#every single female warrior cats character

[dykeboyy]

my hot take of the night is that survivors is an infinitely better series than warriors

#there's SO many reasons i say this and it starts with the fact that survivors isn't nearly as misogynistic and ableist as warriors is #disabled characters like twitch actually get a fucking chance to do something instead of turning into med cat fodder #and not every single female character is forced to be with a man #there's like. sweet bella and moon. and that's it #and they don't lose their entire fucking personality the moment they're with a dude #like bella still fucking slayed in the second arc #i think warriors has more creativity put into it but overall it's just written so clumsily and there's just. so much bad stuff there #and survivors just feels so much less cluttered and so much better written #on the downside though survivors has gillian philip :/ #voice of starlight

[lionblaze03-2]

I think this weird trend of hating male bland background characters in warriors needs to stop. The girl ones are bland too. They’re ALL bland. You know what you can do? Make up personalities for all of them and have fun yourself

#Like I notice a lot of people just. Being mad. At the amount of boring male characters #But they’re all boring. Every single character that isn’t a main character is boring. #Except for like. Poppyfrost and sorreltail. And even then most of that’s headcanon stuff like no ones cool without it unless they’re mc #And sometimes not even then. Poor sweet Lionblaze. My empty potential squandered boy #But like responding with total hatred seems like an extreme answer just make characters. What does it matter if they’re male or female #Why does it HAVE to be a gender war in the fandom just because the series itself underutilizes female pov and major characters #Why don’t we like... give the empty female background characters personalities #And then. Get this. Do it with the males too!!! #Writing!! #warrior cats #wc #warriors

[iron-sides]

ok so my family didnt want to listen to this rant so here it is but i feel like ok tbh. warriors is just like i will show you the most cool and awesome girl cat ever. btw shes one dimensional and evil and oh shes dead. its likie oh sorry i robbed ur girl cat of all her layers and dimension IN HOLLYLEAFS STORY THE NOVELLA SHE REFERENCES SEVERAL TIMES HOW MUCH SHE MISSES HER BROTHERS AND THEN SHE COMES BACK AND THEYRE ALL JUST EACH OTHERS CLANMATES. youd fucking think that after literally their entire lives THESE siblings if not leafpool and squirrelflight would be close and tight and have a realy interesting dynamic but GOD FORBID ANY NON ROMANTIC RELATIONSHIP BE GIVEN ANY WEIGHT anyway. is the newer stuff good i never finished a vision of shadows

#my thots #sorry i just think every single female character in warrior cats has more personality in her little finger than brackenfur (who am i using #here bc hes my favorite thunderclan cat i fucking love him) has in his entire body and the fact that they get to be queens or crazy and #thats it and if theyre medicine cats they get to be queens or crazy or WISH they were queens makes me want to kill someone. #the boy cats have the same problems in fairness except its moreso that the only interesting things they ever fucking do are for romance #like are you seriously telling me that ashfurs defining scene in the fire is because of squilf not liking him back and not like #because his mother fucking died and he and ferncloud as children helped kill the dogs that killed her risking their own lives #in the process???? #wtf #like. idk idk and u can argue that that experience is what leads him to that extreme but then WHY DOES FERNCLOUD NEVER GET TO DO ANYTHING #SIMILAR DESPITE LOOSING FIRST BRINDLEFACE THEN HER KITS IN TNP THEN ASHFUR LIKE #arggggggg sorry i love warriors im just mad because i am angy #l #all i want is the warriors books to acknowledge the depth of sibling relationships literally ever <- he values being an older sister more t #han Most Things

[themonsterundermystairs]

short list of lgbt-inclusive games that i love (in brackets is the kind of representation):

- cattails and it‘s sequel, cattails: wildwood story (nonbinary, queer in general): these are both great games that warrior cats fans will love. also, every single cat in the game is non binary. everyone is only referred to by they/them and you can have kittens with anyone.

- starfield (nonbinary, bi, same sex relationships, trans): you can choose your pronouns (he, she or they) no matter your body type. you can also always change your body and pronouns for a small fee. some main companions talk about former partners of the same gender, in at least one case, a character references dating men and women. guards may also reference a partner of the same gender.

- skyrim (same sex relationships for player, gay): you can marry regardless of gender and adopt kids with your spouse. there is a dead gay couple. (this will be the only game with so little representation on this list. i included it because i love skyrim, because you can make it gayer with mods and because it is from 2011 so i don‘t have high expectations)

- ikenfell (nonbinary, queer relationships, neopronouns): a really fun rpg with a fun combat system. also very queer, every character has their pronouns listed and there are nonbinary people with they/them, ze/zir and even he/him pronouns. i haven‘t quite finished playing through it yet, but there are all kinds of queer relationships. oh and you save the game by petting cats

- wandersong (queer relationships, gender nonconformity, nonbinary): a really unique and wholesome game about a bard that wants to save the world. it has an amazing story and some of the most well written characters i have ever encountered. the bard is nonbinary and uses all pronouns and there is a noteworthy nonbinary character whose story doesn‘t revolve around them being nonbinary. they are fully accepted. there are plenty of queer relationships. there are mermaids with beard stubble.

