#razorverse

[yuridovewing]

tbh this depends on whatever happens with her in TBC and if i like it or not, but… kinda tempted to make razorverse dovewing stay with the guardian cats rather than go to shadowclan. and shadowsight/lightleap (?) go with goldenheart to shadowclan while pouncestep stays with her

[yuridovewing]

need to think about my wc au again thats mostly just a mishmash of several ideas rather than focusing on canon. i want to think about cloudbright going to find skyclan and squirrelkit being the one darkstripe tried to poison and that affecting her for the rest of her life….

[yuridovewing]

settling on pinestar’s choice for my next liveread ^^ partly bc its highly recommended and partly because i wanna use the opportunity to figure out razorverse!pinestar’s deal.

i already had a rough idea of him never wanting to be leader, but being pressured to because of the dynasty. he never wanted to be leader and becoming a kittypet was an escape for him. (and his kit mistpaw actually joins him when she’s older)

buuuut the kittypet stuff itself isnt figured out yet, i dont think i want him to be jake’s friend bc im tired of jake being in all of these. so this is a nice opportunity to try and work that out

[yuridovewing]

gonna be honest? taking a female character who's part of her deal was that she didn't want a mate or kits, and having her get knocked up so that the narrative can teach her a lesson is... kinda icky? to say the least. almost meanspirited too, considering how women are treated in this series. feel like the canon thing with her raising the fox cub only for it to turn on her later on already achieves the whole being in her mother shoes stuff way more elegantly. idk.

i get the concern, absolutely, thats also kinda why im tempted to not have her carry anyways. buuuut i will say that this is an au and the drama is mostly just “oh what if dovewing looked like hollyleaf?” and im not really making this a big fleshed out au, its moreso just talking, really. totally get why it doesnt vibe with you though! its an iffy thing and i get it.

although i will say that none of this is done to “punish” hollyleaf narratively. im not quite sure where you got that idea? maybe from the anons, but i dont think ive pushed for that, at least not intentionally. its mostly just tragic irony that she ends up the same as leafpool. that if she were raised differently and couldve been brought up with a healthier mindset, she and willowshine couldve worked something out that worked for them, and their kits wouldnt have to grow up like this. its not a “punishment” so much as it is “good god this situation sucks for everyone involved”.

(altho yeah, like i said, tempted to not have holly carry for that exact reason)

[yuridovewing]

Adding onto the angsty Holly-Leaf relationship: what if Leaf is the first cat to realize that Holly's pregnant? IMO Holly would be in Deep denial about her pregnancy--it's nothing, she's just sick, she wouldn't be stupid enough to have half-clan kittens in the first place, but she can't really hide it from Leaf. (Also, if Lion & Jay watch their sister spiral and desperately try to deny the fact that's rapidly becoming apparent, their dislike of Ivy + Dove has extra layers. They don't hate their nieces, but they can't forget how sick & scared & unhappy the pregnancy made Holly)

OHHH YEAH!!! especially since they're both medics here.... i imagine leafpool, despite everything, tries to help hollyleaf in a heartbeat. saying that she understands. but hollyleaf REFUSES to be on her level. and it just hurts their relationship even further, especially since they're closer in this au...

and you're right on the money with lion and jay! in fact. i moved jayfeather's shitty behavior @ twigkit to ivypaw here. in this, ivypaw first tries to become a medic under jayfeather, who is NOT used to being a full time medic (he was sorta doing half-medic, half-warrior training. because he had a knack for both! and he was a good extra pair of paws) and already has his niece as an apprentice. spoiler- he doesn't handle it well. at all.

he's snappy to ivypaw, he finds little things to yell at her over, and he never outright mentions hollyleaf, but everyone knows that's what it's about. meanwhile, lionblaze isn't really outwardly cruel to dovepaw, but he is controlling over her and possessive, and he is pushing her to be more like her mother. to make up for what she did. but ivypaw notices that lionblaze isn't cruel and perceives their relationship as positive. the mistreatment AND dovepaw's "favoritism" pushed her to the dark forest.

everyone knows about dove/ivy because hollyleaf condemned herself in that gathering too. so the two are treated very differently by their clanmates. being prophecy kits* is the one "redeeming" thing about the sisters to lionblaze and jayfeather at least.

jayfeather does realize he's been cruel to ivypaw and regrets it, but by that point, it's too late. hawkfrost has gotten his grip on her and ivypaw has already incited war against shadowclan, and bramblestar has had ivypaw put into warrior training because she does better there. jayfeather doesn't have easy access to ivypaw anymore, and she sure as fuck doesn't trust him enough to go to him for anything.

