Xenofiction confession

Icon & header image is created and owned by Watership Down. (Wip)

[xenofiction-confession]

this did get me thinking about sturgeon possibly dying though and i realized she literally could not. she's holding the whole comic together. i can imagine hake dying, in fact i believe he was supposed to die really early on at first before plans changed? and i could totally see trout dying at some point and someone like gull fully taking over. but if sturgeon dies there's no one with both good will and the balls to actually do something about it left. which makes sense if you consider her the main character but she is still technically sharing that role with her expendable pushover siblings. sturgeon queen of agency is not going anywhere or the comic will fall apart real fast

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[xenofiction-confession]

IMO IHS is just boring. stuff like GS, WLB, and Jumalanpelko had some issues but at least SOMETHING actually happened each page. (In Golden Shrike’s case each chapter I suppose) I Hope So feels slow and dull in comparison to those. Especially after it branched out from the chapters that mirrored My Pride.

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[xenofiction-confession]

I don’t fully agree with the “lesbian torture porn” description, but I will say that personally I think the girlfriends in these wlw centric stories are often lacking in characterization outside of their relationship to the protagonist

(Forget Me Not does surprisingly dodge this though imo)

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[xenofiction-confession]

there's no shot sturgeon's dead. the author has said there's at least 5 more years of wlb left and she's the only proactive person in the whole comic she's not dying halfway through. that anon has to be trolling

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[xenofiction-confession]

WLB Patron here: the two asks about Sturgeon dying were people joking around or being sarcastic. She’s fine.

Sorry if I’m being a buzzkill by giving away the joke lol. I just wanted to debunk it since Patreon is 8 pages ahead; it’ll be a few weeks until they’re posted, and I didn’t want any poor souls freaking out in the meantime about accidentally seeing a “Patreon spoiler.”

but i have to admit, it was real surprising that she managed to survive a direct blast from The Tide’s laser eyes. wow!! this shit is crazy!!

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[xenofiction-confession]

Controversial take, but as someone who's trans and can't come out or even change my apparience a bit because of the country where I live, I'm really upset when fans call viima a good example of trans rep, and that it actually makes an impact.

Because let's see at it:

-He dies brutally without even fully realizing he's trans. Everyone still refers to him by She/Her pronouns.

-It doesn't really have an impact on the plot or a big exploration of it, beyond a very, single off hand conversation, that I'm pretty sure was retroactively added as an extra. One that could be just waved off, btw. Asking if all the sun cats are always she cats is very whatever.

-We see almost nothing of him, besides very few flashbacks and his ghost. What's even his personality? He's a Red Shirt if anything, which is fine on its own, a narrative tool.

-He's given a name by someone else. And that's the name we must use, but seriously isn't anyone thinking about the fact the trans character has a name given by someone else and he has absolutely no say on it and in-universe is always being misgendered? Guys, how is this a example to follow, it drives me crazy!

Is a tragedy, I know. I wouldn't really mind if people didn't hail Viima as super great trans rep, as opposed to other comics. If you can miss it, is not great trans rep.

Kuutamo and (so far, Lysti) aren't much better. Maybe fandom should stop seeing things as "this is great rep!" And more on "this makes me feel things!"

I don't expect a tragedy & horror to have therapy speak. But saying Viima is one good example of a trans characters in the animal comics community, to me is like saying Tallstar and Jake are good gay rep. Sometimes a minority will be a background character and that's it, just a background character.

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[xenofiction-confession]

confession: I don't know if anyone has talked about it or has confessed this here before (im very new here) but i want to say it is very lonely being a Black fan of xenofiction. especially being someone coming from liking warrior cats as a child (sorry I know that this is something most ppl on here don't like to talk about but its the one I've got a brain worm from it). no one talks about how antiblackness permeates this genre. no one talks about how Weird it is that in warriors, we are constantly calling their groups "clans" (makes me thing of the KKK) and "colonies" (I am very well aware that these are not words and connotations that are fully the fault of warriors as a franchise or as a fandom, But it is worth discussing given how American the fandom is and how British the authors are/have been) or how almost all of the original villains are shown to be a big, dark evil brutes. I don't know, the egregious tribalism and anti native racism is there of course and it needs to be talked AND the antiblackness. the most I've ever seen from warriors fans is giving the cats Black hairstyles, which I do love but idk. I just feel lonely because animals are what Black people are most often compared to and being in love with xenofiction from a young age has led me to question antiblackness a career path and in research. its gotten me places I've never dreamed of but being in community with other fans is just feeling invisible, it feels like no one sees what I see. I'm sorry this turned into a vent with no real point, its been bothering me for months. if any of you have recommendations for xenofic that engages with the antiblackness, not racism, I'd take it. thank you for this blog and thank you for reading.

