swiftpaw is fascinating to me. he's an incredibly minor character in the series and the only interesting thing he ever does is die, but the way his story is set up is prime material for a concise, action packed, emotional, and easily conveyed narrative for shortform animation. this as well as him being an arc 1 character (and therefore recognisable to the majority of people who have ever read warriors) makes him by far one of the most popular cats to make MAPs and AMVs about in the books. it's just hype moments and aura
and, despite being the far more memorable and relevant character of the two as far as the books go, brightheart doesn't get to be the protagonist of this story as often as her counterpart does because this isn't where her story neatly ends. brightheart recovers from her injuries/comes to terms with her disability, falls in love, goes on the great journey, has kids, grows old, is literally still alive in present day, etc and because of that you can't wrap her story up in as tight a package so she always gets shafted for her background character friend/cousin instead (maybe theres some misogyny too but i'm going to be cautiously optimistic for once and assume it's usually just the former). and swiftpaw's disproportionate popularity exists in a cycle, because the animations that people make inspire others to make their own and this has been going on for as long as people have been making warrior cats amvs. plenty of fans don't even read the books. swiftpaw might as well be a protagonist to them. he probably has like 5 lines tops in the actual books.
but also, crucially, it's just such a miserably bleak story. some swiftpaw maps end on the note of relief of brightheart's survival, but the whole plotline is such a bummer that it's almost funny. there are literally hundreds of lovingly crafted youtube videos dedicated to a cat setting out with a clanmate to save his community before promptly getting mauled by dogs and gruesomely dying.
