Warrior Cats / Tropes 0 to G

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0- 9

• 0% Approval Rating: Brokenstar, leader of ShadowClan, was hated so much by the ShadowClan cats that at the end of the first book they teamed up to drive him out.

A

• Abandoned Area:
  • Sites abandoned by humans - old houses, for instance - usually are a benefit, as Clan cats occasionally find shelter in them during journeys. The most prominent ones are in ThunderClan's lake territory: their camp is in a long-abandoned quarry, and the abandoned workman's house still stands with healing herbs such as catmint growing in its garden, and it was also used as a quarantine in one book when a large portion of the Clan got greencough.
  • After the Clans leave the forest, their camps still stand and are considered to be fairly creepy. Graystripe travels to them upon his escape from Twolegs (not realizing that the Clans have left), and Ravenpaw and Barley also take a look around the old territories a few years later.
• Abandoned Mine: The "human view" map reveals the cave that the Moonstone is found in to be an abandoned mine.
• Abandon the Disabled:
  • After Stormkit breaks his jaw, leaving him permanently disfigured and having difficulty eating, his mother Rainflower renames him Crookedkit and rejects him, making him The Unfavorite and leaving the nursery once his brother is apprenticed.
  • In the prequel series, Jagged Peak's leg is crippled in an accident. His brother Clear Sky drives him out of their group, since Clear Sky refuses to allow his group to tolerate weakness.
• Abdicate the Throne: Pinestar, leader of ThunderClan, left the Clan to become a kittypet near the end of his life.
• The Abridged Series: At least four of them
• Abusive Parents:
  • Crowfeather to Breezepelt.
  • Lizardstripe's treatment of Brokenstar:
    ...a queen who did not care for her new charge, who bit it and nipped it and deprived it of milk as punishment for being born at all.
  • Crookedstar's Promise gives us another example in Rainflower. After her son twists his jaw, she forces a name change ("Stormkit" to "Crookedkit"), makes him sleep in another nest, looks down on him constantly, and arranges things so that Oakheart gets special treatment and Crookedstar feels alone.
• Accidental Hero: Scourge became the ruthless warlord he was in part by trying to live up to a reputation for toughness he got for beating up two dogs. One of these incidents was a complete fabrication and in the other the dog became scared of Scourge's massive shadow and ran while Scourge was yowling at him.
• Accidental Murder:
  • In Fading Echoes, Lionblaze accidentally kills Russetfur when pulling her off Firestar. They establish, however, that she probably shouldn't have been fighting still at her age.
  • During the Dawn of the Clans arc, Gray Wing is minding his own business when he's attacked by Fox, and in the ensuing fight, Gray Wing accidentally kills Fox by slashing his throat.
  • In Fire and Ice, Whiteclaw falls to his death over a skirmish between his home Clan, RiverClan and ThunderClan over Sunningrocks. He was fighting Graystripe of ThunderClan along the edge of the gorge and he slips, grabbing onto the side. Graystripe attempts to save Whiteclaw but he still falls to his doom.
• Accidental Passenger: In Tigerheart's Shadow, Tigerheart hides from some humans in a pile of luggage. Turns out the luggage is on a cart, which gets loaded onto a nearby train, trapping Tigerheart along for the ride. Thankfully, it brings him to the city his mate has fled to.
• The Ace: Lionblaze. He's an awesome at fighting, hunting, and everything else the Clans care about. Of course, it all comes from his secret invincibility powers. Whether or not he is ashamed about this varies depending on what point in his character development the series is at.
• Acid Reflux Nightmare: Brambleclaw originally thinks his prophecy dream was one of these.
• Acronym and Abbreviation Overload: The fandom is fond of this. Acronyms include:
  • The series titles (The OS for The Original Series, TNP for The New Prophecy, TPOT for Power of Three, OOTS for Omen of the Stars, DOTC for Dawn of the Clans, AVOS for A Vision of Shadows).
  • Book titles (TDH for The Darkest Hour, FQ for Firestar's Quest, BP for Bluestar's Prophecy, NW for Night Whispers, BotC for Battles of the Clans, T4A for The Fourth Apprentice, and SotC for Secrets of the Clans, to name a few... This created a slight issue when Code of the Clans came along, because there was already a CotC from Cats of the Clans. There were even forum threads debating on what to call it - the most common form is C2otC). A later problem came when Tallstar's Revenge and Thunder Rising were announced as releases for the same years. Fans called them both "TR" until they realized the problem. Some alternate acronyms were made as solutions, such as TaR and TSR for Tallstar's Revenge, and ThR and TRi for Thunder Rising.
  • Some characters, places, etc (HF for Hawkfrost, DF for The Dark Forest, PoNS for The Place of No Stars, another name for the Dark Forest).
