saw a post about sisters in wc who should have gotten their brothers’ arcs and i wanna add to that by saying:
MOTHWING SHOULD HAVE BEEN THE ONE TO KILL HAWKFROST
it would have been 100x more impactful if it had been her. she was so much closer to him than bramble was, they have so much more sibling lore than ‘ooh we both hang out with our evil dad in cat hell’. it would have been a way more well-rounded and satisfying arc because the buildup was already in place. mothwing is hawkfrost’s first victim, NOT brambleclaw. it would have affected her emotionally way deeper than it affected bramble because she’s already lost tadpole and sasha, hawkfrost was all she had left. at one point hawkfrost and mothwing deeply depended on each other, bramble never had that kind of connection with him. we’re supposed to feel terrible for bramble because of the betrayal he faced, but it pales in comparison to the betrayal mothwing had already faced from hawkfrost. hawkfrost being evil doesn’t even come as much of a surprise from bramble’s perspective because hawkfrost has been that way for basically as long as brambleclaw knew him. meanwhile, mothwing’s novella is basically the only place we get to see the good hawkfrost once had in him.
plus, if the whole thing happened in riverclan, it would be a way better conclusion to hawkfrost’s arc of dangerous ambition in riverclan, rather than dying for a completely unrelated setup and ending the arc so anticlimactically incomplete. hawkfrost spent his life doing all this big brained mastermind shit to make himself leader of riverclan, only to throw that away in favor of giving a handout to his bro in thunderclan. if the writers truly want us to believe that hawkfrost is a calculated man with a mission, then they should show us how he intended to finally seize that power! he is literally the definition of wasted potential and it makes no sense for his character, who is portrayed as rather selfish, to ultimately put his efforts towards a cat other than himself. hawkfrost was so god damn close to being deputy with all of the work he put in, why not make him deputy and mirror the prophecies begin? think of it as hawkfrost being tigerclawstar in the position of the deputy at last, and mothwing being a figure like ravenpaw, who is the only one who knows of the deputy’s evils and has to try and expose or stop them. it should have been leopardstar that hawkfrost targeted, not firestar. the writers went through all the trouble of building up hawkfrost’s attempts to become leader of riverclan, so his assassination attempt should’ve been against leopardstar and should’ve taken place actually in riverclan.
in terms of a compelling protagonist set up to stop hawkfrost, mothwing has 10x the motive that brambleclaw did. bramble was indecisive af about it and had no conviction, him killing hawkfrost was more of a last minute decision that came out of nowhere. narratively it sucked, there was no turning point or gradual realization, it was just ‘oh shit apparently hawkfrost is evil now’. except it wasn’t even a twist at all, brambleclaw was literally present during all the times hawkfrost and their evil dad trained together, hawkfrost regularly discussed his ambitions with bramble. seeing things from bramble’s pov gives us literally no insight on hawkfrost’s change in character because brambleclaw never witnessed hawkfrost’s character development. meanwhile, mothwing’s entire novella details the slow, agonizing process of watching her brother grow colder and more unrecognizable every day. mothwing’s perspective would’ve given us a truly tragic hero with a complex connection to hawkfrost, and it would’ve given us a character who genuinely has a reason to hate hawkfrost but mourn him all the same. and both of those emotions are equally powerful, but bramble has neither of them. the only qualm brambleclaw has with hawkfrost is that he tried to kill firestar. on the other hand, hawkfrost ruined mothwing’s entire life and forced her into a life of shame, forever staining her paws with guilt for a crime he committed. she has an established, powerful narrative reason to kill hawkfrost and be his enemy. mothwing is truly the firestar to hawkfrost’s tigerclawstar, not brambleclaw.
on the topic of mourning, brambleclaw hardly did it at all because he barely freaking knew hawkfrost, hawkfrost’s death had literally no long term effect on bramble. hawkfrost was just a background character in brambleclaw’s life, so reading from his pov makes it seem like hawkfrost hardly mattered at all. but hawkfrost did matter a lot and served as a major character in riverclan, we just don’t get to see that because his death is told from brambleclaw’s thunderclan pov. it’s such a disservice to hawkfrost’s character to tell his death from the perspective of anyone other than mothwing. because, while mothwing may have been the character with the most reason to hate hawkfrost, she was also the character with the most reason to mourn him. hawk and moth watched their sibling drown as kits, then they were left behind in riverclan by their mother. hawkfrost is the only loved one mothwing has left, and she even SAYS “we only have each other now”. even when he destroys her life, mothwing still can’t bring herself to fully turn her back on him, because a part of her will always love the cat her brother used to be. she can’t just forget about him like bramble does. there is literally not a single character who has a more meaningful connection to hawkfrost than mothwing does, which is why she’s the only cat whose pov can fully do justice to his death. if the writers want hawkfrost to actually mean something, then mothwing is the cat who needs to tell his story.
i will admit, the whole ‘stake to the throat’ death is cool. it’s a brutal death that gives you shivers and it ties together the image pretty well, but it’s also completely random and spontaneous. sometimes, wildcard deaths are cool and keep the story interesting, and this death would be a cool one to give to another cat, but i personally find it to be somewhat of a bad fit for hawkfrost specifically. i say this because hawkfrost was very much a character centered around meticulous plotting, and pretty much everything he does tends to tie in to an overarching plan. from a writing perspective, he’s a character about the payoff of the effort put into setting up plot points. he’s meant to make you go ‘remember when he did this? well now it’s finally relevant!’ and so i simply think that giving him an out-of-nowhere death doesn’t do him justice. there’s no buildup, relevance or imagery to the stake except for the exact moment when it happens, and it feels just as unsatisfying as the fact that it was brambleclaw doing it. however, if mothwing had been the one to kill him in self defense and had she done so in riverclan, we could’ve had a truly awesome full-circle death. tadpole drowning is the big, dramatic backstory piece of hawk and moth, it even indirectly leads to mothwing wanting to be a medicine cat in order to save cats who may die that way. so, what better way to kill hawkfrost than to have him drown, specifically at the hands of mothwing? imagine mothwing struggling with him in the water, trying to grapple him away from leopardstar, only to realize hawkfrost has stopped moving and she has just doomed him to the same fate that once scarred them all those moons ago. imagine mothwing, a cat who dedicated her life to saving cats from this very fate, realizing that she has just killed her only remaining family, the one who technically gave her this job to begin with? genuinely, what could possibly be a better end to hawkfrost’s life than that?
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