one thing i’m really excited for in Three of Swords (po3 rewrite) is figuring out how to balance fanon and canon interpretations of characters. especially since i have to choose which fanon interpretations to use!
i got into warriors around what i’m unofficially dubbing the middle age, bc i like naming things, it’s fun. this coming after the golden age of the fandom, yknow, firestar doesnt like waffles and sss warrior cats and emo scourge and cringe ocs. to my eyes, the fandom culture after that was focused on improving art (better animation and art and fanfic overall, i remember a ton of guides on how to avoid common fanfic mistakes) but still had a lot of the same trappings of early fandom. especially in the opinions about characters—remember everyone hating dovewing and loving ivypool?
then in the past few years its like things have shifted. the demographic as a whole feels older now, but maybe that’s just me—i don’t know how popular wc is with the current eleven year olds. but i’ve seen a lot of “x character deserved better” and “i was wrong about y character” type sentiments (i was one of them! sorry, dovewing). some of the same topics keep being retread, but the consensus on them has changed. there’s probably an essay in there somewhere.
but back to Three of Swords. i haven’t actually reread po3 in a while (it’s on my list, lol), so all my own thoughts are also colored by nostalgia and years of fanon. i have a lot of space here to explore breezepelt, since the story will be windclan-centric, and i have to decide what to keep from canon and from fanon, as well as deciding what role i want him to play. i want to make the Three a little scarier, more powerful and more mystical, really set apart from their clanmates, but i don’t want to lose too much of their canon personalities.
even starclan could go several ways. are they malevolent, benevolent? powerful or incompetent? with crowfeather now being the three’s mother and nightcloud being present but not directly a parent, how does that change their characters? i still think crowfeather was absolutely unprepared to be a parent to breezepelt, but the circumstances are wildly different now.
and what about onestar and firestar? with the three in windclan and firestar still receiving the kin of kin prophecy, how long will it take to put together, and what does that do to clan relations? what version of onestar do i even want to write, with how inconsistent he is?
and i’ve said it before, i’ll say it again: what the hell am i supposed to do with sol? i definitely want him to play a bigger role, but i’m still throwing around ideas as to how to do that and how he ties into the larger dark forest plot.
the final thing i’m really adamant about is portraying these cats as, well, young. nightcloud, crowfeather, leafpool, and squirrelflight all started the new prophecy as apprentices. in my rewrite, by the time the Three are born they’ve only been warriors (or medicine cats) for 4-5 moons. that makes them adults for a little less than a year by the time the Three are apprenticed, which is when i’m thinking of starting Three of Swords unless i can think of something interesting to do in their kithood.
they’re very young and have had really tumultuous apprenticeships/early adulthoods, and that’s not stopping anytime soon. the Three are incredibly young, and every individual thing they deal with would be a lot, but all of it? i know the fandom view on hollyleaf specifically has been shifting from this sort of badass murder queen to the scared, confused kid making bad choices she was, and i want to write about that. and give lionblaze a character beyond “fighty man goes dark side.” and give jayfeather a character other than “grumpy snark. also is blind.”
annnnd this got away from me oops. happy anniversary. i have a love-hate relationship with po3 because it’s got SO MUCH happening but also NOTHING happening.