  • Related websites (WW for Warriors Wish, while the Warriors Official Forum is called either the OF for "Official Forum", WOF for "Warriors Official Forum", or WCF for "Warrior Cats Forum").
• Action Dad: In Crookedstar's Promise, Shellheart is a Papa Cat, defending Crookedkit from his own mate. When she coldly tells him she blames her son for what happened to him, Shellheart is quick to defend him and breaks up with her.
• Action Girl: Almost every single she-cat in the series is just as competent as any one of the male characters that are not named Scourge or Lionblaze. Even she-cats that you wouldn't expect to be badass turn out to be this, such as medicine cats (in Into the Wild, Yellowfang defeats The Dragon and nearly takes down the Big Bad), queens (they help out during Twilight's badger attack, and Lionblaze successfully teaches them some fighting skills in The Last Hope that are seen in the Final Battle), and elders (Mousefur and Goldenflower drive away a freaking badger on their own in Twilight). The number one example of this is probably Ivypool. She's female, but she's also the main character that doles out the most asskicking (well, other than Lionblaze, but Ivypool actually worked for her strength).
• Action Mom: Though she-cats take a break from their warrior duties when they have kits, they still have to be ready to protect their kits if the camp is attacked. One gift that new leaders are often given as part of their nine lives is the love a mother has for her kits, in order to help them protect the Clan; this life is often expected to feel gentle, and the new leader is often shocked by how painfully fierce it is - mothers are willing to face any amount of enemies or even die for their kits. One particular Action Mom is Leafstar: leaders normally are not allowed to have kits because it conflicts with their duties, but Leafstar decided to have kits anyway.
• Action Prologue:
  • Into the Wild: Starts with a fight between RiverClan and ThunderClan.
  • Crookedstar's Promise: Focuses on the RiverClan camp being flooded and Rainflower giving birth during a storm.
• Adaptational Attractiveness: In the books, half of Brightheart's face is destroyed due to a near-fatal encounter with a dog: covered in scar tissue, and she lost an eye and an ear. In the Graystripe manga, she's normal-looking except that one of her eyes is closed, making it look like she's constantly winking. Averted in the full-color re-release, where she actually has the scars she's supposed to.
• Adaptational Ugliness: In the books, Runningnose is a fairly normal cat, just with constant sniffles that he cannot cure despite being a medicine cat. The Tigerstar and Sasha manga makes him ragged and almost elderly-looking.
• Adaptation Dye-Job: In the actual books, Millie is a silver tabby. On the manga covers, she's pinkish-brown colored. The illustrator explained that when he got the character outlines, she was only described as a tabby, so he pictured her as rosy brown, and didn't find out her real color until he had already colored the cover of the second volume. He discussed with his editor whether to change it, but they decided that it would be dull to have two gray cats next to each other.
• Adapted Out: The SkyClan and the Stranger manga trilogy (and bonus manga at the end of SkyClan's Destiny) is unique among Warriors mangas in that they try to make all SkyClan cats appear, or at least be mentioned. While almost the entire Clan is in there, the only ones to not show up or be mentioned at all in either the trilogy or the bonus manga are Sagepaw and Egg, for whatever reason. Sagepaw appears in later books; Egg does not.
• Adoption Angst: It's a subtle reoccuring theme for characters to stop seeing their adopted parents as their family after learning they're adopted. It isn't mentioned in-text, but several characters stopped referring to their foster/adopted parents as such upon the reveal.
  • Hollyleaf and her siblings take it particularly far, not only becoming more distant from their adoptive mother Squirrelflight upon finding out the truth but outright hating and resenting her for lying to them, with Hollyleaf having a dramatic Freak Out over it.
  • Twigbranch feels out of place due to being adopted and wants to find her "real" family despite her adoptive family being shown to be loving, looking with jealousy at how much biological parents love their children. However, when switching Clans to be with her biological father she ends up regretting it and returning to her adopted Clan.
• Adorable Fluffy Tail: Several characters have fluffy tails as a notable feature. Squirrelflight, in particular, was named Squirrelkit due to her fluffy tail, and she had hoped her warrior name wouldn't be Squirreltail after it too.
• Adventures in Comaland:
  • In The Sight, Poppyfrost has greencough, and has a dream about being in StarClan's forest. Jayfeather is also there, because of his power, and stops her from dying.
  • In Squirrelflight's Hope, Squirrelflight and Leafpool are caught in a rockslide, and find themselves in StarClan's forest while their lives hang in the balance. It appears to be a dreamlike state, especially when Squirrelflight thinks about how she could wake up in the medicine cat den at any moment.
• Advertised Extra: Tigerstar is this for the second and third books of Tigerstar and Sasha. In the first book, he was the love interest. However, in the second book (on which he is the only one on the cover), he shows up, asks the hero a question, and is never seen again! In book three, he only appears in dream sequences. It's like the writers didn't know what to do with him, so they hid him in a cupboard and hoped no one would find him.
