???????? does the new team think that leaders just fuck around all day or???????????

okay so.

alderheart mouths off to a kittypet because he was being rude over him losing a toe. said kittypet jumps him for it, and sparkpelt rushes out to save him. you would think here that maybe alderheart has had some character development and maybe got the stick out of his ass and stops thinking that his sister breathes to spite him?

lmao of course not, he throws another hissy fit cause poor baby got emasculated.

“was she TRYING to rub it in???” she probably just doesnt want you to worry about her considering you got beat up.

how dare sparkpelt be concerned over her brother. what a selfish bitch. i bet shes only doing this for clout somehow. she CLEARLY concieved herself in squirrelflights womb alongside alderheart JUST to steal the spotlight and make him look like a pussy. what an inconsiderate bitch!

little side tangent, it’s quite interesting how sparkpelt was retconned into not wanting skyclan around and totally hating their guts and pushing for xenophobia and hatred when that 100% was not how she was in the first half of the arc. but alderheart’s own hatred for outsiders (in this case, kittypets) is consistent from book 1 to this very scene. and no one cares. because that’s “acceptable” xenophobia. its almost like the erins dont think xenophobia is all that bad actually and its kinda stupid to hone in on sparkpelt being twisted and bent into a strawman in this arc and act like shes the source of xenophobia when this whole damn series has a problem with xenophobia. sparkpelt’s xenophobia is only bad because it’s directed at the “wrong” group. and even then we’re supposed to gasp in horror with twigpaw as she gripes about how weird and bad skyclan is for the daylight warriors and leaders patrolling.

anyways back to alderheart’s tantrum. “we were so close!” oh, were you? this isnt new, youve been bitching about her being a selfish brat since book 1. you complain that she wouldnt understand your unique tortured soul, then you complain that she wants to help? and i guess the right thing to do would be letting you bite the dust. i honestly wish she did. itd be funny.

also the phone works both ways and she has a life. get a grip for fucks sake.

after this they admittedly have a nice moment where alderheart apologizes for being sensitive but it comes after spark is made to apologize for no good reason. so it hits weird. she reassures him about vague prophecy number 37384838. they have a nice chat about larksong.

and then because we need alderheart to have the ultimate w this chapter, a dog attacks sparkpelt and the medic with no training and no good fighting skills is able to epically save her life.

“omg alderheart that was so brave… youre the REAL hero…. youre so cool and awesome……….”

this would have been fine without this bullshit at the end to make alderheart win back his pride and get his sister back for emasculating him.

i know we’ve all ragged on this scene but i really can’t get enough of ivypool openly admitting she shut down the patrol over dovewing and twigpaw’s immediately gotta look directly into the camera to say “remember kids! marrying outsiders is WRONG! ivypool didn’t totally fuck up here, she had good intentions so let’s not hold this against her! everything should be forgiven now :)”

uh. do not do that.

good guy bramblestar agrees to separate two orphans

i realize thats a lot for this arc to tackle but it doesnt sit right with me that they emphasize that skyclan is different from rogues. that they should be worthy of the clans’ time and respect because they’re warriors. that oh, it was wrong to mistreat twigpaw and violetpaw because they were clanborn all along! when like hey maybe we shouldnt be treating rogues like secondclass citizens at all. just a thought.

So I do get the anger in the Warriors fandom about how aggressively anti adoption the series is, don’t get me wrong. It’s incredibly insidious how a character will learn that their parents adopted them and not really even be mad or frustrated, but will just completely drop them and pretend that there’s no connection there whatsoever, good or bad. How Gray Wing, despite them preaching about how he’s a wonderful adopted dad, literally is manifested a new wife to have bio babies with him as a “reward”. its so aggressively anti found family it hurts

But that being said…. I don’t really like how people apply this to Twigbranch. At least from what I’ve seen. Twigbranch wasn’t lovingly adopted after her mother gave her up, she didn’t scoff and say “Lilyheart doesn’t count, she can’t love me like a REAL mom”, she didn’t preach about how blood is thicker than water or anything . Her mother died tragically through a series of circumstances that couldn’t be controlled. She was just given to Lilyheart because she was the only one available, and she was only accepted into the clan because they thought she’d fulfill a prophecy, and treated her like a burden when she wasn’t instantly special. She was excluded and teased by her foster siblings, her doctor verbally abused her which turned more people against her, including said foster siblings. Her sister was pried away from her into an abusive environment and she was denied access to her in any way. She wasn’t even told about the full circumstances of why ThunderClan is even doing all this. Lilyheart and Alderheart are good to her, sure, but that seems to be it. And later on, when her family seems to be out there, her own mentor sabotages the patrol for selfish reasons and no one steps up.

