Cats of the Carved Mountain is a xenomoggy worldbuilding project by @wander-wren , heavily inspired by the likes of @bonefall and @troutfur , but steadily gathering inspo from other sources as I become more Cultured. It is not a proper story or comic; the goal is to create a wiki for the setting and it’s long history, with a particular focus on two or three specific eras that will have full character rosters and more granular arcs/plot points.
current goal: posting the rosters
The largest community of cats in Carvemount are the Oathsworn, three factions descended from an ancient kingdom and a war that never truly ended. Their most notable neighbors are a group called the Silence of the Dragonfly, a reserved and spiritual group who reincarnate when they die.
Carvemount started as a Warrior Cats fanclan project and I am still extricating it from that background. I originally planned to wait until I had a solid cast of characters and had fully divorced from WC, but I’m impatient and this stuff is more fun with friends! Feel free to send questions or advice, I am still painfully new to this space despite being a WC fan for half my life </3. Better pinned will come once I have some more basic things like names nailed down.
i was gonna post and ask if we think it’s valid to give a cat the prefix Luna- but in the course of thinking about it i’ve decided i don’t care and i will come up with a convoluted reasoning because i think it’s good and i can do what i want
mmm somethings been rattling around inside my brain about queerness in xenofiction (warrior cats centric cause that’s obviously mostly what people are talking about in my internet circles) and I know around here I am preaching to the choir but w/e. I feel like i may have made this post before but i’ll do it again until i feel like i’ve crafted all of my thoughts correctly
everyone knows there’s always like. some shmuck on twitter or youtube comment sections, complaining about how gay cats just don’t make sense ~realistically~
and the common argument back is always something along the lines of “these cats have complex society and religion and talk to ghosts and sometimes have magic powers, and being gay is where you draw the line? it doesn’t have to be realistic”
and something just rubs me the wrong way about that argument, not that it’s WRONG, it’s not wrong, xenofiction by definition is all super super unrealistic. I think it’s more like, it oversimplifies it. because honestly when I make critiques about the warriors world building not making sense, I don’t tend to like the argument beginning and ending at “well it doesn’t have to be realistic” because no it doesn’t but it’s still supposed to feel believable.
i think i don’t like that the argument seems to imply that gay animal characters are at all on par with other fantasy things like talking to ghosts and having powers or complex religion. I also don’t like it when people who are being fake-supportive can condescendingly say “well the gay couple may be completely absurd and unrealistic but I guess it’s ok because its just a silly fantasy :) ” cause like. Like its not unrealistic tho. i don’t like the implication that it’s uniquely unrealistic, if this was a grounded story with no magic or religion and the cat social groups were more inspired by real feral cats, it would still be illogical for some queer cats not to exist.
I feel like it is a more effective argument to point out that straight cats are just as unrealistic, in fact more unrealistic and silly
“cats lovingly and monogamously married-for-life and raising kids together” is the absurdity it should be compared to, rather then the magic elements. Because then the complainers have to contend with the fact that they aren’t bothered by unrealistic relationships between cat characters, they are just uniquely bothered by gay ones.
I mean…not to get tmi but it seems obvious to me this knee jerk reaction people have to rolling their eyes and scoffing when “gay” and “animal character” are placed in the same sentence is based on their insistence on equating the breeding behavior of animals to the romantic relationships of humans. Y'know, they’re assuming that when people talk about romantic couples between anthro characters, that that is the sort of thing they are drawing from. When, certainly when it comes to cats, that is a very very poor equivalent. Cat mating behaviors are not affectionate or long lasting–they actually seem quite stressful, and then the father runs off to find more girls and probably never calls his one-night-stand again.
this is why I am really not fond of “mate” being used at the go-to replacement for husband/wife in xenofiction. Consider just coming up with a brand new word for your animal character’s version of romance! maybe they have types of relationships and words for them that humans don’t even have! but “mate” feels like. an action, nothing more. It doesn’t inherently imply love. frankly I think more people should be anthropomorphizing mates as simply Business Partnerships where the business is in desiring offspring, as opposed to husband/wife.
Just like….ok if you’re going to use the real behavior of animals as at least the loose inspiration for your anthropomorphic character’s behavior, surely pair bonding would be a smoother translation to what we view as a romantic couple?? not mating?? because pair bonded animals are the ones having consistent pleasant interactions, and being physically affectionate, and working together in life, sometimes even raising each others kids together.
