Warrior Cats - On Questioning The Location

 I inadvertently saw a post on Reddit (need to stop my Reddit addiction returning!) that questioned the Warriors series location. Quite frankly I’m not sure why this question was being asked, and certainly not in paragraphs of detail. Redditors have a thing about you not having done the research yourself first, and a simple look-up will tell you that Warriors is set in the UK.

The only argument could be that while the lead writer, Vicky, thought it was based in the New Forest, the other two initial writers envisaged it in other UK locations when they were writing.

By the second series a bit more liberty was taken but the setting basically remains the same – making it somewhere more fictional, but still in the UK. The rest is mistakes, and by that I mean all the American animals that pop up in later series, most likely included by the newer writers. They were never mentioned previously because they didn’t exist in the UK. Unfortunately it seems to be a matter of human nature to assume something could be if no-one said it couldn’t be, sometimes ignoring the times a property was originated, and the assumptions that would have been made when it came out (meaning those things didn’t need to be pointed out then to be understood). In other words, no-one would have needed to say then that it couldn’t exist, much like how chipmunks are a very American animal so would never be in a book set in the UK. Anyone who knows anything about the UK would know that. But I digress.

The depictions of Midnight as an American badger instead of a European badger also fall into this category, only it is illustrators making the mistake this time, rather than writers. Still, I’ve seen worse mistakes, like how my edition of Bambi (the novel, I mean) depicts the deer as red deer (they are roe, which are a lot smaller and look very different) and drew a rabbit in place of a hare (also very different!).

Sharptooth? This is based on stories of big cats roaming the UK, and artistic licence has been taken. As a more personal take on the matter, (something I’m sure no-one will agree with me on!) unless we are suggesting he escaped from a zoo somewhere, it would be more convincing to have him be a lynx. Such creatures died out in Scotland one thousand years ago, but are native, and while stretching it a bit, he could have been meant to be the last of his kind, possibly driven to unnatural habits. The wolves, while they could count under a similar bracket of technically being native (but not explained away in the same way!), I think it is far more likely, given I haven’t even read as far as them, that they are simply the writers running out of ideas.

The lion and tiger thing (remember the lion on the cover is a regular one, not a cave lion!) can only really be explained by some sort of twoleg exposure at some point in the past to such creatures, unless cats passed through the hypothetical zoo I mentioned earlier! Big cats and regular cats share ancestors but are in completely different groups from each other at this point, so they cannot be considered the Warriors most ancient ancestors or anything, which eliminates my collective unconscious theory, which would actually make a lot more sense.

As we’re on the subject I might as well address the elephant in the room: the warrior cats themselves. There are three possibilities. One, they are actually Scottish wild cats with liberties taken, two they are kittypets gone feral so long ago they’ve forgotten their origins, or three, they are the result of Scottish wild cats and kittypets breeding with each other. Option three is the most likely, especially as that does actually happen in real life (it’s considered a problem, in fact). It would also explain their appearance, build, and their diversity. It would also make sense why they would look down on kittypets as they are actually genetically distant, not just raised differently.