A Deep Dive Into The Warrior Cats Fandom

#Deep #Dive #Warrior #Cats #Fandom

Let me tell you about a story it’s a story filled with romance drama darkness intrigue and mystery a story with more twists than a bag of pretzels and so many characters that you just you just won’t remember them all they’re just way too many characters a story so famous and widely loved that

It’s inspired one of the most prevalent fan bases out there and that story is warrior cats today we’ll be discussing the warrior cat’s fandom and all the drama intrigue mystery and history behind the franchise before we get into the video i’d like to give a massive thank you to vitelli

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Now let’s get on with the video Warrior cats is a series of novels and comics which center around four clans of wild cats who live together in a forest the series is written by erin hunter and published by harpercollins and is mainly targeted towards young teen tweens erin hunter’s magnum opus of a franchise truly struck gold with seven

Full series 16 standalone books 17 comic books and six field guides tallying up to a staggering 81 books mamma mia that’s a big franchise before we go any further i’m going to give you a quick rundown on the warrior cats universe don’t worry i’m not going to do a

Play-by-play of every single book i’m just going to skim the basic law because it is pretty funny alright let’s go okay so the book series focuses on a bunch of wild cats in a forest all the cats are separated into like four groups but actually not really but we’ll get to

That in a second these groups are called clans and there’s thunderclan winclan riverclan and shadowclan thunderclan is basically like the classic good guy clan they’re described as very noble and brave and their main skill is being good at fighting and hunting but also all the clans are pretty good at that so whatever

Riverclan cats live by the river obviously and especially because they can swim and catch fish shadow clan is the edgy clan and basically like the slytherin house of the warrior cats series because all the evil guys come from there they’re good at being sneaky because evil and they

Also eat gross stuff like frogs and lizards because evil lastly windclan lives on exposed more land so basically it [ __ ] windy you know how i said there were four clans well actually i was a lying man back there because there’s another clan called sky clan but their territory got

Destroyed so they had to disband whoa that rhymed there are also rogue cats who are loners without a clan and kitty pets who are house cats you know how i said there was one extra clan well basically i lied to you again because there’s one more clan called

Blood clan but it isn’t really an official clan and it’s basically just a group of super villains and they’re very edgy and aren’t religious oh yeah the religion so basically all the cats believe in a place called starclan where you go if you die and all your cat ancestors live there

Starclan is pretty much cat heaven and sometimes medicine cats have premonitions and dreams about it essentially these cats are good christian folk moving on in each clan you get assigned a different role based on your age and experience kits are kittens apprentices are young cats in training and warriors are fully

Grown cats who protect their clan and hunt and have a grand old time a lot of the plots revolve around apprentices working hard to become warriors there’s like a whole ceremony thing and it’s a very big deal also every clan has like a big brother system where the warriors have to take

Apprentices on board and train them you also have to uphold something called the warrior code where you promise to be a very good boy and not overthrow your leader obviously that code gets broken a lot queens are pregnant cats medicine cats are exactly what they sound like the

Deputy is the second in charge cat and the leader of the clan is the most epic cat of all and they get 10 whole lives there are also elder cats so you know just old cats there are a lot of characters in the series like an insane amount there’s firestar who’s the

Main character of the first series his best friend greystripe and greystripe’s girlfriend from another clan or something i don’t know but the most important character in the franchise is the evil bad boy scourge he was the evil tortured villain of the first books and every edgy kid’s

Favorite character he has jet black fur and a torn ear and a collar made from cat and dog teeth basically every kid was thirsting over this cat and the fan art ranges from cool and scary feral cat to this cat shops at doll’s kill and by the way both interpretations are very valid

And good there are other cats i guess like spotted leaf who people really didn’t seem to like there was a lot of comments about her being a mary sue there’s thistleclaw who was revealed to be lusting after what was essentially a child character yes that was a real thing erin hunter wrote into

The books jayfeather who’s another topical character but i’m only including him because i saw a post that called him repulsive but good-natured and i just thought that was really funny yellowfang is like a cool grizzled old lady cat you get the picture there are a lot of damn cats running around this

Forest and not all of them were exactly well written but we’ll get to that later that’s pretty much everything so now that you’re caught up on the law we can move on the first series of warrior cat’s books titled the prophecies begin chronicle the story of a kittypet named

Rusty who ventures into the forest and joins one of the clans and it’s a pretty solid series that introduces all the key concepts that we just discussed the series came about when publisher harpercollins asked erin hunter to write a fantasy series about feral cats and while she was originally reluctant and

Probably like what dude that’s so weird and specific she made it work according to wikipedia she quote expanded the storyline to include elements of war politics revenge doomed love and religious conflict she also wrote that she was inspired by the works of shakespeare all of this is really funny because if

You’ve read the books which i have you know this series isn’t exactly shakespeare there are lots of problems with these books i’m just gonna breeze through them and keep in mind this is obviously just opinion okay number one the books just aren’t that good even die hard fans are

Quick to admit that the series is pretty poorly written at times with nonsensical plots inconsistent characterization and a lot of exaggerated melodrama the quality of the books themselves vary some arcs and novellas are really really good and still hold up today while others are pure filler and straight up ruin

Entire characters these books can also get really complicated with very complex family trees that branch out into different books and series and also erin hunter sometimes gets these family trees mixed up to add an extra layer of what the hell is going on here number two lots of plot holes not to

Sound like cinemasins or anything but these books do have a lot of inconsistencies which can make the story both bizarre and hilarious a few popular and frequently memed examples of this are dove wings eye color scourges cola color and heavy step dying multiple times i get that this is just a symptom of

Having way way too many characters but there are cases where the writers mix up the names of the main characters or even change your character’s eye color mid-paragraph so it’s pretty egregious you know it’s bad when the wikipedia for your series has a mistake section entirely dedicated to your continuity

Blunders thirdly as i mentioned earlier plots were pretty frequently recycled you have your cast you have your setting a couple deaths here a few battles there throw in some romance for good measure and yeah there’s not really much you can do beyond that to be fair this is a

Problem that a lot of long running series face you know jumping the shark and all that but it is still worth noting these dramatic plot twists were often recycled book after book meaning that the stories relied heavily on the quality of the characters which was hit or miss

