It bothers me when people compare Tailchaser's song and Warriors and act like they're so similar when they're really not?
To me Tailchaser's Song is most similar to Watership Down, being a single novel of epic proportions, with a large focus on the fictional language/mythology, large overall battle that must be won that's not initially present at the beginning of the story but that the plot builds up to through other conflicts.
To me, Warriors is most similar to series like Wings of Fire (arc structure, novellas, etc), Redwall (Length), Guardians of Ga'Hoole (Conflict and age) and Silverwing (how our characters actually perceive the world). Actually, I think it's most similar to the various Ginga manga than anything else.
While Felidae is known for it's graphic violence, it's also not comparable really, besides featuring cats and a cat-cult. These cats are fully aware of how humans work, and at the same time, they often act more cat-like.
While writing this up, I realized that there's a distinct subgenre within Xenofiction that I'm going to refer to as "dog stories". A "dog story" is told from the perspective of a dog, but it's actually about the people in the dog's life rather than the dog itself. In essence, the story could be told from the perspective of a sentient air fryer and very little would change. Popular examples would be "A dog's purpose" and "The art of racing in the rain" amongst others. Of course, not all stories about dogs are "dog stories" but many of them are.
Also, I'm realizing that mice are super popular for Xenofiction, except most just make them tiny humans living parallel to humanity. This isn't a bad thing as many of them are pretty good stories (Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIHM, The Tale of Despereaux , The Rescuers, Etc), while birds outside of owls are very very underrepresented (except for Swordbird, which as a kid I thought sucked. Which is funny because I was and still am into Warriors) ...Unless you count Raptor Red?
