July 22, 2019
[This guide was copied, as is, from Wattpad. At the time, I had no intention of posting it here. Please excuse any discrepancies.]
This section discusses humans in the Warriors universe, what they do, and how they might be used to enhance fanfiction. As Warriors is an animal story, they are generally regarded as plot devices rather than characters; to date, no canon story treats a human as a character.
In any book about animals, humans make an inevitable appearance. Whether they are exploring the abandoned area the story takes place in, intervening directly with one of the characters, or their domain is the setting, they are always ready to act as a plot device. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Yes, I have railed plot devices before, or at least the idea of using complex topics and tropes as poorly used plot devices. In a story centered around animals a line is usually drawn between them and humans, and that line is often very pronounced. In such stories, Warriors included, they often cannot be controlled. Rightfully so. We are the apex creatures of planet Earth, after all. But just because our animals (often) lack the ability to control us in stories centered around them, it does not mean we have to be out of sight all the time.
HUMANS IN WARRIORS
Known as 'twolegs' to the cats of the Warriors universe, they are treated roughly the same as other books about animals, albeit with less screen time. Humans are a constant threat for cats. They run them over with their 'monsters', walk around their territory uninvited, and have literally destroyed settings in rare occasions. Saying humans are a dominant force is an understatement, but saying they are the dominant force would be incorrect. That title goes to StarClan and, to a lesser extent, the Place of No Stars. Some books about animals use their humans similarly. In Watership Down, humans are the cause of the conflict in their tearing up of the moors the rabbits live on, forcing them to move. But are they the cause of all the character development, minor conflicts, and the ending? No. Same can be said about the humans in Warriors. Did some insane homeless guy give Spottedleaf her prophecy? No. StarClan did.
This comes at little surprise. Animals cannot speak to us in the same way we speak to each other. With Warriors being about feral cats, it would not make sense for them to openly communicate with humans. If they cannot communicate effectively with our characters or interact within the boundaries of our setting, then their role in the story is usually demoted. In the canon's case, to plot devices. Children exist to get scared off by our feral cats, cars exist to kill minor characters, they can destroy parts of the setting on occasion, they ignorantly strut through clan territory, and they bring things with them that they may lose. And they… actually, that is about it. They do not do much else in canon aside from these minor inconveniences. Sure they may kill a cat here and there, but it is usually nothing serious to the main plots in the books. The worst they have ever done, in fact, was presumably bring dogs close enough to the forest to allow Tigerclaw to manipulate them (I only say presumably because the dogs certainly were not there in books prior to A Dangerous Path).
It is unfortunate that humans are often underutilized in Warriors. But the Erins certainly use them better than how they are used in movies about animals: as evil beings looking to cut down a forest for no other reason than to build luxury housing or something. The Erins do not even use them poorly. But they could be used in so many more ways than they are. Some situations may have even benefited from their presence.
WHY SPECIFICALLY HUMANS?
There are plenty of plot devices out there for us to use in any storytelling medium. Some are not easily available to us with animal stories like Warriors. This is where humans come in.
Everyone writes different fanfiction. While there is only one group of Erins, there are thousands of amateur writers out there who have written fanfics about their work. It is reasonable to believe we all might use humans differently than they did. Most tend to omit them. Others use them as an unstoppable force. And very few use them as the main antagonist. Regardless of how they are used, humans act as a plot device on a very high level. By high level, I mean humans can be as abstract as a hurricane and just as easy to understand. They might not fit into every story, as a result, but they are a predictable plot device. In the confines of an animal story, there is only so much humans can do without taking attention away from our main animal characters. As such, few bits of their language and references can appear, or only so many cultural customs and behaviors. Without these traits, humans become abstract. From a literary standpoint, this is not bad. It means that seeing a human in a story about feral cats is not a good thing for them.
It is story time! Here is one from when I was in high school. Living in a new-ish built [California suburb] was nice. There were trees everywhere, courtesy of the government. Where there were trees, there were many bees and other insects that helped said trees bloom and blossom better. And that meant a very healthy bird population. And this meant that there was more than enough food for feral cats, born from the abandoned pets and wandering loaners. One night, around 02:00, loud meowing echoed up and down the street. The screech of heavy brakes woke everyone. That was unusual in such a quiet neighborhood. I just went back to sleep, though. I had school in the morning. When I woke up naturally, my mom told me that a utility truck stopped just in time to prevent running over a shoebox full of kittens. That box was being pushed by none other than their mother! Clearly accustomed to feral life among humans, she was living off (and literally in) our trash. The driver, who knew how to deal with feral domestics as a landscaper, had left the kits and their mother with our roused neighbor across the street. The mother did not freak out, nor did she try to slip away when all grew quiet again. This is very uncharacteristic behavior for feral cats for those of you who do not know, and even stranger for a nursing mother. She allowed herself and her kits to be handled if it meant temporary shelter.
