i'm salvator e/em or it/its. this is my warrior cats blog. it waxes and wanes in activity. i post art and random meta.
not nsfw but i'd prefer followers to be 18+ just because i'm crudely made and i like to swear and be cynical. and also i like to complain about misogyny and racism and other serious topics in the books/fandom as well. if you follow me it means you promise to behave under my posts.
i primarily enjoy interpreting warrior cats as a satire on war and jingoism, very in line with 'theater of cruelty' surrealism. i don't like rewrites that sacrifice the shortcomings of clan society. most of my wc discussion is under this lens of hostility and doesn't necessarily follow the textual 'mood' that the authors of the books imply. this is because i think they don't know what they're doing.
my favorite cats are shadowsight dovewing twigbranch spottedleaf leafpool and tree. fav background cats are foxleap and icecloud but also hazeltail and mousewhisker. favorite clan is windclan or shadowclan. favorite arc is the broken code. i miss novellas real bad. ive given up on reading any mainline story stuff past asc.
required readings for my interpretation of warrior cats (yes really)
- spurt of blood by antonin artaud
- galapagos by kurt vonnegut
- marisol and sueño by josé rivera
- additionally, life is a dream by pedro calderón de la barca
- man alive and get to heaven by everything everything
- basically any arthuriana, but also this specific article about prophecies and free will
- my #readinglist tag which is half a farce and half real
#la vida es gatos is the tag for my humanised fantasy retelling of wc. i don't know if i'll ever do anything serious and complete with it but all my posts about it go in there.
sprite on this post is dovewing from the polish wiki
icon is sss warrior cats spottedleaf
banner is russian artwork of dovewing
ummmm unpopular popular opinion game time. the new prophecy?
ok so. echoing stuff youve said. i like the Idea of crowfeather as an accessory to leafpool's arc. i like him as a misguided excuse for leafpool to sort out her feelings of alienation and loneliness and i like how, when they return, crowfeather immediately tries to sweep it under the rug and compensates for his "disloyalty" by entering a loveless marriage with nightcloud entirely for political gain. i think, without the context of things like tbc and author word of god "they still love each other and they will live happily in starclan" type shit, it's very strong for both characters involved. similarly (and this stretches a bit past the tnp threshold, but whatever) i do like how crowfeather and nightcloud are some of the only cats to actually split up as a couple without it being a big dramatic thing. like i mean all the breezepelt stuff is a mess and there's moments where they try to portray leafpool as a cheating whore or whatever, but just on a base level, between crowfeather and nightcloud, i think their (lack of a) relationship is really interesting.
on a similar train of thought, it was an arc where a lot of cats had actual friends and it was relatively plot relevant instead of every background character just being used as excuses to go on patrols. like leafpool has a lot of friends!! and theyre even girls!! characters like sorreltail and cody and mothwing are allowed to be part of the narrative!! and i think its funny that leafpaw unknowingly meets mothwings mom while trapped by twolegs lol. i dont think they ever talk about it.
for avos: i really like the sisters conceptually and ive talked about it before but i really like tree as what he is in base AVOS… i think his novella was a bad step for his characterisation because his false backstory to needletail i think in one of the extra chapters was far more compelling and mysterious. i think he works best as a reflection of sol as this mystical outsider who can do miracles but while sol has the attitude for it while being really pathetic and having 0 control and skills, tree is someone who is genuinely capable of doing amazing things but has no drive at all for it. and i suppose i think of it more cynically than the books actually intend it, but i also like taking his forgettability in clan politics as a conscious flaw of the clans and the mediator role in itself. his job is entirely optical and meant to uphold a vision of peace that is completely unattainable.
thats not so much about avos i suppose as it is about how stupid the extra material is. so uhhh more in the spirit of the game: i love twigbranch. i love her clan hopping and hesitation and the fact she doesnt want to have kids and the way she struggles with connecting with a family that she never really had at all. i know a lot of avos rewrites kind of place more of an emphasis on her and alderheart's connection, or her and thunderclan in general, but to be perfectly honest i like her as someone who is drifting everywhere she goes and feels out of place everywhere she goes, who only stays in thunderclan because she "began" there and it's the greatest normalcy she can ever hope for. it does just speak to me personally as a mixed immigrant who lives in a completely different country now. also i like the fact that sticking with skyclan is not the resolution of her arc. like obviously its written with the "we're in different clans but we're still family <3" caveat but even that is kind of refreshing for warrior cats which is so focused on blood relations and nationalism. i guess its happened before with tawnypelt but that was like a weird "people compare me to my racist father so im joining my racist father to prove im not racist like my father" while twigbranch feels more realistic to me lol
also, twigbranch has an awesome name, cannot believe people were complaining about it. its literally cute.