And keeping that in mind, frankly you could argue that gay-coded cats should be the norm. (not that I think pair bonded creatures should always be interpreted as a romantic coded relationship, you could interpret some as platonic or familial or simply allies needing to survive. The point is no matter what route you go, you are projecting some human experience onto animals who’s minds and feelings we cannot ever actually understand. So to make it coded as a gay romance is just as reasonable as making it an adopted found-family sort of affection. You can go any route and be the same amount of unrealistic.)
If these losers actually want reasonable cat fiction, no one should have romantic affection for anyone! and if two cats have kittens together, it should be treated more like a short-lived antagonistic business partnership where you part ways immediately after. If you only criticize one type of romance for being “unbelievable and silly because these are CATS for crying out loud 🙄” but you don’t feel “distracted” or “taken out of the story” about the other type of romance, then this aint about realism my guy, sounds like you just have some baggage to unpack.
I am beating people over the head with a very big sign that reads “Whether you’re writing about cats or birds or aliens or fantasy people or whatever, you cannot grant any creature the ability to love without all the variety and complexity that **naturally** goes hand in hand with those messy emotions. If the creatures can fall in love at all, then there must exist the possibility for some of them to be queer about it. And if you view queerness as unnatural, then we don’t have a writing disagreement, we have a fundamental moral disagreement about life. And I can’t help you there, that’s your problem! But I refuse to let people benignly hide behind a “simple desire for more realistic-feeling fiction uwu” as a defense!! (gay people are real. It’s true! I checked!!)”
shout out to the random little resurgence this post got lol…somewhat validating bc i am thinking about this topic A Lot. tempted to rewrite a more concise version of it again b/c i’m really getting off track in the middle. probably should have been two separate posts….
fun fact i’ve since written an actual essay for school on this topic and the maximum 2,000 word assignment was 6,000 words when i turned it in…
…god someday i’ll learn how to focus in an essay, it just hasn’t happened yet.
just committed to having the first 7-8 chapters of my original serial novelthing done by mid-september, and now i have an actual obligation attached to it so i kind of have to.
i currently have. 3. plus prologue. so i need to lock in. i am also in the midst of the biggest transition period EVER lifewise. i make such great decisions. anyway if you’re waiting on anything else creative from me you probably won’t get it until october unless i crash and burn or get done early (will never happen) or take a small break to cleanse my palate. i’m sorry i also thought i would have more time to work on shit :(((
just telling yall i do actually have deadlines and a busy work schedule coming up (i work 48 hours this week cries forever) so once i finish the fee things i’m working on here in the next few days (riparian roster, calendar post, religion post) i’ll probably be quiet for a while again. unless the cats eat my brain. then rip my deadlines :/
i have also been turning over thoughts about three branches, the second biggest town in the old kingdom before its collapse. i’ve had the idea for a while that it hung on for a good while by itself, being mostly removed from all of the conflict, and maybe there were battles with winged and riparian over their land.
now, in my head i decided that they did eventually fall, but maybe if you go to that part of the forest you can still see remains of their town. but now i’m thinking….what if they didn’t die out? its the farthest town from the heart, a part of both winged and rip’s territory that they don’t visit too often (also in my head the oaths have a small main home territory that they patrol daily and a much larger claim beyond that that they don’t watch as closely). they could be hiding in secret, or tbh they could just be openly living there, having ultimately won the right to self-determination, maybe with some caveats….either option is interesting. i’ll keep turning it over
keep stalling out trying to write clearfang’s backstory and i’ve realized (only now, in my infinite genius obviously) that this is because while i know the CURRENT state of affairs between the oaths, i dont know how we got there, so it’s hard to write about what the literal leader has been doing for the past couple years
why did winged kidnap some of their seers? why is cliff just staying out of it? probably more questions i haven’t even thought of yet?
i think to answer this i have to go back a few decades and really nail down the origins of the great project. i think i decided that it started around 30 years ago? long enough that no one alive remembers it starting, and long enough for some of its effects to start to show, but still really recently in the grand scheme of the timeline
i’m thinking it started with a massacre, something really big and really bad for riparian that pushed them to desperate acts. probably winged and cliff were involved to extra make them feel ganged up on? but like? why? what are they fighting over?
