#in regards to 'why do people defend curlfeather or mapleshade' takes mostly

[rookflower]

sorry to beat a dead horse but aye i truly do not get what people are on about when they act like it's sexist to question the motives or do a more sympathetic reading of female antagonists (so, really just curlfeather and mapleshade) instead of "just letting them be pure evil like the male characters are".

like "we have shallow flat evil male characters who are evil for the sake of being evil, but not the equivalent for female characters, so surely we need to balance it out" well, uh. we don't have compelling, consistent, sympathetic female antagonists either! we are lacking in the morally grey female characters department too! what is being robbed!! and have you seen how the fandom used to talk about thistleclaw? people are going to be looking into sympathetic reasoning behind the male characters anyways! hell, canon does it sometimes! and this is completely ignoring the context of every sexist writing decision that exists in canon that is inevitably going into the writing of these characters and the people around them. you can't fix warrior cats fandom sexism by embracing the books at face value or hell, even stripping away even MORE nuance from them somehow, because the books themselves are also sexist LMFAO

yes, warrior cats needs more female villains. i don't think it's sexist that we don't need to read every vaguely antagonistic woman as cackling irredeemable monsters who drink kitten blood and were simply born into this world to kill people though, i think that take is honestly baffling.

(also, a lot of discussions about wc character morality in general tend to forget that fictional characters are not real people they are making callout posts about and are instead the authors trying to say or do something within a story they're telling. someone suggesting that curlfeather loved her daughter or that mapleshade is a victim of the warrior code is not enabling them to do more bad things to other people it is engaging with the story being told)