i don't mind a lot of the 'these are just humans' critiques lended towards books like warrior cats. like i enjoy a good philosophical story with indepth worldbuilding about animal conlangs and how colors are described as beeboo and lala but i also just don't mind the purpose of a story being an abstracted fable-y reflection of human society and relationships. wc is haphazard about it but i like the way one of the erins phrased it (forgot which) that was like, "writing with cats is great because you can have a character be born and like 2 years later they're having their own kids" like after getting into my medieval au and approaching it like an original story, Yeah the fact humans take so long to develop mentally and also Human Pregnancy Being Obscenely Long Compared To Other Animals does in fact get in the way of storytelling. like you just cannot suspend disbelief as easily without doing a dozen timeskips lol. and i think just that shifted time scale is already a really good and fascinating argument for writing "shallow" xenofiction
for avos: i really like the sisters conceptually and ive talked about it before but i really like tree as what he is in base AVOS… i think his novella was a bad step for his characterisation because his false backstory to needletail i think in one of the extra chapters was far more compelling and mysterious. i think he works best as a reflection of sol as this mystical outsider who can do miracles but while sol has the attitude for it while being really pathetic and having 0 control and skills, tree is someone who is genuinely capable of doing amazing things but has no drive at all for it. and i suppose i think of it more cynically than the books actually intend it, but i also like taking his forgettability in clan politics as a conscious flaw of the clans and the mediator role in itself. his job is entirely optical and meant to uphold a vision of peace that is completely unattainable.
thats not so much about avos i suppose as it is about how stupid the extra material is. so uhhh more in the spirit of the game: i love twigbranch. i love her clan hopping and hesitation and the fact she doesnt want to have kids and the way she struggles with connecting with a family that she never really had at all. i know a lot of avos rewrites kind of place more of an emphasis on her and alderheart's connection, or her and thunderclan in general, but to be perfectly honest i like her as someone who is drifting everywhere she goes and feels out of place everywhere she goes, who only stays in thunderclan because she "began" there and it's the greatest normalcy she can ever hope for. it does just speak to me personally as a mixed immigrant who lives in a completely different country now. also i like the fact that sticking with skyclan is not the resolution of her arc. like obviously its written with the "we're in different clans but we're still family <3" caveat but even that is kind of refreshing for warrior cats which is so focused on blood relations and nationalism. i guess its happened before with tawnypelt but that was like a weird "people compare me to my racist father so im joining my racist father to prove im not racist like my father" while twigbranch feels more realistic to me lol
also, twigbranch has an awesome name, cannot believe people were complaining about it. its literally cute.
so sorry for popping up randomly in your inbox but I stumbled onto your art while looking for frostdawn playlists on spotify (lol) and literally fell in love with your style. it's so unique and I love the way you use color and shape in your designs!! additionally your interpretations of the characters are so real and so genuine and I just had to let you know. thank you for making art!! and also sick character playlists that are very on point to me I guess ^^
Ppl send topics and instead of salt or hot takes, you MUST talk abt smth you like about it. Good excuse to gush abt smth you already love, OR think and find smth positive to say.
Hard mode, “missed potential” is NOT allowed as an answer.
more fantasy au stuff. sasha and mothwing this time!
check the post i made a few days ago in my tags for more twolegplace lore, but tldr it’s a big city type deal on the cusp of having an industrial revolution, clans strongly oppose relations with twolegplace because they view it as a faux-utopia of complete leisure where everyone is lazy and gets things for free. in reality it’s not that idealistic and there’s a lot of poor districts buckling under the weight of extreme expansion. this is important base knowledge for sasha and a lot of other rogues/kittypets going forward!