so many potential answers. the only concrete one i have so far is the leader from either wing or cliff deciding they need to conquer all the territories or some shit, finally finish the war that never ended, probably due to some kind of prophecy. i should make prophecies like a relatively common thing like they are in warrior cats bc they’re fun. but it could just be a war over….god i don’t know. you would think after having read a series called WARRIOR CATS for so long i would have more ideas about cats going to war
oh, i was also considering maybe like…a drought or something, and riparian has all the water but won’t share, but tbh i really like the idea of it not really being “their fault” or “deserved” in any major way. i think that would put a nice twist on it. they’re genuine underdogs tired of getting kicked around by their neighbors. eugenics and authoritarianism are still really bad, obviously, but. yknow
So while I play with making my own dialect(s) of Bonefall's Clanmew, I run into more and more situations where I need words that simply don't exist, and coming up with them is very scary and hard! Luckily, there is GenWord, a conlanging tool that allows you to randomly generate words based on specific settings. I hyperfixated a little too close to the sun and worked out as complete a set of rules for Clanmew as possible, which I'll put here for any other dialect-makers to use :3.
First, the categories. These parts tell the generator what consonants and vowels are available, as well as the frequency with which they appear. I used a character frequency counter to determine the order. The main two categories are consonants and vowels. You could add more categories for your different types of consonants (stops, liquids), but when I tried that I think I made it less Clanmew-y and I was too tired to keep playing with it. That feature does give you more control over your consonant clusters, though, if you'd like to play with it. There's a tutorial on the site that goes over how. Anyway!
C=rRhkwbpsfnmglSHcYCqFP tdj
V=aoeiuy
I've put a space between T, D, and J at the top because they only show up in 1-4 words (out of over 1.6k) in the current Clanmew lexicon. According to Bones, J is Townmew-specific and there shouldn't be any dental consonants, so some people may choose to omit those.
The capital letters do matter for something called the Rewrite Rules, which tell the generator to swap out certain characters for consonant clusters. I am also including some illegal consonant clusters to prevent those from showing up. These are all the ones I noticed in Clanmew, but feel free to let me know if I missed any:
Now comes the hard part: syllables. These are pretty hard because there's no easy way to check for frequency, so I just kinda....stared at the list and did my best. This section checks for how consonants and vowels can show up in a syllable. If that makes sense. It is also ordered by frequency again.
Single-word syllables:
VC
VCC
CVC
CCVCC
CCV
VCCC
Word-initial syllables:
CV
V
CVC
VC
CCVC
CCV
Mid-word syllables:
CV
V
VC
CVC
Word-final syllables:
CV
V
VC
CVC
Honestly, I could probably refine that a bit more, add more syllable types and play with the order, but it's actually starting to break my brain, lol. I would love better control over the frequency of specific clusters (rw for example), and I'm sure I could achieve that with some more work, but this will do for now. People with more patience and Clanmew/conlang experience than me, feel free to tweak stuff and show me!
Also, just for reference, here is a post Bones made about how they come up with words, which you can take or leave as you see fit :3.
back to roster & profile work, amongst other things. in the wake of New Gender Stuff, i have a question!
should i include those genders/pronouns on the roster? i feel like it would be convenient as a reference/seeing character associations at a glance. especially this early on, i really want to convey as much of the narrative via the rosters as possible because so much of it is still trapped in my head. BUT this is giving me a dilemma.
sneak peek of my very messy roster sitch. this is what it looks like on regular degular 100% zoom, and that cut-off column on the right is the last column. i want to eliminate sidescrolling as much as possible.
now. i should be able to shrink most of the columns without cutting off any information, which will allow me to add at least one more column, but might get a bit squished:
i think that is the maximum amount of information i would want to include, and there is actually some wiggle room still to expand the columns a bit. but i could also have less info, if people don't mind jumping between docs to look at things. including the english translation of the genders is a bit redundant for the higher ranks, though. but then what about cases like dustlight, who might be expected to be a provider but is actually rivered?
the leftmost column doesn't currently have a purpose for non-high ranks, so i could put the english translations there? is that weird? i am also still stuck on how to/whether to incorporate mentor/apprentice relationships into this, and i was thinking about using the left column to signify that somehow....or i could do as the books do and put apprentices right under their mentors? like this?
i think my eye is more drawn to it if it's next to the names, but y'all can tell me. or i might not need the arrow but i like the idea of a more obvious visual. also everything else here is accurate (at least right now) except deepsun being island's mentor, i just haven't named enough seers lol.
i was gonna put a poll here but i think my questions are too complicated for that lol.
