#Also I hate that Nightheart and Sunbeam are love interests please stop this

[wc-confessions]

It kinda boggles my mind how everyone in the fandom calls the writing misogynistic while the writers are all women-- like I get it, plenty of women are misogynistic, but my mind is still absolutely fucking boggled by how widely accepted it is in the fandom. It is like you say Erin Hunter and in the very next breath the word misogynist is there.

There are so many shitty rude stupid ass male characters (in the newest book!!! Sky!!!) and frankly the only female characters that looked overtly bad were Nightheart's two family members (who are just.... generic cats? I get they had some personality in other books but they're ultimately background characters; at least they're providing a conflict??? Which is needed??? In a story?????) and then of course Uhhh-- Berryheart yeah, Sunbeam's radicalized mother. Who gives me the vibes of a sort of female right wing extremist, of whom there are plenty and can deserve to be mocked a bit.

Squilf was actually shown to be super competent in stepping up in the wake of Bramblestar's depressive episode, who was made into a joke (yay!), and I think her butting heads with Nightheart was entertaining. She acknowledges his youth and is hard on him about it, but it's reasonable too-- of course he's given apprentice tasks, there are no apprentices. How is it fair for others warriors to get extra bedding duty? And of course he shouldn't have gone into ShadowClan territory-- he got lucky that it was Lightleap's boyfriend!! The books make you sympathize with Nightheart as his POV, but I never found Squilf to be disrespected or unreasonable, just hated by him. Maybe I am just a weirdo though! I drink respecting Squilf juice.

I would like less romance plots though. The lack of gay representation in the series is getting so damn distracting! I am too much of a lesbian to understand Frostpaw wanting to stop being a medicine cat and settle down with Splashtail who I barely even fucking know in the span of a few minutes-- Sunbeam rejecting Nightheart would've been interesting, but she's also falling for him, it seems. If Frostpaw really does quit to get with Splashtail I am going to be so disoriented, I CANNOT be reading three het POVs again. I am not strong enough. (I do think Frostpaw finding her resolve to quit after Owlnose did was interesting, though. I cannot blame her for quitting considering the stress she's under. But for the love of god PLEASE STAY)

Anyway in the end I kind of pity the writers who are forced to make up new stories and keep things fresh. Like how do they do anything without it being somehow wrong-- like oops, we wanted to pair these two characters, but it turns out they share a great grandma! At this point we need to kill everyone and start over unless fans of background character #12 get upset that they're ooc because of this one specific line they had in a novella I didn't read. And let's not forget killing a disabled cat being bad despite characters constantly getting culled for no reason. (I would REALLY like some fresh disabled blood though-- like, can we get some more cats losing eyesight and legs here??? It would make the incredibly generic background characters SO much more interesting, God. Like who the fuck is Sneezecloud?? I would respect Sneezecloud more if he was chronically ill but he is just a generic cat named Sneezecloud, OK.)

Anyway this is so badly written I don't even have a point here but this is called warriors confessions and dammit I am going to confess.

[rainsnap]

I love how in Sky you have Sunbeam and Nightheart just chilling, stealing fair food, dealing with simple issues like "oh no, my clan doesn't appreciate my horrible attitude" or "my best friend and crush got together and now everyone is pitying me + my mother's past trauma is causing her to hate my brother's girlfriend"

and Frostpaw is over there just Dying. Just casually falling apart with things like "I saw my mom be torn apart and now I have to pick someone else to be leader and walk them down this very same path and experience the trauma again every single time" and "I, a literal child, am being pressured into picking a new leader because I apparently have the skills to talk to dead cats and Oh No I don't think I can actually????" I get the theme for each of them is being isolated in their own clans but Boy Howdy is one of these things not like the others!