Things I Hate About Warriors Fanfiction

Mental Illness ll part 1

When planning out a chapter revising my earlier one on mental illness, I realised there are so many issues that come under mental illness in wc fanfiction. So it's split into multiple parts.

This one is about unrealistic understanding of mental illness in warriors fanfiction. What that means is basically how the Clans in people's fanfictions and their understanding of mental illness is often really unrealistic.

Sure, the Warriors society is anthropomorphic. But there is a line between anthropomorphic and unrealistic. And sometimes people take their anthropomorphism way too far, into the point where they should probably just write about humans.

There is no reason, no logical reason that Clans would know what bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety, etc, is in human terms. No reason why they would follow the exact same treatment plans. They're cats. They have no knowledge of brain function.
That doesn't mean you shouldn't write about mental illness. Trust me, I encourage it. But please remember that they're cats. They have a complete different society and understanding of things.

I can already see the comments regarding Saving Sable coming. And let me explain: yeah. I fucked up. When writing that fic, I justified that the Clans knew reactive attachment disorder by name, as well as specific therapies and treatment plans, because a cat with more advanced knowledge came and told the Clan. And yeah, I guess that works. But it's lazy and a bit too miraculous. The magical stranger with an answer for everything is just shitty writing. I wrote SS when I was 14 and my opinions and how I write has changed since then.

I planned to write about the society where aforementioned magical stranger came from. And then I abandoned all worldbuilding and planning for two years. Yikes. But I'm actively worldbuilding and planning for that again, and needless to say there'll be some revisions to that society that make them more realistic to cats.

It's just a bit disconcerting, to be honest. Reading a Warriors fic and suddenly they're talking about complex human terms. Imagine reading that in a published book. It would feel out of place and make the established society feel less real. Especially when it's inconsistent. Oh yeah, the Clans know what social anxiety disorder is and how to treat it, but they don't know what a fucking car is. You'd think some kittypet would've told them by now.

This is such an easy problem to fix. Even in the canon series, they've made shots at mental illness. Unfortunately it hasn't always been that great (no, Erins, Bluestar did not have dementia. She had ptsd. I've ranted about this before, and I'll do it again.) But I think Palebird's story tells it quite well. No one ever said "hey, Palebird, I think you have postnatal depression." But everyone was gentle around her and understood that she was sad, a different sad to the usual emotion. They understood that she felt drained and exhausted a lot. They understood that she could be detatched. And they treated her accordingly. No diagnosises made, no words said. It was just "this is how Palebird is feeling. This is how we act around her and help her." Readers have the ability to read between the lines.

I think this is the most realistic of the scenarios, if you don't want to write about ableism. But that can be a little limiting. So let's warriorise mental illness.

I'd suggest making it similar to greencough. Symptoms remain the same, but no one goes around using scientific words like "conduct disorder" or "psychopathy." They use more warrior-like names. As for treatment, they're not going to spout out shit about "selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor." Cats don't know shit about serotonin. But they do have herbs and those herbs also have mental health healing properties. Obviously not realistically, but herbs like thyme are said to soothe shock. And no, cats aren't going to understand "cognitive behavioural therapy," but that doesn't mean you can't adapt some of the key ideas to fit into the warriors world. I saw a really good tumblr post about this about two years ago. I hunted it down here:

Anyway, just some ideas. It just gets on my nerves. If you want to write warriors fanfiction, write warriors fanfiction. If it doesn't fit the world, write about humans. Not a hard concept, y'all.