HI i wanted to pop in here to say this looks absolutely AMAZING. i was introduced via someone sharing the gender/sexuality post when talking on discord and it's been rolling around in my brain since. i also have the stupid little cats and it's SO refreshing to finally see some detailed, thorough worldbuilding like this!! keep going man. wonderful work so far
thank you ahhhh! i’m happy you like it :3 i’ve been neglecting my kitties lately due to time-sensitive real life obligations + burnout + other projects eating my brain, but i have some free time this weekend and this ask is drawing me back to playing with kitties for a bit….
as per usual this is all still in development; nothing on this blog should be taken as gospel until it is refined on the official webbed site (which i am also working on in the background). as such i am happily accepting thoughts, questions, and advice on everything here. with that out of the way, onward!
Oathsworn cats conceive of sex, gender, and sexuality very differently than we do. Due to their strong culture around lineage and legacy, as well as their natural drive to reproduce as wild animals, they place a great amount of importance on fertility and producing kits. In fact, being kitfree by choice for any reason is one of their most severe social taboos, and cats in this category will often face intense social backlash.
Ths has led to a trinary sex system, where the three categories are uwrrm (able to sire kits), yaow (able to carry kits), and mwrawoen (infertile). Whether celibate or childfree cats fall into the third category or not can vary; mwrawoen is usually assigned later in life to elder cats or those who have had long-term fertility issues, but it can sometimes be assigned to intersex cats at birth depending on how the Oaths interpret their variation. These three categories are important to Oath life, but they ultimately have little to no bearing on ideas about sexuality, gender, or behavior more broadly.
Enter the octodenary gender system.
Yes, the Oaths recognize a total of eighteen different constructed sets of norms, behaviors, and presentations based on social role. While these “genders” (and whether the Oaths consider them “gender” per se is up for debate, hello quirks of translation) are not based on what we would consider to be sex characteristics, the Oaths do have a strong belief in “innate talent” and consider it to be biological on a certain level, so gender is not an entirely fluid, choose-your-own-adventure system.
The eighteen genders are as follows. I’ve included their Oathmew name and third person/second person pronouns; apologies to anyone super familiar with Clanmew for the pronouns I’m yoinking & recontextualizing. I also apologize in advance for any crimes against cat orthography I may have inadvertently committed.
Leader | Shainim (Ssar/Ssars): A ruler by bloodright, blessed by the gods. They are expected to be highly intelligent, strategic, and decisive, with a certain level of ruthlessness. On the other hand, a leader is also expected to be personable, adaptable, and charismatic, to form close relationships with their subjects and be a trusted, well-liked figurehead.
Heir | Eefshainim (Ar/Ars): In line for the throne, but may or may not ever reach it and has other responsibilities in the meantime. An heir is expected to be much more involved with their Oathmates than outside affairs, and so should be amiable, charming, and empathetic, with a well-rounded set of skills in as many areas as possible. Even in active wartime, a bloodthirsty heir is typically frowned upon. Heirs can lose this gender and be shuffled into the general population if they fall sufficiently low in the line of succession; usually only around the first five cats in line are allowed to occupy this role.
Seer | Shahanim (Pyrr/Pyrrs): A spiritual leader, closely connected to the gods and ancestors, but also a medical professional. Seers should be reliable, mature, steadfast presences who ideally never show strong emotions. They should be iron-willed and firm, and compassionate but somewhat distant, focused on cultivating relationships with their gods, leadership, and patients rather than the general population.
Scribe | Pabpiarrnim (Rarr/Rarrs): A historian dedicated to documenting current events and creating new copies of historical records. A scribe should be a quiet, studious observer, capable of great patience and dedication. It is accepted that they will usually be a bit “weird”—this is a popular position for introverted neurodivergent cats who can swing it. They are also expected to be an isolated group, both as a natural consequence of their specialized knowledge and to avoid bias in recordkeeping. A skinny or lanky body type and messy fur are expected.
