immortal rat leader, immortal badger midnight, immortal cat rock.... this implies that every group of animals has an immortal all-knowing being in its species
Thank you Moonkitti for also holding the opinion that prey animals being able to communicate in carnivore-centric animal worlds is Super Weird and for the same reasons. Its strange that most narratives auto-accept that "well yeah, of course they would all still follow the circle of life or whatever and kill each other" when in reality...I mean would your entire species actually accept that arrangement if you were a prey animal in that world? If you think about it for more than a second it truly does make no sense
Yeah,it's always a bit wierd. Especially as a lot of them just go "it's the circle of life" and there's not really any other further communication about it. In Wolves of The Beyond at least there's a RITUAL for it. There's a moment of communication and appreciation to the animal more so then like in Warrior cats were they thank starclan. Still a bit wierd, the idea of any animal accepting it, but it is interesting that they're at least communicating more about it. It's mostly for larger animals though. We don't see much rodents and such communicate the same except for a rabbit(we learn rabbits have their own version of Glaux). But we don't see much of the wolves hunting smaller prey as we do with owls in Guardians of Ga'hoole. They don't have the same ritual, but they do have set rules(no eating young prey, no eating snakes/nestmaid snakes etc.) It's a lot more detail then from what warriors has, but think could just be how the books are set up. The Owls being lot more advanced in how they live and such then cats in Warriors.
Yeah, tbh I'd say Watership Down does a good job with it. I think the only case of a "predator" speaking to the rabbits is within the mythology and when a rat talks to a rabbit (and I call the rat a predator very loosely bc rats had attacked the rabbits in a different section of the book). Otherwise it's only prey talking to prey or the singular bird that talks to them (and the bird is hardly a predator for them). And even in those cases it's said that the rabbits are using a sort of hedgespeak to communicate, think "Common" in DND, and that normally the rabbits are speaking Lapine to each other. And those they speak to in hedgespeak have an accent and generally communicate haltingly. Even then, the points where they communicate outside their species are very rare. imo it's done well and doesn't feel weird.
@@scribblecrumbhi scribble! dont the rabbits mythological beliefs in watership down also involve them being preyed upon, because if there is nothing to predate on them, they will multiply out of control, eat all the plants, and the earth will become barren? i heard about that and it stuck with me as a great way to incorporate the food chain into the mythos of your xenofiction
Amazing how you can all acknowledge how impossible it would be to predate on animals if they could communicate using our language, yet fail to apply that to the animals you yourselves consume. If they could beg for their lives in a language you understand, it would no longer be so easy to blindly follow the concept of the circle of life.
Mousefur, please talk about mousefur. Despite being somewhat xenophobic in, into the wild, she seems to somewhat lay off on that part (not entirely sadly) and even says that daisy should stay, in the new Prophecy and is somewhat nice, unlike dustpelt. She never had a mate and didnt seem to ever want one either + i feel like her retirement as a whole was...way too rushed. In into the wold she was described as a young warrior, and going off of that only around 2 years later (in the new prophecy) goes to the elders den. Which honestly sucked cause i just..really like her, especially her relationship with longtail.
We could headcannon sickness, like the idea that runningnose seems to have chronic issues maybe Mousefur developed joint pain or something. It is a shame though, she was an interesting character.
@@Parasolhyena for real One of the only interesting female background character that isn't falling in love with a random tom and becomes a queen for practically the rest of her life before going to the elders den
1:32 my assumption as a kid was always either “oh if cats could hear the dogs right now these would be the only words they could understand” or just “in this universe dogs think more primitively than the cats who have their own cat societies with laws and religion and that midnight has an even higher level of thinking that reaches a prophetic understanding of space and time, so different animals must be different levels of smart”
@@ieatmice751 as a kid i didn’t really love to think about that because i was very much a dog person and if there had been a dog version of these books back then i would’ve switched to it in a heartbeat (i did read survivors, i was really disappointed that it wasnt just a dog version of warrior cats), but i knew it was probably the case that the dogs were supposed to be just primitive and viscous
big fan of the implication that potentially, in the warrior cats universe, there is just one designated super intelligent immortal animal for each species that all happen to live in the same general area. rat leader for rats, Midnight for badgers. i havent read warriors in long enough to remember if Rock was super old or just a ghost or whatever. etc etc.
pfft screaming “DIE CAT” and then rat leader kills firestar is pretty freakin hilarious. if nine-life magic didnt immediately being firestar back and he just dies i would be cracking up not crying over firestars death
I was also thinking that perhaps the “waves” of signals were done through actual dialogue. Rats and mice, if I’m not remembering incorrectly, have really high voices that are beyond the regular human hearing range. I was thinking this was why the cats seemed to not understand the mice, but they all were able to follow the rat leader, rather than telepathy.
