#I gotta make a bus driver meme lmao

[bonefall]

Question about Tiger- what WAS his end goal? We know that he wanted to be TC leader but he really quickly pivoted to "world forest domination" after that failed, which is one of those things that feels like thistle's law would oppose. Also why did he start going after half clan cats while also preaching for the clans uniting under him and him alone one leader? Other than kitty racism of course.

(Gently) If you think that Thistle Law would oppose total forest takeover, then I really recommend you head over to the masterpost on Thistle Law as a concept. Nothing about Thistle Law is isolationist, never has been

The ideology sets itself apart from Hard Traditionalism because it becomes willing to enforce some standard of xenophobic purity. That's what Tigerstar wanted to do. There is no "other than kitty racism." That's it. Stonefur, Mistyfoot, Stormpaw, and Featherpaw's lives are the result of codebreaking and that makes them lesser than other cats.

There is no logical reason for bigotry. It's not a principle. It doesn't make sense. It's reactionary discomfort and cruelty given form.

Tigerstar wanted to decide who was pure enough to live and who was filthy enough to die. These categories are arbitrary.

(Under the cut TW: speaking frankly about miscegenation, segregation, and genocide.)

"But if they all united under one Clan, then they'd just start mixing in the end, wouldn't they?"

No. They wouldn't. The steps go like this;

The groups live together and mingle too closely. To prevent them from interbreeding, the code is emphasized.

Someone breaks the code. They are punished.

The kits are dealt with; either eliminated or considered lesser.

But every birth of mixed children poses an "existential" threat. "Purity" is a concept that has to be protected, if a Pure parent mixes with the wrong parent, ALL of the resulting children are dirty. It is a threat to the concept of purity.

And this continues to happen, and "purity" must be protected, so... the groups need to be kept separate.

There is no such thing as "separate but equal." One group is an underclass, prevented from moving freely. This would have been RiverClan.

But the groups continue to mingle, people won't stay put in a ghetto. More extreme measures are taken. Sterilization, kidnapping, execution...

But that still doesn't work. There's only one solution; Genocide.

The logical conclusion of this ideology is genocide. That's where it ends. It doesn't matter if the fascist believes this at the stage he's at or not; that is the built-in conclusion.

Fascism is a death cult.

Tigerstar's goal was to take over the forest and arbitrarily decide which cats would be "True" cats of TigerClan. He would have weeded out cats seemingly at random, but heavily favored ShadowClan. Eventually, the Clans would shift into various classes, before each one is systemically eliminated.

IF he went unopposed. Fascism is unstable. Hyperemotional, self-obsessed, frothing egotists are REALLY bad at organizing government and its very structure is prone to infighting.

The enemy is everywhere, both strong and weak. You live in a constant state of paranoia. You waste all your money on ridiculous vanity weapon projects and overestimate your abilities to absurdity. You kill off all the intellectuals because you're too fragile to be told no. The biggest liar in history is the person who equated any kind of fascism with "evil genius," spite is blinding and insecurity makes you do stupid things.

Turns out, that's really bad for holding onto power. These regimes crumble like a shitty jenga tower eventually; problem is, they're deadly before that point and drag down thousands of innocent people on the way down.