My History With and Thoughts On Warrior Cats

When I was ten, I started reading books as a regular hobby. I had dabbled in it before, mainly with the Junie B. Jones and Encyclopedia Brown books, but this was the first time I started reading regularly. But it wasn't with the middle grade fantasy books I consume today. I started with the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books and moved to Big Nate, mostly focusing on middle school books that focused on...well, middle school. But there was still a thirst for fantasy within me, and when I was thirteen, I started on the Warriors Cats series by Erin Hunter.

(Spoilers ahead!)

The series looked perfect for me. I'm a cat person, and it was intense and dark for a kid's series. My local library had a good few of the books, and I started with the first published one, Into the Wild.

I devoured the book, getting through it in a week. I got the second book, Fire and Ice, and read it over the next week. But I had to take a bit of a break after that.

The Warriors books are split up into multiple arcs, and the first one, The Prophecies Begin, was what I was reading. However, my library only had the first three books in that arc, and someone else had checked out the third book.

Luckily, I had another option: the prequel arc, Dawn of the Clans. My library had all of those books, and I started with the first one, The Sun Trail. I remember reading it at the stadium at my high school as a game went on.

I went through all the books in Dawn of the Clans, being moved to tears by the way it ended. It wasn't perfect, having a weak villain in the end and needing better writing for the female characters, but it still ended up becoming my second-favorite arc from the series.

My most favorite is the original, The Prophecies Begin. I got the books for Christmas and got them all read soon after that. At that point, I was a full-on Warrior Cats fan.

My library started getting more books from the series, and I started on the second published arc, The New Prophecy. I enjoyed it at first. When I returned Midnight, I told the librarian that it was a really good book. I have fond memories of reading Moonrise, being excited when the characters met the mountain cats, enjoying Stormfur's POV, and being enchanted by the atmosphere. But sometime after I finished this arc, it ended up being my least favorite.

As it continued farther on, its issues became more and more apparent. Overtly padded plots filled with great amounts of nothing going on (A recurring problem with this series), and a very, VERY disappointing climax. But it didn't stop me from continuing with the series.

The next arc was Power of Three, and if I were ever to make a countdown of books that I loved and hated, these would definitely make the top five.

First, the positives. There's a lot of sweet moments throughout, like at the end of The Sight. Jayfeather is my favorite viewpoint character in the series, and the fire scene from Long Shadows is one of the most iconic in the series for a reason. Everything after it was a real page-turner!

But for the negatives, that was the only page-turner portion of the story I could think of. Many scenes were unmemorable, the plot usually had almost nothing to it and was packed with filler. Certain characters I was supposed to like were irritating at times, and one of the viewpoint characters, Lionblaze. is a legendarily nothing character among the fandom to the point where some fans have said they skipped his chapters for being so inconsequential.

So, Power of Three...VERY mixed feelings overall.

Sometime after that, I read started reading Omen of the Stars. It didn't have the exact same issues as Power of Three, but it still had filler issues. When I read Night Whispers, I was excited to have a viewpoint character from outside ThunderClan, which made the ending, where said character dies, really tick me off. I started Sign of the Moon afterward, but it also had filler issues and I wasn't enjoying it, so I DNF'd it about six chapters in.

That's all for the main series, aside from a brief step into The Broken Code. I didn't get very far in it because it was also slow-paced. But anyone who's familiar with Warrior Cats knows that it's much more than the main arcs. There are plenty of sub-series, ranging from OEL mangas, short stories, and graphic novels. I'll start off this section with the first sub-series, the extra-long Super Editions.

Firestar's Quest and Moth Flight's Vision were my first steps into the Super Editions, though I'm not sure which one was first. However, while both had some moments and characters I enjoyed, I dropped both of them because of the excessive filler I found throughout. Thus, the first Super Edition I finished was Bluestar's Prophecy.

BP was easily my favorite of this sub-series. The titular character was interesting and her story was nice to follow as a prequel to the first arc. It could've been more exciting in places, but it was still good. In fact, it made me excited for the next one I read, Crookedstar's Promise.

Unfortunately, it wasn't what I was hoping for.

There were some things about it that I liked, like Crookedstar's difficult relationship with his mother, but the way it was pulled off left me feeling like I was being dragged along. It was less a structured plot and more like every three chapters there was a new conflict that the main character would work through. It wasn't very exciting, and it was the last Super Edition I read.

The last relevant category of these books are the mangas and graphic novels, the comic book adventures. In my mind, I have them in two categories, the good ones and the not-so-good.

The good ones are the Ravenpaw's Path trilogy and The Rise of Scourge. The former has some tension and structure issues but was pretty good overall, while the other is one of my favorite stories from this universe, chronicling the life of one of its most dastardly villains, Scourge, in a way that makes me hope to see him and BloodClan in a DEATH BATTLE! episode up against Napoleon and his dogs from Animal Farm.

(It'll probably never happen, but a guy can dream, can't he?)

On the other hand, the others that I've read, Graystripe's Adventure, A Shadow in RiverClan, and Winds of Change, all came with serious issues. For the formermost, the titular character has none of the class clown personality that endeared him to readers in the main series. In ASiR, the whole story is a bunch of nothing, just some drama that could've been avoided if the cast just talked to each other.

The lattermost was the most disappointing for me. I thought the main protagonist, Mudclaw, who had his status stripped away for questionable reasons from his point of view, would be interesting, but the book doesn't delve into any of the interesting questions or talking points it could have. It just turns him into a petty bad guy. So much wasted potential!

...and that just about sums up all of my time with this series.

As for my history with these books, while they started as some of my favorites in the fantasy genre, my opinion of them soured the more I went along.

But if you're hoping to take a look at this franchise, I implore you, don't take only my word for it. It has a sizable fandom, and there are many fans who rant about and scrutinize it but still love it nonetheless. It can be quite messy, but in the eyes of many, there's still a lot to love.