Number four there are just way too many characters like these books are filled with names basically every sentence will have at least one name in it and it makes it kind of a nightmare to read especially because all the characters names follow the same naming scheme

So they’re all very similar maybe i just had bad reading comprehension i don’t know lastly and this is just another nitpick and not even really about the writing but the covers of these books can be really funny sometimes don’t get me wrong the paintings are beautiful and have a really pretty style

But there’s only so many ways you can paint a dramatic close-up of a cat’s face before it starts to look like when you try to take a picture of your cat and it like smooches up to the camera so the photo is just their big face taking up half the picture also

Some of these are just straight up copy pasted and the cover of grey stripes vow is one of the funniest book covers i’ve ever seen i just i don’t really have any words for this it’s not just me a lot of fans have complained about the official book

Covers being really strange but to make up for it there are a lot of really beautiful fan made ones that’s a trend that you’ll continue to see in the fandom if there’s any flaw or lacking area in the novels the fans will immediately swoop in to make their own cool and unique interpretations

Lastly if we’re talking the worst of the series well with the dubious quality of the books that tends to be pretty subjective the biggest contenders in terms of the novellas are probably bramble stars storms squirrel flights hope spotted leaf’s heart and yellow fang’s secret they’ve all been described as rage

Inducing unbearable disgusting and incredibly unpleasant from storylines that completely ruin entire characters to really dubious plotlines with awful messages for example spottedleaf’s heart was basically a book about an abusive relationship and the whole thing was portrayed in a surprisingly mature and nuanced way a good portion of the book is spent

Showing thistleclaw as senior warrior basically grooming the very young and naive spottedleaf also the book explicitly implies that he’s been lusting after her since she was a kitten so they’re gross it’s not that these kind of topics can’t be explored in fiction there are plenty of works out there that

Delve into these kind of disturbing topics and have a lot to say but this is a children’s book series aimed at ages like 8 to 13. if we’re talking main series arcs the least popular seems to be omen of the stars it was pretty divisive and a lot

Of people jumped ship at this point or just skipped the sarc entirely this post from the warrior cats role play forum also has a really good point and then a lot of the books regardless of how poorly written and widely hated they are contain really important story information that informs the entire

Canon of the series which is probably why so many fans stopped trying to keep up with the plot as the series went on however my irrelevant opinions aside the books were obviously ahead they’ve sold over 30 million copies worldwide and spawned a very large and dedicated fan base

But like why is that exactly why did the works of aaron hunter resonate so heavily with tweens around the globe to the point where they were literally at school on the playground role-playing as feral cats well here’s what i think some franchises are just set up perfectly to allow a

Fanbase to cultivate i’ve noticed a lot of really popular y a franchises will have groups within its world that readers can identify with like the houses in harry potter or the factions from divergent not to bring divergent into 2021 that’s a throwback of a reference

Wc sets up a bunch of clans all with different skills and traits so readers can kind of pick the clan that appeals to the most and they’ll be more likely to buy merch from it i mean read more about it because they identify with it wc also has pretty clear world building and

Well-established rules so readers can easily write their own fan fiction or insert their own ocs within the confines of this fictional universe they can even make their own clans or rules or rewrite the entire canon but the basic foundation is there and that allows readers to engage very easily

Regardless of their skill or interest level as for why kids and tweens were so drawn to it in the first place warrior cats was basically an edgy furry role play brought to life and it had all the drama and angst that a nerdy deviant art kid could ask for no shade by the

Way that’s 100 a cell phone plus the books were fun i know i just spent like five minutes slandering them and they do have their flaws but honestly the books are just fun soap opera dramas sit within a fantasy animal framework and that’s a fun and good

Concept also i wasn’t joking when i said kids were on the playground larping warriors i’ve heard so many people say that they and their friends would pretend to be from rival clans and run around on all fours pretending to be cats even to the point where warriors roleplays were banned at their schools

For being too violent but now we reached the first twist of this video you see erin hunter is not an author at all but a pseudonym for multiple writers who are writing for the warrior cat series there were seven primary authors and editors writing under the pseudonym kate carey sheriff baldry victoria

Holmes tui sutherland clarissa hudden and bali and surlys and jillian phillip who we’ll get to later because oh boy is there a lot of controversy surrounding her so like when we were talking about all those plot holes and inconsistencies earlier yeah those apparently came about because the writers and editors mainly

These three could never agree on like anything so major plotlines and story events were constantly getting retconned and bali and jillian actually didn’t have too much to do with warriors but they helped write one of the other i guess spin-off books i should probably mention those erin hunter wrote three other series

Seekers survivors and brave lands disclaimer i haven’t read any of these but as far as i can tell seekers is warrior cats but with dogs survivors is a story about four bears and brave lands is set in the african pride lands i read some reviews and for the most

Part it seems like a lot of warriors fans actually really enjoyed these series though some found them to be boring or too derivative i only mention this point a to point out that it’s funny that there’s such a demand for book series written by aaron hunter which are just about animals

Vibing out in the forest and b to show what a monopoly harpercollins was forming through erin hunter while they didn’t achieve their triumphs and defeats the epic highs and lows of the warrior cats books to have your franchise get three whole separate spin-off series is a pretty rare thing

And goes to show just how popular these books were and this popularity spawned a community a fandom if you will filled with creativity and vibrancy and weirdness and drama and we’re gonna discuss all of it in the next section of this video so without further ado let’s move on to

A lot of discussion of fandom is very surface level and basically just about how cringy it is that kids like something we’ve talked a lot about different fandoms on this channel and while i have been guilty of being kind of reductive about them it’s usually for the sake of time

Obviously that’s not a problem with this video as you can see by the timestamp so we have all the time in the world to discuss the fandom in depth to discuss the many facets of the warrior cats fandom i’ve split them up into four groups four clans if you will first the most

Well-known and powerful clan of them all known far and wide across the forest the the forest being the internet in this allegory this clan has the skill of a steady hand in endless patience and this clan is known as animation clan it’s no secret that a lot of animation comes

From the warrior cat’s fandom if you’ve been on youtube you’ve probably seen a warrior cat’s animation or fan project in some form or another there are many different genres of wc animation on youtube so let me walk you through them number one episodic series these are actual long running series with multiple episodes