You know, prey animals being able to talk was kind of a whole plot point in Tailchaser's song, with the protagonist having to wrestle with a promise he made to a squirrel and his nature and a cat. (also in that book basically any vertebrate can talk to any other, and each species had their own culture and mythos. quite interesting.）
Honestly the prey being sentient or able to communicate thing never bothered me in media. I guess my logic is that if intelligence and the ability to communicate was all it took to not kill something then humans wouldn’t kill each other either. But they do….constantly. I figured the animals kill each other for the same reasons humans do. They just don’t care about anyone other than themselves or their own kind.
Definitely agree that the idea of predators and prey speaking the same language in books like Warriors just feels…weird most of the time. And the whole “it’s just nature” thing never feels like enough of a justification. I think my favorite way I’ve seen it handled is in The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents. It’s a standalone in the otherwise human centric Discworld series. Basically, the cat and the rats that live around the dumpsters of the wizard academy eat some improperly disposed of magic waste and gain sentience. The dynamic between the cat (Maurice) and the rats is really interesting because Maurice remembers vaguely how he used to kill and eat them, but now they can communicate on the same level and are tentatively friends. (Btw they use their newfound sentience to scam entire towns into thinking there’s a rat infestation and this random kid they kidnapped is the Pied Piper. It’s a good time.) The main villain of the story is in fact a rat king who can mind control other rats………….and the final battle is between him and a ginger cat who dies in the fight but then comes back to life bc he has nine lives. The comparison is there that’s all I’m saying! …..Also I’m realizing that Firestar’s Quest is what started my fascination with rat kings (in fiction! Not in real life!) even though the rat leader is…not that.
i also always do wonder whether or not the dog's translations are so simple because barking is hard to understand for cats, and they only catch one or two phrases, and this is a cat-narrated story
The translations feel evocative of how barking sounds imo. One bark sounds like a single, sharp, short word. Even when a dog is barking up a storm, each individual bark still has that quality unless it's like, a basset hound croon which is just a bark but long. It's entirely possible that the cats are only catching one or two words since most cats don't speak dog, but "Hole here! Free! Pack free!" does follow the same kind of rhythmic pattern as dog barking tends to irl.
@@lalas181 that could be true. i guess i'd just long ago adopted the headcanon that cats don't necessarily meow every time they talk and that a lot of it is body language, and that the same thing would apply for dogs, therefore two short barks could be a full sentence if we add in the dog body language
I would rlly like a talking vid on Thrushpelt. I feel like he’s a very underrated character and deserves more attention. I find his romantic interest in Bluefur/star to be cute and I think he handled the situation with her kits well and took the fact that his crush didn’t like him back like a champ and accepted the fact they were just friends. (Unlike some cats we all know… looking at you Bumblestripe and Ashfur)
When they brought Brightpaw back to camp after the dog attack wasn't she saying "pack pack kill kill" implying that she understood the dogs? Arc 1 was weird. About rat leader: maybe it was an escaped lab rat humans experimented on and that's where the weird abilities came from. Secret of NIMH style.
The "Escaped Pets" comment about the racoons makes sense to me tbh. I live in canada and our smallest province has skunks ONLY because some fucker decided to try breeding them for their fur and then released them all when no one wanted to buy skunk fur. Maybe someone had a similar thought in Warriors and theres a poor Ministry of Enviroment employee begging people to cull the invasive racoon population
Reminds me of Seekers, where Ujurak can talk to whatever species he's currently transformed into, but always understands bears. Is it ever explained why he starts forgetting who he is while transformed starting with Fire in the Sky?
Wayne's art of Midnight is just so pretty!! And I've been fascinated by the rat leader. I imagined he had a deeper voice or speaking through his minions
As a Warrior Cats fan who set the series aside after the conclusion of OotS arc (but always looks forward to your videos, no matter the content, so that I can still feel caught-up on all the lore and changes 🤣👏🏻 Thank you for your service!!), can you do a Talking or some kind of video on the whole Author shift-around/New Team stuff? How many of the original four are still writing for WC or have they all been replaced with different Ghost Writers? Thank you for your consideration!
I personally adore noncats in Clans and I`m very curious about the noncat societies outside of Clan culture. I`ve seen a few spins and interpretations of said noncat societies(such as EggYolkLord`s/Swanfeather The Elder`s regarding prey society and her Clan noncat OCs). The idea that prey noncats who could communicate with predators just accepting that they`re going to die feels so wrong, too(another reason why I love Swan`s interpretation). Also considering how smart dogs are in our world, they probably could speak more than they appear to in the books, or they mainly rely on body language with a few words spoken for context. "Pack pack, kill kill" with baring teeth and false charges for emphasis. Noncats especially flourish in the roblox roleplaying community, but there`s always been backlash to it. People get so upset about a noncat warrior, or especially a noncat high role. The thing is, they`re OCs. People can`t really control somebody else`s OC. It`s a book series about religious cats who can literally kill god, so the realism in this series is out the window, all over the place, and there`s no set agreement on it. Gatekeeping OCs is so pointless. I also never thought much of the rat leader until now, there's a lot more mystery about that guy than I realized.
