#bristleroot

[jayadwal]

[sillisorrels]

Hypokits for an adopt post! ( on a different platform)

I LOVE HOW MOTHPOOL’S CAME OUT AA SO SILLY

[sp00nful0fsuga]

Warriors doodle requests <3

[voyageclan]

Happy valentines, time to repost my favorite doomed ship animation meme from last year 💜

[camoucrimson]

Mildly obsessed with the warriorcats minis (I can post them seperately if asked 😁)

[ladybug-makes-warriors-gay]

hiiii!!! i just read your post on wc romances and how they fall short and id love to hear more about your ideas regarding bristlefrost and rootsprings relationship! awesome post btw!

thank you! romance is wc is honestly one of the topics i feel most strongly about, which funny coming from me (very aromantic).

bristlefrost and rootspring are interesting to me because they feel much more like they have an actual relationship and real feelings towards and thoughts about each other. they actually interact, they have scenes together, and their dynamic has an impact on both them and the cats around them. they also don't just fall in love and have everything immediately work out for them.

i first read tbc when it was coming out years ago and never finished it, and i honestly didn't remember their dynamic at all. now that i've read it again, honestly i think they are more interesting individually when you consider their impact on each other, but they're still more interesting individually. i honestly think that bristlefrost dying saved their dynamic, because otherwise they would just be background in love couple #23 with five million legacy babies.

wc in general has a habit, especially recently, of treating couples as a unit in the way they are talked about and interact with others. nightheart and sunbeam are definitely the worst offender for this, and i have many, many opinions on their relationship, but they are given so much more care and consideration when they are not together or when they have to do something on their own. i think they are both incredibly interesting characters, but whenever they are together, they are both dumbed down to "perfectly in love and work great together and none of their conflicts with each other matter anymore", mostly in the last books of asc.

rootspring and bristlefrost definitely get this near the end of tbc too, just to a lesser degree than night and sun. i noticed it most in the way that shadowsight is talked about as their friend as a couple, not on an individual level. but, the main thing that i hear people talking about, and honestly i agree, is that bristlefrost wasn't into rootspring. it was interesting that he liked her and she didn't like him back, and it made her feel more like a character with agency, rather than "woman only focused on romantic relationships", especially after her character was so rooted in her feelings about stemleaf (which is a topic for a whole separate post. i think there were good and bad elements of that plotline). then she just suddenly did like him, without much leadup or development.

despite all of that, i still think they're one of the better written romances. i like that they don't start off immediately romantic, that they each have different feelings about their relationship and have to navigate becoming friends during all the plot stuff that's going on. i think it's interesting that they both have other motivations and that their clans are more important to both of them for most of the time they know each other. i like the tragedy of realizing too late that it could have been different, but it wasn't. i like that they have conversations about their relationship and communicate. i like that bristlefrost's sacrifice was her own choice, that rootspring was one factor of many in it. i like that her death has a lasting impact on rootspring, and that he talks to other characters about it. i like his moments with ivypool. i like that bristlefrost doesn't get to come back and that she isn't either background mom #72 or beautiful dead starclan love interest #438.

i like them because they're complicated and multifaceted, and because their relationship isn't everything to them but it eventually comes to affect the way they each see everything else. i like that i have enough thoughts about them and moments that they have to write this long of a post about them.

[d0vesong]

future bristleroot sticker!

[loftwingofcrimson]

The two opposites of what I would give to have Bristlefrost and Rootspring back together and what I would do if Bristlefrost ever came back at all