• Aesop Amnesia: No matter how many times the Clans learn the value of working together to overcome danger, they'll usually be at each other's throats again by the next book. This includes even after they make it an official law that they'll forget their rivalries in times of trouble.
• Affably Evil: Sol, who, although a bit self-centered, is seen as nice and polite by most cats who meet him... until he starts playing mind games and manipulating them for fun.
• Affectionate Gesture to the Nose: It's considered an affectionate gesture to touch noses, especially as a greeting to a friend or family member.
• After Action Patch Up: Happens frequently after major or minor battles.
• Afterlife Angst: Flametail, in the afterlife of StarClan, is upset about dying, and particularly about how he got lured into the Dark Forest after his death and was nearly killed again and permanently. He takes this out on Jayfeather, the cat who failed to save him, and nearly lets Jayfeather die himself before having a change of heart.
• Afterlife Welcome: It's tradition for the deceased to be guided to StarClan by a loved one, often either a close relative or a deceased mate. The guide isn't always someone they knew in life; for example, one kitten named Mosskit was welcomed by her aunt, who died before Mosskit was born.
• Agonizing Stomach Wound: When Scourge slices Tigerstar up the belly, the wound is deep enough to make him die nine times over, in slow, agonizing pain.
• All Genes Are Codominant:
  • There are multiple male tortoiseshell and calico cats, which are incredibly rare due to the pattern requiring them to have an extra X chromosome.
  • Spiderleg is a black cat with a brown belly, which should be impossible because the two colors are carried on the same gene and black is completely dominant over brown. Barring some rare genetic flukes, ^note like the black alleles being rendered non-functional on his belly or being a chimera with a brown kitten he absorbed in utero Spiderleg should be solid black.
• All Girls Want Bad Boys:
  • Snowfur only had eyes for Thistleclaw, who was violent and kind of a jerk.
  • Speckle from Sunrise knew that the traveling cat Sol was a bad guy, but she was hopelessly in love with him and wished he was the father of her kits.
• Alliterative Family:
  • Graystripe and Millie's kits are named Bumblestripe, Blossomfall, and Briarlight.
  • Sparkpelt and Larksong's kits are Finchpaw, Flamepaw, and Flickerkit. Later subverted when Flamepaw’s name is changed to Nightheart.
• Alliterative Name: Several of the Ancients and Dawn of the Clans characters: Stone Song, Chasing Clouds, River Ripple, Sun Shadow, Turtle Tail, Falling Feather.
• All There in the Manual: Many character motivations, family tree information, bits of worldbuilding, and pivotal scenes are only seen or mentioned in the field guides, the app, and Word of God.
• All Your Base Are Belong to Us:
  • Happens in Into the Wild when ShadowClan launches an attack on ThunderClan's camp.
  • In Twilight, an army of badgers attacks ThunderClan's camp in revenge for the cats driving them out of their homes.
  • Also happens in Eclipse when RiverClan and WindClan team up to attack ThunderClan.
  • In Squirrelflight's Hope, the Clans attack the Sisters' camp.
• Almost Dead Guy: Very common.
  • In Forest of Secrets, Brokenstar survives just long enough to suddenly comprehend that he's dying and get an Oh, Crap! moment. It was exactly the kind of death that he deserved.
  • Midway through Rising Storm, Fireheart finds Whitethroat by a Thunderpath. Whitethroat gets hit by a car, but he still keeps talking for a little bit before he dies.
  • At the end of Rising Storm, Fireheart finds Yellowfang dying of smoke inhalation. Although it has been a long time since the fire, she manages to survive the whole time only to die immediately after Firestar finds her. Before she dies, she confesses all her secrets (which he already knew), and gives him reassurance that it's a good way to die.
  • In A Dangerous Path, Bluestar holds on just long enough to apologize to her kits, be forgiven, and to tell Fireheart how much faith she has in him before she dies.
  • In The Darkest Hour, after Bone strikes him down, Whitestorm reassures Firestar that it's been a pleasure being deputy and tells him that Graystripe was always destined to be his deputy before dying.
  • In The Darkest Hour, Darkstripe rambles aimlessly as he dies. Strangely, it actually worked as a send off for the character.
  • In Moonrise, Feathertail lives just long enough to tease Crowpaw and echo his words before dying.
  • In Twilight, Cinderpelt tells Leafpool to be brave as she dies.
  • In Sunset, Hawkfrost taunts Brambleclaw one last time and warns him that nothing is over before he dies.
  • In The Last Hope, Hollyleaf forgives Leafpool and says that she's not afraid to die with her last breaths.