I think a Clear Sky talking video would really entertaining. There’s so many different angles to approach it from. He’s the most chaotic spaz in the series lol.
This is a strange video indeed... anyways I know you're probably not gonna take suggestions but please talk about ocelot? Ocelot the kittypet appeared in ch 39 of long shadows. I think it was really cute that they self sponsored themselves by saying the "Tiny kittens on the shelf", probably minis in Ocelots house Edit: at 3:30 you mention that the prey is shown to be sentient, and that also bothers me. This is why I love Wolves of the Beyonds, they have this thing when the wolves kill prey (forgot the name), but they show respect and there is mentioned to be "agreement between predator and prey"
I remember that series! The sister series, Guardians of Ga'Hoole, had a good approach where the owl didn't really know that prey animals had the capacity to be sentient until a prophetic rabbit showed up (which also kinda freaked out the owl characters). Sure, there's a bunch of other talking/sentient animals in the series (wolves, snakes, possibly other birds, etc) but they're several degrees removed from the main cast, have different "levels" of society/communication/sentience, and also not the primary prey animals so it's not like the heros are killing and eating the cast of Redwall every other page lol (tho to be fair, there WAS a cannibalistic owl in at least one of the books). It ended up feeling more like our relationships to other animals in real life, where some animals are "food" and not given much else thought to unless there's extraordinary circumstances, but then there's other animals that we have some ability to "communicate" with or recognize personalities/emotions, or animals with the ability to form social relationships (basically cow, pig, chicken vs dolphin, crow/raven, dogs/wolves)
@@thebeesknees715 Exactly! About what you said about the *cough* cannibalistic *cough* animals, they were framed as being bad, they were bad, and acted bad, which i feel justifies putting that in a childrens book.
I do feel you on the animal xenofiction where the prey and predators talk thing. Always made me uncomfortable. One of the reasons (besides it being very much made for kids) that I couldn't get into Lion Guard. Lion King has always had this in-universe but by keeping hero predation entirely off screen and only having timon and pumbaa as actual talking prey animals, they juuuust kept the suspension of disbelief in there Fuli the cheetah saving a talking zebra colt from the evil hyenas and then ending the episode with 'okay i'm off to go hunt seeya' is the weirdest thing imaginable. Having a council of animal leaders debating over where the crocodile delegate is allowed to have his people eat the other delegate's children and where he isn't is horrifying. The only thing that I can think about if I watch Lion Guard is the administration nightmare of managing a savannah full of sentient animals who need to eat each other. Horrifying. The prey animals of the lion guard are in a dictator state where their leaders are literally eating them while also pretending to be their friends when saving them from rockslides. Horrifying, sinister. I will never stop thinking about it.
Maybe a talking on Heatherstar? She shows up in one or two books I think, and is pretty important in Tallstar's revenge. It's very clear she favors the moor-runners above the tunnelers, because she makes most of the apprentices moor runners. I honestly hated her when reading Tallstar's prophecy, and when she got rid of the role of tunneler, getting rid of a major advantage for Windclan and getting rid of one of the only things that made Windclan unique, I hated her even more. Not to mention she gives Hopkit the prefix -Dead.
rat leader is a divine punishment from starclan to condemn skyclan, only by defeating the mighty rat leader did skyclan prove they were worth saving. (then they all got killed again)
Please do a video on Blackstar! There is so much that happend in his life, he is one of the only cats to actually really need a redemption arc. For half of his life, Blackstar was a murder who followed two dictators by *free will*. He deserved more than what the books gave him and was, in my opinion, the best Shadowclan leader. He was ready to be aggressive and attack, but he also was kind and good to his clan.
every time the cats directly communicate with noncats, it opens up some strange implications about the way their universe functions... granted, this also happens many times when the cats communicate with other cats
FINALLY the rat leader is so interesting im surprised he isn't talked about much more often. i'v always wanted to do a pmv for him but I struggle with large projects so I havn't gotten to it quiet yet.