(*i still have no clue wtf ivypool's deal is regarding powers... according to my lore, she actually should have them! and idk why she wouldn't? but i also don't really know what her power should be, yknow? and it's an important part of her character that dovewing has that "privilege" over her)

[yuridovewing]

oooh, holly being dove-ivy's mom is rlly fun! i feel like there's a lot of juicy potential to compare her situation to leaf's (if she's the one carrying) b/c like. holly doesn't know if she wants to be a mom and then finds herself expecting prophecy kits...she is not breaking the cycle

YEAH!!! i also love it for the drama and hypocrisy. instead of taking the time to realize that she's in her mother's position and experiencing how hard it is to be in her spot right at this moment, she's refusing to empathize with her. because doing so would mean admitting that the code is wrong. that no one needs to be punished. and someone must be punished, because that is how the clans work, if no one is punished then the cats will become weak.

also how halfclan kits end up being prophecy kits, this is when holly realizes the truth, and she sees the powers not as boons but as a curse. they're punishments to deem the "soiled" cats as otherworldly monsters that would destroy the clans. and hollyleaf is bringing even more of these into the world.

[yuridovewing]

oh also here’s how i fix the leopardpine thing in razorverse: leopardfoot is older for one thing (i imagine that there’s still an age gap but not a creepy one), she’s a warrior from the get-go, and she and pine weren’t in love. they both had kittens for convenience. leopardfoot was aromantic and didnt want a mate and pinestar was feeling stressed with age and pressured to have kittens to continue the dynasty. purely a convenient political thing

[yuridovewing]

I'm not sure what order of events you were thinking of for your au, but I think it might ease up a bit of the worry over "narratively punishing" Holly if she found out she was having kits BEFORE she learns of her parentage.

I feel like the punishment vibes in part might come from the idea that the sequence of events would be Holly learns Leaf is her mom -> Holly lashes out at Leafpool -> Holly finds out she's expecting kits and is now in a similar position as Leaf. That order of events in a narrative structure could make it read less as an ironic twist of fate and more like Holly is being karmically punished with kits as a result of her treatment of Leaf, you feel me?

Holly learning that she's expecting kits BEFORE she has her crisis of parentage would make it feel less like a punishment and make it stand out more as the natural, if ironic, consequence of the course of her own actions. I imagine it'd provide even more emotional conflict for her, too. She's already on edge about the coming kits, and maybe she's even trying to test the waters with bringing up the general topic of half clan kits with Leafpool and Squirrelflight and seeing their reactions but they're acting kind of cagey about it which just unsettles her more, and then. Bam. Fire scene. And now she's panicking because she thought it was bad enough already, but now she doesn't know what legacy, what blood she's passing down to her kits! Now, she can justify to herself that killing Ashfur is also in part something she has to do to protect her kits-- if he revealed the secret, it could put her kits in an even worse position if everyone knew Holly wasn't even Pure ThunderClan. And now, it's of critical importance for her to figure out exactly who her bio parents actually were so she knows what she's passing to her kits. Then, when she finally finds out that Leaf gave birth to her, she uses the revelation to retroactively blame her-- Leafpool doomed her to her same fate! She has cursed the bloodline! All of her mistakes are Leafpool's mistakes! It's in her blood! And in this way, while the revelation of her parentage is the worst nightmare Holly could've ever conceived of, it's also... the tiniest bit of a relief. Because suddenly she has a scapegoat for her own huge mistake.

Anyway, maybe that was the order of events you were planning on already, but if so, take this ask as an opportunity to lay it out more clearly, and if not, take this ask as a bit of non-confrontational advice on how to maybe ease some of those concerns surrounding "narrative punishment." I both completely understand why that other anon feels icky about it while ALSO understanding that you definitely did not intend for that interpretation and are just one normal person trying to play around with a fun au idea. So I hope I'm making sense and not sounding rude to anybody!

(sorry for how late this is, been hanging out with my wifey irl <3)

OOOO YEAH YOU NAILED IT!!! i hadnt thought of specifics and i think i actually had hollywillows fling happen after the fire (as a way to console herself) but before she killed ashfur? tbh i need to reread po3 to get a better grasp on the timeline. but she does know about the kits before she learns about leafpool.