- a short hike (nonbinary): an amazingly fun game that actually feels like a holiday. it also has a super fast turtle that goes by they/them pronouns

- shovel knight (queer relationships, trans, nonbinary): fun platformer that allows you to choose your body type (male/female) and your pronouns (he/she/they) independently from one another. you can also do the same for all bosses and your love interest.

- squidlit and super squidlit: really fun gameboy style games that were created by independent trans developers.

#skyrim #starfield #lgbt #lgbtq #gaymer #trans #non binary #enby #neopronouns #cattails #warrior cats #wandersong #ikenfell #shovel knight #game recommendations

[canonmisogynyvictimstournament]

Now that submissions are closed, we can talk stats. There were 881 valid, unique submissions for 474 characters! Woof, women have it rough out there!

The most submitted characters, with a relevant propaganda snippet included, are:

1. Sakura Haruno (Naruto): 28 [where do i even fucking begin]

2. Cordelia Chase (Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Angel): 21 [OH SO MANY THINGS]

3. Misa Amane (Death Note): 20 [The author of Death Note invented new forms of misogyny just to apply them to Misa.]

4. Kaede Akamatsu (Danganronpa V3): 15 [Oh, you thought we would have a female main character in one of our mainline games? With a cool defining talent, no less? That's stupid of you]

5. TIE: Kairi (Kingdom Hearts): 14 [I'm so mad. I think she deserves a gun.]

5. TIE: Stephanie Brown (DC Comics): 14 [She does eventually get retconned as surviving the event and hiding out in Africa (don't ask, it does not make more sense in context)]

The canons with the most submissions, with a relevant propaganda snippet included, are:

1. DC Comics: 61 [DC has SO MUCH sexism it's laughable]

2. Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Angel: 35 [Fuck Joss Whedon, man.]

3. Naruto: 33 [because Kishimoto hates women]

4. Warrior Cats: 26 [Warriors is one of the most misogynistic children's series I've ever seen]

5. Danganronpa: 25 [I honestly had to think about it just to decide which woman is treated the worst because this series hates them so much]

The canons with the most characters submitted, with a relevant propaganda snippet for a specific character included, are:

1. DC Comics: 21 [Free her from the huge tits back breaking pose.]

2. Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Angel: 12 [Anyways she was so hot and for what. 10/10 my lesbian awakening.]

3. Supernatural: 11 [Yeah, she got randomly killed off-screen for shock value and manpain, but she sent an email right before she died so at least her death wasn't in vain, right?]

4. TIE: Star Trek: 9 [She literally gets teleported out of her clothes in one episode.]

4. TIE: Yu-Gi-Oh!: 9 [One loss is particularly brutal as she falls from a large height directly onto her head and goes into a coma (again. yes this was the second time).]

5. TIE: Warrior Cats: 8 [I'm sure she'll get submitted again just ask any reasonable fan they'll tell you about her and her sister]

5. TIE: Attack on Titan: 8 [As a child soldier, she does commit some war crimes]

And here are some charts to show how some of these entries fucked the scale on my charts:

Look at Sakura, fucking up my chart with her numbers.

On a similar note...

Good god, DC, I know what you did, but add fucking up my charts to your list of crimes.

And now, enjoy some rankings of my favorite things:

My favorite universal sentiment quotes from propaganda are:

She lived she served cunt and then she got killed off super early so that the male characters could experience man pain and also because I guess she would have been too powerful if left alive. [Wen Qing (Mo Dao Zu Shi)]

That design. Dear god. I don't want to live on this planet anymore. [Mitzi (The Queen's Corgi)]

In the end she may have girlbossed too close to the sun, but I support her anger. [Ling Wen (Heaven Official's Blessing)]

the victim of “writer doesn’t understand women and also hates them” disease. [Naomi Misora (Death Note)]

She could 100% kill somebody but nobody ever effing lets her. Rip queen. [Kairi (Kingdom Hearts)]

My favorite raging at a writer quotes from propaganda are:

1. You took every single protagonist to weird lion heaven, Clive, but suddenly Susan isn't good enough. [Susan Pevensie (The Chronicles of Narnia)]

2. Being a woman written by Joss Whedon should automatically entitle her to financial compensation tbh. [River Tam (Firefly)]

