Exiled From Cat-meow-lot
Sep. 24th, 2022 11:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
troisoiseauxAfter a discussion of Charith Baldry's role as ghostwriter for the Warrior Cats series took over arose in the comments of osprey_archer's review of Baldry's "OTT tragic woobie fic" of an Arthurian retelling, Exiled From Camelot, I took one for the team and re-read a couple of the Warriors books: one by Baldry, and one by Kate Cary, one of the other writers who will continue publishing books under the collective pseudonym of Erin Hunter until, presumably, the heat death of the universe.
Confession: I 100% went into this expecting to write a fondly mocking Mystery Science Theater 3000 of a review, because as a concept, the Warriors series is nuts. It's Game of Thrones, about feral cats, for elementary schoolers. It's been published at a rate of 2-4 books a year for almost twenty years; it's apparently currently on its eighth sub-series. It has prophesies coming out of its furry little ears, and in sub-series #3, the protagonists have magic powers. It is COMPLETELY BONKERS and I absolutely devoured these books as a kid (approx. 4th-6th grade).
Turns out, they're actually pretty compelling! I read Moonrise and Dawn, the second and third books of the second subseries (Warriors: The New Prophesy); the tl;dr of the Wikipedia summary of the first book is that six young warriors from the four Clans are told in a dream to go on a quest, to hear a prophesy, which is that the warrior cats' territory is going to be destroyed by humans. There is also another prophesy, which doesn't make a ton of sense without more context than I need to go into to explain the plot of these two books specifically, but it's a thing. Prophesies: 2, not including the "receiving quest instructions in a dream" thing.
In Moonrise, which is Baldry's, the questers head back to warn their Clans, which have already discovered the hard way that their territory has been slated for human land development. There's an interesting juxtaposition between the two plotlines— the questers have bonded despite their differences, and look forward to working together to save their Clans when they return; meanwhile, back home, encroaching starvation and a rash of cats going missing has increased tensions between the Clans. The questers encounter a community of cats who live in the mountains, and there's a brief interlude of cross-cultural discovery, before it turns out that the mountain cats are convinced that one of the questers is prophesied to save them from a dreaded mountain lion and they've decided he's going to save them whether he likes it or not. (Their prophesy turns out to be correct, but as usual, not in the way that everyone thought. We're now at prophesies: 3; dramatic self-sacrifice: 1.) At home, the secret son of the Big Bad of the first sub-series - we'll call him BigBadStar - plots his own rise to cat fascism.
In Dawn, the questers return to an apocalyptic scene: the landscape torn up, trees torn down, the Clans relocated to makeshift camps at the edges of their territory and starving. One of the questers discovers that the missing cats - including her sister - have been trapped by humans, and leads a daring rescue. The four Clans ultimately agree to leave, and find new territory, together; their journey takes them through the mountains again, where they are aided by the mountain cats. One of the original questers - who had fallen in love with a mountain cat in the previous book - decides to stay with them, and another, who was still an apprentice, receives his warrior name. They ultimately reach the place that came to one of the cats in a dream! Yay! BigBadStar's secret son's paternity is revealed, which worries a lot ofpeople cats and makes things complicated for his half-brother, the known son of BigBadStar, who has spent his whole life trying to prove that he's loyal to his Clan/more than his father's son. Total prophesies: 4; dramatic self-sacrifices: 3; otherwise dramatic deaths: at least 3?
(Dawn also features my FAVORITE CHARACTER, Ravenpaw, in a larger-than-cameo role. In the very first book, Ravenpaw is a ThunderClan apprentice, but he's a. generally just too much of a cinnamon roll - too smol, too pure - for the life of a warrior and b. apprenticed to the warrior who becomes BigBadStar, so after he witnesses a murder, his friends help him fake his death so he can go live with his friend Barley, a barn cat who lives outside of the Clan system. I don't think this was intended to be a gay metaphor, but it absolutely feels like a gay metaphor, and whoever wrote this Wikipedia page clearly agrees with me.)
My one nit to pick - I mean, as a grown adult reading a series for children, there are a number of other nits that I have decided aren't my problem, but to pick one - is that there are just so many characters and so much going on, all of the time, that even the POV characters feel very thinly sketched. This isn't necessarily a problem, because the books are action-heavy where they're characterization-light; I guess it's a feature rather than a bug?
Having done some background Googling, I am gobsmacked to discover that the series apparently takes place in England??? I mean, the fact that one of the Clans' territories is moorland probably should have been a clue, but in my defense, I was in the U.S. and ten.
(In retrospect, why was I so eager to tear into something that brought my younger self so much joy?)
osprey_archer's review of Baldry's "OTT tragic woobie fic" of an Arthurian retelling, Exiled From Camelot, I took one for the team and re-read a couple of the Warriors books: one by Baldry, and one by Kate Cary, one of the other writers who will continue publishing books under the collective pseudonym of Erin Hunter until, presumably, the heat death of the universe.Confession: I 100% went into this expecting to write a fondly mocking Mystery Science Theater 3000 of a review, because as a concept, the Warriors series is nuts. It's Game of Thrones, about feral cats, for elementary schoolers. It's been published at a rate of 2-4 books a year for almost twenty years; it's apparently currently on its eighth sub-series. It has prophesies coming out of its furry little ears, and in sub-series #3, the protagonists have magic powers. It is COMPLETELY BONKERS and I absolutely devoured these books as a kid (approx. 4th-6th grade).