Um. Yeah I think I’d want to know my biological family too in that situation. She’s allowed to mourn the mother she never got to know and to want to know her father and be with her sister, especially after how ThunderClan treated her. “Oh she’s turning against her found family!” WHAT found family?

it definitely isn’t, but i’m gonna pretend that this is a tiny little throwback to graystripe and mosspelt coparenting stormfur and feathertail and being friends over it.

alderpaw your granddad is firestar, why do you hate housecats THAT much

Jayfeather shut the fuck up challenge

like theres no way someone on the team DOESNT have a hate boner going for sparkpelt right. like why else is she constantly raked over the coals and bastardized for plot angst

Darkest Night Diagnosis: F

I think that's our first F tier. Should I be making a tierlist. Whatever.

I think this book singlehandedly killed the Warriors hyperfix, for better or for worse. I will now be significantly slower with this reread because of this book.

Look... as frustrating and bad as Apprentice's Quest, Thunder and Shadow, and Hawkwing's Journey were, they had redeeming elements. Sparkpaw is a joy when shes doing things in the Apprentice's Quest. Twigkit and Violetkit's tragic relationship is really compelling in like a meta way in Thunder and Shadow. And while that first half is god awful tedious bullshit, the second half of Hawkwing's Journey when they're actually on said journey gets really interesting, and it also had Curlypaw who is the best character.

There's... nothing like that in Darkest Night. I was bored and annoyed and miserable from start to finish. Nothing got my creative juices flowing. Nothing got me thinking about how the plot could be compelling with certain headcanons without just changing the entire thing. There is like one nice scene with Sparkpelt talking about Larksong to Alderheart and it's sandwiched in between Alder screaming at her for emasculating him and pointing out her being ooc for the sake of being a strawman, and then her getting brutalized by a dog so Alderheart can win his pride back. It's not an offensive book but it is mind numbingly boring. It's an unbearably slow read and most of it is spent meandering about.

Characters like Sparkpelt are twisted from their original portrayal for the sake of contrivances. SkyClan is miserable. Mistystar is made into an idiot for the plot to work. Things just happen without rhyme or reason. Barely anything of actual substance even happens and the things that do happen are contrived and aggravating to read about.

I know Warriors doesn't really have intentional themes, and the consistent ones are.... really, really bad. But it felt like at every turn, this book was contradicting itself, Twigpaw's arc being the biggest example. I've said it over and over, but the way this arc is trying to claim a cute found family story with Twigpaw and ThunderClan is so jarring. We're just supposed to accept that ThunderClan was good to her because... they're ThunderClan. They're The Good Ones. Every clan is awful and weird and bad compared to ThunderClan. No Matter What. Please don't talk about all the times her clanmates called her deadweight and considered kicking her out bc of her heritage if she wasn't a prophet.

And they can't even commit to "found family vs blood family" either. They hook Twigpaw up with her adoptive brother and dismiss his adoption as never having been all that important in the face of his "real" family. They dismiss and downplay Twigpaw's biological relationship with Tinycloud and her new litter for the sake of emphasizing that Twig is alone (while contrasting Violetpaw meeting Cherrytail and Hawkwing's nobody sisters). And they ship off Hawkwing and Violetpaw for most of the book so that Twigpaw can talk about how alone she feels and how it's so sad that Jayfeather isn't verbally abusing her anymore. If anyone thinks that Twigbranch has a compelling found family relationship with ThunderClan and her arc is about grappling with chosen family vs biological family, they didn't actually read the book.

And you see this with Alderheart and Sparkpelt too, sort of. They're trying to go "xenophobia is bad! Alderheart and Sparkpelt are split over their political differences!" But the book only sees Sparkpelt as bad because they've deemed xenophobia against SkyClan specifically as a bad thing. Alderheart's dismissiveness and hatred of kittypets is not only not questioned, but reinforced several times. So it's kind of weird that people paint this as like a thing where Sparkpelt is uniquely bad when Alderheart is arguably a whole lot worse, but hes not xenophobic to a clannnn. So it doesn't count I guess.

Speaking of Sparkpelt though, wow I can't blame her for wanting SkyClan gone, because I don't give a fuck about these nobodies either. They are so boring, put them back in the gorge so I don't have to keep reading about them please <3 I don't care about Leafstar or Hawkwing or any of these guys. I don't even have that much to say about them, they're just annoying and boring and I wish they'd go away forever.

Anyways, first F tier book. First book where I was just bored and miserable the whole time. I don't expect AVoS to get better from here. In fact, poll time.

If I get no, I'll just read the wiki summaries, and maybe seek out specific passages from the pdfs. Yes is for reading the whole thing.

aughhh lionblaze specifically not enjoying dovewing's presence here

im not reading briarlight's death scene but there is something so incredibly insidious to me about tree being announced for this Brand New Special Boy Role Made Just For Him because he wouldnt do warrior or medic work, and in the exact same paragraph on the wiki, briarlight dies because the authors basically thought she was too worthless to keep around

does leafstar have fans? bc im sorry but shes been incredibly unlikable these past few books

resisting the urge to post every single normal xenophobic thing these protagonists spew is so hard. i feel like thats most of my lb tag. like i cannot stress enough to yall how WEIRD these books are!!!