fans are sort of embroiled in this drama they don’t really have context for, because i’m not kidding, the current drama centers around the grandchildren of our original cast.

it’s kind of hard to know why, say, mistystar matters if you don’t know that she’s the child of bluefur and oakheart and if you don’t remember the drama that surrounded that when bluestar was dying and tigerstar and leopardstar were ruling a combined shadow/riverclan.

(i really hope that’s intelligible i tried to lay the groundwork for it. basically, there’s a biracial kid in a very segregated society who becomes the leader of one of the clans. which is obviously drama, especially considering that that clan was part of a weird supremacy movement a while back.)

& you know? i really hope one of the new series gets to be like, a soft reboot. just. end the current drama and pick up again with the latest generation. a) we’re starting to run out of names, and b) i think that it’s kind of tipped over the edge of sane.

the series also used to be very low fantasy. the cat societies are reasonably close to feral cat colonies (the biggest detail is that toms don’t all have their own territory, but there’s honestly in-universe discussion of this and it’s basically a culture thing), and while star clan/religion is a real and legitimate thing, there’s also a discussion of its abuse and most of the early books don’t really use star clan/related ideas as a physical force so much as a plot device, barring, like, when a new leader gets their nine lives.

honestly, i’ll always adore these books for serving the role they did, and a lot of the series is fantastically well written. but the fandom surrounding it can be, uh, not great because 9-14 year olds don’t really have good brains to understand this.

also, i’m very sad that i can’t find the flash game that was for the great prophecy. it was not very fun, but i enjoyed playing it, so if anyone knows the url so i can search the internet archive for it, please let me know.

section ten: i’m morbidly curious but there are 56 hours of books to read, assuming a very fast reading pace, so is there something i can start with to experience this without dedicating 4 days to it?

yes, there is.

it’s called bluestar’s prophecy. it’s standalone, and i should have given you enough of a background on the lore that you don’t need to know anything else. i’ve already given away the twist in series 1 that it would spoil, so you’re all good on that front.

if you want more, or want the original experience, the first series is self contained and quite good. i’ve given the broad outlines of the plot, but trust me, there’s a lot of surprises and all sorts of things i skipped over because while i like it, it’s not exactly fandom primer material

i also enjoy firestar’s quest and skyclan’s destiny for super editions, but you’ll need to read the first series to understand FQ and FQ to understand SD, so it’s not exactly a starting point. also, SD especially deals with a very different set of themes as the other books.

also, if you were to, say, search “readwarriorcats” (no spaces) on duckduckgo, and then click on one of the first links, you know, not the official site, the one hosted on one of those free website things, you know, not wix, not wordpress, the other one, you would only find lists of the books with hyperlinks.

#warrior cats #fandom #txt #mine #1st #February #2021 #February 1st 2021 #essay #personal #long #q

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st-louis · 6 years

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JEWISH PLAYERS IN THE NHL: 1/? JASON ZUCKER

(photo by Andy King, NHLI)

so this is going to be an ongoing series about Jewish players in the NHL because there are like... under seven of them. I’m starting with Jason Zucker because he’s one of my favorites. :> He’s talented, a little bit of a weirdo, and just seems like an all-around nice person.

He plays left wing for the Minnesota Wild. According to his official team bio, was born in Southern California but grew up in Las Vegas. He’s Jewish but he doesn’t consider himself religious, he wasn’t bar mitzvah’d because he didn’t want to miss hockey (his mom does make kugel tho, so that’s legit secular Jew cred.)

His mom, Natalie, was a competitive figure skater, and his dad, Scott, is a general contractor who built both ice and roller rinks, and he got his start skating there at age 2 1/2. He’d practice for hours, played competitive roller hockey, and was known for his speed (playing defense originally because he could get from one end of the rink to another so quickly). He didn’t switch to ice hockey until he was eight or nine. At the time his skating was terrible; the toe pick in ice skates threw him off, and he didn’t improve until he got a skating coach.

He described his work ethic:

For me, I was on the side yard of my parents house. I had a little piece of roller hockey sport court where I wouldn’t ruin my sticks, and I would shoot pucks for hours and hours and hours a day. I remember we had a little wall on the side and I would do jump squats onto the wall and I would run sprints around the backyard. It was a terrible setup for working out but I would find myself out there all the time, because it was fun.

Still good enough to end up on UNDTP tho. In 2009 and 2010 Zucker helped the US win the World Junior Under-18, and the 2010 World Junior Championships. He committed to the University of Denver before being drafted by the Wild in 2010, and played two seasons there (45G, 46A in 78 games). He turned pro at the end of the 2011-12 season.

Right before the draft, his best friend, Nick Schaefer, died in a car accident. He has a tattoo -- “game time” on his chest in his memory. On the draft:

I was thrilled, but I couldn’t shake the thought of what had happened to Nick. The fragility of life and the importance of even the smallest moments really hit me. Like everybody else, I sometimes stop and think back to those instances when, in a second, I had a choice to do one thing or the other. And ever since that summer night in 2010, Nick, in some way, has been with me every time.

