Since you said just a couple days ago that you originally had Foxjaw be Mudpaw's dad, how exactly did that change into Possum being his dad?
That idea came from an old video idea that I ended up scrapping! It was actually the old version of the events told in "The Accident" if you can believe it. I wanted to use the song "Lullaby" by American Horror Song as a backstory for Mudpaw
Warning for some dark themes in this alternate story. darker than usual lmao.
In the first version of the story, neither of Mudpaw's parents were from Micaclan. The fire still happens, but it's a really big apartment building, and lots of cats are displaced. Possum (idk if I had thought of a name for him at this point) says he's heard of some cats living deep in the mountains, and the huge group goes off in search of the clan. However, as time passes, cats start dropping off; some succumbing to the cold, others getting lost in the swirling wind and snow. Mudpaw's mom ends up collapsing, and Possum can only take her so far. He can't carry both Mudpaw and Sweetpea. She basically tells him to go on without her, but Possum can't bear to leave her to die a painful death alone in the cold.
From here, I had two ideas, and one was significantly darker than the other. In one, Possum stays by her side until she dies, and gets left behind by the larger group. In the other, he basically performs a mercy-kill, so that she doesn't have to keep suffering. Possum end up unable to leave her, either way. When he stays, he grows too cold to move. When he does the mercy-kill, he finds that he can't even bring himself to leave her body, not even to save his kit. He takes her collar and puts it on his kit (who is a fair bit older than he appears in The Accident, old enough to walk on his own), but can't move himself after. Eventually, baby Mudpaw has to try to find the group that left them behind, leaving behind his dead mom and near-catatonic father. He can't find the group, and ends up collapsing in an icy mud puddle. But before he meets the same fate as his mother, a clan cat, wrentail, finds him. He's taken back to the clan and nursed back to health; his only connection to his old life being a dirty and mangled kittypet collar that's far too big for him.
The framing for the story in the video was going to be mudpaw telling his story to pearfur's kittens. If you remember the mudpaw trauma dump video, that's what it was going to be leading up to haha
ANYWAY the storyline morphed over time BUT the funniest thing about it is that Possum being a former Micaclan cat became a thing only because I accidentally gave both him and Gullytuft that white forehead head marking. I thought, instead of redesigning him, why not have it be a family resemblance? So then they became siblings and Possum became an ex-Micaclan member! (I did eventually redesign him but I made him more gullytuft-ish instead of less lol)
