Reblogging for extra commentary to elaborate my feels and frustrations
Plumwillow and Hawkwing’s relationship while it lasted might be one of my favorite relationships in warriors canon, platonic or romantic.
Hawkwing’s Journey was pretty brutal, and here are two cats who have lost nearly everything who find a connection through their shared pain and resolve to help each other continue on. Hawkwing was such a good parent figure to Plumwillow’s kits, just gdi that’s my shit right there. I actually cried at this scene when I first read the book and I cried like 3 times drawing this, and warriors can’t make me do that very often anymore
So I have hang ups about romance in fiction, namely that I hate it 90% of the time. It too often feels like it happens to check a mark off a list and not because it actually felt like a natural conclusion for the characters. This is ESPECIALLY true with warriors. I can count on one hand the amount of canon relationships that I actually care about and didn’t just find irritating/boring. I hate the way they write romance, as it’s pretty much always “two cats with no chemistry fight a lot and/or are really mean to each other b/c that’s what engaging romantic tension looks like right? then they fall in love and have babies.” (ironically, Hawkwing’s relationship with Pebbleshine was one of the worst examples of this, WHY DID SHE FALL IN LOVE WITH HIM???) I just never believe it! 99% of these cats get together because the plot wanted them to from the moment they set eyes on each other, they never develop naturally, they have nothing in common most of the time. They just feel so forced.
Plumwillow started their partnership by saying “I could never take another mate” like for once I wasn’t having annoying romantic tension stuffed down my throat in the most transparent way possible from the start. Male and female characters supporting each other for reasons other than the promise of romance as a reward? sign me the FUCK up. And everything about their partnership felt so natural, like they had real believable reasons for it to happen and Hawkwing was so good at supporting Plumwillow and her babies and god I crie. This is exactly what both of them needed at that moment, and I am SO STARVED for good balanced platonic relationships, especially between male and female characters. I adored the idea of platonic life partners who maybe won’t ever be able to necessarily fall in love but stay together to co raise kids like. I just love that. But they seemed so sweet together that I could have gone either platonic or romantic because they’d both be believable. When it eventually got to the point where Hawkwing started to think “I wonder if we could ever move on from our loss and become mates?” I actually wasn’t annoyed? I have no way of explaining how rare that is, in ANY story. I really could have taken it either way because I was so invested in their interactions and the family unit they built.
…………….You know. While it lasted. Unfortunately birds gotta fly, fish gotta swim, and the Erins’ gotta undermine adopted families.
I’m a fool really, I should have seen it coming by how much they kept peppering in Hawkwing’s melodramatic internal side thoughts of “but i’ll never really feel like I belong with them like I would my ReAL FaMiLY :’(” because as we all know, adopted families are fake and the only reason anyone adopts children long term is as a consolation prize for not getting to have biological children (remember how the authors later added in that StarClan told Squirrelflight she was infertile to make her want to raise Leafpool’s kits? because apparently she wouldn’t have otherwise?) I naively thought maybe those thoughts were going to be treated as flaws and Hawkwing would come to see them as a real family like they were already treating each other as, but of course what really happened is Sandynose pops back into the picture out of NO WHERE for no reason other than, well, Hawkwing was going to be given his ReAL cHiLDreN back soon, so according to the authors that meant that he didn’t need his lesser consolation adopted kits anymore. Never mind that he was there for Plumwillow and he alone encouraged her to keep going during her kitting when she was so overcome by grief that she wanted to give up on living, never mind that he raised them and protected them the whole first part of their life, never mind they thought of him as their father and didn’t even want to replace him with Sandy, just push them away and never interact with them again because it might make Sandypants uncomfortable. He’s their REAL DAD after all, who cares that he’s never even met them
And I didn’t read past Shattered Sky, but I assume that none of them ever really interacted or spoke about it ever again, yes?
So yeah the notorious Hunter squad lets me down into my grave in the end once again, but for a brief beautiful moment I got a glimpse of the type of relationship I always wanted to see in warriors, and it meant a lot to me. I have a theory that the Erin’s can only write good relationships when they are explicitly not trying to write romantic relationships, because it means that they have to give the cats actual reasons to like each other instead of having them argue and be mean all the time for the ~romantic drama~
But I’ll still never be over the missed opportunity for Hawkwing and Plumwillow to remain close platonic or romantic partners, and for Plumwillow to act as a motherly figure for Violetshine and Twigbranch when they find them again and for all of them to be one big mismatched family unit supporting each other, but unfortunately I’m not allowed to have nice things