3. A lot can be summed up in a couple words, namely, "Furman, why?" [Arcee (Transformers)]

4. Can you tell respect women juice ran in Tolstoy's veins. [Lise Bolkonskaya (War and Peace)]

5. TIE: (specifically a guy called Dan Didio, who we all hate) [Stephanie Brown (DC Comics)]

5. TIE: until Geoff motherfucking Johns comes into the picture [Pantha (DC Comics)]

My favorite quotes from propaganda that have nothing to do with misogyny, y'all are just funny:

I wish I could use bold here, because there's no such thing as uppercase numbers. [Arcee (Transformers)]

the most convoluted and lore dense piece of media this side of the afton criticality. [Jane Crocker (Homestuck)]

ended up starting a gang war by accident [Stephanie Brown (DC Comics)]

Ashfur, who later turns out to be a murderous incel [Squirrelflight (Warrior Cats)]

Hawkfrost is actively seeing Brambleclaw and his evil father in cat hell. [Squirrelflight (Warrior Cats)]

#not polls #stats

[wc-confessions]

As a lesbian I have to agree with the anon mentioning the seeming fetishization of female characters in Warriors. It seems very popular to pair each and every single female cat with each other no matter the compatibility or other concerning factors simply because it’s WLW. I’ve also actually encountered some comment sections of ship discussions where people will straight up say X ship is immediately the best because it’s lesbians despite the ship being discussed is toxic or having a large enough questionable age gap. I also dislike the culture of pairing female cats with another female cat who was abused by the same mate or both had shitty partners. Not everyone who is on their own healing journey is compatible with someone else also on their own healing journey. Sometimes it can make it worse, from personal experience. I don’t see it much where people let the female characters simply take some time to heal in their own time and pace without a female partner to “cure them”. It’s usually portrayed as “they’re both better now because they’re lesbians so they’re both healed now no questions asked they’re immediately happy no problems at all they’re lesbians look at them my lesbians!” which is… kinda weird? I mostly see this with Moonlight and Squilf which is it’s own can of worms given that Moonlight literally kidnapped Squilf and is sexist to toms, which I doubt Squilf would stand for since her own sons adopted and blood related to her are toms and she loves her children no matter their identity. It makes me feel like lesbian love life in Warriors fandom spaces is often stemmed with this weird “UwU my gay babies they’re in love and they’re babies they’re gay babies” energy and I don’t like it. The anon that described it as like being akin to pairing dolls up said it best.

I think it’s more common with new fans and “baby’s first WLW ship” like Mothpool, but it’s still annoying and kinda weird. I’m a Mothpool shipper myself and there’s certain fans of it that I refuse to interact with because of above reasons. I hate when some people infantilize the ship making Leafpool seem like a “dumb naive baby who is helpless and weak and can’t save herself” and Mothwing is her “big strong duchess in armor coming to save her”. Yes, I’ve actually seen comments and artwork depicting this sort of dynamic and it feels off. Why portray it like this? Also it portrays Leafpool OOC?

Okay sorry it got long I just really wanted to get it off my chest. All I’m saying is to please not fetishize lesbian love. It only harms us in the end and does us no good. Ship things with respect for the orientations it is centered around and stop treating these ships like this. Signed, a real life lesbian.

.

#text #confession #anonymous #warrior cats

[insufferableprotagonistpoll]

Propaganda why Harry Dresden is insufferable:

Sir can you treat women as competent peers and not as damsels you need to protect? Do you have to comment on the attractiveness of every woman you meet?

This man's lower head is doing the thinking far more often the his upper head for at least half of his page time, yet as insufferable as THAT is, Harry also manages to make the situation exponentially worse by annoying the women around him with obnoxiously performative chivalry (that some of them expressly reject, which does not stop him.) It's the white knighting that drives me nuts, it's so condescending.

Basically everything bad that happens to him and those around him is his own fault, but he somehow never learns and just keeps doing things like 'protecting' others by not telling them crucial information. I get that he's CURSED, OH THE HUMANITY, but come on. And he does that annoying male gaze thing where he subconsciously evaluates every female character by attractiveness. Couldn't stand being in his head.

Propaganda why Brambleclaw is insufferable:

Brambleclaw is $h!tty towards his girlfriend Squirrelflight because she believes that his half-brother, Hawkfrost, isn’t a good cat even though she’s right about that and Brambleclaw went against his character development of wanting to be nothing like his murderous father, Tigerstar, by training with him along with his half-brother in kitty cat hell.

He's rude and whiny, his first book as a protagonist has him trying to train the she-cat that would become his wife in fighting and he just doesn't have a single nice thing to say about her. He's the narratives specialest little boy and from what ive seen almost everyone in the WC fandom hates that guy.

basically the authors forgot everything that was previously established about him except for ""his father was the previous bad guy"", so he goes from ""i will never be like my father"" to ""maybe the racist fascist dictator who abandoned half his kids wasn't so bad after all"". and then there's his relationship with Squirrelflight, which i'm sure other submitters have gone in detail about..

