Warriors Fanfics: Specialized Writing Guide

Cat-ification

July 13, 2019

This section covers behaviors in real life cats versus cats in Warriors. Warriors is a fantasy novel where realistic cat behavior has rarely been implied or shown, so having unrealistic cats is not technically wrong. So this topic can be taken or left, for it is not as much advice to improve as it is something to think about.

How realistic cats are in Warriors is something that is never really discussed by the fandom. It is one of those topics that is only brought up by a disgruntled fan or in fanfiction guides like this one. And when it is, no one discusses how realistic cats would make the series better - or if they would make it better. You figure a 30+ book series about cats would have some realistic depictions of them, right?

Well...

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CAT BEHAVIOR IN WARRIORS

Cat-ification is my word for making the cats of Warriors behave closer to their real life counterparts; this is not an actual term (or even a grammatically correct one). The cats in one of the only novel series about cats out there do not really act like cats. They act more like us. For example:

- The cats sleep at night and are active by day. Always. It is a special circumstance to be active at night.

- They care deeply about the concepts of parenthood and kinship. They mate with the intent on doing so for life.

- Mothers use their experiences to teach their kits to grow up like or better than themselves. The father is even known and present.

- They are active most of the time they are awake. Climate and food availability do not affect this.

- Females do not go into heat, so kits come as they will. It is not uncommon for less than a full litter to be born.

There are more traits, of course, but these are the most obvious. The important takeaway is that the Erin's cats act more like humans than actual cats. If any of you own a cat, you may have noticed it does not, in fact, fight for Stars and clan when it leaves the house for extended periods of time. Bonus downer points if yours is indoor only. So why is it that a story about literal domestic feral cats has none of the expected cat behavior?

Cats that act less like cats are easier for readers to grasp and imagine. You would think that only cat lovers are reading a lengthy fantasy series about cats. You would probably expect everyone reading has a cat, or studies them intensely in hopes of owning their own one day. This is not the case. Not even the Erins are cat experts (last I checked, one of the former ones was a dog person). In a story about humans, it is easy to grasp what they might or should do based on their age, location, and status. We generally have an idea what a seventeen year-old college freshman is like, or a fifty-something detective promising to retire after that last cold case. We do not have to be them, but there is information on them. They exist in real life (to certain degrees) and they are still human in the end. Cats on the other had cannot speak, are not as smart or as complex as us, and have a much more limited range of motion. We only talk to humans... most of the time. If the Erins wrote 15 minutes of Firestar grooming his crotch and thinking nothing of it, we would wonder what the hell we were reading.

Cats that act more human also give more freedom to the authors in regards to storytelling and character behaviors. If the Erins had to deal with the fact that cats are active whenever it is easiest to get food, day or night, are very skittish of each other, and are pretty damn lazy, there would not be much room for conflict. Why get jealous of other couples if there are plenty of toms and she-cats to go around? Why fight over territory when our protagonist could just claim the high ground of a tree? No social structure, no romance, no gods. It would make for a pretty bland 30+ books, right? After all, most human behavior is limited to humans.