In this installment of Warriors Roundup: our final three novellas.

Daisy’s Kin

“Who is Daisy?” I hear you cry.  Well, Daisy is a former barn cat who came to live with ThunderClan back in the New Prophecy and ever since has acting as a “nursery queen” – that is, a she-cat who lives full time in the clan’s nursery and helps new mothers with their kits.  This novella takes place during the events of the Broken Code.  The False Bramblestar has been outed, but during his reign two of Daisy’s kits were killed, leaving her with one surviving son, Mousewhisker. Her old mate from the barn Smokey shows up in ThunderClan, begging for help; his new mate, Coriander, is having a difficult kitting.  Daisy, along with Mousewhisker and Alderheart, go to assist Coriander; Coriander gives birth to two live kits, but dies shortly after.  Not wanting his kits to become kittypets, Smoky insists on bringing the newborns to SkyClan, who has a nursing mother who can care for them.  On the way to SkyClan, the five encounter the Sisters, who also have a nursing mother and take in the kits.  Later, once the kits are weaned, Smoky takes them back to his barn.  Daisy, unsure of her place in ThunderClan, decides to join him.  Later, several ThunderClan cats (including Mousewhisker) stop by the barn and ask Daisy to return, as they have a new mother who needs her help.  Daisy ultimately decides to return to ThunderClan, saying a tearful goodbye to Smoky and his kits but promising to visit.

Daisy was a great choice of a subject for a novella.  Warriors overwhelmingly follows cats in the two standard clan career paths, warrior and medicine cat, so it’s nice to get a PoV from a character with a more unusual role in the clan.  Daisy is also, I believe, only the fourth non-clanborn cat to get a full novella or Super Edition from their point of view after Firestar, Tree, and Mothwing.  One of the aspects of the Warriors world that I feel has been woefully underexplored is the perspective of outsiders.  Like I said in my Tigerheart’s Shadow roundup, most groups of outsiders are treated by the text as “defective Clans” in need of the assistance of the more sophisticated Clan cats.  While this has been alleviated somewhat by the introduction of the Sisters (who the text treats considerably less chauvinistically) we still rarely see the world through their point of view (the only example I can think of being Tree’s novella.)

Unfortunately, Daisy’s Kin doesn’t take full advantage of the strength of its concept.  The novella takes place during the Broken Code arc, four full arcs after Daisy first joined ThunderClan in the New Prophecy.  Daisy is already fully integrated into clan life and her brief sojourn back to the barn with Smoky is motivated by the same general dissatisfaction with post-False Bramblestar ThunderClan that motivated Graystripe to wander in his Super Edition.  There’s not necessarily anything wrong with this, but I can’t help but feel this novella would have been more interesting if it focused on Daisy’s initial struggles to integrate into ThunderClan that we caught a glimpse of in the New Prophecy.  The side plot of Mousewhisker and Smoky’s relationship wasn’t much of anything either; unfortunately parent-child relationships in Warriors are only treated as important when they’re relevant to the plot, so the fact that Mousewhisker and his siblings effectively had an absent father isn’t really something that has ever come up before.

Overall, this one was okay.

Spotfur’s Rebellion

“Who is Spotfur?” I hear you cry.  Well, Spotfur is a ThunderClan warrior who was a minor character in the Broken Code arc.  This novella starts with some filler: Spotpaw is a troublesome apprentice.  Spotpaw has a crush on Stempaw.  Spotpaw helps the clan.  Spotfur becomes a warrior.  Then, Bramblestar falls ill, dies, comes back, and starts acting strangely.  Unlike the rest of ThunderClan, Spotfur and her mate Stemleaf immediately pick up on the fact that post-resurrection Bramblestar is acting weird.  Together, they approach some other disaffected clanmates and plan a meeting of like-minded clan cats.  At this meeting, Rootpaw reveals that Bramblestar’s body is under the control of an impostor. Later, after the rebel group has grown considerably, they hold a meeting to determine what to do about the False Bramblestar.  Squirrelflight insists that the False Bramblestar should not be harmed, but Spotfur and Stemleaf decide he’s too dangerous to be left alive and plan to assassinate him without the approval of the rebel leadership.  Spotfur and Stemleaf’s group attack Bramblestar, but Bristlefrost (who had earlier promised Squirrelflight to protect Bramblestar) brings reinforcements for the imposter.  The assassination attempt fails, and Stemleaf is killed in the fighting.  With her mate dead at the hands of the impostor, Spotfur vows that one day the rebels will re-take ThunderClan

The nicest thing I can say about this novella is that it wasn’t boring.  Unfortunately, this is largely a testament of how interesting the Impostor plotline is as a concept, as this novella is almost entirely extraneous.  While Spotfur is a PoV we’ve never seen before, this novella doesn’t really provide any new information on ThunderClan under the Impostor.  The emotional center of this novella is supposed to be the relationship between Spotfur and Stemleaf, but Warriors has never been great at depicting interesting romantic relationships and this is no exception.  I’d say more if there was any more to say, but there just isn’t – this novella didn’t really feel like anything substantial.  Sorry, Spotfur fans.