  • Later in The Last Hope, Spottedleaf tells Firestar that she can't travel with him any longer as her spirit fades away for good. Subverted when she has one last thing to say to him, but it's too late and she dies with it unresolved.
  • Probably the most badass one ever occurs in The Last Hope when Firestar uses his dying moments to rid the world of his Arch-Enemy forever. His last words aren't a lament, but a badass quip.
  • In A Warrior's Spirit, Root tells Tree that he wants his son to stay with him while he dies.
• Alternate Animal Affection: There's no single equivalent of a kiss in Warriors, but cats tend to press their cheeks together, lick each other, and/or entwine their tails when they're emotionally close, regardless of whether the relationship is platonic or romantic.
• Alternative Calendar: The Clans measure everything by moons instead of months and have alternate names for the seasons because they're cats.
• Always Chaotic Evil: Dogs, great StarClan! Except for the pair in the Ravenpaw's Path trilogy. At first they may be ungrateful to Ravenpaw and Barley for saving their lives (attacking them as soon as they're free), but later they return the favor to Ravenpaw, Barley, and the ThunderClan cats by helping chase off BloodClan. And also the dogs in Warrior's Refuge; they seem pretty vicious to the barn cats, but once Millie reveals she can speak a little dog it's revealed that they chase cats not to catch them, but because it's fun.
• Always Second Best:
  • Tigerstar suffered from this. He claims that he was a great warrior, but as soon as Bluestar discovered Firestar, he was reduced to "a great warrior, just not as good as Firestar".
  • Ashfur in the second arc, Warrior Cats: The New Prophecy. He would be the best choice for deputy...if not for Brambleclaw. He could have been StarClan's chosen one... if not for Brambleclaw. He could have had Squirrelflight's affections...if not for Brambleclaw. See the pattern?
  • Gray Wing from Dawn of the Clans to his brother Clear Sky. He's the Tribe's second best hunter after Clear Sky, second place in their little brother Jagged Peak's Big Brother Worship, and second place romantically to Clear Sky's first mate Bright Stream and second mate Storm. It stems from Gray Wing being a deconstruction of series protagonist Firestar.
• Amateur Sleuth:
  • Firestar went out of his way to solve several crimes in the original series, such as Redtail's death and some kit-killings in ShadowClan.
  • Minor character Shrewtooth later tries his paws at it by solving the mystery of Leafstar's lost kits in the SkyClan and the Stranger manga minutes before Leafstar herself worked it out.
• Amazingly Embarrassing Parents: The reason why Rootpaw resents his father Tree: he's different from everyone else in the Clan, doesn't follow tradition, and has unconventional methods to doing things.
• Ambiguously Gay:
  • Ravenpaw and Barley. They spend basically all of their time together, and one of the authors has stated (paraphrased) that "they don't want any she-cats bossing them around." There's also Ravenpaw promising to wait for Barley in the afterlife.
  • Tallstar and Jake. Ravenpaw and Barley could just be seen as Ho Yay if you didn't have the subtle implication from Word of God that they aren't interested in she-cats (despite Jake having mated with both Quince and Nutmeg, having Tiny/Scourge, Ruby, Socks, Rusty/Firepaw/heart/star, Princess and some other kits in the process), but Jake and Tallstar seem to be in love without ever coming out and saying it. In this case, the authors do just about everything they can (short of actually outing the characters) to say that the two were together.
• Ambiguous Time Period: The series appears to take place in the present day. However, nobody knows how long in the "past" the background lore goes back - Word of God has flip-flopped on whether the Clans have been in the forest for 50 years or 30 years, both of which are considered to be too short by fans considering all the leaders and generation gaps we know about. When you go all the way back - before the Clans were formed, before the Tribe was formed, back when their ancestors lived by the lake - there seems to be modern construction equipment; it describes yellow vehicles. Most people accept the series as taking place slightly in the future because of this, but it's not clear exactly when.
• Ambition Is Evil: A recurring theme in the books.
  • Tigerstar's desire to be leader of ThunderClan (and later of all four Clans) is what makes him a villain; he will do just about anything to achieve his goal.
  • Brambleclaw feels the very same ambition that drove his father but, well aware of what his father became, he is determined to not allow his ambition to control him (still implying that ambition is the opposite of good, even though Whitestorm also mentions in the first series that Firestar has quite a bit of ambition himself).
• American Kirby Is Hardcore:
  • Some of the covers of the other-language versions of the books are more hardcore than the originals: for instance, compare this American cover◊ to this Russian cover◊.
  • The title translation is also subject to this; in one example the title was translated as Raging Storm rather than Rising Storm. Also, the French title for Fire and Ice roughly means In Fire and In Blood.
  • Inverted with the Japanese covers. The Japanese cover◊ for The Darkest Hour, which is one of the most carnage-tastic books in the series, is of two fluffy kitties smiling.