Created by a select few very patient and dedicated individuals the views speak for themselves and while many earlier series are rudimentary they were the closest thing wc fans had to a television series so they were very well loved there was even a full-length movie adaption of the books made using

Littlest pet shops and yes it is unironically a cinematic masterpiece number two maps map stands for multi-animator project and is basically what it sounds like on the tin you pick a dramatic licensed pop song you split it up into maybe 20 to 30 parts and assign each of those parts to different

Animators those animators take their part animated in their own style and it’s all stitched together sometimes there are set color palettes or themes for these maps but others just let the participants go wild and regardless the result is always pretty amazing there’s such a wide variety of styles in

Any given map and i just love seeing all these different artists come together to make something really cool maps make up the bulk of wc animation and some of these things are famous with a capital f with views soaring into the millions notable examples include ready as i’ll ever be

Toxic the five giants and roxanne but the list goes on and on number three other animation very original title i know these include amvs or anime animated music videos which are the same as maps but generally only made by one person meps or multi-edited projects which are pictures and effects edited together to

Music and last but not least pmvs or picture music videos which are basically maps but they occasionally include some limited animation i know these abbreviations feel like taking a high school chemistry class like this is the animation periodic table but once you get to know what they

Mean they’re not too hard to remember number 4 comedy skits these were very popular in the early fandom and were basically vine but with warrior cats like literally some of them were vine with warrior cats animators would take a short voice clip of something funny or xd

Random and draw some crude cat drawings over top for comedic effect one of the most well-known wc comedy animators was mama ted who arguably popularized this genre and made a lot of super famous videos obviously there are other kinds of animations but those are the main kinds

You’re gonna see and i can guarantee that there are multiple videos in each category that have millions and millions of views you better believe that this [ __ ] was insanely popular not just among warriors fans but among the general youtube populace a cute example of these animations making their way outside the fandom are

The few times that the musicians or singers behind the songs used in the animations have left comments saying how great they think it is despite probably being kind of baffled as to why this song has been used in an animation about angsty anime cat drama a youtuber called alicat is believed to

Be one of the first people to start creating and uploading warriors animations to youtube and definitely one of the first to become super big in the fandom for it flightfoot warrior is notable for kind of introducing a more violent and graphic style to their animations which surprisingly wasn’t

Very common for animators to depict at that point in time fans praised their animations for being more true to the series in terms of violence and brutality or at least as much brutality as can be conveyed on ms paint other popular figures include mama ted jinjin ninja crown prince duck feathers tribble of

Doom spotted leaf 25 citavara and plenty more as the years went on and the fandom grew more and more animators were finding viral success with their warrior cat’s animations regardless of age or skill level or style or genre animators were blowing up left and right not literally obviously arguably the

Warrior cats fandom heavily contributed to the animation boom that was occurring on youtube in the late 2000s to the early 2010s another really interesting side effect of a generation of kids growing up making flipper clip animations of feral cats is that a lot and i mean a lot of

Them have grown up to become extremely skilled animators some are even working in the industry or maintaining very popular youtube channels a lot of people like to talk about how cringy or horrible these animations are but they’ve inspired so many kids to pursue art as a hobby or even a career

And i think that’s really cool the last notable thing to mention about the warrior cat’s animation scene is the movie or rather the lack of a movie since the earliest days of the fandom fans have been begging for a warrior cats movie and in a way the animation

Community has kind of filled that hole you can go on youtube and watch hours of animated cat content including fan made movies and movie trailers i remember people kept posting fake trailers or leaks of the movie that were just made in the sims 3 and i literally fell for it every time

But what about the real deal warrior cats is a million dollar franchise in fact it might be worth much more than that and there’s a clear demand for a movie while surprisingly nearly 20 years later the fandom might finally get their wish fulfilled in 2016 the warrior kids film rights

Were acquired by alibaba pictures now the studio isn’t very well known in the western world as they mainly produce chinese films but by the looks of things they haven’t exactly picked their investments too wisely also this statement from the studio’s president is cold comfort since he doesn’t really seem to have a huge

Amount of knowledge on the franchise it’s not set in a jungle but there’s still one last hope you know like the book from the series according to an article by variety alibaba pictures announced that it would be partnering with steven spielberg’s company amblin partners to produce and distribute films keep in mind that

Amblin produces movies through dreamworks and according to this dubious imdb listing an official dreamworks warrior cats movie could be on the cards as early as 2023 however we will have to wait and see if the stars align for this mysterious production that was a star clan pun now let us move

On to the second clan they possess creativity and a steady hand and yeah this is basically this is basically just the other one now that i’m reading it well i gotta split the fandom into four somehow so warrior cats artists get their own section obviously where there’s a popular piece

Of media there will be fan art from the dawn of the series fans have been drawing the settings and characters in their own unique styles and of course drawing their own original characters and stories as well one aspect of warrior cat’s art that i love is that there are a bunch of really

Well established and popular art styles within the fandom and these subgenres of style are all delightful in their own way to show off some of my favorites i’m going to be referencing this chart made by twitty user frankie b cat keep in mind this isn’t to box anyone’s style into one strict genre

Many artist stars will fit into multiple boxes or none at all and this chart is just a goofy and fun way to point out some of the more iconic styles that you might see in the fandom first is the classic late 2000s ms paint anime style i’m going to be combining these three

Sections since they’re all fairly similar this style was popularized by the early warriors animators such as ali kat nyah flightfoot warrior and spotted fire25 it’s categorized by spiky anime hair big eyes and a generally very loose grip on anatomy and perspective this anime style was kind of the main style that the

Phantom used from around 2008 to 2012 and was hugely popular i believe that this is not only because most of the popular animators and artists were using this style but because it was very accessible as a young kid in the early 2010s i barely even knew what digital

Art was and since ms paint is free and already on your computer and so easy to use it’s a good first stepping stone for kids wanting to get into it so basically while this style is often labeled as cringy it introduced a whole bunch of kids to warriors and making art in

General which is really cool for a lot of fans this style is super nostalgic but it’s kind of fallen out of popularity with the times second up book cover this style is similar to realism or even semi-realism and often features these big sweeping environments with bright and dramatic

