Name: The Community of A Vision of Shadows – Sunny's Spiel | Warriors Analysis
Uploaded: 2024-02-18T15:39:44.000Z
Duration: 14 min 7 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Basic passive voice

This video topic was picked out by my patrons, and  suggested originally by Herriberri (apologies if  

Adverbs of degree

I mispronounced that) who pointed out that A  Vision of Shadows is an arc I really haven't  

covered much on the channel…which is true,  but uhhh maybe this video will explain why.

A Vision of Shadows is not my favorite  arc…on some days it is my least favorite arc,  

tossing that position back and forth with The New  Prophecy, and while I have several qualms with it,  

the primary thing that prevents A Vision of  Shadows from being in any way appealing to  

me is the characters. I have my gripes with  how the main characters were constructed,  

some of which I've talked about before, and  also how the support characters like Needletail,  

Finleap, or Jayfeather are handled in this arc but  the biggest problems come in the background cast  

where they simply cease to exist at all. With all  of the newest arcs, there has been a trend of more  

background characters being pulled up for a single  line, a short scene, or maybe even a part of a  

book when a character is needed but then thrown  back out immediately after their utility is gone,  

creating very disjointed clans full of nobodies  who mainly just fulfill the purposes of being  

mean to or oppositions for our point of view  characters. This is especially true with any  

characters who were specifically born at the end  of or after Omen of the Stars, but even some of  

the older characters who were less prominent  are shoved into obscurity of different levels  

and often stripped of any notable personality or  relationships they had before. I really hate this,  

on a personal level. I am someone who mainly  goes into fiction looking for characters I  

can understand and see grow and relationships  between those characters that I can feel happy  

to see flourish. Refusing to flesh out characters  to any extent and instead slotting their names  

into lines you need at random prevents any of that  from occurring, and it is made even worse when,  

to fuel the plots, most of the lines  you slot them into are derisive, cruel,  

and / or illogical. It ends up feeling like the  clans are filled to the brim with mouse-brained  

jerks who serve no purpose other than to make us  pity the protagonist for having to deal with them.

Here I am showing lists of every Thunderclan,  Shadowclan, and Skyclan cat born or introduced  

at the very end of Omen of the Stars or during the  A Vision of Shadows period. I'm focusing on these  

to give a fair shot in just showing clans we have  points of views in at some point. Immediately you  

can see the first problem: too many stinkin'  cats. There was already a big kit boom at the  

end of Omen of the Stars and in between that arc  and A Vision of Shadows, but this arc also opens  

us up to points of view in three clans instead  of one. Inevitably only some of the cats are  

going to be able to get much focus. And just as a  fun piece of evidence, here they are in order of  

how many lines they have. Of course we have the  protagonists and the closest support characters  

who get higher counts, but after three or four top  characters, no one manages to get even 50 lines  

across all six books in the arc, and before long  every clan gets into the single-digits, a problem  

especially prevalent in Thunderclan where tons of  new characters were born or carried over from the  

end of the last arc without being given any time  or focus in this new story. Even many of those who  

*are* prominent in this arc will practically  disappear in next arcs while only a few of  

the currently-obscure cats will ever be given  prominence in the future, let alone consistent  

prominence. Now, if any of the lines these  background characters get are intentional or added  

to an overall picture the authors themselves note  down about who these cats are, then no matter how  

long it takes, characters will eventually form.  However, Warriors is and always has been a series  

written by the seat of the Erins' pants, and their  deadlines and lack of a series bible force them to  

instead assign random lines or roles to whatever  character wins the lottery in one chapter and let  

them go in the next. That makes it very hard  to do a deep dive of, say Dewnose in the way I  

would for Hazeltail or Thornclaw, but it is what  I have promised so let's at least give a couple  

of these cats a try. I'm going to randomize which  cats I actually cover for each clan, discounting  

everyone with more than a hundred or less than  five lines just to give these guys a chance.