Provider | Ualgapbnim (Chka/Chkas): A hunter, gatherer, or farmer who provides food and raw material for their community, as well as doing any labor-intensive work like moving a downed tree. Stamina, grit, and determination are core traits, as is selflessness. A good provider is strong enough to work from dawn to dusk, but should also be one of the leaner cats in their Oath, never eating or resting until all others are cared for.
Creative | Kenkanim (Nya/Nyas): A cook or crafter focused on the arts. Creatives should be friendly, clever problem solvers and make good mentors and kitminders, spending most of their time working in the middle of the social hub. Good grooming and lots of accessories are a must.
Warrior | Kachnim (Urr/Urrs): A powerful fighter and the first line of the Oath’s defense. They are expected to be confident and domineering, risk-taking, aggressive, but also deeply protective and humble. Soldiers work as a unit; ego is both insulting and dangerous. The best warriors are large, strong, and thick-furred, but there is plenty of room for small and agile fighters with the right attitude.
Rivered | Meewa (Shu/Shus): Riparian specific, a cat with a strong connection to the water—often associated with clairvoyant or otherwise spiritually-gifted cats not born to the seer line. Great asset for water ecosystem management. Rivered cats are rare, special, ethereal folks, possessing great wisdom and calm, but also being flighty and unpredictable. Lots of accessories, paint, and body modifications are expected.
Wanderer | Paohanim (Pao/Paos): Mostly Cliff-specific, refers to a cat who has left their territory for a long time but plans to return. Mostly applies to spies or those on a journey to find themself; short-term quests with specific goals do not count. Wanderers are lonely, tragic figures, but also brave adventurers with an intense sense of loyalty. Sometimes recently-deceased cats are referred to this way as a method of easing the grieving process, but it is considered unhealthy to do long-term.
Kit/Young Apprentice | Mew (Wi/Wees): A young cat who is not expected to give anything to their community yet and is still figuring themself out. Kits should be playful, carefree, impulsive, and friendly, but with a healthy dose of shyness and deference that keeps them safe.
Neutral/Unknown | Wibra[nim] (Kar/Kars): A cat or creature whose gender is unknown; inanimate objects. One cannot really identify as neutral without social backlash; not only is it objectifying and dehumanizing, but it implies the cat in question does not have a strong social role and perhaps does not contribute much to their community. Carries connotations of laziness, selfishness, or being confused and misguided.
Prey | Biyaw (Uu/Uus): Any living creature that is hunted for food. Associated with observance and cleverness or skittishness and cowardice in turns. Referring to a cat by prey pronouns is highly disrespectful, and similarly to “neutral” identifying as such personally is seen as very strange and a likely sign that something is wrong.
Predator | Bayao (Yarr/Yarrs): Any living creature that hunts cats or is likely to attack them. Associated with power, uncontrolled aggression, lack of higher cognition, and dishonor. Calling someone a beast is a step further than referring to them as a rogue. Any cat trying to take this identity for themself would be seen as making a direct threat and treated accordingly.
Rogue | Mwrrnim (Mwrr/Mwrrs): Hostile outsider not affiliated with the Oaths; often given to traitors and exiles regardless of their hostility level. Rogues are dirty, underhanded, cruel enemies who attack just for the thrill of the fight; this term should not be applied to cats acting in self-defense or due to a misunderstanding.
Rancher | Ee’mornim (Eem/Eems): Since all nearby human settlements are very rural and mostly farms/ranches, the traditional housecat does not really exist. Instead these are savvy, sharp-witted, bold and easygoing explorers; absolutely self-sufficient, but not very territorial or aggressive. Often fun-loving and make good storytellers and singers.
Ancestor | Garrmwa (Murr/Murrs): Any deceased cat, but especially those who have been dead a long time. The ancestral hills are known to slowly strip away a cat’s personal identity, turning many of the oldest spirits into faded, generic fonts of wisdom until they become one with the ether in a slow secondary death. Those who have passed on within living memory may be referred to by their living pronouns and ancestral ones interchangeably, especially by loved ones.
Saint | Kepba (Ai/Ais): Some ancestors are elevated to the position of sainthood due to their acts in life; these cats are more powerful and fade much more slowly. Saints are expected to be kind, gracious, noble mentors and guides, but are also able to hold onto more of their traits from life and it is well accepted that they are not a monolith. The saint gender/pronouns are sometimes considered more a sign of respect than a true gender, and a particularly bold and spiritual cat may refer to a saint with their pronouns from life, if they are known.