Colors and lighting falling in line with the style of the books the style is also known as the wayne mclaughlin style since he was the artist for many of the original books and his art is regarded as pretty iconic among the fanbase sadly wayne passed away in 2015 but his

Artwork set the tone and feeling for the entire series and his legacy can definitely be seen in a lot of modern warriors fan art let’s move on to the design artist style this style began to grow on tumblr and twitter towards the mid to late 2010s and kind of came into

Fashion as the original fans began growing up and getting really good at art there’s obviously a very wide variety of stars that fall under this umbrella but essentially the style focuses heavily on unique and strong character designs these designs often use strong shapes or colours and use very striking features

To make the characters stand out horror cute and disney are basically what they sound like but 3d is an interesting one in the warriors fandom most of the 3d art was like warrior cat scenes played out using the sims 3 pits expansion but nowadays there’s lots of really incredible 3d art coming out

Artists like robinstar solitude and chicky are producing awesome stuff and knowing just how painfully tough and frustrating 3d modelling and animation can be it’s really impressive how much work these artists have put into this stuff but not everything was sunshine and rainbows in the art community and the

Scandal known as project cloverkit kind of proves that back in 2015 a tumblr hate blog made fun of and mocked a brightly coloured warrior cat’s oc on deviantart named cloverkit who was made by a young artist seeing this hatred directed at a young and inexperienced artist enraged the warrior cats community who

Started project cloverkit in retaliation the goal of the movement was to draw as much fan out of cloverkit as possible as well as flood the original artist deviantart with support while the project was very sweet and well-intentioned it backfired in a massive way when the original artist deviantart was almost immediately

Flooded with hundreds and hundreds of comments some were positive and encouraging while others were hateful and mean with some other young fans becoming jealous at the attention that this mary sue character was getting the original artist ended up having to beg people to stop making art of cloverkit and spamming her page

Before she eventually deactivated her entire account after those psas were posted throughout tumblr and deviantart warning artists to just stop with the fan art and hashtag stop project cloverkit was spread alongside it while the project was originally a very kind and wholesome way to support someone it caused a lot of

Stress for the original artist and shows that even the most well-intentioned projects can end up causing more harm than good though this particular incident was ill-fated there are still plenty of other art projects that show the talent and imagination of the community from model sets to zines to birthday

Cakes to parodies and everything in between artists from all walks of life have been drawn to the series and have contributed some amazing pieces of art to it the third clan well the third clan doesn’t really have any specific skills unless you count reading comprehension as a skill i guess but they do

Really really care about warrior cats they spend hours poring over wikipedia entries arguing on twitter and discussing their own head canons and theories this clan is known as the fans the readers i don’t know but basically we’re talking about headcanons and general fan behavior this four clans format is really falling

Apart in my hands here like i mentioned earlier warrior cats as a series can be really inconsistent whether it’s swapped or mislabeled characters incorrect descriptions or even major plot holes for most readers these inconsistencies are just annoyances but for die-hard members of the fandom they can be huge sources of drama

Take for example the colour of dove wing’s eyes a scandal known as the dove course now with the errands being the errands in the book stuff wing’s eye color was described as green blue and even gold leading to mass confusion and debate over what her true eye colour was

Most agree that it was green but one of the warrior cat’s wiki moderators who also ran the wiki twitter disagreed after kate carey wrote that dovewing’s eyes were blue on her facebook all hell broke loose as the fandom began a war over the fictional cat’s eye colour and the wiki moderator began

Blocking twitter users who disagreed with them after the dove course died down this wiki moderator actually stepped down and apologized for their actions which is good and yeah it was a bit of a [ __ ] show but some good did come of it when the drama with dovewing’s eyes and

The rogue wiki moderator blew up a youtube animator called moon kitty made a video criticizing the mod while also commenting on the poor quality of the wiki in general in our community the warrior cats wiki is very widely used there are so many characters and books to keep up with

That it’s hard to not keep going back to it which is why it’s so unfortunate the warrior cat’s wiki is a terrible resource sure if you want to know what a character looks like it can give you an idea but do you want to know what the character’s personality is

Who the character’s friends are that’s just too bad unless you want to scroll through 4 000 walls of text for character names the descriptions of the cat’s history is super long and over detailed which makes it pretty unusable as well unless you’re on an extremely minor character’s page meanwhile if you’re visiting to

Understand what the characters look like you’re in luck this is the only thing the warrior cats wiki will actually tell you unfortunately you can’t simply look at the picture because they range from wildly inaccurate to just plain silly anything the authors say be it in a

Facebook post a comment on a forum or 10 years old gets added to the warrior cat’s wiki immediately as canon even if it directly contradicts the newest books the books didn’t have a canonical bible god knows why and the errands have stated on multiple occasions that they

Can’t keep up with their own established law so the wiki was pretty vital for keeping readers informed on what the hell was going on before the dove course the warrior cat’s wiki was an absolute mess with blocky walls of text spelling mistakes and more incorrect information than you could

Shake jay for the stick at because of moon kitty and the rest of the fandom putting the pressure on the moderators decided to reformat and clean up the website and nowadays it’s a very well maintained source of information honestly the wiki is more reliable for information than the errands themselves

Though i guess that’s not saying much you may be breathing a sigh of relief that we’re finally done with petty discourse about how the cats look but you can suck that sigh right back up and sit back down because we’re not done an eerily similar argument occurred when

Fans couldn’t figure out the canon color of scourge’s collar and had to fight each other about it i guess in the english cats of the clan’s book it’s yellow but in the english rise of scourge graphic novel it’s clearly shown to be purple in many of the foreign book covers

Including russian and taiwanese it’s depicted as greenish grey brown red and even as more of a chain or piece of string type thing than a collar and a lot of fan art is depicted as bright red which kind of just further added confusion to the situation and i’m here to say that

It’s rainbow the canon color is rainbow we can stop arguing about it because it’s rainbow an interesting phenomenon in the fandom is the fact that a lot of fans haven’t actually read all the books myself included sorry to out myself as a fake fan after all the series this large it’s a