• An Arm and a Leg: Amputations have happened twice, both with tails:
  • In Sunset, Berrykit gets his tail caught in a fox trap and badly mangled, foreshadowing the danger they'll pose later on in the book. The Medic Leafpool determines that she can't save it, and amputates it, leaving a stump. The injury makes the kit's mother so afraid of life in the wild that she temporarily leaves the Clan with her kits to return to the barn where they were born.
  • In the sixth arc, A Vision of Shadows, half of Finpaw's tail has to be amputated to free him from a massive, heavy branch that the cats cannot shift. The situation emphasizes SkyClan's need for a medicine cat, and it is during his stay in the medicine den that he and Twigpaw first start to realize their feelings for each other.
• Ancestor Veneration: Both the Clans and the Tribe, due to originally having been one-and-the-same, share a very similar belief about the afterlife and ancestry. Good, noble cats from both end up in either StarClan or the Tribe of Endless Hunting, where they can watch over the living. The living in turn worship their ancestors, often looking to them for help and guidance, especially as they are capable of giving omens about the future or even prophecies.
• Ancient Conspiracy: The Dark Forest, which has been plotting to destroy the Clans since long before Firestar came to the forest.
• Ancient Keeper: Midnight is a helpful badger who can speak Cat. She seems to have an infinite amount of knowledge, and she always shows up to inform the heroes of the next plot point. Also, she's been around since the dawn of time.
• And I Must Scream: Beetlewhisker. In The Last Hope, when he dies in the Dark Forest, his spirit is trapped in his body because StarClan can't reach him and the Dark Forest refuses to take him. This leaves him in a state of perpetual agony until the Dark Forest is defeated and StarClan finally rescues him.
• And This Is for...: In The Blazing Star, Star Flower betrays Thunder and helps her father One Eye attack Thunder's father, Clear Sky. Later in the fight, Gray Wing (Thunder's uncle and Clear Sky's brother) kicks her back, thinking with satisfaction, "That one's for Thunder".
• Angry Guard Dog: Guard dogs appear at the prologue of A Dangerous Path, brought to the Treecutplace compound by humans to find the arsonists who set the forest on fire in Rising Storm.
• Anguished Declaration of Love: Crowfeather to Leafpool, after saving her from falling off a cliff.
  Crowfeather: Is that what you think? Don't you know how I feel about you? And how much I hate myself for feeling that way about another cat so soon after Feathertail's death? I loved her, I really did! How can I love you too?
• Animal Naming Conventions:
  • Clan cats have portmanteau names that are generally related to nature or cat biology. Kittens are named "[x]kit". Upon becoming apprentinces at six months old, they're renamed "[x]paw". Once finishing their apprenticeship around twelve moons they're given their adult name, which adds a random suffix to the prefix of their name. If they become Clan leader then they're renamed again, but this time a "-star" is attached to their name. As a rule of thumb, rogues and pets are also renamed when they join a Clan.
  • The few non-Clan stray cats depicted usually have naturalist names like "Pounce" or "Snowflake".
  • Cats of the Tribe of Rushing Water have Name That Unfolds Like Lotus Blossom. As a result, they're given nicknames.
  • Midnight the badger and Sharptooth the cougar imply things about their species' naming traditions, but no other members are named.
• Animal Religion: The Clans have a version of ancestor worship. When they die, their spirits go to join StarClan, their version of heaven, if they're noble and to the Dark Forest if they betray the Warrior Code. StarClan grants the Clan leaders their nine lives, and also give visions and direction to the Clans' medicine cats.
• Animal Talk: Several different types of animals can speak, but each species speaks a different "language" and they are all unintelligible to each other (and to humans). The cats can only understand one or two words that the dog pack speaks (namely, "pack" and "kill"), while Midnight the badger is highly unusual for having learned to talk to cats, as well as foxes and rabbits. It's even mentioned that there are different languages among cats in different regions (Midnight can speak a couple of those others too). The Tribe of Rushing Water, for instance, speaks the same language as the Clans, but are mentioned to have a strange accent and use different idioms.
  Midnight: Fox and rabbit also. They speak... not of interest. Fox talk is all of kill. Rabbit have thistledown for brain.
• Animesque: James Barry's manga also is in a more animesque style than the other artists—fitting, since they were distributed under the North American manga publisher Tokyopop. He tends to give cats tufts of fur on their heads too, but for the most part it actually looks like fur. The only example where it actually was hair was Husker from the Graystripe trilogy.
• Antagonistic Offspring:
  • Breezepelt in Power of Three and Omen of the Stars. He's the son of Crowfeather, but he allies himself with the ghosts of the villains in an attempt to overthrow the society of the characters.
  • Yellowfang's son Brokenstar is one of the first villains to be shown in the entire series. In fact, he was so evil that Yellowfang had to kill him to save ThunderClan.