Turns out, they're actually pretty compelling! I read Moonrise and Dawn, the second and third books of the second subseries (Warriors: The New Prophesy); the tl;dr of the Wikipedia summary of the first book is that six young warriors from the four Clans are told in a dream to go on a quest, to hear a prophesy, which is that the warrior cats' territory is going to be destroyed by humans. There is also another prophesy, which doesn't make a ton of sense without more context than I need to go into to explain the plot of these two books specifically, but it's a thing. Prophesies: 2, not including the "receiving quest instructions in a dream" thing.
In Moonrise, which is Baldry's, the questers head back to warn their Clans, which have already discovered the hard way that their territory has been slated for human land development. There's an interesting juxtaposition between the two plotlines— the questers have bonded despite their differences, and look forward to working together to save their Clans when they return; meanwhile, back home, encroaching starvation and a rash of cats going missing has increased tensions between the Clans. The questers encounter a community of cats who live in the mountains, and there's a brief interlude of cross-cultural discovery, before it turns out that the mountain cats are convinced that one of the questers is prophesied to save them from a dreaded mountain lion and they've decided he's going to save them whether he likes it or not. (Their prophesy turns out to be correct, but as usual, not in the way that everyone thought. We're now at prophesies: 3; dramatic self-sacrifice: 1.) At home, the secret son of the Big Bad of the first sub-series - we'll call him BigBadStar - plots his own rise to cat fascism.
In Dawn, the questers return to an apocalyptic scene: the landscape torn up, trees torn down, the Clans relocated to makeshift camps at the edges of their territory and starving. One of the questers discovers that the missing cats - including her sister - have been trapped by humans, and leads a daring rescue. The four Clans ultimately agree to leave, and find new territory, together; their journey takes them through the mountains again, where they are aided by the mountain cats. One of the original questers - who had fallen in love with a mountain cat in the previous book - decides to stay with them, and another, who was still an apprentice, receives his warrior name. They ultimately reach the place that came to one of the cats in a dream! Yay! BigBadStar's secret son's paternity is revealed, which worries a lot of
(Dawn also features my FAVORITE CHARACTER, Ravenpaw, in a larger-than-cameo role. In the very first book, Ravenpaw is a ThunderClan apprentice, but he's a. generally just too much of a cinnamon roll - too smol, too pure - for the life of a warrior and b. apprenticed to the warrior who becomes BigBadStar, so after he witnesses a murder, his friends help him fake his death so he can go live with his friend Barley, a barn cat who lives outside of the Clan system. I don't think this was intended to be a gay metaphor, but it absolutely feels like a gay metaphor, and whoever wrote this Wikipedia page clearly agrees with me.)
My one nit to pick - I mean, as a grown adult reading a series for children, there are a number of other nits that I have decided aren't my problem, but to pick one - is that there are just so many characters and so much going on, all of the time, that even the POV characters feel very thinly sketched. This isn't necessarily a problem, because the books are action-heavy where they're characterization-light; I guess it's a feature rather than a bug?
Having done some background Googling, I am gobsmacked to discover that the series apparently takes place in England??? I mean, the fact that one of the Clans' territories is moorland probably should have been a clue, but in my defense, I was in the U.S. and ten.
(In retrospect, why was I so eager to tear into something that brought my younger self so much joy?)
no subject
Date: 2022-09-24 09:33 pm (UTC)I think I assumed they took place in a secondary world rather than technically our own
The first two sub-series - maybe even just the first series and a half? - definitely take place in Our World, In Modern Times. Having skimmed the sub-series summaries on Wikipedia, I... don't know if the cats ever interact with humans again, after the above-discussed move?? Possibly they've crossed over into some secondary fantasy world, because that is apparently the point where characters start developing magic powers... (There are dots! I've connected them!)
no subject
Date: 2022-09-25 01:29 am (UTC)I don't know what to tell you! I read the books almost from the year they were published until dramatically burning out a decade later thanks to moral alignment species essentialism. I have since enjoyed being on a panel where we processed a lot of our residual feelings about the series, but I don't know that I would actually recommend it.
And I never actually read any non-Warriors intelligent cat books, although I read a lot of standalone ones about intelligent rodents... I feel like there are a lot of children's books about anthropomorphic mice??
I can think of examples with rats and hamsters, but your basic point still stands.
(I forgot Le Guin's Catwings.)
no subject
Date: 2022-09-25 02:14 am (UTC)I can think of examples with rats and hamsters, but your basic point still stands.
I can't think of any with hamsters*, but rats, definitely! I was always quite fond of rat characters, actually, because they were usually a bit anti-heroish or at least grumpy sidekicks. I just feel like there's something about mice as spunky underdogs that comes up a lot in kids' lit??
* I do vaguely remember seeing a movie about hamster spies, but I feel like that doesn't count...?
no subject
Date: 2022-09-25 03:13 am (UTC)I recommend Tor Seidler's A Rat's Tale!