Ok I saw the dog part and just wanted to comment on that. We are most likely reading from the perspective of a cat. Meaning we can’t speak dog. We might speak a little so that’s all we know. The dogs are probably speaking in full,constructed sentences for THEM but for us it’s just some words. But that’s only my theory
I would love to hear you talk about Erin Hunter's other series. I had no clue you read them and being frank I dont see anyone else taking an interest I them. It weird becuase there are a lot of concepts that connect the Hunterverse such as each first arc having two villains, and the same tropes being played out.
i've had the exact same thoughts about intelligent animal groups being able to communicate in xenofiction i wouldn't say communication between them ruins it for me completely but it does break me out of the immersion pretty drastically (the only way it doesn't is if it's specifically different predator animals having commutation with each other or vice versa and not predator and prey being of the same level of intelligence and communication)
I'd love to hear you talk about Sol. He's such a pathetic little weirdo, and i kinda love him, not for what he was in the books but for the potential he had. I just wanna know your thoughts on him.
tbh no clue what predators are supposed to do in the scenario that prey is sapient, like, unless their omnivores they still *have* to eat prey to y'know survive. This probably creates cruel cultures and superiority to justify it tbh, prey should certainly put out more opposition to it though or alternatively try and make pacts and deals with their predators but those potential deals sound incredibly cruel, like offering up elders in exchange for sparing everyone else/protection from other predators. it makes sense but....... eugh... offering up dead and sick sounds like the recipe for poisoning predators or making them unhealthy and whatnot
SkyClan’s rat issue is just the boss from Dark Souls 2, Royal Rat Vanguard. But if it could talk like the Rat King it’s defending. And well… if they were normal rat size.
Please do a Leopardfoot video. Everyone forgets about her, but she gave birth to TIGERSTAR. Her mate left her to become a kittypet! If you read bluestar prophecy, Pinestar doesn’t even stay with her to see his kits! She is such an underrated character
I think it’s that the other animals are just a lot more primitive. Like, while cats think like us, most of the other animals are barely able to grasp basic concepts like freedom and language. Midnight is an exception to this rule, as I think from what she has said would lead us to believe that the Badgers are on a more similar level to cats than the other creatures are. The rats and prey animals are to the cats as we are to Neanderthals and/or monkeys. Certain species have varying intelligence as well, I’d probably guess, lining up with Midnight’s statement about the rabbits being stupid and foxes only thinking about violence.
i love how this video went from talking abt a one-off villain to a long discussion about how his sapience opens a massive can of worms in regards to wc’s worldbuilding
Been a long time watcher, though I never commented. I have to thank the people who suggested giving the RAT LEADER a talking point. And I must thank you for making this video.
I bet the raccoons could have escaped generations back and they’ve bred and built up a population to where it was, but like Erin hunters may not bother with that also still raccoons don’t have large groups like that so it still is silly. Way more fun to imagine who 40-raccoon-man is and what his life must be like, both before and after his forty raccoons broke out of his garage and left him alone
I have a theory. Maybe, the cat clans aren't the only clans. The leader of each of these clans has multiple lives. Midnight, the cat leaders, the rat leader, the pack leader, and likely the leaders of the prey animals are already long dead.
I feel like we need a talking/mini talking of brokenstar. He seemed to grow into being evil, though he was fortold to, it was be very interesting to get a pov novela with broken star
Idea: Rat Leader not only passes down thier knowledge, but thier soul to the next rat. Reincarnate into the fellow rate again and again again... Also too overconfident to think of a Plan B, he thinks if he killed the cats once, he can easily do again. Its Ashfur all over again.
Perhaps the rats had a sacred ancestors that gave them extra lives too. Assuming each animal gets special abilities from their ancestors would be very cool. Let's say the whispering cave or something gave them their magic life and that's why they can't talk anymore
Holy shat I just made a review video about 'the hunt for elsewhere' where I complain about the predator prey relationships too! The trope bothers me so much because it ends up making the anthropomorphic predators look like canibals when they're having full convos with the same species they eat. Flipping hate it. The only books I can stand that do it is the amazing Maurice and bravelands.
Can you talk about Honeyfern, Poppyfrost, and Berrynose, and just about cats taking new mates after the other died in general? I really love poppyfrost but I thought it was weird that she fell in love with berrynose, especially since his past mate was her sister. I kinda hate it, and the subplot just annoys me whenever I read the power of three and omen of the stars.
I'd like to see a mini-talking about oakfur and/or mosspelt, they're characters from the first arc that are still living as elders and yet have been random stock background characters their whole lives
My personal headcanon is that the rat got lost on his way to _Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH_ (explaining both his intelligence and longevity) and just decided to role with it when he found himself in this book instead.
I think warrior cats should eat bats more often. They are a small meal yes but they can give them to kits. I’m not sure if it’s possible for them to actually catch them but it would be a little extra prey.
i was wondering if you could do a mini talking over flintfang and his relationship with his apprentice, badgerfang! i love the way the interact in the series and badgerfangs death was beyond depressing. and i just want to know more about flintfang as a character! thanks for reading and i hope you consider!