God | Ootss’mep (Kem/Kems): The three gods that watch over all Oathsworn cats and their ancestors. This is such a specialized niche that there are not really expectations attached; the Oathsworn would not dare to box their gods in in such a way; however, they would also not dare to lower them to the same social positioning as an ordinary cat, so new gender it is!
*Some of these are subject to change, especially as I build out my own dialect more, but this is serviceable for now. I will continue to use English pronouns for cats in most contexts for simplicity and accessibility, trying to map our gender system onto theirs as best I can.
So, there you have it! Eighteen whole genders and three sexes. It’s very important to note that a cat is not locked into only one role; most have hobbies, like a hunter who helps scribe on the side, or a prince with a special interest in weaving. Gender here is about the core of who you are, your identity, and how you act and present yourself to your community, not just the work you do most often.
Now the question becomes: how the fuck do you have gay or trans cats in this universe? Are such concepts even meaningful here?
Well, yes and no. Gender is considered very fluid for the first 8-10 months of life, but somewhat predetermined based on personality, body type, and lineage. A tiny, quiet cat would be discouraged from going the warrior route, for example. Still, some change is acceptable up through the first year or so of a cat’s life, but gets progressively more and more frowned upon as the years go by. Genderfluid, agender, and gender-nonconforming cats will face some backlash socially, but will have allies and have most cats come around eventually, except in the case of trying to claim predator-ness as outlined above, or certain holy or bloodline-specific roles like saint, seer, or heir.
Transitioning is an entirely social game that requires developing new skills, new ways of carrying oneself, and sometimes entirely new friend groups. It’s certainly not unheard of, and transphobic (or queerphobic, for that matter) violence and systemic oppression is not really a thing. At most, there will be some derogatory comments and chilly attitudes, but equally plenty of cats will be happy to welcome a new friend who is being true to themself.
On sexuality: Due to the aforementioned heavy emphasis on producing biological kits, all cats are expected to participate in a male-female coupling at least once, preferably two or three times in their life. Thus, any cats who do not want to do that for any reason will be looked down on, even if they help to raise a partner’s biological kits (the view on single-parent adoption varies by circumstance). Systemic bigotry on this level has died out in the modern community, but cats who choose not to have kits will still be subjected to judgemental commentary, not unlike their human counterparts.
However, having kits with someone does not in any way have to be connected to a romantic relationship, so polyamory and surrogacy and suchlike are totally normal; in fact, being in just one monogamous relationship at a time forever is so rare it is considered a sexuality of sorts (mroobabun, roughly “beaver-hearted”). The only other true sexualities are just the opposite; cats who don’t want any kind of romantic relationship (hoolbabun, hollow-hearted), and cats who do not want kits (bowkoen, hollow-bellied). For further context, mwrawoen (infertile) comes from “devastation + tree hollow”, the idea that something can live and function normally with a gaping hole in it, and that this missing element is definitionally a massive emotional blow. The names for these things are brutal because they were made up centuries ago by an even more conservative culture and have yet to be changed. It would be cool to play with coming up with nicer ones…
Anyway. With so many genders, orientations like gay or straight are more or less meaningless; cats simply view sexuality as a set of preferences. At most, exclusively same-gender parents raising a litter will be mildly frowned upon due to the belief that they could create unbalanced children.
Finally, how all this ties into the concepts of lineage. The Oaths are still a matrilineal culture, so with very few exceptions lineage is traced through the dam, regardless of whether that cat had any paw at all in raising the kit. Typically a dam is expected to at least have a godparent-like role in a litter’s lives, but this doesn’t always happen. Still, the dam holds all legal rights over the kits, and would have the ability to control medical care and education to a certain extent, as well as the power to move away or keep the kits within their community regardless of any other parents’ wishes. This is the default unless the dam renounces their parental rights, dies, or is completely unknown, in which case the power is given to the next-nearest biological relative. It will only be given to a non-related parent figure when no biological relatives can be found or the leader determines that it is in the kits’ best interest.
