I know a lot of people think that the problem w Hollyleaf’s characterization was that they redeemed her at all but respectfully I literally couldn’t disagree more… first off I think part of the appeal of her character in a series that has been biting itself in the ass for 20 years by refusing to deviate from the good and evil binary- even (especially?) when doing so would make the story more interesting- is her moral ambiguity, like I think making her all-out evil would make her just as uninteresting to me as if they’d depicted her as always being in the right. Second of all I think it’s important to acknowledge that Hollyleaf’s more reprehensible actions are a direct result of her believing that she is always in the right. She has main character syndrome and she is making it everyone else’s problem!! She doesn’t do evil shit to be evil, she always does what she thinks is the right thing to do because she always has to be right. And while this is definitely more out of pride than genuine altruism, I don’t think it necessarily started out that way. With what we’ve been presented I think it’s safe to say that, while Holly has always been ambitious and self-centered to some degree, she is also fundamentally principled with a strong sense of justice and unwavering loyalty to her clan. She might have let her worst traits win out due to stubbornness and being allergic to admittance of wrongdoing, but actually turning on her clan? Committing conscious acts of evil against innocent cats (who haven’t committed any perceived offense against the warrior code)? Hollyleaf could never justify that to herself, and so it wouldn’t make sense for her character. I just hate the way that they went ab her redemption… like I liked the parallels between the fox cub turning on her and the way she treated Leafpool, but other than that, wtf was she supposed to have learned from dicking around underground for however many moons? How did that advance her character growth? I think they should have killed her in the tunnel collapse and sent her to the Dark Forest, bc being sent to cat hell might be the only thing that would ever make Holly admit she was in the wrong tbh. And then!! Bc she realized she fucked up and is still loyal to her principles and her clan, she could have acted as a sort of DF deprogrammer from the inside, warning the cats training in the DF ab what they were getting into and eventually fighting against the DF in the Great Battle. Then we could finally get a DF cat being admitted to Starclan after their redemption instead of this weird reverential treatment of punitive justice that the series seems determined to push on their child audience