So the Warriors editorial just confirmed that Frecklewish was deliberately placed in the Dark Forest for, um... leaving kits to drown because the river was flooding and she didn’t know how to swim and er... not showing remorse in front of Mapleshade, who she had cause to be mad at? I’m not gonna analyse this in particular detail because I know the fandom will be tearing this article apart without me, but I am left wondering where the hell we are in terms of the Warriors world.
I think this is the first time I’ve sincerely felt like the world is now in wholly unfamiliar hands. Not just that but clumsy hands that are eroding at the franchise piece by piece.
I have noticed the word ‘retcon’ flying around a lot recently in respect to the New Family Tree and Warriors’ general attempts to establish new details on top of pre-existing framework. Let’s settle this really quick, retconning is fundamentally a neutral concept. Sometimes it’s benign, like when Mapleshade’s appearance was changed from ginger to tortoiseshell in her first appearances back in 2012. Sometimes it’s appropriate, like when some cats get caught up in the sprawling family connections and end up dating blood relatives and the writers have to intervene. Sometimes the writers even dance around continuity errors with love, like they did by reaffirming Rowanstar’s gender transition two years ago. These are all fine and dandy! There are also bad things, like some of the broken continuity errors in some of Clarissa Hutton’s early attempts at novella writing after Vicky’s departure, but these are ultimately errors and soft changes, and this article is about intentional and hard changes.
Warriors can be divided into two editorial eras. From 2003 to 2013, ending with The Sun Trail, the plots, characters and world of the Warriors series were written by one person: Victoria Holmes. She would write the outline of each novel, and then based on that outline the manuscript would be written by either Kate Cary or Cherith Baldry. Vicky would also write the field guides and novellas alone, and continued to do so for a few years after she stopped working on the main novels. Since her soft retirement in 2013, her job has been taken over by a team of editors, called the ‘story team’. As of the 2017 publication of the novella collection Legends of the Clans, she is now fully retired. Finally, as of the new site launch in 2019, the site is managed by a team of content editors, who work in the same physical location as the story team and can generally be considered part of the same editorial body despite differing jobs. For clarity, the Frecklewish article was written by the story team, not the content editors.
We don’t have many names and faces for this editorial team. We know among them is HarperCollins executive Erica Sussman. Novella writer Clarissa Hutton no doubt has some involvement too. Our lack of personal connection to this team compared to Vicky definitely makes their decisions more nebulous and harder to justify, but it also makes them harder to analyse, which is what I’m trying to do here. To the best of my ability, I’ll be avoiding analysing character with the intent to just discuss the effects of their narrative decisions.
I believe there’s been a certain amount of overzealousness being employed in the worldbuilding of this current ‘era’ of Warriors (which I will be calling the Editorial era to contrast the Vicky era), especially since the new site launch and the start of The Broken Code arc.
And, yeah, I think The Broken Code has broken Warriors.
So the thing about the Dark Forest is that it was invented as a flexible plot device that was able to propel the Firestar vs Tigerstar conflict beyond its otherwise definite end in the first arc, while still being a dynamic setpiece for the actual protagonists of the future arcs. You will notice that there is nothing really explored about the location beyond this purpose. Introduction of new Dark Forest characters is limited and more for decoration than for intent. The focus is on Tigerstar and his fellow ‘leaders’ (the other villains we have met throughout the books), and their sole goal is to launch an attack on the Clans. Beyond our introduction to the concept of permanent spiritual death through Antpelt, this land has little to offer us in terms of new worldbuilding ideas, hooks for future arcs. The Dark Forest is as dark, misty and confusing as its own purpose as a setpiece. That means that, for all intents and purposes, when the Great Battle ended with Tigerstar, Brokenstar dead and others scattered without their leaders, that was the end of the Dark Forest as a narrative setpiece.
With A Vision of Shadows over with its social upheaval and politics reflecting The New Prophecy, the new team had to turn to the Power of Three of their new saga. The A Vision of Shadows arc suffered from malformed direction, feeling split down the middle between Darktail’s story and SkyClan’s story, and the story team definitely understood they now needed a grander idea that could carry a six-book arc. Naturally, their minds turned to a number of unanswered questions and talking points surrounding the story since Omen of the Stars.
What happened to the Dark Forest after the Great Battle?
Why did Ashfur get into StarClan?
What does the Warrior Code mean anymore?
All of these questions have one thing in common: they’re highly discussed by fans, and have been for years. They’re also questions that were pretty much already addressed in text and moved on from in Vicky era and even a little bit in early Editorial era. Dark Forest is weird and empty. Yellowfang provided some wishy-washy judgement on Ashfur which was stupid and hand-wavy but ultimately enough in line with her idiosyncrasies to work at face value. The Code is still the Code, but traditions change and interpretations are pretty inconsistent. We may gripe and complain, but this is something we were all pretty used to in Vicky’s Warriors. Whether we liked it or not (and trust me, sometimes it was for the worse), I think we understood she had the prolific mindset of someone contracted to plot an entire franchise and was interested in moving on instead of dwelling on old decisions. The Dark Forest was a plot device. Ashfur was a plot device. The Code is an attempt at hard world rules, with the nuanced acknowledgement that they aren’t just that, and must be interpreted and explored by the characters. Once these ideas had served their purpose in full, Vicky didn’t want to play with them anymore. Cue the Toy Story GIF.
So let’s get back to the use of these elements in The Broken Code, which I’ll remind you is the third arc of the Editorial era. Dawn and Vision passed relatively benignly in terms of world, being very insular in the sense that they formed a new post-Omen saga of Warriors, one that wasn’t so referential of the past saga. Of course, it is not inherently bad to make a Dark Forest arc after Omen. As I’ve stated, the Dark Forest as a setpiece was tight and flexible, but that tightness made it incredibly vague and unestablished, basically only existing in the bounds of its own relevance to the plot. It isn’t a crime to extrapolate on this setpiece to create a new conflict.