So first up…looks like Grassheart! She was  Tawnypelt's apprentice during Bramblestar's  

Storm but is introduced as a queen in the second  book of this arc. Several characters mention  

her and her kits without her being on screen.  However, she gets two full lines in this book:  

one asking who Alderpaw is and one telling  Violetkit that she has never seen her kit,  

Snakekit, so ill. Her kits become apprentices,  also with no word from her, and she returns to  

warrior duties in time for the Shattered Sky…where  she is mentioned exactly once by Darktail when  

he asks Rain for an assessment of her talent,  which was that she wasn't the greatest fighter  

but not likely to be a traitor to the Kin. Onto  Darkest Night! Here she uh…watches a speech from  

Rowanstar, suggests that they send out a search  party to look for the six-toed cat, exchanges  

glances with Stonewing in a sign of distrusting  Rowanstar, suggests the exact same search party  

again, blames Scorchfur for driving Rowanstar  away, presses around her kits with Stonewing  

who is now confirmed to be her mate for the first  time ever, suggests Shadowclan get supplies from  

their old camp before moving to Skyclan, cheers  Violetshine's warrior name along with the clan,  

and finally questions why Berryheart and  Yarrowleaf haven't returned to the clan. Already  

we're seeing the results of haphazardly assigning  lines to cats, as this book's meager pickings for  

her have had her be both for and against Rowanstar  as a leader. Even in this *very* small number  

of lines, she already has inconsistency, and  certainly no depth. This continues in River of  

Fire where she starts by demanding an answer as  to what Twigpaw is doing there, though she does  

accept Violetshine. Later she and Strikestone run  into Thunderclan and ask for Hawkwing because the  

missing Shadowclan cats have returned and  even later she gets her fourth and final  

line explaining that they're going to the Moonpool  where Tigerheart was taken. Finally, in The Raging  

Storm, she and Strikestone watch the Gathering  with neutral expressions, she goes on a patrol,  

and Violetshine thinks about her being caring if  not motherly when she was a kit. Grassheart gets  

attacked twice by Leafstar before and after she  calls to retreat and runs away. Medicine cats are  

mentioned to be treating her wounds a few times  and she says it hurts. Much later, she says that  

a Shadowclan warrior would never poison someone  because they settle arguments with claws like  

warriors. She also defends Tigerstar for wanting  to keep their land to protect Shadowclan. She and  

Snaketooth escort Alderheart to the border when  her wound heals and she notices that Tigerstar  

looked angry with Alderheart and checks in on  him…and that's everything she does in the arc. Her  

main role is as a mother, a sub-par warrior, and  a patient so there's not a lot to go on beyond the  

stock Warriors she-cat characterization. She also  never interacts with her former mentor Tawnypelt,  

here or in Bramblestar's Storm, so it's impossible  to say what that relationship was like. It is  

probably true that she likes her mate and kits  and she appears to be at least friendly with  

Strikestone as well, in a single book. Her values,  though, are very difficult to pin down thanks to  

the contradictions and the best I can say is that  she probably believes in fights solving problems  

to some degree. She at least has an implied  relationship with Alderheart after he treated her  

for so long but how that changes her perceptions  of other clans or what either of them honestly  

feel about each other beyond generic thanks is  completely unknown. Mostly, she's just she-cat:  

there to provide kits, fill in background space,  and expound on the current plot details we need to  

notice when her name is selected from a hat. Keep  in mind, she's also one of the more prominent cats  

on this list, about average. This is just what A  Vision of Shadows tends to give its characters.

As Skyclan's representative, the randomizer has  given me Nectarpaw: a kit born in Hawkwing's  

Journey who is an apprentice when she's introduced  in Darkest Night. Her first appearance is,  

in fact, being introduced by Nettlesplash,  her father. Later she and a bunch of other  

apprentices go on a patrol to the twolegplace and  she gets her first two lines encouraging Violetpaw  

to climb a tree while the other apprentices stay  down and telling her not to listen to Gravelpaw,  

who already thinks he's a warrior. Later it is  noted that both Nectarpaw and Fringepaw have  

“lost their shyness” and become more friendly with  their new denmate: Violetpaw, though I can't help  

wishing we ever saw any evidence of this. We also  learn in passing that Nectarpaw had, at one point,  

wandered too close to a twoleg patrol and been  saved by Molewhisker. She gets excited when they  

approach the lake, though that quickly drained  into hunger, that they relieved by going hunting  

with Gravelpaw and Nettlesplash, and that's  the last thing she does in the book. In River  

of Fire, she unfortunately only appears in the  allegiances, but in The Raging Storm, she is seen  