Fanfic / Warriors Redux

Warriors Redux is a now-abandoned Deconstruction Fic/Fix Fic by Dullard dedicated to the revision of the Warriors series. The first book is also viewable on Archive of Our Own.

Warriors Redux attempted to revise the series' first arc, expanding on and editing the lore to be more believable. Although Firepaw's path remains the same as the first arc, the steps he takes to get there vary wildly.

The story adapted the entirety of Into the Wild, Forest of Secrets and Rising Storm. A summary of the fourth arc was completed before the fanfic was dropped entirely.

A reboot of the series by the same author, Iterum: Children of the Quartz Heart, began in 2021 and is still ongoing as of October 2023.

---

Warriors Redux contains examples of:

• Action Girl:
  • As in canon, almost every female cat is just as competent as their male counterparts.
  • Subverted with female seers, as they aren't taught to fight.
• Action Prologue: The opening prologue is quite similar to the original one in terms of the action.
• Adaptational Attractiveness: Played relatively straight with Buzzardface (the replacement for Barkface), as in the allegiances he's outright stated to be handsome (due to the "face" suffix representing beauty).
• Adaptational Early Appearance:
  • Several cats from outside ThunderClan are met at the Gathering, some even books before their original introduction.
  • Redtail also gets this, as he watches Rusty with Bluestar instead of Lionheart/pelt.
• Adaptational Heroism: Justified in all instances, as it's been done to make the world more believable.
• Adaptational Intelligence:
  • Raventhroat figures out Tigerclaw's plans by deduction rather than by witnessing his murder of Redtail. ThunderClan in general acts much smarter around Tigerclaw, with Bluestar not immediately dismissing the allegations on him but still being cautious about blaming a loyal warrior based on circumstantial evidence (and she looks especially smarter without there being any witnesses of Tigerclaw's crimes).
  • Some of the more contrived aspects of the book are removed, like Tigerclaw convincing everyone of the clearly harmless Ravenpaw's treachery and ShadowClan not being suspicious of Tigerclaw when he tries to become their leader.
  • Downplayed with ShadowClan, as they're still somewhat jerkasses, but they're less dark and edgy (and what remains of it is explained by their strong religious devotions) and they aren't hated by everyone, nor purported to be the "evil villain Clan."
  • Also double subverted, as Brokenstar stays in power, but it's given that he'll be overthrown and ShadowClan restored to its former... glory?
  • Somehow with Tigerclaw. While he still commits the actions he committed in Canon, his new motives make him a He Who Fights Monsters / Knight Templar / Well-Intentioned Extremist.
• Adaptation Dye-Job: Many cats' descriptions have been changed to be more in-line with genetics.
• Adaptation Name Change: Numerous characters are given new names for various reasons, such as if their name doesn't sound "feline enough":
  • Runningwind becomes Teaselfoot.
  • Lionheart becomes Lionpelt.
  • Smallear becomes Smallstorm.
  • Whitestorm becomes Whitecloud.
  • Yellowfang becomes Murkpelt. (Although she's still affectionately called by her former name by some, and Graypaw jokingly suggests changing her name to this at one point.)
  • Runningnose becomes Fogcloud.
  • Boulder becomes Bouldernose.
  • Clawface becomes Clawedface.
  • Littlecloud becomes Littlethroat.
  • Whitethroat becomes Dipperfoot.
  • Stumpytail becomes Batwhisker.
  • Frogtail becomes Dusktail.
  • Tangleburr becomes Wigeonfur.
  • Wetpaw becomes Rainpaw.
  • Tallpoppy becomes Poppytail.
  • Applekit becomes Stoatkit.
  • Poolcloud becomes Palecloud.
  • Tallstar becomes Rookstar.
  • Barkface becomes Buzzardface.
  • Onewhisker becomes Wrenwhisker.
  • Ashfoot becomes Nettlefoot.
  • Weaselfur becomes Squirrelfur.
  • Rushtail becomes Jaytail.
  • Gorsetail becomes Fawnfoot.
  • Webfoot becomes Roachpaw.
  • Whitetail becomes Lightpaw.
  • Sunstrike becomes Copperpaw.
  • Runningbrook becomes Cranekit.
  • Eaglekit becomes Falconkit.
  • Oakheart becomes Oakclaw.
  • Mudfur becomes Shellcloud.
  • Blackclaw becomes Nightclaw.
  • Voletooth becomes Volefang.
  • Whiteclaw becomes Sloeclaw.
  • Minnowtail becomes Minnowstream.
  • Mosspelt becomes Mottlepaw.
  • Stonestream becomes Pebblepaw.
  • Beechfur becomes Lampreypaw.
  • Greenflower becomes Duckflower.
  • Mistyfoot becomes Mistfoot.
  • Loudbelly becomes Cedarkit.
  • Heavystep becomes Otterkit.
  • Perchkit becomes Shadekit.
  • Primrosepaw becomes Sheepkit.
  • Pikepaw becomes Starlingkit.
  • Graypool becomes Greypath.
  • Windstar becomes The Crone.
  • Thunderstar becomes Brawn.
  • Shadowstar becomes Rowena.
  • Riverstar becomes Ripple.
  • Mothermouth has been changed to simply "The Mother," and is even integrated into the cat's mythology and religion.
• Adaptation Personality Change:
  • Justified with Greypaw, as he was formerly just played for comic relief and dramatic subplots, whereas now he's a much more well-rounded and fleshed-out character.
  • Tigerclaw is also less of an obvious villain.
  • Spottedleaf is more "out there" than her level-headed canon portrayal, keeping with the odd nature of seers.
• Adapted Out:
  • Seems to be the case with SkyClan, as it's been outright stated that the author believes the SkyClan arc was just an excuse to milk the "Hero Firestar" thing.
  • The Dark Forest doesn't exist as the story keeps it ambiguous whether afterlives are real or not. Instead, it's believed that bad warriors just simply stop existing, period.
• Aesop Amnesia: Shouldn't be as big of a deal as it was in the original, since the Clans are so culturally separate now that any attempts at unification would be treated like wanting to unify, say, Switzerland, Canada, Argentina, and Japan: It's just not going to happen. It should be noted that this was a problem in the original because, for the first arc, it was constantly mentioned by Clanners that the reason Clans shouldn't get together was because they were separate... despite the fact that all of the Clan's individual cultures were exactly the same and that many of the background characters themselves were basically interchangeable personality-wise.
• All Genes Are Codominant: This has been treated with contempt, and all genetically-impossible appearances have been changed.
• All There in the Manual: The author has done a lot of explaining about the amendments and worldbuilding before even getting into the rewriting of the first book.
• Alternative Calendar: Although somewhat similar to the original, the cats' system of measuring time has also been changed.
• Ambiguous Gender: Cats can't apparently gender humans because Rusty simply refers to his owners by vague, neutral terms.
• Ambiguous Time Period: Still the case, although the author has confirmed that the first book is set around the early 2010s, and the Clans have been around for about 100 years prior.
• Ambition Is Evil: Treated with contempt.
• Animal Religion: StarClan still exists, although its reality is ambiguous and it's been changed into a sort of collective Hive Mind afterlife where everybody is one.
• Animal Talk: Both Felidae, the language of cats, and Fang, the language of carnivores in general.
• Anyone Can Die: Still the case. Sandstorm, a character who lived until the A Vision of Shadows arc in the canon Warriors, is killed off in Chapter 34 of Arc 2.
• Ascended Extra:
  • Where Spottedleaf had not had much action before her death in the original, she is given more prominence and an expanded role in the Redux.
  • Possibly the case with TigerClan, LionClan, and LeopardClan, as they've been changed into each being one god, respectively: Rokhoa, Horoa, and Surii.

