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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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anti-transphobia · 7 years

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IF YOU CANT SCROLL DOWN AND TELL THIS POST IS REALLY LONG THE SHORTEET ANR BEST I COULD GET IT WITH MY CURRENT SITUATUATION IS THE HEART BULLETS SO IF YOU WANNA REQD ANYRHINT AT ALL I RECCOMEND THAT UNLESS YOU UAVE A GOOD ATTENTION SPAN AND/OR ARE INTERESTED AND THE AFFECTS OF CERTAIN DRUGS ON PEOPLE OR U IF YOU WNNA KNO W HOE UNBEARABLEBYOULL BE IF YOU DO DUMB SHIT AND TRY TO KILL YOURSELF WITH MEDS

Even if i "sound" (by how im typing) like im fine right now please please keep in mind i am not. I am in physical pain and will be for a while which will disable me for a while. i hope that isnt ableist to say? Its true i will be temporarily unable to walk and when i can not for long and without hurtint myself. It may not be the best choice of words but im not sure. Please correct me if im wront and i hope im not asking for all kinds of special treatmeant but please be kind about it. Being in a bad place doesny make it okay but i do need peoppes kid gloves on right now or else i may make some person who may just be trying to help feel bad abt themselves for possibly making me more depressed and suicidal. I know this is a good posibility if people arent gentle with me but it doesnt mean i can stop how i feel if it happens. Back to the topic which i cant even remember (im gonna reiterate this destroys my memory as well as ability to focus on something which is a dangerous combo) so it may not ah make any fucking sense. It sounds like i was talking abt how much pain im still in with a focus on my physical pain instead of my mental and how it stills affects and limits me. Well. Not sure where i was going with that and while if youre one of those ppl who get concerned over strangers ans stuff uh i forgot what i was writit here! Honestly no exaggeration. I thought abt my fp for a split second and ive already lost my point. I suppose i coulve just deleter the sentence and skipped that or tjought of something else to say but in case youre the one forgettib somethin here, rambling side affect. I am on the verge of making this a 20 page post abt how i cant stop ramblint while im saying im rambling. Sorry so sorry i have little control over every part of me, inside my brain and out under normal circumstances so ywah its 10000× worse now. Attempting to get back on poiny again, i think ppl who get worriee abt others easily shouldbt worrt too much abt whether im gonna die right now bc it all depends on how fast i recover and whether my parents are working today so i have tue chance to harm myself more. God i have no idea whwt rhie post means or was supposed to be abt. Ill try to summarize what i thini is goin on ans what i was truna say BAD SUMMARY POSSIBLY UNLESS I KNOW MYSELF PRETTY WELL WHICH I THINK I DO: ☆im not healed yet im still dealing with a lot of things rn even though i may still appear okay to some. While ppl on the verge of attemptiny suicide or harming themsepves have just as valid feelings as people who actually do, and being close to hurtiny yourself takes definite time to heaol, im going to go out on a hopefully not rude or bad limb and say ppl who actually do it generally need more recovery time and ppl need to understand the healing wont be as fast as it may be if nothit was actually done ☆ i forgot the second thing so ill write this here as a genuine and unnppanned reminder that this is having very clear affects on me. Also the laco of sleep for over a day is gonna fuk w me on its own combinee with drug usage soo yeh ☆ i remember now ppl who get concerner shouldbt be too concerned abt me dying atm or in a too near future ☆ i dont encourage ppl to worry abt me and the fact some ppl aay they do feels like a joke to me but there are definately things to worry abt. Even if you think physical health is less important than mental health which most ppl unfortunately dont see them as equal, my physical health and mental health are connected in many ways right now. If i get too stressed, scared (an im extremely paranoid rn on the verge of a freakout constantly), or even happy/excited my increases heart rate will go nuts and put nearly unbearable pain which may in turn worsen my mental health and create a cycle of pain ☆ once again i keep forgetting andb as the side affects are worsening im becoming less anr less like the person who solemly started to write this post (i think the word fits accurately here but it sounds odd. Dont let this make you think im happy, im in no way happy. I just have a shit ton of energy which if i caree abt my wellbeing would b dangerous bc its easier for ke to kill myself now. Or it woipd be if it werent for the fact im in a lot of paij rn for a variety of reasons) ☆with that last bullet im p sure i was gonna say i love you guys. I didnt so i will say t here!! I love you guts you guys have helped me 'kay? BEAR WITH ME AS I ATTEMPT TO SHORTEN WHWT I SAY FOR EVERYONES BENEFIT EVEN IF IT TAKES 5 TRIES ANE 4 POSTS Buttercup Tries a Summary 2.0 ♡im in a lot of pain right now. Im shaking for a few reasojs and oje of em is bc im in a shitton of pain ♡please be kind to me for a bit. more gentle then you woule usually have to be with me. i dont wnna ask for too much but even joking around without saying youre joking very blatantly could make everythibg a lot worse which i dont wnna happen bc it woulsbbe unfair to a persob meaning no harm ♡i dont think i said i love you guys? I love you guys ♡im probablt missing a shit ton of impprtant thints so im just gojna sau im in a lot o f pain holy fuck if you even have a casual conversatioj im probabky gonna mention how my body is dying and not peacefully ♡Oh JUST REMEMBEREE MY PHONE BATTERY. ITS AT 6%. IT WAS AT 11/12 WHEN I STARTED WRITING THIS POST. IT TAKES ME THAT LONG TO SAY SIMPLE THINGS IN MY CURRWNT STATE (im gonna grt an estimate of how long this post took and put it in the tags and if anyones interested or willijg to humour me and pretend to care i can find tags of a big suicide attempt i did when i was 13/early14 just so you can. Get a grasp of how bad my rambling can REALLY be) ♡puttin this with a new heart cuz the last one is too damned long now fuck you buttercuo and ur dumb ass anyways my phone is at 5% now ans still lowering. I m physically unavle to get toje computer wnd while i can use my phone while chargij t it doesnt work as well and everyhiny i do will taoe even longer. It fucks w the keypad so my spellijy will probabky be worse agian ajd tumblt wouod die every other minute so

#i think o has sometjint else but whatevs #im probabltbgonna post on tpoc a bit #so i dont seem like a huge dickbag whos only doing this ajd drawing itbout for atrwntion #whicu is not wha im doing and i onow i cant control whatsbhappening to me ans whatbom doij #bc of it #bit i still feel guilty abt it esp knowing tjis i s whwtbwoildbhappen ig i lived #typing getting worse shaking increaeing also im rusihing as mu battety is at 4% @#ans will probably be lower by the timr i finally pos this #suicide #long post #randok

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