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vic-does-battlecats · 3 days

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Harelight

#harelight #a vision of shadows #the broken code #a starless clan #RiverClan #warrior cats #warriors #this guys pretty neat . I sure hope nothing happens to him #anyway. am happy with how he looks

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vic-does-battlecats · 5 days

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By ‘I’ll talk about this later’, I guess I mean now because it needs to escape my brain (put this under a read more because it got VERY LONG)

Alright so. There’s this bonus scene for the second book of AVOS (Thunder and Shadow) I’m not even sure how many people know about? I definitely didn’t before a week or so ago

In it, a few-days-into-her-apprenticeship-Needlepaw (so new she hasn’t even caught her first piece of prey yet) is snatched up by an owl during night training and carried off. She manages to get it to drop her and survives the fall. After this, she catches herself her first piece of prey, but she doesn’t eat it. At this point, this Needlepaw still believes fully in the code, and she hopes to save it until a patrol finds her. However, that pateol never comes, and instead she’s woken up when Tree finds her and tries to steal her prey. Nevertheless, they reconcile and Tree agrees to guide her back to the lake, which is apparently quite a distance.

As they journey to the lake, Tree tells Needlepaw his (now retconned to be a lie) story about being abandoned as a kit. Needlepaw senses he is lonely and is enjoying the time spent with another cat as he guides her home. She feels sorry for him having had to live alone his whole life, since she has never known a life without her clanmates to be there for her.

When they reach shadowclan, Needlepaw learns from the patrol who find her, including her mentor Tawnypelt, that they didn’t even try to find her, and this exchange happens:

The whole time she’s been lost, Needlepaw has been hoping to run into the patrol come to find her, and it had never been there to begin with. Instead, she’d been brought back by a loner who then defended her from the clan who didn’t step up to find her. She tries to make them let Tree join the clan, but they act awkward about it until Tree ducks out and leaves. While she’d been a code abiding apprentice up to now, it’s this whole situation that can kind of be attributed to why she turns out how she does.

How many apprentices get a taste of being outside clan territory, for one? Very few, unless they are sent on special missions, and even then not within a couple days of being apprenticed, and especially not without their mentor present. And yet, this is exactly what Needlepaw finds herself in. And it is a friendly loner, a cat from outside the clans that she’s supposed to distrust on principle, who is kind enough to take a cat he’s never meant back to a home that he knows is unfriendly towards cats like him. And the clan she thought so highly of just let him leave without bothering to get to know him, even though the two bonded on this little adventure together:

Crucially, three things have happened: Needlepaw has made a friend outside the clan, learned not every cat outside the clan is bad, and that her clan isn’t infallible. And yet, the clans are famously hostile and / or dismissive of anyone who doesn’t think plainly that the clans are wholly superior to those outside the clans. She can’t, in fact, rely on her clan like she hoped she could, either, as them not looking for her proved to herself (in her own mind, anyway). It would make sense that she would remember this situation vividly and let it stew in her mind. She had no littermates, and the other apprentices in AVOS seem to badly influence each other in many ways, which likely didn’t help any feelings of unbelonging and dissatisfaction with clan life.

Beyond that, this situation is also the first time she’s been outside the clan’s territories, something she will later do multiple times. It was her first taste of freedom and exploration, something most of her clan wouldn’t understand or support. It makes sense why that could be a cause of loneliness, too, made worse by her spending time alone to do said wandering in the first place. Alderpaw within the text notices she has an air of loneliness even when she tries to put up a cool and unbothered appearance.

Then there’s the fact she’s an only kit. She tries to be a sister to violetkit/paw, kind of, but she fails in many ways. It’s like she doesn’t really know how to truly care for someone anymore, and she doesn’t truly have Violet’s best intentions in mind a lot of the time. But she does die to save her, the sister she never had. All while her parents, off clan land and unaware that she’s dead, have another litter of siblings she’ll never meet.

While her just.. being fine with evil people is weird, I do think she’s so interesting in concept. She learns cats outside the clans can have good ideas and be good people, too, and she is drawn in by the kin. She gets to go on an adventure as a young apprentice, and chases that continuously. She finds her clan isn’t perfect, and she comes to despise it enough to work to tear it apart. And she’s desperately lonely, and will never be a sister in a way that was truly pure and good

Anyway yeah. This was stupid long LOL I just think she’s a fascinating concept. She’s very desperate for real connection but she doesn’t let herself be vulnerable enough for it later on.. not a character that makes much sense within a lot of the books but mannn I want to like her so badly. But avos is so weird sometimes it’s hard to concretely say anything about most of the characters

Lonely wanderer, never to truly be a sister