Chapter Text
July 13, 2019
This section covers behaviors in real life cats versus cats in Warriors. Warriors is a fantasy novel where realistic cat behavior has rarely been implied or shown, so having unrealistic cats is not technically wrong. So this topic can be taken or left, for it is not as much advice to improve as it is something to think about.
How realistic cats are in Warriors is something that is never really discussed by the fandom. It is one of those topics that is only brought up by a disgruntled fan or in fanfiction guides like this one. And when it is, no one discusses how realistic cats would make the series better - or if they would make it better. You figure a 30+ book series about cats would have some realistic depictions of them, right?
Well…
--------------------
CAT BEHAVIOR IN WARRIORS
Cat-ification is my word for making the cats of Warriors behave closer to their real life counterparts; this is not an actual term (or even a grammatically correct one). The cats in one of the only novel series about cats out there do not really act like cats. They act more like us. For example:
- The cats sleep at night and are active by day. Always. It is a special circumstance to be active at night.
- They care deeply about the concepts of parenthood and kinship. They mate with the intent on doing so for life.
- Mothers use their experiences to teach their kits to grow up like or better than themselves. The father is even known and present.
- They are active most of the time they are awake. Climate and food availability do not affect this.
- Females do not go into heat, so kits come as they will. It is not uncommon for less than a full litter to be born.
There are more traits, of course, but these are the most obvious. The important takeaway is that the Erin's cats act more like humans than actual cats. If any of you own a cat, you may have noticed it does not, in fact, fight for Stars and clan when it leaves the house for extended periods of time. Bonus downer points if yours is indoor only. So why is it that a story about literal domestic feral cats has none of the expected cat behavior?
Cats that act less like cats are easier for readers to grasp and imagine. You would think that only cat lovers are reading a lengthy fantasy series about cats. You would probably expect everyone reading has a cat, or studies them intensely in hopes of owning their own one day. This is not the case. Not even the Erins are cat experts (last I checked, one of the former ones was a dog person). In a story about humans, it is easy to grasp what they might or should do based on their age, location, and status. We generally have an idea what a seventeen year-old college freshman is like, or a fifty-something detective promising to retire after that last cold case. We do not have to be them, but there is information on them. They exist in real life (to certain degrees) and they are still human in the end. Cats on the other had cannot speak, are not as smart or as complex as us, and have a much more limited range of motion. We only talk to humans… most of the time. If the Erins wrote 15 minutes of Firestar grooming his crotch and thinking nothing of it, we would wonder what the hell we were reading.
Cats that act more human also give more freedom to the authors in regards to storytelling and character behaviors. If the Erins had to deal with the fact that cats are active whenever it is easiest to get food, day or night, are very skittish of each other, and are pretty damn lazy, there would not be much room for conflict. Why get jealous of other couples if there are plenty of toms and she-cats to go around? Why fight over territory when our protagonist could just claim the high ground of a tree? No social structure, no romance, no gods. It would make for a pretty bland 30+ books, right? After all, most human behavior is limited to humans.
It seems pretty easy why the Erins would choose to anthropomorphize their cats as heavily as they did. Could they have made a compelling series about animals acting more realistic? Absolutely. Just look at Watership Down (it is about rabbits, not cats). But it would not be the Warriors we all recognize. So what about those of us who want to write cat-like cats instead of humans in cat bodies?
--------------------
CAT-IFICATION IN FANFICTION
As expected, the cats in our fanfictions act about the same as the ones in canon. I think the only time the Erins beat us in realism is during birthing scenes, where they go into great detail that we often do not (yeah, pregnancy and birth is the part they choose to be realistic above all else). Our stories are derivative works, after all. This is expected. And this is not a problem. If the cats in our fanfics do not act realistic, so be it. They never had to.
For some of us, however, we might actually want our cats to be cats. What if we do not like how off the Erins are about cat behaviors? Well, it is not impossible to write a Warriors fanfic with realistic cats. But there are definitely a few things to keep in mind when doing so:
- Cat’s sleep cycles depend on safety and food. Most cats are active at night for that reason, hunting mice, birds, and rats that are taking advantage of the decreased human activity. Cats can see just fine at night or in near total darkness, unlike humans.
- The concepts of kinship and family do not exist for cats, nor do they take on life mates. If a she-cat goes into heat and a littermate is the only one around, she will take him. Cat’s genes have also evolved to prevent inbreeding from being a problem.
- Queens go into heat and get pregnant, on average, twice per year. One queen could easily bring four to ten live kits into the world in that span, a reason they are considered an invasive species. Cat mating, contrary to what canon implies, is not the slightest bit pleasant or romantic.
- Queens nurse their kits and leave them when they are weaned from nursing. The kits do not stay together, rather they just scramble. The father is not present for anything unless the queen has birthed among humans; they may allow the human to introduce the father if he remains in close proximity or is also a pet.
- Cats only travel in groups when they absolutely have to, whether it is for survival reasons or safety from stronger predators or humans. They are normally very territorial and will attack cats who enter their marked borders.
- Without being socialized early by humans, a domestic cat will act far closer to its wild relatives than most other pets would. They do just fine outside of captivity, as they are often an apex predator in developed areas.
This is not all of the information available, of course. For more, use Wikipedia. They have an incredibly in depth fact sheet about cats that is much more accurate than the hundreds of others online (the odds of you needing their exact height to the centimeter for your fanfic are near zero). The cats in Warriors do not follow any of these behaviors. Not one. Yet every single domestic cat in the world does. Even the feral ones. The ancestors they derived from also follow these behaviors to the letter; they are actually much more skittish than their domesticated counterparts. But they look no different from them, so your warrior cats did not descend from sabre cats or whatever. But I think you already knew that.
Since this is not a section on advice to correct an error, I have no right way to incorporate this behavior into your fanfic. It really is your discretion. But I can provide an example: my own fanfic. In A Reign of Thunder and Lightning , I intentionally made my cats more realistic. In addition to leaving the fantasy world and joining the real one, I had clans operational 24/7, toms banned from being around kits, and cats not knowing (or caring) who their parents were. I also tried to portray the anxiety that some cats can feel when in unfamiliar or unfavorable situations, since the setting is a human war zone and StarClan had gone dark. All of this, of course, pushes that fanfic deep into alternate universe territory. But I wanted it there. While the setting change had more to do with that than the cat behaviors, the cats were not a small part of that decision. I personally prefer a story about cats to be close, at least close, to how they might act in real life. More than anything else, that rigidness of the source material irked me. That does not make Warriors bad, nor do I think it is bad. But using realistic cats was my way of making my fanfic stand out in a good way and writing what I wanted to see from canon but never got to. Is it correct or incorrect? Neither. Good or bad? The readers are the judge of that.
--------------------
IN CONCLUSION…
If you are particularly concerned with how much like cats your fanfic’s cast acts, feel free to seek more information about them. Realism is not something that comes up often in our fandom, so I thought I would bring it up. It might provide a different type of story, or allow more options when storytelling than if you pulled 100% from the source material. It makes for something different. Not right or wrong, but different.
Most of us are not cat experts, but it pays to know. After all, none of us are human experts when we write about them.
- Tyto