sasha facts:
she’s a vaudeville burlesque sort of performer who’s main thing is singing and generally looking pretty. sasha wilde is a stage name! but it’s what most people know her as, even as she visits the clans
her background is southeast asian! she’s a second gen immigrant to twolegplace and went into the profession in her 20s after struggling to keep herself afloat. her family was not remarkably rich and she didn’t want to strain them
though she enjoyed her job and it provided her with some amount of financial safety, harassment was common and she was often overworking herself
when tigerstar is exiled from thunderclan, he spends two-ish years in twolegplace, where he meets sasha after a performance. falling on hard times and feeling overdue for romance sasha accompanies him for a while and they have an affair
he sort of just leaves her one day without any words exchanged. she’s fine with this for a while but then tigerstar’s complete absence kind of worries her even if she’s realised by now that He is not a good man. she tracks him down along the clans but gets told off by a shadowclan patrol. at this point she’s already had hawkfrost and is currently pregnant with mothwing. russetfur follows her back to the city outskirts (She is barely scraping by and it is noticeable) and she informs sasha that tigerstar is dead, but that the clans would probably not be happy about supporting his kids because of his reputation as a tyrant. she recommends riverclan as a potential sanctuary due to their past ties with tigerstar…. kind of taking advantage of leopardstar’s weakness
fwiw russetfur is right as leopardstar takes full sympathy for sasha and welcomes her with the caveat that her children be trained as riverclan warriors
she stays in riverclan and recovers for a couple of years, watching her kids grow up. around their late teens she becomes restless and decides to return back to the city
she seeks out bloodclan (i don’t think scourge will die in this au and the whole showdown will happen very differently — it’s already stupid in the books but it becomes even weirder to wipe out a group of poor starving people when the clans end up leaving that territory in like a year anyway) and basically lives in their midst, and she bonds with scourge about tigerstar trauma
kind of implied but tadpole doesn’t exist in this au. because What’s the point.
now for mothwing:
trained as a warrior early on just like in the books, then became a cleric after her older brother hawkfrost fakes a sign for her
very skilled as a surgeon — has a strong foundation in proper medicine and therapy of course but she’s got the best hands for amputations and stitches out of all the clerics
her story is fairly 1 on 1 with the books honestly. thank you girl for being mostly irrelevant
her name and title is ‘melati the mothwing’ which leads me to a tangent: you may have noticed for my silverstream design i’ve named her ‘nerissa of silverstream’ and i think, at least among nobility, most riverclanners actually have a ‘of (name)’ title instead of a ‘the’ due to nobility being much stronger and more consistent. so actually like crookedstar’s human name would be ‘king christopher of silverstream’ or something, with the implication that silverstream is the family name. because it’s the most monarchistic sounding out of that family line haha. so basically riverclan is one of the only kingdoms to have a familial title inheritance system like this… and so, mothwing having a more basic title yet being a cleric signifies that she is not only not nobility, but also an outsider, as it’s very very rare for riverclan clerics to not have SOME relation to the upper crust of society. anyway that’s an early ‘tigerstar dad’ clue
notice that she has very plain clothing (as all good clerics do) but it Does have some blue embellishments and minor armor. the first comes from riverclan being immodest and obsessed with embellishment, and the second comes from her wanting to signify her past as a warrior. most riverclanners receive custom armor upon graduating apprenticeship so it’d be a shame to throw out those nice pauldrons, right
riverclan clerics also typically have masks which actually started as a sort of status thing, and they were always stylised after nature as a sort of commedia dellarte sensibility since riverclan is the most ‘invested’ in arts and theater especially. but i think as arcs go on these become commonplace among all clerics because it turns out they’re good for preventing disease spread. Lol
did you know most doctors didn’t wear gloves until about 100 years ago? that’s why she’s handling a scalpel bare-handed. maybe the clans learn about germ theory by tbc
tangent: i think riverclan has the highest success rate of medical intervention because they live by the sea and probably have more sensibility about washing things + air quality and stuff in general. meanwhile skyclan probably actually knows about contamination. so you know what? that’s true. the clans do learn about germ theory by tbc
more fantasy au stuff. sasha and mothwing this time!
check the post i made a few days ago in my tags for more twolegplace lore, but tldr it’s a big city type deal on the cusp of having an industrial revolution, clans strongly oppose relations with twolegplace because they view it as a faux-utopia of complete leisure where everyone is lazy and gets things for free. in reality it’s not that idealistic and there’s a lot of poor districts buckling under the weight of extreme expansion. this is important base knowledge for sasha and a lot of other rogues/kittypets going forward!