#harry dresden #the dresden files #brambleclaw #warrior cats #insufferable protagonist poll #insufferable protagonist tournament #tournament poll

[blimbo-buddy]

warrior cats fans don't know shit about the books until it's time to bring up every single wrong-doing of a female character, down to the time they were mean towards someone

#blimbo rambles #wc

[nellieofthevalley]

I love mapleshade!

Shes my favorite warrior cats character, and I think while she’s definitely overrated, shes also overhated. Lots of people will actively act like shes the worst character in warriors when we also have cats like Finleap…And thistleclaw.. And I think thats stupid. I think Lots of peoples opinions are Heavily influenced by major warrior cats figures in the community, and on top of that I honestly also think its one of those issues that we see in lots of other communities. Its the issue where female villians are treated like the bane of everyone’s existence, and then the same people will turn around and defend their male counterparts or other male villians. Like hello? What the hell? And dont even get me started on people who defend her actions- guys we can ENJOY characters without defending every single thing they do. Anyway, thats my mapleshade rant!

#wc mapleshade #mapleshades vengeance #mapleshade's vengeance #mapleshade #warrior cats #warrior cats art

[solarpunkpresentspodcast]

It’s Time to End the Hero’s Journey

I don’t know about you, but I’ve absolutely had enough of it: the story structure known as the hero’s journey.

It’s everywhere, from Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark to just about every Bruce Willis or Tom Cruise movie you’ve ever seen even through to Barbie and The Hunger Games. A hero is called to action, refuses the call before begrudgingly accepting it, has adventures in which (generally) he is repeatedly tested, receives assistance from mentors and other helpers, is brought low by a nemesis shortly before (generally) ultimately succeeding, and comes home an enlightened person.

Brought to public awareness as a common pattern in myth by Joseph Campbell in his books, like The Hero With a Thousand Faces, it has irritatingly come to take over western, industrialized movie making and mass market fiction. We have even, to a frightening large extent, internalized our own personal narratives as hero’s journeys thanks, in part, to the self-help industry.

But this is all laziness and a terrible failure of imagination. On top of being egotistical and self-indulgent, the hero’s journey is far from the only structure possible for stories. Worse, its sharp focus on the individual and the male experience of heroism, instead of on community or other ways of moving through life, it has us longing for strong leaders of single–minded, masculine vision. And it has us dreaming of ourselves rising the occasion in the fight against tyranny and catastrophe instead of imagining ourselves working together with other people to solve systemic problems before they plunge us into exactly that sort of catastrophe and tyranny.

Oh, Have You Ever Heard This Story Before

Even if you haven’t been formally introduced to it, you encounter the hero’s journey all the time. Lifted from myths like the wanderings of Odysseus, the story of Jonah, the life of Buddha, and many fairy tales, the hero’s journey has morphed into what feels like our default mode of storytelling.

Take the “save the cat” rules for script writing, which are just the hero’s journey template. Just about every Hollywood blockbuster now follows this formula. Not just just about every Bruce Willis and Tom Cruise (and the Rock and Vin Diesel and Liam Neesen and etc) movie ever, but all the super hero movies. Even female protagonists are frequently shoehorned into the hero’s journey template (see: Angelina Jolie in “Salt” and “Mr. & Mrs. Smith”; Katniss Everdeen in the Hunger Games books and films; Mila Jovovich in all the Resident Evil movies; and even the little girl at the heart of the story of “Spirited Away”), as if the only way to be interesting is if you’re a hero just like the guys.

But This Is Not Great

While these stories make for great escapism, they’re not great for actually changing the world.

Look at the sort of places the hero’s journey goes…

At the end of the movie Edge of Tomorrow, it becomes clear that the whole point of Tom Cruise’s character’s saving the world from alien invasion is that he’s learned to be a brave, bold hero, rather than a selfish coward. This doesn’t make him less arrogant, but it means he gets the girl, the satisfaction of knowing he has saved the life of anyone he will ever meet, and a magical fresh start that wipes away the negative consequences of his previous insufficiently heroic behavior.

Or, look at Katniss at the end of the fourth Hunger Games movie (Mockingjay, part 2). She’s sitting in a sunny meadow with her husband and young children. On the one hand, oh, I get it know. This is why ordinary people pick up arms and go to war in the face of a terrible threat. She fought so hard and sacrificed so much, not just for her own survival, but so her as not yet even conceived of children could grow up in freedom. It was all worth it. On the other hand, she’s been transformed from being a fearless warrior, skilled hunter, revered leader, and the chosen one who fomented an entire revolution by staying true to her ideals and made the world safe from not one, but two tyrants into a harmless young mother, utterly unthreatening in a faded, modest calico dress, tending to her husband and young family. The whole point of her journey is that the minute she she doesn’t need to be a strong, fearless, rousing warrior anymore of unprecedented skill with a bow and arrow she can happily settle into domesticated bliss, aside from a bit of PTSD? That, deed done, she can now settle into the fate she was truly made for, that of being tame and ordinary and enjoying her subservient place in the patriarchy? I mean, ARGH!