Huge time and money sync and it seemed like a lot of fans were either uninterested or unable to keep up with the series because of this the fandom actually became kind of more important than the books themselves with readers keeping up with the series through popular comics maps and animations

It became one of those fan bases that outgrew its source material and really took on a life of its own with fans crafting their own theories and narratives which would go on to make genuine impacts in how the wider community viewed the source material in most cases you’d just be called a

Poser well you wouldn’t be called a poser because it’s not 1990 but you get what i mean in the wc fandom though it’s actually fairly common to only have a very loose grasp of the books making the fandom pretty accessible to all kinds of people the final clan in the forest is known

Far and wide for their cheeto dusted fingers in one hand a mouse like a computer mouse they’re not just holding a rodent and in the other hand a bottle of mountain dew this clan is known as the game is yes warrior cats games are a thing and they come in many forms

Despite the fact that as a kid i would spend hours feverishly googling warrior cat’s 3d mmorpg most of the early games were fairly rudimentary one of the earliest fan games was warrior cat’s untold tales created by falconstar don’t quote me on this but i’m pretty

Sure the game was made in rpg maker and was a pretty basic top down pixel rpg set in the world of warrior cats despite being developed by just one person the game boasts some pretty impressive features with over 100 areas character customization and lots of fairly complex mechanics i mean it was

No last device you pick which one i’m talking about here but it was pretty mind blowing for warriors obsessed kids if you didn’t know or play the original game you may know falcon stuff from his more recent title cat tales released on steam and switched to very positive reviews

Hence why the games are aesthetically and fundamentally very similar though cattails is an obvious improvement with prettier graphics and more features so if you didn’t know that cat tails was originally an unlicensed warrior cats rpg you do now you’re welcome another game which isn’t actually a warriors game but was still

Big in the fandom was the kitten maker by kimura this is one of these character creators slash doll makers that was really big back in the day on like azalea’s dolls and dole divine i saw so many people back in the day making warriors ocs with this thing it

Was like the go-to for those who wanted a cool looking character but didn’t have the skills to draw it sadly flash player isn’t supported anymore so my childhood is ruined and i’m crying now back before roblox was the epic and lit platform that it is today you know

Back when ticks were a thing leave a comment if you remember ticks anyway years and years ago there was the super old warrior cats roblox roleplay game and i’m not talking about the modern one that’s on there today which is like pretty advanced with nice lighting and character models oh no

Back in my day there was another warrior cats game and oh boy was it something the models were these horrible blocky cylindrical cats with these blank human looking faces the map was muddy and filled with gross textures and the game world just straight up ended and

You could like walk right off the edge there were no game mechanics and everyone was like 12 but we loved it god damn it nowadays even though the fandom isn’t quite as popular and bustling as it once was there are still plenty of fan games coming out from text adventures like

Warrior cats and new dawn to legitimate open world 3d rpgs like warrior cats clans divided which is kind of a big deal in the fandom given that fans have been asking for a game like this for years not to wax poetic but i really do feel like these games show the pure

Dedication of the wc fanbase fan art fan fiction and animation are pretty common among other fan bases but the pure amount of time and effort it takes to make a whole lost video game even a small one is insane there’s so much to the fandom that i

Didn’t even touch on like the ancient roleplay blogs or the deviantart groups or the hundreds of microdramas that have popped up around certain ships or characters but getting into the minutia of the fandom would take days honestly if you just start sifting through warrior cat’s tags in obscure

Forums you’ll find so much creativity and nostalgia and weirdness it’s easy to look at the negatives like the drama or the gatekeeping or the bad takes but aside from that the fandom is like a treasure trove of cool projects and art wc isn’t really at the peak of its

Popularity anymore don’t get me wrong there’s still a big fandom but it’s definitely been declining in recent years both because of the writing itself and the fan base growing up and out of it it’s just a natural thing that kind of happens to franchises especially long-running ones but much like cockroaches the remaining

Fanbase have stuck around through thick and thin and shown their dedication and passion for the franchise that they love so much So with any big fandom there’ll be drama and conflicts in wacky stories because naturally people are going to have pretty strong opinions about something that they really love hell i already know there are going to be plenty of warrior cats fans frothing at the mouth because of some of the

Opinions i’ve expressed in this video and i’m looking forward to reading your scathing posts on a slash warrior cats my point is everyone says oh this fandom is so toxic everyone’s so dramatic there’s so much drama but really that’s true of pretty much every fandom especially the big ones

So don’t take this as me dunking on the fans or the franchise because it’s all in good fun and you can find wacky stories like this from pretty much every fandom also note i’m not going to be talking about any of the big artists or animators who are revealed to be like

Groomers or creeps because it’s unpleasant to talk about and many victims are still very affected by these events i just know there’s going to be a bunch of comments like oh you left out this animator from the fandom who did a really horrible thing and while we shouldn’t try to ignore or

Censor these important issues i don’t want to frame them as drama or gossip to be exploited and i don’t want to cause harm to the victims who have expressly asked me not to cover these issues with that out of the way let’s explore a decade’s worth of cat drama as we dive

Into the weirdest and wildest stories from the fandom so this series is about cats right feral cats to be more exact and as far as i’m aware there are no 24-hour vet clinics in thunderclan territory so it’s safe to assume that most of these cats have all the working anatomy that most feral

Animals will have if you catch my drift obviously this is a disgust in the book since they’re aimed at a younger audience and that would be weird as hell but when one artist dared to depict firestar’s junk all hell broke loose the drama started when an animator on youtube uploaded

Their part for an upcoming warriors map typical stuff but not everything was as it seemed when to their horror the warrior cats community saw that this artist had depicted fire stars well as all these comments put it fireballs while most of these comments were simply joking around or making memes some

Members of the community became outraged and it spiraled into a pretty sizable drama within the fandom some thought that showing an up close shot of a cat’s junk was gross and weird and i mean it’s not not those things but the artist was being called a creep and even a zoo file

Over this drawing it’s just basic animal anatomy and the drawing wasn’t offensive or graphic or god forbid sexual in any way and yet it sent the community into shambles it’s just kind of funny how violent and gory the books can get but showing like two seconds of the outline of a cat’s