• Big Bad: There doesn't seem to be an overreaching villain, as the evilness of the "bad guys" can be called into question in the redux. However, the main antagonists so far are:
  • Arc 1: (Into the Wild): Brokenstar
  • Arc 2: (Forest of Secrets): Tigerclaw
  • Arc 3: (Rising Storm): The Dogs
  • Arc 4: (The Darkest Hour): Scourge

• Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": The cats' vocabulary has been changed from the original, although for some reason some parts of it have been changed back into ordinary human terms, and an entire new language has been constructed for the cats.
• Call-Back:
  • There is a Call-Back to the original book when Greypaw jokingly suggests renaming Murkpelt as Yellowfang.
  • Then Murkpelt (who was actually nameless after leaving ShadowClan as punishment for whatever crime caused her to be banished) adopts the name Yellowfang when she becomes ThunderClan's medicine cat.
• Career-Ending Injury: This will not be the case except in situations on the verge of Body Horror, considering how adaptable and versatile cats are.
• Carnivore Confusion: Crows seem to be sentient as well, and many other carnivores are at least intelligent enough for cats to be able to use the Fang language to speak to them.
• Cat Stereotype: The author has made statements on a few of these, which invert some of the stereotypes:
  • White cats are thought of by the Clans to usually be "bad" and are usually the villain in nursery stories.
  • Black cats, on the other hand, are thought of as special and magical.
  • As in the original, red/ginger/yellow (go together because of cats' colorblindness) cats are thought of as heroic, mainly because of their color being similar to the pelt of Horoa, the lion, one of the cat gods.
• Cheerful Funeral: RiverClan cats grieve the week after a cat dies. The first week is spent rejoicing over their life.