sasha facts:
she’s a vaudeville burlesque sort of performer who’s main thing is singing and generally looking pretty. sasha wilde is a stage name! but it’s what most people know her as, even as she visits the clans
her background is southeast asian! she’s a second gen immigrant to twolegplace and went into the profession in her 20s after struggling to keep herself afloat. her family was not remarkably rich and she didn’t want to strain them
though she enjoyed her job and it provided her with some amount of financial safety, harassment was common and she was often overworking herself
when tigerstar is exiled from thunderclan, he spends two-ish years in twolegplace, where he meets sasha after a performance. falling on hard times and feeling overdue for romance sasha accompanies him for a while and they have an affair
he sort of just leaves her one day without any words exchanged. she’s fine with this for a while but then tigerstar’s complete absence kind of worries her even if she’s realised by now that He is not a good man. she tracks him down along the clans but gets told off by a shadowclan patrol. at this point she’s already had hawkfrost and is currently pregnant with mothwing. russetfur follows her back to the city outskirts (She is barely scraping by and it is noticeable) and she informs sasha that tigerstar is dead, but that the clans would probably not be happy about supporting his kids because of his reputation as a tyrant. she recommends riverclan as a potential sanctuary due to their past ties with tigerstar…. kind of taking advantage of leopardstar’s weakness
fwiw russetfur is right as leopardstar takes full sympathy for sasha and welcomes her with the caveat that her children be trained as riverclan warriors
she stays in riverclan and recovers for a couple of years, watching her kids grow up. around their late teens she becomes restless and decides to return back to the city
she seeks out bloodclan (i don’t think scourge will die in this au and the whole showdown will happen very differently — it’s already stupid in the books but it becomes even weirder to wipe out a group of poor starving people when the clans end up leaving that territory in like a year anyway) and basically lives in their midst, and she bonds with scourge about tigerstar trauma
kind of implied but tadpole doesn’t exist in this au. because What’s the point.
now for mothwing:
trained as a warrior early on just like in the books, then became a cleric after her older brother hawkfrost fakes a sign for her
very skilled as a surgeon — has a strong foundation in proper medicine and therapy of course but she’s got the best hands for amputations and stitches out of all the clerics
her story is fairly 1 on 1 with the books honestly. thank you girl for being mostly irrelevant
her name and title is ‘melati the mothwing’ which leads me to a tangent: you may have noticed for my silverstream design i’ve named her ‘nerissa of silverstream’ and i think, at least among nobility, most riverclanners actually have a ‘of (name)’ title instead of a ‘the’ due to nobility being much stronger and more consistent. so actually like crookedstar’s human name would be ‘king christopher of silverstream’ or something, with the implication that silverstream is the family name. because it’s the most monarchistic sounding out of that family line haha. so basically riverclan is one of the only kingdoms to have a familial title inheritance system like this… and so, mothwing having a more basic title yet being a cleric signifies that she is not only not nobility, but also an outsider, as it’s very very rare for riverclan clerics to not have SOME relation to the upper crust of society. anyway that’s an early ‘tigerstar dad’ clue
notice that she has very plain clothing (as all good clerics do) but it Does have some blue embellishments and minor armor. the first comes from riverclan being immodest and obsessed with embellishment, and the second comes from her wanting to signify her past as a warrior. most riverclanners receive custom armor upon graduating apprenticeship so it’d be a shame to throw out those nice pauldrons, right
riverclan clerics also typically have masks which actually started as a sort of status thing, and they were always stylised after nature as a sort of commedia dellarte sensibility since riverclan is the most ‘invested’ in arts and theater especially. but i think as arcs go on these become commonplace among all clerics because it turns out they’re good for preventing disease spread. Lol
did you know most doctors didn’t wear gloves until about 100 years ago? that’s why she’s handling a scalpel bare-handed. maybe the clans learn about germ theory by tbc
tangent: i think riverclan has the highest success rate of medical intervention because they live by the sea and probably have more sensibility about washing things + air quality and stuff in general. meanwhile skyclan probably actually knows about contamination. so you know what? that’s true. the clans do learn about germ theory by tbc
a lot of toxic mom and daughter relationship in fiction are about a mother that either doesn't love her daughter at all and makes her pay for it, or loves her too strongly without understanding her at all and suffocating her slowly. these are both really good but there's something to be said about the mom who looks at her daughter and understands her fully and despises her, while also being protective and loving her in a warped way. im going to fix you into what you should have been for your own good. i will mold you in what you need to be to survive. i will do this for your own good because i do understand you and i love you and the more you squirm and fight back the worse you make jt for both of us. ughhhh need more of this so so bad
