How I Telepathically Reproduced My 200 Children (And Other Band Stories)

I've made a huge mistake

Jan 14, 2017
So I was reading this one Warriors Cats headcanon thing (am I spelling that right) and they said something about how they shipped these two characters together and I commented something along the lines of this:

"Aw man, I ship Foxleap and Ivypool. I know they're technically related but it pretty much doesn't matter all that much in the series"

Before I go on about why that comment was not the best thing, I have to explain the incest in the Warriors Cats series for those that either don't read the series or don't know about it.

Now, this series is written by 3-4 different people. If keeping track of a bunch of characters made by four different people isn't hard enough, they have written (and are still writing) 60+ BOOKS. If THAT'S not a lot of books I don't know what is. But, anyway, with all those literal HUNDREDS of different characters all having something going on at the same time, there's going to be some inconsistencies.

It'll be hard to explain exactly how the incest works, but basically, the cats in the "clans" they live in are limited to having "mates", or partners, with only the cats in their clans. Those are the rules. Shadowclan cats can't be with Riverclan cats, Riverclan can't be with Thunderclan, and so on. This makes most, if not all of the cats in a single clan somehow related to every other cat in that clan.

Some are luckier, and are related through distant cousins, or aunts, or uncles, while others are less lucky and are first cousins or even aunt and uncle. This would be complicated but easier to keep track of through human bloodlines, but with the cats it's different. Some cats will have two litters with two different parents, so some cats are only half uncles or half sisters or quarter cousins or something like that. Sounds complicated yet? If that's not hard to keep track of, there's anywhere around 1-5 cats in a litter at a time. Not to mention the cats in the story that are already PREVIOUSLY RELATED. I'll put some names on it to help it make more sense.

Spoilers, by the way, for the second arc of the series.

Squirrelflight is the daughter of Firestar. She is trying to chose between two cats she likes: Brambleclaw and Ashfur. Brambleclaw is not related to her whatsoever, or as far as I know. People say, however, that Ashfur is her half uncle. This is because his parents were distantly related to only her mother. I don't want to get into the details right now, but the point I'm trying to make is that cats aren't gonna understand which of their already dead and gone relatives are related. They're cats for God's sake.

The only incest that really happens in the series is through distant uncles/aunts and cousins. The worst one is between a brother and a sister, but that's because they originally wrote them as mates first, and then about twelve books later realized they had identified them as being brother and sister by mistake, but it was too late and they couldn't change it. So it wasn't on purpose.

Why am I writing this again? Oh yeah, my comments on the headcanon.

So Foxleap and Ivypool are technically distant relatives, but as the issue of incest is never pointed out in the series it's never really a big deal. That's what I thought, at least.

I read further into the story and OH MY GOSH HELP ME PLEASE

ANYBODY, and I mean ANYBODY that has said ANYTHING about how "maybe not 90% of the cats in a fantasy book series are the sexuality or gender or wolf-kin or owl-kin or WHATEVER you think they are because again they are cats that have a heaven and live together in an organized society and they probably don't think that stuff through"

And oh my gosh, EVERYBODY just FLIES OF THE HANDLE

50+ comments of arguing and fighting and throwing tantrums and oh god help me please because by reading those TERRIBLY-DRAMATIC-EMO-TUMBLR-ANGSTY-IIDENTIFYASAGOSHDANGWOLFORSOMETHING comments I found out that the author is HIGHLY TRIGGERED by the mere mention of "hey there's incest and weirdness in a book series about cats but i guess it's passable because it's not real"

And I realized that my comment is EXACTLY what will get me screamed at over the comment section in that book.

I haven't gotten a comment back yet, but I'm sure I will. I probably won't reply.

But that doesn't mean I still haven't made a huge mistake.