Junk is too far so if you didn’t know warrior cats has its own merch store t-shirts charms mugs and all that other good stuff all of fairly varying quality and this varying quality became a big problem in october of 2020 when the store announced a new wave of warrior cats plushies

The quality had seemingly improved from the last wave with sleek vibrant coats nice embroidery and more shapely heads and faces titillated by these stunning prototype images warrior cats fans across the globe slammed their 30-100 usd not including text and shipping down on the counter and said dammit give me that

Plush cat well those fans were in for a shock when shortly after pre-orders sold out the prototype image on the website was changed to this the differences aren’t huge but you can tell the plushies are more washed out shapeless and they have these big blocky muzzles that make them look so

Goofy so warrior cats had a fallout 76 sized problem on their hands hundreds of fans had put their money down on a product based on an outdated prototype and emails were flooding into support asking for a refund or at least an explanation the wc store issued this

Apology post on the website writing that they quote accidentally posted the prototype images which sure okay benefit of the day i guess they then said that the new designs were meant to be an improvement to make them look closer to the original characters which is definitely just a straight up lie

They’re both accurate to the characters but the new designs are just clearly over lower quality at the end of the day the plushies didn’t look horrible or anything but many fans are still pretty pissed that they got away with basically false advertising for a 30 product without offering so much as a

Refund for these big block heads you know how earlier i was talking about one of the many errands and how she was like problematic and stuff well that’s because jillian phillip one of the many writers under the aaron hunter pseudonym was outed as a very vocal turf in late 2020 and it flipped

The fandom upside down for context turf stands for trans exclusionary radical feminist which is basically a radical feminist who believes that trans women are not women and don’t deserve to have the same rights and advocacy as cis women basically turfs are just transphobes who hide it behind hashtag girlboss feminism

It’s important to note that a large portion of the warrior cat’s fandom is lgbtq plus so when jillian added hashtag i stand with jk rowling into her twitter bio it’s fair to say that suspicions were raised and these suspicions would be confirmed shortly after when jillian’s side

Account was found to be filled with transphobic rhetoric it was all ugly cruel and bigoted as you can see and even though jillian tried to hide her transphobia behind a veil of feminism it was very clear that she had a lot of harmful and intolerant views

So after all this came out obviously the warriors fandom was pretty upset and julian got a lot of backlash about this there were a lot of young and impressionable fans who looked up to her and many readers of the series were trans at the height of this kerfuffle jillian tweeted bring

It homophobes and lesbian haters it’s still lockdown i’m bored before eventually privating her account unbeknownst to the author while she was fighting with children on twitter they were sending emails to her employer the book packaging company working partners and whether it was because of these emails or the firestorm on twitter

Jillian was fired yeah she just straight up doesn’t write for the warrior cat series anymore working partners very quickly cut ties with jillian almost as soon as the whole drama started and released a statement to the public erin hunter is not a single person but a diverse team of creatives and writers we

Recently became aware that jillian philip had associated the erin hunter pen name with her personal views on twitter thus associating them with the whole collective in light of this situation the decision was taken to no longer work with jillian philip the decision was not taken in direct response to the nature of jillian’s

Personally expressed views so it seems that working partners drop dropped jillian not because of her harmful beliefs but instead because they feared a loss of reputation and revenue which is depressing but that’s business i guess regardless wc fans rejoiced and the media had an absolute field day author jillian fell upon

Facing twitter mobs getting fired for supporting jk rowling a best-selling children’s author was sacked by her publishers after tweeting her support for j.k rowling the children’s author cancelled by her publisher after backing jk rowling jillian phillip tells how she was left to fear for her young readers in a world

Where daring to speak your mind can spell disaster the funniest thing about this one is that julian philip herself wrote this article and headline anyway she issued a statement complaining about cancel culture and also wrote that she was surprised harper collins dropped her because she didn’t think they were awoke

Company yeah she says a lot of weird things i don’t know she called the people who got her fired at twitter mob and anonymous trolls which is an odd thing for her to say considering 99 of them were literally warrior cats stan accounts and children now that she doesn’t really try to hide

Her transphobia on her main account she often retweets really unnecessarily offensive and provocative things as a [ __ ] you to the homophobes and lesbian haters i presume so whether you believe that it was the angry twitter mob cancelling an innocent woman or a transphobe getting what she deserved you can’t deny that when the

Warrior cats fandom works together they get results I’m sorry to leave you in the lurch with such an insane title but there’s virtually no information on this event supposedly for a few short hours back in september of 2019 warrior cats fans and cardi b stans were at war over the hashtag wotw in the warriors fandom this stands for

Warrior of the week which is a weekly twitter art contest hosted on the official warrior cats website for cardi b fans wotw stood for writing on the wall a song released by french montana in which she featured so supposedly both fanbases were fighting over the hashtag to the point

Where people actually started getting harassed over it so yeah apparently [ __ ] got serial aside from a few people in a thread on my twitter and a few stray mentions here and there there’s basically no information or remaining tweets that i can find about this incident so if you

Know more definitely drop a comment we all want to know also do you like how i said stray like a cat moving on once upon a time there was a very terrible youtuber and their name was izzy i mean pk russell now if you weren’t a child on the

Internet in like 2018 wait what this was only two years ago jesus christ i wasn’t even a child i was like in high school god the passage of time is inevitable anyway back to the sky pk russell was a very popular youtuber back in around 2017 to 2019 and his

Channel mainly revolved around cringe reactions and animation reviews now everyone is entitled to their own opinion and people should be free to review or criticize pieces of media as they please but pk russell’s content was just blatantly making fun of kids and young artists so he’d been making these wonderfully

Stupid videos about how tweening is bad or youtube animation sucks when he stumbled across the warriors fandom which i can only assume he saw as a veritable treasure trove of cringe he made two videos edgy warrior cats map map review and the warrior cats community is terrible

Map review pk russell was already known to the community as a nasty piece of work given his penchant for making fun of 10 year olds but this really tipped the community over the edge unfortunately because of this brutal review the animator alike removed their map from youtube though the various

Animators involved in the map simply could have become embarrassed at the old art styles or whatever most people credit the wave of negative attention that pk russell brought to ellicat’s map as the reason for its removal either way it’s pretty sad that the animators felt that they had to do this