Blackfoot’s Reckoning

“Who is Blackfoot?” I hear you cry.  Well, Blackfoot, later known as Blackstar, was the leader of ShadowClan from the New Prophecy through Bramblestar’s Storm.  It’s immediately following the battle at the end of the Prophecies Begin – Scourge is dead and the forest is saved from the threat of total annihilation by BloodClan.  With Evil Tigerstar dead, his deputy Blackfoot is next in line for leadership of ShadowClan.  Blackfoot and medicine cat Runningnose go the Moonstone so Blackfoot can receive his nine lives, but before he receives each life, he is forced to relive a moment from his past.  Most of these moments revolve around Blackfoot’s complicity in the crimes of the two Obviously Evil leaders he had been deputy under, Brokenstar and Evil Tigerstar.  Under Brokenstar, Blackfoot had done nothing to speak out against his leaders’ use of child soldiers and actively supported his attempts to drive WindClan from the forest and kidnap other clans’ kits to make more child soldiers.  Under Evil Tigerstar, Blackfoot had been complicit in his leaders’ attempts to eradicate half-clan cats: we get to see the “Evil Tigerstar tells Stonefur to kill two apprentices, Stonefur asks Leopardstar what she wants him to do, Leopardstar tells him to do what Tigerstar says” scene from Blackfoot’s perspective, in which Stonefur is ultimately killed by Blackfoot.  After being brought low by confronting the enormity of his past mistakes, Blackfoot’s final two visions are more comforting: one is of him caring for the sick cats of ShadowClan during the events of Tigerclaw’s Fury, and another is a collection of brief glimpses of potential futures.  After receiving his final vision and his final life, Blackfoot is acclaimed as the new leader of ShadowClan as Blackstar.

Blackfoot was another good choice for a subject.  The fact that StarClan was okay with Blackstar becoming clan leader when he was second-in-command to both Brokenstar and Evil Tigerstar is something that warranted exploration. 

Textually, Warriors seems to implicitly accept the Nuremberg defense as valid.  Nearly every arc, cats do terrible things at the orders of their leaders and are let off the hook for any real consequences because they were “just following orders” (see: followers of Clear Sky, Brokenstar, Evil Tigerstar, Darktail, the False Bramblestar, and Splashtail.)  To a certain extent I don’t have a problem with this.  Diegetically, clan society puts a high value on loyalty and the violence ordered by bad guy leaders rarely rises to the level of war crimes.  Also, practically speaking, if every cat who willingly followed Splashtail was exiled, RiverClan would have, like, four members right now.  That said, if there’s any cat for whom the Nuremberg defense shouldn’t work, it’s Blackfoot.  This cat was second in command to not one, but two different Obviously Evil clan leaders, both of whom very much did war crimes in which Blackfoot was very much complicit.  Blackfoot personally went to kidnap ThunderClan kits to use as child soldiers and executed Stonefur on Evil Tigerstar’s orders for the crime of having the wrong parents.  Blackstar is a war criminal, even more so than Leopardstar.  I don’t think this has ever been addressed in the main series – if I’m remembering correctly, in the beginning of the New Prophecy Blackstar is leader of ShadowClan and everybody is just kind of okay with it. 

So, how does this novella square that circle?  According to the text, Blackfoot is just incredibly credulous and incredibly loyal.  Blackstar loves his leaders, he never questions their decisions, and he implicitly believes every obvious, self-serving lie they feed him.  He is the opposite of genre savvy; he seems completely oblivious to the fact that he’s in the Slytherin of Warrior Cats.  Only in the middle of his nine lives ceremony does he stop and think “wait a minute, did Brokenstar lie to me about Raggedstar’s death?”  Yes, Blackfoot, your Obviously Evil clan leader wasn’t entirely honest with you about the circumstances of his predecessor’s death, an event to which he was the only witness and through which he stood the most to gain.

All that said, I get it.  A 100 page novella was never going to be enough to adequately cover a personality change from “eager participant in war crimes” to “good leader,” so some kind of cop-out to the first part was going to be necessary, and of the available options “he was just too stupid to realize what he was doing was wrong” is probably the best we could have gotten.  It’s not even entirely out of character considering how, in Power of Three, Blackstar gets fooled into forsaking StarClan by obvious charlatan Sol.  I also just think it’s funny to imagine Blackstar as a cat whose moral compass is completely overwritten by any authority figure telling him to do something.

Overall, I liked this novella.  Despite his obvious faults, I like Blackstar and nine lives ceremonies are always fun to see.

Closing Thoughts

All in all, an unexceptional batch of novellas.  Blackfoot’s Reckoning was the best of the three, and it was just good.

And…that’s it.  As of the date of this roundup going live, Blackfoot’s Reckoning is the final published Warriors novella.  Novellas fill an interesting niche in the Warriors franchise – conceptually they have to be interesting enough that they don’t feel entirely superfluous, but not so interesting that their concepts can’t be fully explored in their very limited page count, and not every novella is able to make it work.  Out of the novellas, I’d say my favorites are, in no particular order:

• Dovewing’s Silence
• Mapleshade’s Vengeance
• Ravenpaw’s Farewell
• Pinestar’s Choice
• Mothwing’s Secret

And my least favorites are, in no particular order:

• Hollyleaf’s Story
• Cloudstar’s Journey
• Thunderstar’s Echo
• Tawnypelt’s Clan
• Pebbleshine’s Kits

Next up: our final batch of Super Editions, including Stormclan’s Folly, which releases next week.  What will I think of the first new release since I’ve started my Warriors journey?  Read and find out…