He still writes Nick’s initials on every single one of his sticks, along with “Mom,” “Dad,” and “STS,” for shoot to score.

His first seasons weren’t super great and he bounced around between the AHL and the NHL during the first few years. He scored his first NHL goal against Detroit in 2013, but his season was cut short by a torn quadriceps. In 2014-15 things definitely improved with 21 goals in 51 games and a 16.9% shooting percentage.

Zucker had some interesting thoughts on the billeting system and leaving home so young. While he felt it was 100% worth it and he’d do it over again, he wouldn’t let his kids do it if they didn’t really want to--as a result of the unusual way he was raised he doesn’t have any friends outside of hockey, and that was “probably tough for [his] parents to see.”

Another great thing about him is his charity work: he and his wife, Carly, started a campaign to raise funds for a family suite at the University of Minnesota Masonic Children’s Hospital, and raised more than $1,000,000 in nine months. But he’s been involved with the hospital since 2015, and the campaign was inspired by one of the children he met and befriended there. Tucker had been diagnosed with bone cancer but still had time to give Jason some advice:

He said, “Jason, I’ve been watching you a lot this year. I need to give you some advice, O.K?”

I kind of laughed him off.

“No, I’m serious, Jason. First, you need to backcheck harder. It will make things easier on the other end. And secondly, shoot more!”

After Tucker passed away, Zucker got his autograph tattooed on his wrist, along with that advice: shoot more.

Also, because I love dumb hockey player tattoos, he also has “USA” on his back (I know) and on his left arm, in Hebrew, “in pursuit of perfection.” I, uh, have to quote this article in a large part because of this story involving Charlie Coyle:

“Everyone always wants to strive to be the best,” Zucker said. “I’m no different. I want to be better than everybody in that locker room and they all want to be better than me. That’s just the way it goes. That’s the way our business runs. I’m always striving to be perfect and I may never reach there. Nobody ever will. But I’m always striving to get to that.”

The other meaning? Zucker says he has “a little OCD [obsessive-compulsive disorder].”

“A little?” teammate Charlie Coyle, who lives with Zucker in Minneapolis, says with a chuckle. “Go in his room. He’s a big guy with watches and he’s got this whole case of probably 50 watches perfectly lined up, every one just perfect. Go in his closet and all his shirts are hung up, almost color coded. They’re all perfect. Same with his shoes, not one out of place.

“Just everything. Like everything. We go grocery shopping, and you open the cabinets, and everything is all perfect, labels facing out and spaced apart so evenly. I’m telling you, everything. I’m a neat person, so it’s fine, but it’s a little over the top.

“Heck, just watch him take off his equipment. He takes his laces and folds them perfectly down so it just sits there.”

Of course, there are few things Coyle enjoys more than messing with Zucker … by messing up his perfect stuff.

Listen, I know.

He married Carly Aplin in 2016, and they have two children together.

Anyway! He had an excellent season in 2017-2018. This July, he signed a five-year, $27.5 million contract after career highs: goals (33), assists (31) and points (64), mostly on the first line, and after being nominated for the King Clancy. In short:

Jason Zucker made significant strides in his game this season, both offensively and defensively. He was among the team’s top performers throughout the year, and although he was streaky at times, he contributed in some way on most nights. Without Zucker, the team may have actually missed the playoffs, as his improved offense carried the team for a few stretches of the campaign (one 7-game point streak and two 6-game point streaks).

Hockey Wilderness agrees.

JUST A GOOD TEAM GUY!!!! Here he is talking about his team when specifically being interviewed about his own awesome performance:

Asked after the game if he felt compelled to lift the team after a week of saying the leaders needed to, Zucker said, “Absolutely I did. I wasn’t happy with how I played the first two games. I thought I had some good spurts. It just wasn’t good enough. I know the way that I can play and (this) was much more like it. (Staal, Mikko Koivu, Zach Parise, I think everybody would’ve said the same thing about the first two games. We all wanted to step up and play well.

“That’s what true leadership is. Just guys going out and showing it on the ice. (Ryan Suter) was phenomenal. (Matt Dumba) played really well. (Jared Spurgeon) was battling. On a night he said he didn’t feel great with the puck, I thought (Spurgeon) was one of our best defensemen. You can’t say enough about a lot of the guys in this room.”

via The Athletic

some videos:

very encouraging but extremely, unfortunately boring when mic’d up what are you doing how does this even happen scores in literally 10 seconds of play first hat trick!!!! trying to explain cribbage to charlie coyle lmao a highlight reel lmao fighting

SOURCES

Official Bio Rooted in Roller Hockey Who the Folk?! Wild Agree to Five Year, 27.5 Million Contract Player’s Tribune Words Will Last Lifetime For Wild’s Jason Zucker Perfection is Always the Goal Jason Zucker took giant leaps forward Jason Zucker puts his leadership on display

#jews on skates #jason zucker #am yisrael hockey #anyway he's kind of boring but i love him anyway #idk i'm not entirely HAPPY with this post i feel like i should do MORE but i'm also going to end up sitting on it forever if i do

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