And personally i think that the art and animation all look amazing thankfully pk russell’s other target the better days map by tennelle flowers has remained up and has a lot of really nice and supportive comments on it in general i think it’s fine to goof on

A fandom i mean i’ve done that plenty of times in this video myself but when you start dragging animators and artists into the spotlight to be laughed at then it turns from goofing to basically bullying clearly pk russell himself has moved on to bigger and better things like voa the documentary

Minecraft youtubers didn’t expect that topic to come up in this video did you well for most people there’s not much in common between minecraft youtubers and warrior cats but one person made that very tenuous link in a now infamous twitter thread warrior cats dream smp storylines focused on territorial disputes and then

Character development adopted by the artists animations are considered the canon content the fandom was absolutely up in arms about this for a variety of reasons some had pretty strong feelings about the dream smp and how the youtubers were problematic or harmful while others just thought it was a straight-up stupid take

The tweet got 13 000 likes and was a huge drama in the fandom for a few days from the looks of things the creator of the tweet did it as a joke or like to troll i guess but they also are an unironic minecraft youtuber stance so i don’t know

Either way that fateful day that warrior cats was compared to the dream snp will go down in the annals of warriors history and there it shall remain here’s an internet tip for you sometimes people start drama on purpose yep that’s right some people’s hot takes are actually ice-cold

Attempts at starting drama and causing rifts between communities and this very scenario happened just this year in 2021 back in 2020 a tumblr user by the name mad mozarty and feline fantasy made a satirical and joking post predicting what dramas would occur within the fandom in 2021.

The first entry on this list reads someone claims that making the clan populations each look different from each other is eugenics mass discourse ensues on whether you’re allowed to draw when clang cats is thin and long versus thunderclan cats being big and muscly little did this tumblr user know their

Joke post would become a reality just a few months later when this exact scenario became a real topic of debate in the community fans were genuinely arguing over whether it was quote eugenics to draw riverclan cats skinny or thunderclan cat’s buff and the drama sprew through the community like

Wildfire it seemed like a miracle perhaps sent from star clan this tumblr user’s sarcastic post had actually come true just as they predicted that it would had they just predicted the future well not quite shortly after the discourse started a tumblr user called vogels actually admitted to the whole thing

Okay so i’m posting a proper apology the recent worry cats dramas cantering on eugenics was my fault yesterday me and a few others in the server i run were joking about how funny it would be to make the list of curse wc 2021 discourse points real

The first one on the list was the clan differences and designs getting called eugenics i put it up in the notifications channel and told the server that they had to accomplish it by the end of february this was all a joke and if anything came

From it i expected it to just be between the few people and on it everything happened overnight as i slept and i had no hand in its actual execution the situation is now being managed and controlled and those who started this are deleting their reblogs and fake accounts and posting their own apologies

Most if not all of the people involved were miners and a few didn’t even understand what eugenics meant or the full weight of it and they’re all very sorry i’m really sorry for bringing this into existence i like the foresight to understand the consequences that had

Come from my actions and it led to a lot of harm and stress as this is obviously not a topic to be taken lightly or joked about obviously the fandom was pretty pissed at this group of fans thought that the topic of eugenics an infamously unfunny topic was hilarious enough to turn into

An epic prank i guess i can kind of see how they thought this would be a good idea or thought it would be like a funny prank to do but when you look at the list and see that it contains a lot of really loaded topics yeah it’s probably just time to scrap

The whole idea cast your mind back to like the middle of this video when we were talking about the dove course what do you mean this video is formatted perfectly anyway as we previously discussed the dove course fundamentally changed how the warriors wiki functioned and turned

It from a bunch of lies glued together to appear like a functioning site into the ultimate canon source for all wc content but where had all that false information come from in the first place well the errands would often answer fan questions on facebook and in august of

2016 victoria holmes the main editor of the books would write a post about someone called sue suzanne she wrote that sue would be answering fan questions about law and family trees and plot lines and that her word was 100 canonical victoria even got in contact with the

Wikipedia mods to confirm that yes sue suzanne’s word was completely canon and while everyone was pretty skeptical this was coming from one of the errands herself and the aaron’s word was gospel the problem was sue suzanne’s word was gospel now too and oh boy did she start preaching it

Began as most garbage fires do innocently she would post about the many unnamed kits from the books giving them names personalities and backstories in one of these posts sue writes that vicky was quote so happy and looked over every single cat and agreed to see every fact about them as canon

It was unnecessary and kinda weird god knows there are enough cats to keep track of i don’t have time to think about one that appeared on one page one time but to be fair sue wasn’t hurting anyone and her little revisions weren’t exactly getting in the way of the story so for

The most part fans enjoyed these harmless little info dumps however as time went on these unnamed kit posts would become more and more outlandish as she struggled to give every unnamed character a non-contradictory backstory and family tree she was given kits parents which in turn was messing up the already very

Confusing and contradictory family trees which apparently even resulted in some implied incest within the clans though most of sue’s posts are deleted now so i can’t fully fact check that after this she started retconing information about already established characters in a pretty horrendous way she wrote that two characters bright

Flower and lily whisker actually went to the dark forest when they died which is basically cat hell they didn’t even do anything bad their crimes were being angry which as far as i’m aware isn’t violating any rules of the warrior code although i don’t know maybe they wrote it like really small at

The bottom and they just didn’t see it then spotted leaf’s heart comes out and everyone flips their [ __ ] quick interlude before we continue let’s recap all the information that we have on sue suzanne sue wrote on the warrior cats forum that she had been assisting victoria as an editor and on facebook

Victoria confirmed that sue had helped her write pine star’s choice which is a pretty big deal however later victoria would write on her facebook that while sue had been acting as her editor she wasn’t actually an official editor or writer and was just a really knowledgeable super fan

So sue had helped victoria write an entire canonical book as an editor but wasn’t actually an editor she was just a fan but her word was also canon confusing but let’s continue so with fans raging about spotted leaf’s heart they completely turned on sue suzanne blaming her for the awful new book [ __ ]