  • Leopardfoot and Pinestar's son Tigerkit, who would eventually grow up to be Tigerstar. Thistleclaw was an influence on Tigerstar's character.
• Anyone Can Die: Beyond the large amount of minor characters and villains that get killed, even important characters like Yellowfang, Bluestar, Feathertail, Cinderpelt, Flametail, Hollyleaf (for reals this time), Spottedleaf's spirit, and Firestar get killed off.
• Apathetic Pet: This generally applies with cats. Many former kittypets leave their owners without much thought, though some grow attached to their "housefolk". Rusty, the original lead who would later be known as Firestar, was born and raised a pet but took the Call to Adventure without a second thought for his owners and didn't once worry about leaving them.
• Arch-Enemy: The most notable examples are Fireheart and Tigerclaw, and, coincidentally, their mentors, Bluefur and Thistleclaw.
• Archnemesis Dad:
  • Tigerstar is the Big Bad, with his son Brambleclaw as the hero during the New Prophecy arc. However, while Tigerstar seeks to rule the world, Brambleclaw wants to stop him and says he'd rather die than join him.
  • Clear Sky was this for Thunder in Dawn Of The Clans until his Heel–Face Turn in The First Battle.
• Arc Welding: Some books have melded two subplots together to make their story through use of a retcon.
  • Crookedstar's Promise introduces the Dark Forest to the past and shows it influencing the events of books as early as Fire and Ice through use of Crookedstar's story.
  • Yellowfang's Secret makes it so that SkyClan is directly responsible for the rise of Brokenstar, even though they had died out years before his birth.
• Arc Words: Some of the prophecies. "Pack, pack, kill, kill" in A Dangerous Path.
• Art Evolution: The graphic novels' illustrator James Barry's art has gotten noticeably better between his first trilogy and his later volumes. In some of the older works, the cats more or less had Only Six Faces, but now, in addition to being better art in general, the cats are a lot easier to tell apart and they all have distinctive facial features.
• Artifact Alias:
  • In The Sun Trail, Lion's Roar refers to Stoneteller as Half Moon, the name she had before she became the leader of the Tribe of Rushing Water and took up the new name. It's meant to show that they are old friends, but is ironically a Series Continuity Error since Lion's Roar was born basically the same day she was renamed.
  • In Mothwing's Secret, Hawkfrost calls Mothwing "Moth", her original name from when they were kits. She protests this, since she belongs to RiverClan and is Mothwing now, and he approves of her determination to fit in. Later, in an ironic, emotional echo, he dies and she grieves for Hawk, the innocent brother he used to be, rather than the manipulative villain he had become as Hawkfrost.
• Ascended Extra:
  • Nightcloud was a minor character in The New Prophecy. In the third arc, she becomes Crowfeather's mate and is one of the most important WindClan characters.
  • Rowanclaw was also a minor character in the first series and The New Prophecy - so minor that they accidentally switched the character's gender from female to male. They made him a more major character by making him Tawnypelt's mate in acknowledgement of the error, and he went on to become the leader of ShadowClan.
  • Sunbeam was originally a background character so minor that she only appeared in two of the first ten books she was alive for (Tigerstar's Shadow, the last two Vision of Shadows books, Squirrelflight's Hope, and the Broken Code arc), saying only one word onscreen. To the readers' surprise, she was chosen to become a protagonist for A Starless Clan.
• Ascended Fanboy: Deconstructed in SkyClan and the Stranger. Sol's mother always got him and his siblings to behave by telling them stories of the Sky Warriors, which were the SkyClan cats from the days before the Clan was destroyed. Sol always loved the stories of the Sky Warriors. When his mom left him at the home of a crazy cat lady, he wished that he could become a Sky Warrior, because he thought that if he did, she would come back. After he grew up, he learned that SkyClan had been rebuilt, and wanted nothing more than to become one of its members. Leafstar, SkyClan's leader, let him join, but no matter how much he tried he didn't have what it took. She promised that she would let him become a warrior after he had proved himself, but Sol, fueled by his dreams from kithood, was impatient. To try to become a SkyClan warrior faster, he kidnapped Leafstar's kits, planning to "find" them after she realized they were missing and become a warrior because of it. Leafstar caught him however, and exiled him, realizing that he had none of the qualities of a true warrior. Because of this, Sol turned against the Clans, and vowed to destroy their Code of Honor to prove that it was worthless.
• Asskicking Leads to Leadership: BloodClan works this way. Scourge can kill a cat in one blow; he's leader. Bone is huge and also a powerful fighter; he's second in command.