And then there’s “Oppenheimer”, which took the incredible story of everyone and everything that converged to create the atomic bomb, drop it on Japan, and start the Cold War and turned it into the personal hero’s journey of one man. So ridiculous and, frankly, so meh. Go read The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes—which is one of the best books ever written—if you want your mind properly blown by this story. Sure, his story of the endeavor is way more challenging to the reader—you’re going to be exposed to actual information about atomic physics— than the celebrity biopic approach. But you get so much gain for your pain if you push through the reading of the story. You’ll learn so much of the history of the chemistry of the elements that make up existence, of the various genius scientists (all of whom were some pretty interesting characters) involved in the advancement of nuclear science and the Manhattan Project, and you’ll truly feel the horror of the scientists when the military comes along and takes the product of their hard work to save the free world and doesn’t give them any say on how it will be used. But Oppenheimer (in the movie about him). Oh, poor guy, gets his name drawn through the mud by a political nemesis and is a bit sad when all the people die when the bomb is dropped. Sheesh. Doing its sad little treading of the boards in the shadow of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Oppenheimer is the perfect example of how limited, narrow minded, narcissistic, and shallow the hero’s journey approach can be compared to other ways of telling the story.

 We Should Be Telling All Sorts of Stories

Honestly, these hero’s journey stories aren’t the only kinds of stories we should be telling—either within in the genre of solarpunk or not. Not only is all this heroic journeying getting boring, there are major downsides to locking ourselves into this single vision of story. Like becoming fans of authoritarianism and monarchy.

David Brin had some great words about how Star Wars’ use of the hero’s journey results in main messages that are authoritarian and undemocratic, leading us, for instance, to forgive—and even fete—great evil, despite the millions of death that person (Darth Vader) has caused, so long as he performs a personal act of redemption in the end. Star Wars and its hero’s journey involving the Skywalkers has us cheering on people with a magical hereditary right to power, as if we’re fine with consigning basically everyone else to be followers.

Jo Walton and Ada Palmer also touched on the down sides and limitations of the hero’s journey, at least adjacently, in their editorial in Uncanny Magazine that called for more stories that don’t center on a single protagonist, called to action, from whom all change unfolds. Using history as their example, the point out that events generally happen because of the actions of the many, not just of one special single person. I might add, when big outcomes do hinge upon the actions, leadership, and unique talents of one single person, it’s generally someone despotic, like Hitler or Stalin. And, as pointed out to us by one of our listeners, Jon Ronson has a great podcast with one episode in particular about how trying to understand your own life as a hero’s journey can lead you to brainwash yourself straight down a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories, until the call to action you hear is to undermine, if not actually overthrow, democracy.

 To the Typewriter Computer, Solarpunks!

Here’s my call to action by you. Let’s let solarpunk stories dump the hero’s journey, even as a means to explore life in a solarpunk future. Let’s use all the other story structures instead.

Let’s tell stories about endeavors—like the making of the atomic bomb—not about a person undertaking an endeavor—like Oppenheimer herding his cats at Los Alamos.

Let’s tell stories about relationships between people, or between a group of people and the natural world.

Let’s tell stories where the actions of an individual on his, her, or their own never advance the plot.

Let’s tell stories about moments, or about conflicts, where what’s interesting is the development of the moment or conflict, not of the protagonist and antagonist’s paths through them.

And when we do tell stories about a single protagonist, let’s not keep religiously following the structure laid out by Joseph Campbell and copied by save the cat.

Not every protagonist needs to be a hero! There are so many other arcs to follow.

#Christina #hero's journey #dystopia #apocalypse

[canon-notcanon-warriorcats]