What is a crime is to redefine it in a way that makes it incongruent to the existing world of Warriors.
I’m not gonna pretend like a tight ‘word of god’ respect to an established world is ideal. It limits narrative innovation and makes the whole writing process very stale and restrictive. You always want to be adding new ideas, new conflicts, or you’re gonna lose the serialised aspect of the word series very quickly. But by god, when you’re multiple editors working on something that was once created by a single mind, you have to find some balance! I think we all learned this with Star Wars. Respect doesn’t have to kill innovation if you don’t let it. It’s about acknowledging the framework, the sandbox you have before you and extrapolating within that. It’s about ‘yes, and’ improvisation, about building instead of second-guessing or just plain misinterpreting the framework by saying no, it was like this.
Since Squirrelflight’s Hope, the story team refuses to yes and Vicky’s worldbuilding. StarClan has trials for situations they engendered now. Like oh, yeah, if you thought it was bad enough that Squirrelflight got flak from her Clanmates, now the people who manipulated her into the situation have got something to say! They just do that now. Purgatory exists and Juniperclaw’s in it. StarClan cats can control ghosts and possess corpses if they’re mean enough. Frecklewish is in the Dark Forest.
Since when did the Dark Forest ever accept people that weren’t total fucking villains? Oh, apparently they’ve been doing that since always according to Editorial. Look, Frecklewish is here. Frecklewish is here amid “ethnic cleansing” Tigerstar and “child soldiers” Brokenstar and “serial murderer” Mapleshade. Lest I forget to mention that Frecklewish is Mapleshade’s victim.
And it’s not just about retcon, because we know that’s a neutral device, but it’s about the unintentional implications that retcon, when used zealously and disrespectfully, raises about every other pillar of the world.
StarClan had its issues before, but now they're a ghost court? When did that happen? What made it happen? Why is their judgement unsympathetic and ignorant of context when we just had an arc exploring why unsympathetic interpretation of the Code is bad?
What even are the rules anymore when Mudclaw can go to StarClan after staging a coup but his narrative parallel Juniperclaw has to settle for the most second-thoughted attempt at Purgatory possible after a similar deed leads to him saving a life in a fit of sacrificial atonement?
Why does Shadowsight have no connection to StarClan when StarClan has always had the ability to send visions and dreams to literally any random cat? Has it lost that ability? Do cats who can’t commune with StarClan just exist now?
If Ashfur can control ghosts, what is stopping any morally dubious cat ever from doing the exact same thing? Has it been done before without us realising?
If good thoughts and bad thoughts influence the behaviour of the Dark Forest and its inhabitants, why did we not see this with the Dark Forest trainees? Is this implying someone like Breezepelt was ‘infected’ by the Dark Forest instead of having his own agency?
We had our peeves before this but we did not have these issues and now we do, because the nature of retroactivity is that it affects everything that came before. It breaks everything that came before by rendering it unreliable. With a retcon, if you say ‘this exists now’, it has always existed. Frecklewish has always been in the Dark Forest. Vicky did not put Frecklewish in the Dark Forest, but she has always been there.
Yesterday, the editors looked at Mapleshade’s Vengeance, a slice of the world they did not create, and said ‘Frecklewish callously and deliberately facilitated the deaths of Mapleshade’s kits and felt no remorse’. Mapleshade’s Vengeance replied ‘we don’t know these things, because we lack her perspective’. They said ‘this is her perspective now’, and Mapleshade’s Vengeance lost its feet as a piece of literature entirely.
This type of editorial behaviour completely undercuts the writing that once existed, and destroys the reader’s confidence in that writing. Your reader has no reason to have faith in it anymore. You are mangling the hand that pays you.
If I were to search for an appropriate metaphor, I would say a franchise is essentially a tower that is constantly built upon, because every addition relies on the foundations below it, and if you just up and take the bottom out because you want to change the bricks or whatever, you’ve got a problem. The characters and plots could be absolutely airtight, but as far as narrative goes, these elements do not exist in a vacuum, and I do not remotely understand Warriors’ world anymore.
So that’s my problem with the editorial approach these past few years. The story team are trying to take full control over a world that was not always theirs. They’re trying to rebuild the house instead of living in it, and not only is it unrecognisable but it is broken.
What is my suggestion to the story team? Please, begin reconsidering your approach to the world. Instead of imposing yourself onto old ideas, consider why those ideas were placed on the tapestry in the first place, and how they can be enriched. I know you’re capable of this, because instalments like Graystripe’s Vow and the recent novellas and Jolley’s work on the graphic novels still understand the series. They add without subtracting. And I know you’re probably listening to my thoughts in some indirect respect, because my long-winded anonymous suggestions on your brand poll last year continue to appear in the recent slew of super editions and graphic novels with astounding specificity.
For all its passion and intrigue and careful planning, The Broken Code did not work. And I think without careful reassessment, the franchise may be broken forever.
CONCLUSION
Thanks for reading to the end. I’d like to mention that this is basically a late-night braindump in response to the Frecklewish article further exposing a deep problem I’ve perceived with the IP over the past three years. It is not a structured essay, and I’m not about to pretend I’m trying to be some creative consultant to Working Partners, as much as I might wish it so. It isn’t really about Frecklewish nor does it really discuss other problems with the IP such as colonialist themes, but I feel it’s a perspective that hasn’t really been explored in detail outside some of Moonkitti’s analyses over the years, a good example being her video ‘that Whitestorm problem i keep bringing up’.
Discussion is welcomed and encouraged. I’d like to refine my own argument via some second opinions, since as mentioned I didn’t really structure this blog post.