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[xenofiction-confession]

yeah sturgeon just died on the patreon, i really can't believe it. no one to root for left in the comic.

Yikes...

[xenofiction-confession]

Hot take regarding WAC: I feel like exploring ABDL kinks in cat fiction, especially when a lot of kids follow the comics (you know they won't heed warnings), is a tad weird. Like I am all for people doing what they want, but when the relationship never looked romantic of any kind, it's really weird it came out of the blue.

Especially when said characters rope in a child in the story. I wish it had been mentioned earlier on because I had believed the two were actual mother and son.

Don't get me started on how the abusive gay relationship is a stereotype. Big burly guy abuses the effeminate small guy. We've seen this millions of times on yaoi AO3 and written better.

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[xenofiction-confession]

i don't think trout is babied at all. she's clearly being held responsible for her actions by the readers and the narrative. i beg people to have an ounce of empathy for her, bc yes, her actions are unforgivable, but she's been through so much physical and mental trauma i can at least empathize with why she is a weak leader. wlb is trying to ask difficult questions about leadership and organized animal societies, and i think it's doing a good job exploring the answers. i find a lot of readers are just impatient; the comic is very long, i have faith trouts arc will be satisfying, and she will get her karma, but in a way that doesn't throw her out entirely.

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[xenofiction-confession]

Wait when did Talondusk and Fishwhisker start dating??

Petalsong did date both of them, but they never entered a relationship with each other??

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[xenofiction-confession]

It pisses me off that Heartclan Chronicles has two characters who are victims of rape/sexual assault yet the author didn't even explore the consequences and effects it had on the characters. They just cried/acted shocked and that's it. Hell, one of them even had to give birth to their rapists (Nightflash) kid. It feels like this was just added for shock value and because it's now a "trend". Also they decided it was a good idea to bring back Nightflash in their new story when he was already dead because???? I guess because they ran out of ideas for creative villains

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[xenofiction-confession]

I understand that using humans as villains in animal stories has its reasons and, unfortunately, reflects reality. But on top of that, these stories are as boring and obvious as saying that water is wet and the sun is hot. In particular, it depresses me because most stories like this feel like they exist solely to fuel some misanthropic sentiment in order to gain validation, rather than to convey a message about changing things.

It also infuriates and saddens me to a certain extent, because I feel that continuing to feed that narrative only obscures and undermines all the people who dedicate their lives to trying to care for species and ecosystems and who, in many cases, even die without anyone listening to them. Of course, there are idiots who do horrible things to nature out of selfishness and for stupid reasons, but I also know firsthand that many others genuinely want to make a difference, and I’m sick of being part of that group that’s just mocked and sidelined while they keep pushing these messages of “humanity is evil, nature is good and pure” because they don’t even want to listen to the people who study these things and try to ask for help to the change.

Even if it’s fiction, even if you want to convey a message, I think it should be a bit more nuanced than just a narrow-minded, pessimistic view that only looks for villains and evil before even presenting a more complete picture.

Sorry, if i got a little carried away.

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[xenofiction-confession]

now that heart clan chronicles has been brought up, I'm now curious as to why anon hates it, i would've read it but the first page had so many speech bubbles that i instantly noped out of it

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[xenofiction-confession]

rest in peace sturgeon what lurks beneath, you would have loved hit showtime series yellowjackets

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[xenofiction-confession]

One of Clouded Moon's biggest fuck ups is taking the old Warrior Cats criticism of the background characters not feeling like people way too far. Not every character needs to be treated like a main character, and we sure as hell don't need to know the entire backstory of ever guy ever. What the original criticism was about was making background characters consistent.

My personal recommendation for working with Xenofiction settings with groups of those size is to focus on a few characters. If you build your group right, you won't need to refer to everyone by name. Only those the protagonist knows well enough. It's very helpful to leave the true scale of the group vague as it lets you slip in characters you need later without having to justify them being there. You don't need to flesh out every single character who has ever lived in your group the way Clouded Moon does, you're just taking time and focus away from your central characters. If you need a background character to say a single line in your entire story, you can always use a physical description.

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[xenofiction-confession]

on one hand i wish we lived in a world where there was no expectation for gender and sexual minority characters to be good "representation" in indie stories, on the other i see how consistently people make appalling decisions for such characters and wonder if we've all learned nothing from how much mainstream media gets criticized about these things. especially in cat xenofiction that's clearly influenced by warrior cats which has (for good reason) been under fire for its questionable writing. i've seen so many stories marketed as "better warriors" or "queer warriors" fall into the same sexist and homophobic tropes it's actually scary. again i don't think it's wise to put the expectation of good rep on indie writers but if you're going to use your queer characters as a selling point the least you could do is not treat them horribly

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