"We need more female villains in warrior cats! Ya'll coulnd't handle mapleshade and she was a rather decent villain. Most of the time people just pick two sides: everyone but maple was wrong or everyone was right and maple was wrong. When, in fact, it's a much more deep and complex situation. More like everyone was an asshole expect for like, the kits, Myler and nettlepaw (there are more but like, i don't really remember). The thing with the book is that it is not black and white, most of the characters are morally grey with light or dark tendencies, but still in a grey area. Like, I can understand where Ravenwing is coming from, he's interpreting a sign from starclan and telling his clanmates about it. Oakstar and Frecklewish are deeply wounded due to being lied to about the kit's being Birchface's. However, does that justify the treatment towards Petalkit, Larchkit and Patchkit? Of fucking course not! It's not their fault who their father is. To Mapleshade? Understanble, to literal kids? Never. So much so, that I believe that if the kits got to stay in thunderclan, with Maple being the only one exiled, she would've not turned into revenge. After all, we all know that the thing she loved the most was her kits, and them being taken away from her forcefully, with her having little to no time to properly mourn their deaths, was what led her into the path of murdering those who wronged her *and* her kits. I feel it usually falls flat on the fandom that they were what mattered the most to her, and Appledusk's open denial about the kits was another trigger for her revenge. That and, let's be honest, Appledusk was one of the biggest assholes in the entire book, not only he was cheating on Reedshine with maple (who neither of the two were aware existed), he didn't give two shits about his kit's deaths. And one more thing, people used to shit so much on Reed, when she was right?? I know we are seeing Maple's pov and she sounds like an asshole but, she's not wrong, in the end Appledusk would always stay with her whilst maple was a fling. It sucks and it's bad but she isn't wrong. That sucks for maple but yeaah. As for Maple herself, a liar, a murderer, and a blame shifter. But also a mother, one that due to grief, rage and feeling betrayal over the death of her children, went down a path she would never be forgiven for. She definetly deserved her end, don't get me wrong, She is a very unreliable narrator too, but every narration of her has some truth to it. She's also stubborn and will get what she wants under all costs. But that's what makes her a good villain. I love her slow descent into quite literal madness over the grief and pain, how she feels that each of her kits live's should be paid back with more death and grief. I fucking adore this character ya'll don't understand. But yeah she's not a 100% Sauron evil character nor an "UWU baby girl wronged by the masses". She's a villain, she fucked things up, and she was a mother who loved her kids and her kids only. We will never get a villain like her again and we should be praising this book for how good it actually is. There won't be any other tragic villain stories like this. And if we do get another female villain, let's hope it's at least a decent character and not just a more worse attempt like sleekwhisker 2.0 Please correct me if my assesments are wrong but I'm having Mapleshade feelings and how everyone does her dirty with interpretations.

nah, mapleshade's story is really good and 3-dimensional (or as 3-dimensional as warrior cats has really gotten)

almost everyone in the story does something wrong, the situation is multiple people's faults, every single character (except those you listed) made mistakes, very tragic mistakes, but also very REALISTIC mistakes

mapleshade became a villain because of her society's rules, because of a merciless leader who decided to also punish toddlers for their parents' crimes (whether oakstar was like that throughout his life or if it was out of grief for his son) and because of her own bad choices

mapleshade is (or could have been) one of the most complicated and 3-dimensional villains the series has had because most other villains are "they were just born like that" or "they were bullied" or "daddy issues" i do wanna correct one thing though, i think the implication is that appledusk cheated on mapleshade with reedshine, not cheated on reedshine with mapleshade, since reedshine had been pregnant when mapleshade and her kits were exiled (unless appledusk and reedshine had been mates before he started seeing mapleshade and they just had kits later, i dunno), but that doesn't really matter in the end, appledusk cheated and was an asshole

i think the problem is that sometimes people just don't really... think critically about what they read, or don't have reading comprehension skills, as well as possibly they haven't read the book since they were a kid who did not have reading comprehension skills and they just still go off of what they remember thinking as a kid (part of why i wanna re-read through the series now as an adult to freshen my memory as well as to see how i feel about everything that happens in the series as an adult as opposed to how i felt and what i thought reading through the books as a kid) i also think it would've benefited to have seen mapleshade before she had gotten pregnant or before she had even become mates with appledusk, because we don't really get to see who she was BEFORE all of that tragedy, before she started lying to all her clanmates, we don't get a baseline of who she was before shit hit the fan

also i wanna mention that i do love sleekwhisker and raven as female villains because i DO like them literally just being evil for fun, like they just don't care they're just assholes

but i do want more complicated villains, i want complicated villains with 3-dimensional characters and backstories, and also i would love if we had a villain like that that was female and also the backstory didn't have anything to do with them being a mother

#warrior cats #long post #like female villains but their villainy has nothing to do with their gender #also maybe a villain who becomes a villain that has to do with them being a dad #no onestar does not count with that... probably

[mapleleafsunset]

