The fandom of Warrior Cats is having a very important conversation right now, not just important for people who read Warriors, for everyone! SPECIALLY people who aren't indigenous (like me!)
For anyone aware, the conversation is about indigenous stereotypes perpetuated by the books, intentional or not.
It's important that we talk about this, that we take conclusions and think critically about the content we consume, something I am finding upsetting personally is that many people are not knowing what to do with the information that indigenous people are uncomfortable with Warriors. They're panicking, they're wanting to get rid of every thing Warrior Cats as quickly as possible and replace things with whatever they think is better. I'm not saying it's not valid to just step away from the series but it's not productive. We need to learn from this, I'm seeing mostly people confused and unsure what the issues are exactly, and fair, the people who started the conversation were just indigenous people venting about Warrior Cats to each other they weren't intending to educarem anyone and they didn't link any sources, a lot of people are going from word of mouth and it makes things uncertain.
But here's the good news! We can look for answers ourselves and WE SHOULD! If we want to make anything better we need to understand what the issues are to be able to learn and do better, we can't find a replacement for "medicine cat" if we don't know why it's bad because it's just as easy to end up on words with similar bad origins thinking they're better like "healer" and "witchdoctor". We can't replace the system of Warrior clans without knowing where this system came from, where the word clan came from, what it means to be a clan what are other existing society systems that we could appropriate by accident.
This conversation shows how much people still need to learn, and we have to. Avoiding the subject and only creating content inspired by European culture won't teach you anything about creating respectful content! This is where we seek out to learn our lessons about identifying harmful stereotypes, about not being quiet about them and knowing their origins and how they're perpetuated in our society in such subtle ways they're normalized.
I will add here that doing your own research can be hard, I am not in a good place mentally, I am very mentally ill and disabled and I am having to take lots of breaks in between reading things and discussing this to take care of myself, Google isn't very useful all the time but we have to try. I made a thread with the useful articles and information I found so far on twitter and I heavily recommend you click here to check it out.
Also, boost indigenous voices and organizations, Clanzine is going to be donating their gains to Raven Foot. Follow and check out the works of indigenous WC and furry artists such as Kit, Wolf, Wren, Angel, Laz and Kitty. Pirate and resell the books and merchandise, sell your own fanart with profits for indigenous organizations, pressure Working Partners saying you dislike the bigotry in the books, give more love for small content creatures specially the ones who aren't white, give YOUR OWN original content more love!!! Adults, take care of the minors in our fandom as they are the ones the books are marketed for, and the youngest are more impressionable and will have a hard time seeing what's wrong with the messages the stories send and they could learn a plethora of terrible things from Warriors.
And most importantly, try to be responsible, try not to panic, this isn't the end of the world or of our communities and our art. I know it can seem like it, trust me, I am autistic I am mentally ill and I know I will not manage to read any other book series, I know how much of my growth as a person and the art I make has been molded by Warriors and the fandom. I have been afraid to try creating original content because I believed people wouldn't be interested but I don't think it's healthy for anyone to only create things based on one popular European book series. This discussion has opened my eyes to see that derivative warrior cat content and original silly animal content is sought out and I shouldn't be afraid to create it. Change is scary, but this will be good and exciting I promise, just take your time read your articles learn your lessons and make your conclusions, there's only good to come out from this and we will make this little corner of the internet a better place for everyone :]
TLDR we need to learn more about racism and become better people and better fantasy animal lovers, it's going to be okay in fact it's going to be great, go research.
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