• Asthma Peril: Two characters have asthma, and they tend to have attacks at the worst possible time:
  • Gray Wing developed it after a fire, and afterward cannot exert himself much. His worst - and final - attack comes in Path of Stars when his son is kidnapped, so he cannot rescue him. Thankfully his friends go in his stead, and he's able to see his son safe and say goodbye to his family before he passes.
  • Nightpelt had to retire early due to his asthma. In the graphic novel Exile from Shadow Clan, he struggles with it a lot, but the worst moment is when Poolcloud is badly injured by a fox and he ends up getting an asthma attack while trying to run to get a medicine cat. She dies, and he blames himself for not bringing help fast enough.
• Attack the Tail: Cats seem to bite each other's tails in battle often. Kits also often practice pouncing on the tail of an unsuspecting older cat.
• Audible Sharpness: In his first graphic novel, Graystripe unsheathes his claws with a "snikt" sound effect.
• Audience Participation:
  • To teach readers about voting, around the 2008 presidential election, there was a poll held on the official site for the "Ultimate Clan Leader", where readers would vote on their favorite Clan leader character with the winner getting a short story written about them. The winner was, naturally, the main character Firestar, and the resulting story was Warriors Ultimate Leader: The Clans Decide.
  • During the series' seventh arc, the official website had a poll for what the protagonist Rootpaw's warrior name should be. The winning name, Rootspring, did indeed become his warrior name.
  • Starting around 2020, the official site began to hold polls for which cat should be the focus of the following year's Super Edition and/or novella. This resulted in the books Leopardstar's Honor, Blackfoot's Reckoning, and the Riverstar Super Edition.
  • The cover of Onestar's Confession was decided upon by a poll on the official site: the options were red and blue, and the blue cover won.
  • The audiobook narrator for the main books and Onestar's Confession were chosen via poll on the offical site.
  • The choice of cats made into plushies has often been decided by poll on the official site.
• Author Catchphrase: Despite "Erin Hunter" being a pseudonym for several authors, this still happens occasionally, sometimes confined to an individual book:
  • 5 out of 6 books in the first arc have a moment where a character "shook his/her head to clear it" - it can happen up to three or more times in a single book.
  • The scent of nearly every Thunderpath (road) is specifically described as "acrid".
  • In Dark River, hedgehogs are used as a comparison an unusually large number of times - a couple characters' fur is spiked out like one at different points, one character is "no bigger than a hedgehog", a sleepy character is claimed to be hibernating like a hedgehog, and one character's difficulty in talking to her sibling was compared to picking fleas off a hedgehog.
  • There are many instances when a hungry character comments, "My belly thinks my throat's been clawed out".
  • Characters letting out a mrrow for various reasons (e.g. laughter) happens almost exclusively in books written by Cherith.
• Automobiles Are Alien: The cats refer to cars as "monsters" and try to stay away from highways, or "Thunderpaths" as they call them. However, they must use them to pass through territories or go to Highstones. Quite a few characters end up hit by cars and either killed or disabled. Not only are the cars frightening, but the general atmosphere of the highway is unnerving to cats due to its disgusting smell and unnatural texture.
• Autopilot Artistry: Played with in Jayfeather's case. He's naturally blind, and while this usually means he's seen as less capable than his Clanmates, he can function pretty much effortlessly despite it. When he's with the Ancients, he has his sight, but finds he's still unable to hunt unless his eyes are closed.
• Avenging the Villain: Darkstripe and Hawkfrost's motivation for attempting to kill Firestar is mainly vengeance for Tigerstar's death.
• Awesome Moment of Crowning: The leader ceremonies.
• Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other:
  • Squirrelflight and Brambleclaw are almost the poster couple for this pairing. There's at least four fights between them a book.
  • Also, Firestar and Sandstorm in the first arc suit this trope, too. Sandstorm hates Firestar until he saves her life in Fire and Ice, when she starts to like him.
• Axe-Crazy: Plenty of the villains are this. Most notably Mapleshade, whose start of evil was when she very violently murdered cats she felt wronged her based on what she believed were the restless spirits of her kits, and then later on she generally treated everyone with a Slasher Smile.

B

• Back for the Dead: Hollyleaf. After being presumed dead for four books, she returns to ThunderClan in The Forgotten Warrior, only to be killed by Hawkfrost in the next book, The Last Hope.
• Back for the Finale:
  • Stormfur and Brook appear in the last paragraph of Twilight, just in time to be important characters again in Sunset, the finale of The New Prophecy.
  • For the (originally intended) Grand Finale of the series, The Last Hope, the Erins brought back most of the cast of the Original Series, along with several minor characters who hadn't appeared for a while, and a ton of other characters from the backstory of the series: Adderfang, Brindleface, Broken Shadow, Cedarstar (mistakenly called "Cedarheart"), Cinderpelt (in person - er, cat), Fallen Leaves, Flametail, Frostfur, Goosefeather, Half Moon, Hollyflower, Lionheart, Longtail, Mosskit, Owl Feather, Redtail, Runningwind, Silverstream, Slant, Snowfur, Sparrowfeather, Sunstar, Swiftbreeze, Swiftpaw, Tawnyspots, and Whitestorm all make their returns here.