At that point, the annoyed resident of [California suburb] banded together to try and rid themselves of the cats. They all shared their stories on how they would stalk their birdfeeders, sleep in their emptied swimming pools during winter, and attack their pet cats whenever they were let outside. That was nothing, however, to what the neighborhood birdwatchers (there were a lot of them, apparently) noticed. Several bird species had straight-up disappeared. They suspected having given up on their insect-ladin paradise to avoid the out of control cat populace. This neighborhood's property values were rising fast, so the government of [California city] was eager to help. That all happened in that year's February. The feral cat population was down to almost nothing by the end of that summer. Animal control had swept through our massive suburb and caught all the tomcats they could, killing or neutering them. I went from seeing three regulars in our backyard to one, a few times a week if I was lucky enough to catch her.
Point being, who knows what those cats were doing before that intervention. If this was a Warriors fanfic that you wrote, they could have been doing anything before those animal control officers showed up. I would like to see StarClan stop a group of semi-overweight men with enough dead fish and cat pheromones to capture a whole clan.
* Bonus note: with the feral cats decimated, the birds came back way slower than expected. The city sprayed pesticides, at their expense, around the neighborhood for years to keep insects bearable in summer. The wasp population is still excessive to this day.
USING HUMANS IN YOUR STORIES
So our familiar twolegs can do quite a bit to our stories if we allow them. While most will not use them at all, some of us will. And when we use them, we remember what I said earlier about their use in canon: they are a dominant force but not the dominant force. To our cats, humans are just a force of nature. They cannot understand many of their actions, they know they do not act to harm them specifically, and they cannot predict or alter human intervention. Thus, force of nature. To our warrior cats, StarClan is the dominant force that indirectly has the most influence on their customs and motivations. That is not to say they can never be more than that; it is a fanfiction, after all.
While the Erins do not use humans incorrectly, they have greatly limited their role based on the confines of their larger story. We, however, can give our humans as much power over our story as we want. Think about humans doing anything from cutting down forest area, to building residential areas that can act as our setting, to their capture-and-release neutering practices. What would our main character do if their whole clan was captured and made infertile? That would certainly mess with them in a way that affects their actions and, therefore, the actions of our main character. Going the opposite way, we could have a biologist in the area studying a local feral cat population; in our case, the main character's clan. What if they found out she used food to attract cats, and helped them with ticks and injuries? Think of the power that grants to a clan who has this mysteriously useful twoleg on their side. What would the other clans think of such intervention? Because we are not limited to the confines of some multi-arc plot, we can make our humans do whatever we want.
Second, humans can ground our story in reality and broaden the scope of our setting. I know that Warriors takes place in a fictional setting. But that fictional setting is so close to reality that it might as well be. Your fanfic could take place in a real setting, one that is varying degrees of hostile or friendly to animal populations. A gated wildlife preserve and a warzone are two very different places for animals. Sanctuaries and battlefields are easy to imagine for us, and there is plenty of reference and history to draw from. Speaking of history, many ancient cultures worshiped animals. Cats were common on these divine lists. What if our clan struggles were sacred and praised by onlooking humans, ignorant of their 'gods' political and religious strife? What a role reversal, and certainly nothing standard in this fandom. For canon, 'reality' includes seasons, forests and lakes, and human ignorance. We certainly can add more to that list if we want.
There is one more thing we can do with our humans: we can make them friends of our cats, or exist with or alongside them. You have heard of stories like Black Beauty, Life of Pie, and The Call of the Wild; if not, they are stories where humans coexist with animals in some capacity. These are the most common types of animal stories, as this is the most common scenario in real life for humans and animals. Coexisting, in this case, is easier than conflict. So birds learn to deal with power lines and people put deer crossing signs around forest roads. At no point in Warriors do clan cats and humans interact in a meaningful way. That is okay, but we can do much more in our fanfics. We do not have to have these two separate societies of animal and human, and mixing them can really shake up our take on the canon material. Super editions have never been told from a kittypet's point of view. We have never heard of suburban trash being a reliable source of scavenge. Domestic or not, animals and humans live together in real life. And that is another source of inspiration to draw from.
There are plenty of ways to use humans in fanfics now that we have decoupled their use in canon from ours. Not mandatory by any means; some animal stories do not need a direct human presence to be good stories.
IN CONCLUSION…
Humans have the potential to be one of our most powerful plot devices. Only a fraction of their use cases are ever observed in canon, and we can do much, much more with our fanfics. While we can use them as an unstoppable force of nature, they can also live with our cats or be used to justify a distinct setting. In the context of our animal story source material, this is one of those plot devices that you can get really creative with.
You do not have to fall back on forest fires, evil clanmates, or even StarClan for your fanfic. Should you choose, twolegs can be equivalent to all of those things and more.
- Tyto