Talking her and sending her waves of hate after all she’d helped write pine star’s choice and her story post had been getting more and more ridiculous so fans assumed that she was the one who wrote the outlandish and disturbing plot lines found within the book sue was getting harassed accusations

Were flying victoria was kind of trying to do some like pr from the side to quell the outrage but it wasn’t really working and in an attempt to i don’t know maybe shift the blame off of sue suzanne victoria completely threw her under the bus she suddenly came out with multiple

Posts about how sue’s ideas were never canon that she had stated on multiple occasions that they were never meant to be canon and that she had just wanted to let sue quote share her ocs so hold the absolute phone here victoria was straight up lying here and it was pretty ice-cold

As far as i can tell from the archived post victoria never mentioned once that sue’s writing wasn’t canon in fact she’d implied the opposite on more than one occasion the closest post i can find is this one in which she calls the matter of sue’s missing kits being canon quote

Tricky and writes that since she is just one member of a larger team she can’t 100 confirm that these characters existed in the original books that’s completely fair but this statement isn’t exactly calling them non-canon it’s just saying that she can’t confirm or deny because it had pissed the other errands off

Even the wiki mods who had been in contact with victoria herself wrote that they had been led to believe that sue’s word was canon victoria also said that if she were to rewrite the series or write a new set of books she’d definitely include sue’s characters so it’s pretty brutal that

She then turned around and acted as if she had never even considered making them canon at all so the harassment ended up getting super bad for sue especially because all her writing had been added to the wiki under the assumption that it was canon and now hundreds of edits would have to be

Removed and personally i do think a lot of the blame falls on victoria she entrusted suit in this role and hyped her up to be this really knowledgeable superfan editor kind of person but when the heat got too hot she threw her under the bus and acted like

She was some random kid laughing her ocs on her page sue’s writing wasn’t always perfect but she had some pretty interesting and cool ideas and she did the best she could to keep everything canonical it seemed like she was shouldering all this admin continuity research work as a favor to

Victoria just because she enjoyed the series and wanted to help out victoria admitted that she misjudged the reception that sue would get and i don’t think she quite realized how large and intense the fan base was so i guess i can see both sides too suzanne eventually

Deleted her facebook and most traces of her social media presence presumably because of the harassment and victoria stepped down shortly after spotted leaf’s heart because she was undergoing some really serious cancer treatment we’re left with one final baffling question who the hell was sue suzanne most people think that her name was a

Pseudonym and if not that’s one hell of a name she appeared out of the blue virtually no information was known about her and she vanished soon after all the drama went down how did victoria even meet sue was still a random kid on the internet that shared her riding with victoria and

Ended up getting carried away or was she a grown woman who was doing legitimate editing work and got given a little bit too much responsibility the truth may lie somewhere between the two but sue suzanne has gone down and the annals of warrior cat’s history

Is one of the most hated figures in the entire community fans still complain about her today and while it was an absolute [ __ ] show and i don’t think she should have ever been given that much responsibility i can’t help but feel that maybe she was just a

Passionate fan that got thrown in the deep end there are lots of dramas i didn’t include in this list for time but honorable mentions go too that time the fandom had discourse over whether fans who were over the age of 18 should be forced to use their own tag as

To not make miners quote uncomfortable the warrior cats amino no further context needed fans getting cancelled for lusting after the evil murderous cats likewise fans getting cancelled for drawing the good cats as evil fans coming together to make hashtag redtail is over party trend on twitter which was the first warrior cats related

Tag to trend on the website and lastly fans competing over the years to find the stupidest canonical name for a warrior in the books each cat has a warrior name consisting of a prefix and a suffix as long as both of these words are something found out in nature that

Name is possible in universe that means that marshmallow smoke weed mountain dew death star earpod hollywood and smash mouth are all possible warrior names oh and of course garfield which would obviously be my warrior cat name So now we’ve finally reached the end of our tail you know like tail like a cat’s tail it’s another pun was the warrior cat series shakespeare no does the fandom have some very problematic people and dramas within it yes but is the fandom also filled with creative funny talented and kind people

Who have turned this tween novel series into something really complex and interesting no i mean yes i’ve spent a lot of time ragging on the books because it’s fun to criticize old nostalgic media but in my opinion a lot of them still hold up as really interesting pieces of fiction with strong

World building and some really great writing moments do i recommend you read the books yes and no i still think that a lot of the arcs do hold up especially the first one in my opinion but they can be really hit or miss i’d say go for it honestly they’re

Pretty fun and self-indulgent just like drama soap opera type things but they can be genuinely heartfelt and engaging at times as well plus as we’ve already covered the fanbase is super dedicated and there’s plenty of ways to consume this series if you don’t want to read the books i know

A lot of youtubers do recaps or analysis of the novel so if you’re more into that you can watch those these books really resonated with a lot of people kids and adults alike and for a book series to captivate that many people it has to be doing something

Right i know there’ll be a lot of fans that disagree with parts of this video and that’s okay i may have even gotten a few things wrong i really did try my best to double check everything that i put into this video but i haven’t read the books in

Quite a few years so i am a little bit rusty get it that was the name of the main character anyway i really want to know your opinion on the fandom in the series whether you’re a veteran or someone that’s more new to the franchise what was the worst book

Was spotted leaf’s heart really that bad what’s your favorite goofy continuity era who was sue suzanne what was dovewing’s eye colour feel free to use the comments section to discuss i’m genuinely interested to see what everyone has to say about the kind of stuff that we talked about today i’d

Also love to know your opinion on the style of video um i haven’t really done that many long form videos before but this one was really fun um to do it took a really really long time but i did enjoy it and i would be interested in doing more videos like

This um if that’s the kind of thing that you guys want to see so definitely let me know if you kind of enjoyed this format if you stuck around to the end of this video thank you so much i hope that this video was informative or educational or funny or interesting or

Engaging in any way and yeah definitely let me know your feedback and yeah hope to see you in the next one bye thank you so much to my garfield overlords on patreon curbicon sheriff whiskey joe bradshaw icarus princess bossy boots tyson kendall pechalek vampiric misfit jono charles davey

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You guys so much for supporting me it genuinely means the world to me and if you want to join these guys over on patreon the link will be in the description once again thank you so much for watching and i hope to see you in the next one bye