Pleeeeease come back and start cutting and dicing the canon even more, I miss Better Bones so badly
With the state of... *gestures at the world* everything right now I've honestly been struggling with the feeling of wanting to say more than what BB in its current form allows me to say.
I started this project with a lot of love for the WC series. A love that came with patience. Affectionate patience for the sort of well-meaning but naiive neoliberalism that I know the original Erins had. Maybe I was wrong about it all along-- but fixing earlier arcs and fleshing out older characters feels easier to me.
Swap out the ending of TPB to show BloodClan in a less Xenophobic light, flesh out the WindClan Civil War and Leopardstar's leadership by connecting it to TigerClan's ideological legacy, use PO3 as a breather arc to explore how society is changing. These aren't such massive changes, really. That's what "Better Bones" means. The bones are the same, just a bit better.
That patience is running out.
Starting with AVOS and going onward, keeping the "bones" the same is feeling more and more constraining. The newer arcs are more than bad, they're boring. Nothing ever changes and the status quo is never altered.
And that's not even to downplay how BAD they are.
Super Editions will make characters LESS interesting. Every new non-Clan cat group is absurdly xenophobic. The most "impactful" moments from these new books are just shockingly stupid lines about childbirth that we all gather around to go "wtf" about.
I don't LIKE how much I dislike this new stuff, it gets tiring! I don't like having the same critique that the villains are shallow, the heroes are awful, the women are constantly fridged, and StarClan is ghoulish! It's sad!
Especially as I'm growing increasingly desperate about the situation all around me. I use BB to talk about culture and Fascism-- so there's been a lot more I want to say lately. Ideas that feel restrained by the new material more than inspired by it.
I dunno what I'll do yet. But I have been considering "sanding the serial numbers off" a lot, in recent days.