newsies warrior cats. im insane

i'm bored and tired so i'm going to type up every single bit of world building and concepts i have for the newsies warrior cats au ive been creating so far. why have i talked more about newsies on here than like half of my interests. ive watched this once. anyway The strike is replaced with an apprentices rebellion, which means that all of the newsies are apprentices across all five clans (so they're at the lake territories at this time. This is key to the plot with WindClan) But anyway, around this time, the clans are facing a severe lack of food due to a drought, as well just general difficulties. Because of this, the warrior code is officially amended so that apprentice's eat last- and that anyone who isn't an apprentice gets to eat until full. This means that essentially the apprentices are starving, and so the adult cats have enough, leaders across the clans are being slow to promote apprentices to warriors, and appointing kits to be apprentices earlier than they should. As a result of mass starvation and illness amongst apprentices, a rebellion breaks out, starting in ThunderClan (taking the place of Manhattan newsies). The rebellion initially consists primarily of non-violent actions such as refusing to do any apprentice chores, and taking enough prey to feed the apprentices. In protest for the fact that no apprentices are becoming warriors anyone involved in the rebellion choses their own warrior name to go by. There is some escalation to violent action as more clans get involved, the warriors in the clans try and bring the apprentices back to the clan by force etc etc. The other clan cats begin to use an abandoned twoleg house as a sort of prison for some cats. Just a detail so I have somewhere for Crutchie to go that makes sense. Now, journalists. The journalists are replaced as a concept by medicine cats, a young medicine cat apprentice (taking the role of Katherine) gets a sign from StarClan that the change to the code is wrong, and all of the plot with the medicine cats is focused around her trying to get her sign listened to, and she's somewhat helped in interpreting signs by her mentor (Byran Denton. im merging the versions), but eventually gets her sign from StarClan noticed by the clans on her own merit. WindClan is the Brooklyn newsies, I don't care enough to assign any other borough to specific clans other than WindClan being brooklyn purely because theyre small. and spots small. so spots in WindClan. I considered placing Brooklyn as ShadowClan for the intimidation factor but I really hate the whole ShadowClan is intimidating thing so I'm just pretending that's not real. Also WindClan apprentices are mainly girls bc I'm bringing the brooklyn girls into this Scabbing from the strike is replaced by Jack, ive forgotten his warrior cat name I gave him so i'm just calling him Jack, leaving the clans temporarily to become a kittypet, which is where he gets the bandana I draw on his design. He's told if he ends the rebellion and goes to become a kittypet then he can take Crutchie with him, and the other cat will be able to live a better life than they are having trapped in the abandoned twoleg house or in the horrible situation in the clans. I think that's most of my thoughts. Race is a tortoiseshell cat and hes transgender bc most tortoiseshell cats are female. just making this note bc i like it and i havent been bothered to draw him yet. Crutchie is nonbinary, because of the stuff that ive heard about junior newsies where they don't have a gender specified. The StarClan cats who are communicating with the medicine cats are going to be a range of canon characters who I think are suitable. Thinking Swiftpaw, Badgerfang, and whatever the name of the cat who was involved in creating the rule of apprentices not being trained before 6 moons is (i could move and get the book to check but I can't be bothered).

#warrior cats #warrior cats newsies #newsies #jack kelly #spot conlon #this is too thought at this point. help me #this has a target audience of no one theres no crossover between these things #warrior cats au

[overobsessedfanboy23]

"There isn't enough of two guys just being friends!" Is such a weird take to me cuz like...

Yugi and Joey, Tristan and Joey, Judai and Manjome, Judai and Sho, Judai and Edo, Yusei and Jack and Crow, Yusei and Bruno (yeah I ship it but it's not canon), Yuma and Shark, Yuma and Bronk, Yuma and Kaito, Yuya and Sora, Yuya and Sawatari, Yuya and Gong, Yuto and Shun/Shay, Yusaku and Takeru, Yusaku and Kusanagi, Takeru and Flame (again I ship it but there's nothing canonical about it), Yuga and Luke, Yuga and Gakuto, Yuga and Roa, Yuga and Nail

And that's just within Yugioh. There are so fucking many. Even outside of Yugioh, I can name just tons and tons of male characters who are just friends and don't end up romantic.

Meanwhile, every single male/female relationship either has one of them (usually the girl) have a crush (Judai and Asuka, Yuma and Tori, Tristan and Miho) or they end up romantically involved in the end (this latter option is admittedly more of a problem in western media since most anime I watch don't like confirming relationships but I could still name so many).

So often I'll watch a movie or show that's not even a romance and they still manage to squeeze in some romantic subplot no matter how forced or pointless it seems. Edge of Tomorrow comes to mind immediately for me, what even was the point of pairing those two outside of "the lead two characters are a man and a woman"? Do we really want to set a precedent that men and women can never be friends? Because this happens. All the time. Indy gets a new girl in every single Indiana Jones movie. Leia was the only woman of the group in the OG Star Wars trilogy so she had to get paired with one of the guys and one of them was her brother so that can't happen. But it was happening romantically (even if only slightly) before they knew. What even was the point of the romantic sideplots in the Equestria Girls movies? Oh and Fox and the Hound introducing a female love interest just so she can be the female love interest. The boy and girl in Mr Peabody and Sherman are both like nine and the movie still insists on pushing a romantic angle between them when one of them tried to choke out the other. Nearly every Disney princess movie gives their lead a prince, with some being more pointless than others. Doppler and Amelia are implied like twice then randomly have children at the end of Treasure Planet. Don't even get me started on Warrior Cats. I could go on but I'll stop for now.