And here’s where I would put my nice conclusion…..IF I HAD ONE. That’s gender for you! That’s what I’ve been doing with the last week and a half of my life. Yay!
very funny how almost every time i’m writing something about the oaths culture i have the obligatory “except for modern riparian, which is a fascist nightmare” section
‼️‼️I am gay and transgender ‼️‼️ I am not criticizing anyone just mentioning some stuff I've noticed in a literary analysis sort of way I am not trying to start discourse‼️‼️
Anyway. One of my clangen cats just rolled as trans (yay) & it's got me thinking like.
What is it to write cats with gender variance in a world that is essentially post-gender (to the extent that any of us, having been raised from birth saturated in the unconscious stew of gendered thinking, can write something that is 'post-gender').
I've noticed that the vast majority of work in the warrior cats space does seem to strive to have complete equality between the sexes- and not just equality, but complete indistinguishably. I've even seen audiences routinely forget what gender a character even IS (which is kind of delightful). Toms raise litters, mollies become leaders, there is no friction, commentary, noticeable difference.
And that's fine- I'm more or less going that route with Gutterclan- but in a world where this is no social or material difference between the sexes- what does gender variance mean? How does it function? Where does it come from? What does being transgender mean in a world where gender identity does not really exist (or at least is not differentiated- there is One gender, and it is warrior cat*), and physical transition is not possible? Is it just a matter of pronouns?
What need for gender neutral pronouns in a world where essentially all things are already gender neutral? Is it just dysphoria? Do trans tortoiseshell toms hate their orange patches, or do trans mollies feel self conscious about their stud jowls? That's sort of miserable, if the only thing that being trans is, is having a problem with yourself that can't be solved.
And what does sexuality mean, when gender barely exists, and sex essentially doesn't? There is romance in warrior cats, for sure, but sex doesn't really... exist in most warrior cats works, and it definitely doesn't exist in the canon books. Which is absurd to say, because people are always having kittens, and accidental litters are a constant plot tangle, but there is never a sense of how these things occur. Being mates means you sit together at mealtimes and rub cheeks and get sad when the other person dies, and sometimes kittens appear after a timeskip.
This is of course due to the age range of the books, and because the main characters are animals. And I don't think it's a problem in need of changing, but it does make trying to conceive of sexuality strange in this world.
What does being asexual mean when no cats ever really display a sexual desire? What does being a lesbian mean where there functionally is no difference between mollies and toms? (Aros get to stay, the WC conception of romance ports more or less 1:1 from our world).
I do believe that sexuality and gender are to a certain extent innate, but they are also deeply, deeply shaped by our society's conceptions. Which is to say, eg, only desiring relationships with other women is perhaps innate, but the identity of Lesbian is constructed (which is not to say it isn't real- like, currency is a social construct, and we wouldn't say it's fake, or that it lacks power over us, etc). So what does it mean to have those labels in a world that- ostensibly- lacks much of the very human, very 21st century, very western, social baggage that creates them? And the answer is basically one of two things:
you do a lot of baroque gender worldbuilding. For your warrior cats fan work (which! Honestly kind of bangs and I would like to see).
People like to see themselves reflected in fiction, and the reason that we have pansexual cats and grey-ace cats and demi-boy cats is more or less because we have those things in real life, and we say the cats are those things and so they are, even if their history & context of gender and sexuality are completely different from ours, and likely wouldn't have created the same labels.
And there's nothing wrong with either of those approaches! I'm more or less going to go with approach 2 in Gutterclan, which just small switches in terminology, but I find it sort of... unsatisfying, the more I turn it over
*I put this question to my buddy Goose & he posited that the space that gender roles serve for us are, in warrior cats, essentially occupied by narrative roles. Leader, warrior, med cat, even things like villain or loner. I am nodding at this proposal very vigorously. In a world without gender, is the angst of a medicine cat apprentice longing to be a warrior not a sort of transgender longing to fit a different societal role than the one you are coercively assigned?
Anyway. I still don't know how to make my cat trans.
having many thoughts and things but unsure how to Poast…..maybe mini character profiles would be of interest? i’m also trying to nail down at least the oath’s religion, so a post about that will probably come soon, and i’m ruminating on one about sexuality & gender…
winding down….we’ve got three kitties fully filled out on the roster and did some more layout tweaks. also have clearfang’s detailed profile nearly complete (just need to finish history). i wish it wasn’t so late/i didn’t have work tomorrow so i could keep going….wah….i might be able to post riparian’s roster by the end of the week, though, if this keeps up