• Code of Honor: The Warrior Code is greatly expanded from its original fifteen or so rules to being an enormous, complex, convoluted system that was constructed over the course of many decades.
  • Currently incomplete pending posts.
• Conlang: The creator made an entire new cat language, and was even kind enough to change some of the cat words into a form pronounceable for humans.

• Cool Old Lady: The Crone (the redux's version of Windstar.)
• Crisis of Faith: The author says that this kind of thing won't be taken very well among the clans, which makes one wonder if and how Bluestar's loss-of-faith arc would be handled in future.
• Cultural Posturing: Even more exaggerated now that the Clans are genuinely culturally different.
• Dark Is Not Evil: Played fairly straight with ShadowClan, as they aren't "teh Evil Clan" this time around. The closest you could even get to that is their strong religious beliefs which, it's implied, are on the verge of making them a theocracy.
• Dead Fic: As of 2023, the original fic is no longer updated and has been superseded by Iterum: Children of the Quartz Heart.
• Death by Adaptation: One-eye and Sandstorm both don't survive the series like they did in the original. Also Bluestar's kits, since they aren't Mistfoot and Stonefur. Tigerclaw and Brokenstar also die far earlier on.
• Death by Childbirth: Silverstream's mother and grandmother died this way, leading Crookedstar to worry about his daughter. Silverstream herself eventually dies in childbirth, just as she did in the original series.
• Deconstruction Fic: On a massive scale. There's an entire section in which the creator deconstructs characters, Clans, mythology, et cetera.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance:
  • Renaming cats based on injuries would probably seem cruel to a human, though for the cats it is a compliment that represents how tough you must have been to survive such an injury.
  • The clan cats' treatment of gender has received backlash online, with the author arguing that it is a case of this - animals who identify sex based on scent would be unlikely to intuitively grasp the concept of a gender identity that differs from one's biological sex.
• Determinator: Thlainra notes that of "the Bright-Eyed Crow"'s heart beats as if he is battle even when he is dying, because he doesn't want to leave his Clan to be destroyed.
• Fix Fic: As with Deconstruction Fic, on a massive scale, considering the amount of time and effort that must've been put in to make Warriors more believable and realistic.
• Good Is Not Soft: The Clans in general are shown to have serious punishments for wrongdoing, especially shown when Bluestar, after Tigerclaw tries to take over the Clan as in canon, decides to have him executed rather than just exiling him.
• Grey-and-Gray Morality: Already existed in some cases in the original series, but the toning down of ShadowClan's and RiverClan's more egregiously cruel actions and the focus on ThunderClan as a flawed clan rather than the perpetual 'good guys" makes it far grayer.
• Evil Is Bigger: Tigerclaw to Fireheart. Well, really, almost everyone in ThunderClan is bigger than Fireheart, though Tigerclaw is massive even by ThunderClan standards.
• Eye Scream: One-eye loses her eye by getting it caught in some thorns and half-scratching it out with the thorns and her claws while trying to escape. The protagonist of "the Bright-Eyed Crow" gets his eyes taken out in order to turn him into a crow.
• Fire-Forged Friends: Fireheart and Dustpelt go from hating each other to becoming closer allies after they team up to oppose Tigerclaw.
• Heroic BSoD: Bluestar becomes much more withdrawn and laconic after the events of Forest of Secrets, as in canon, though it's toned down here and there is no full-on Sanity Slippage.
• Identical Stranger: Mistfoot and Stonefur become this to Bluestar now that they are no longer her kits.
• Idiot Hero: Fireheart is noted to be a bit less intelligent than the rest of his Clan due to his kitty pet background, and in general tends to do rather impulsive and stupid things (though with the best intentions).
• Karma Houdini: Averted. The punishment system for the Redux has been explained in massive detail, and we get to see demonstrations of it happen, regardless of anyone's intentions. But the most notable aversion is for Tigerclaw; in canon, after his crimes came to light, Tigerclaw was exiled from ThunderClan, and later became ShadowClan's leader. Here, he is given the worst of punishments, which is execution and having his name erased from the Clans' memory, which essentially denies him entrance into StarClan, and is supposed to lead to Cessation of Existence once he has been completely forgotten from the Clans' memory.