Male/female friendships who stay purely platonic and aren't siblings (Luke and Leia) or different species (Nick and Judy from Zootopia) are so so much rarer than male/male or female/female friendships, which are basically everywhere. And what kind of message does that send? That a man and woman can never just be friends? I'd rather not go into how much this exact mindset ruined or just confused so many of my past friendships so just know that my frustration with this is partially personal.

I'm so tired of the most obligatory milk toast straight couples being shoved into every movie or show I watch, especially if it's said female character's only trait or purpose to the narrative. Meanwhile, LGBT pairings are still fighting for representation in media. Steven Universe and The Owl House were revolutionary in terms of representation and they both got canceled early.

It's one thing if the movie is about romance (ie: WALL-E and Elemental are two of my favourite Pixar movies) but it's another when the romance or one sided crush is just shoved in because "that's what men and women have to be doing." It's a stupid mindset and it needs to stop.

This is why Judai & Asuka, Yusaku & Aoi, and Yuga & Romin being purely platonic matter so much to me.

#yugioh #ygo #rambles #rants #random #random thoughts

[lockandkeyhyena]

listen. i think villain aus are extremely fun and i love giving them to my favourite characters (who aren’t villains already) but. god. the way the warrior cats fandom, especially the map community on youtube treats them is so fucking boring. it’s the same every time. random (usually female) character reacts differently to a certain event in canon by going on a manipulation/murderous rampage, usually with an ‘insane’ smile on their face with absolutely no regard for their canon characterisation.

like we could get such good villain aus if people were just aware of a characters’ basic traits and motivation.

how about instead of- lets use dovewing for this example- instead of a dovewing villain au where she decides she’s randomly a super vindictive cat who hates her sister and dies and torments her from the dark forest as a super master manipulator. because thats the basic cut and paste plot of every single villain au map.

lets try and make a villain dovewing au that fits her character! (with a bit of leeway of course, since dovewing is an angel)

dovewing is under a lot of pressure from the prophecy and expectations from the cats around her. what if instead of moving to shadowclan eventually like in canon, she places all her worth on her powers and tries her best to become the perfect prophecy cat in order to gain praise and acknowledgement from the cats around her. she is so desperate for validation that she is the one to push ivypool away and eventually they get into a fight about this fact. she’s so obsessed with her destiny from the stars she’s been neglecting basic daily life stuff like hunting or helping around camp.

maybe she accidentally pushes ivy off the edge of the gorge and covers it up to protect her image if you really need some fratricide and guilt in there.

maybe have all the specialness of her situation get to her head because its all anyone’s been telling her since she was a kit. and when the powers go away after the great battle she realises she never had a chance to develop her own sense of self because she put all her self-worth on her powers.

idk. it’s far from perfect (i whipped it up in five minutes) but it’s better than evil murderous dovewing with no motivation

#auhggggg im just MAD. okay. apply this to any character btw #yeen rambles #warrior cats #this was harder to do with dovewing than i thought but you get my point

[everybody-loves-purdy]

hot take but people who get super upset about female warrior cats dieing and say just cause it’s the authors hate women ( which, yeah sometimes that true. ) need to take a chill pill

I understand, it sucks, and the female characters should be treated better, but not every single death is because a man cat needs help. Sometimes it just helps the story actually flow

like, if SquirrelFlight does die before being made leader, it’s not cause NightHeart needs it, EVERY LEADER HAS BEEN IN SOME LIFE THREATENING SITUATION AND WILL PROBABLY DIE.

don’t get me wrong, there’s a bunch of cases where that’s true. But. Not every time. Please don’t kill NightHeart for a reason that isn’t even his fault

I guess it would entirely depend on the circumstances and what happens after honestly. If Ivypool were to then become Ivystar then I don’t think it would be a misogyny thing. But if she were to die and the purpose of that death was to solely prop up male characters and Ivypool got cast to the wayside, then that would probably be read as misogyny.

But I guess we will just have to wait and see what happens… but as recent as Riverstar’s Home there’s been some bad misogyny in the books (rip Flutter we never knew you) so it’s completely unsurprising people have such little faith

#runninghare1289 #sillyname anon #thunder spoilers

[jellicle-shifters-au]

as someone coming from the warriors fandom into the cats fandom, it really short-circuits my brain and lowkey makes me batty when every single female character in cats is called a "queen" regardless of whether, by definition, she actually is or not

because "queens" in the warriors universe (and also according to multiple internet sources) are cats that are either pregnant and expecting a litter, or cats that are currently nursing a litter

and a "molly" is just. any other female cat that isn't currently expecting or nursing kittens

#the warriors universe also refers to non-nursing female cats as 'she-cats' but i'll die before i ever use that term #idk maybe it's something that came directly from the people who made the musical? #but it still drives me nuts #(side note: i'm not coming for anyone who uses the term 'queen' for whoever) #(this is just about the things that really drop my croissant)