• Knight Templar / He Who Fights Monsters / Well-Intentioned Extremist: Tigerclaw has become this in the Redux. Whereas in canon he was an ordinary evil and diabolical villain, the Redux makes it clear that he is someone who genuinely loves ThunderClan, but he is willing to go to extreme lengths to protect it and lead it to what he thinks is greatness, rather than just wanting power.
• Make It Look Like an Accident: This is typically how the series' villains kill cats, due to cats not being able to easily kill each other directly without getting obviously injured themselves, and the difficulty of hiding a murder from the whole Clan.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Unlike in the original series, where StarClan was indisputably real, in the Reduxverse it's left up to the reader to decide, as evidence is given for both sides of the argument.
• Matriarchy: Downplayed, as it's not that emphasised. Due to how actual cat colonies work (with males being mainly around for breeding and fending off enemies), the four Clans lean towards being matriarchal.
• Mature Animal Story: The story is a more serious and mature-aimed version of Warriors, being closer to works like Tailchaser's Song than the original.
• Meaningful Rename: The redux follows the fan-made traditional naming system, where every suffix given to warriors at their ceremony has a meaning related to the cats' skills, appearance or personality. Renames due to injuries also count.
• Mythopoeia: There is an entire mythology for the Clans beyond just StarClan, which is told in bits and pieces throughout the book and is given more detail in the "amendment" section.
• No Fathers Allowed: Fathers are optional. Queens raise their kits together and don't need to disclose their kits fathers. It's an Open Secret that ThunderClan cats often breed with pets in order to avoid Royal Inbreeding.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Fireheart and his friends end up with punishments several times for doing kind things outside the code, like taking in Murkpelt and the ShadowClan elders and helping to feed RiverClan.
• No Hugging, No Kissing: The author removes almost all romance from the redux, due both to being aromantic and not feeling comfortable with or interested in writing romance and feeling that the romance in the original was usually shallow and derailed the main story. There is quite a broken base over whether this was a good thing.
• Not His Sled:
  • Bluestar's kits really are dead this time.
  • Tigerclaw never becomes leader of ShadowClan - in fact, he is killed in Forest of Secrets
• Overly Specific Afterlife: The four Clans believe that good Clan cats enter a Hive Mind afterlife upon death, while bad Clan cats stop existing. When the kittypet-born Firepaw asks the seer Spottedleaf if non-Clan cats can enter StarClan, she treats it as a stupid question—of course they don't. StarClan is Clan heaven, not cat heaven, so only Clan cats are allowed.
• Partially Civilized Animal: The cats are much less anthropomorphic than in canon, but they still have some partially civilized traits like a complex Animal Religion. The author has clearly Shown Their Work during the deconstruction phase.
• Power Trio: Firehear, Graystripe and Ravenpaw, as in the original. This time, Ravenpaw stays in the Clan.
• Prestige Peril: ShadowClan seers are very highly respected by the Clan, and their authority is given more weight than even the leaders'. But the stress of their job tends to make them age very quickly and die young.
• Proud Warrior Race Guy: ThunderClan is stereotyped as more militaristic than the other Clans.
• Royal Brat: Brokenstar tends to get everything he wants from ShadowClan due to being Raggedstar's son, and he eventually starts murdering anyone who might get in the way of his authority.
• Shown Their Work: The cat genetics, Clan structure, and generally everything are a lot more realistic than in the original.
• Spared by the Adaptation: Redtail, Lionpelt and especially Oakclaw live far longer than in the original. Snowpaw is currently alive past the point where he died in canon.
• The Stoic: WindClan and ThunderClan cats are stereotyped as this. Rookstar in particular is described as having been particularly calm and stoic, even as a kit.
• The Storyteller: Raventhroat gets his name for his skill in telling stories, and tells many of the stories that appear in the redux.
• Trickster Archetype: Mernatha/Petalfall is this in the Clans' myths.
• Unsuccessful Pet Adoption: Rusty reasons with himself that his new owner isn't that attached to him yet, so they'll get over him quickly and adopt a replacement cat.
• What Beautiful Eyes!: The protagonist in the bright-eyed crow story is known for his eyes, which are described as so bright and full of determination that it's impossible to look at them for too long.
• Worldbuilding: There are whole pages devoted to world building, and a lot more focus in put into it compared to the original series.
• You Can't Fight Fate: Subverted, as since StarClan's existence is uncertain, so are their prophecies. Can be outright defied.