• Back from the Dead:
  • In Sunset, Cinderpelt is revealed to have been reincarnated as Sorreltail's daughter Cinderkit.
  • Also, Heavystep, who died but managed to stay on the cast list for quite a while afterwards due to a Continuity Snarl. Similarly, Smokepaw fell off a cliff in Dawn but remained in the books afterward, even being given a warrior name, Smokefoot.
  • The Clan Leaders probably count as well, since they literally have nine lives and spend a few moments dead after losing each one before being revived (minus the wound/disease that killed them). Once the ninth is gone though, they are Killed Off for Real. The sole exception to this rule is Bramblestar due to having his body taken over by an unknown cat after losing his first life.
• Back Story: Explored a lot with different characters. There's The Rise of Scourge, the "prequel" Super Editions, many novellas, and then a number of short stories in the field guides, such as the one about Barley's past. Even the main series has some of these moments.
• Back-to-Back Badasses: According to Secrets of the Clans, this is a technique taught to apprentices.
• Backup from Otherworld:
  • Honeyfern in The Fourth Apprentice shows up from StarClan to save Poppyfrost and Jayfeather from Breezepelt.
  • The Ancients and StarClan join the Clans to fight against the Dark Forest in The Last Hope.
• Badass Creed: Battles of the Clans gave us:
  "RiverClan fish! RiverClan swim! RiverClan warriors use water to win!"
• Badass in Distress: In the SkyClan manga, Action Girl Leafstar gets captured by a Crazy Cat Lady and has to be rescued by her Clanmates.
• Bad Guys Do the Dirty Work: Scourge kills Tigerstar, so Firestar's never put in a position where he has to genuinely consider it.
• Bad Ol' Badger:
  • Cats are the top predators of the forest. Aside from kits being taken by foxes or eagles or humans invading their territory, the only real threats they have are other cats or natural things beyond their control. Badgers are an exception to the rule. They rarely appear but are dangerous to even the most skilled warriors.
  • One of the climactic events of The New Prophecy is the badgers who were displaced when the cats moved to 'their' lake forming into an army and attacking them.
  • Subverted with Midnight. She has learned to speak the language of cats and is generally a neutral character.
• Bad Omen Anecdote:
  • One young cat's spine is broken when a tree falls and she's pinned by the branches. Jayfeather, the medicine cat, tries to encourage her by telling her how ShadowClan once had a cat with a similar injury and had told him about their experiences. Unfortunately, ShadowClan's warrior had ended up dying because of complications with it, which doesn't encourage Jayfeather's patient much.
  • In Dawn of the Clans, when a cat's about to have kits, Gray Wing asks Reed (a cat who's helping with the birth) if he's helped at a kitting before. He said that he has, Gray Wing asked what happened, and he says that the kits lived but the queen died. Gray Wing's worried for a moment, but Reed explains that the queen he'd helped was already sick, while this one is healthy.
• Bad People Abuse Animals: There is an old Twoleg living near SkyClan who is cruel to his pets. In Firestar's Quest, Petal and her kits have to be rescued from him, and in SkyClan's Destiny, the perpetually nervous Shrewtooth reveals that he is so jumpy because he used to be owned by the same man. SkyClan attacks the man to try to teach him not to mistreat any more of his pets.
• Balance Between Good and Evil: Part of Rock's shtick is that there must be a balance between light and darkness, because without one the other would not exist.
• Bandage Wince: A lot of characters tend to wince when herbs are applied - even if moments ago they claimed they're fine and don't need any.
• Band of Brothers: The main characters of The New Prophecy become true friends over the course of their journey, sharing a bond beyond that of Clan boundaries.
• Bastard Bastard:
  • Brokenstar. Since his mother, Yellowfang, is a medicine cat who is not allowed to have kits, he is considered illegitimate. His father, Raggedstar (who is also the leader of ShadowClan), and his mother have to pretend that he is an orphaned kit, so as not to arouse suspicion. He murders his father to become leader.
  • Hawkfrost too. He's the son of Tigerstar and loner Sasha, is a huge Jerkass, pinning down Sorreltail, getting Stormfur and Brook exiled from RiverClan, attempting to take over the Clans (and after his death, destroy them by manipulating living cats), and kicking Beetlewhisker's corpse come to mind. It's quite obvious his father doesn't give a damn about him, but we're never told to feel sorry for him.
  • Darktail, the son of Onestar and a kittypet, who's the Big Bad of the sixth arc, and a pretty terrible cat who treats his cats horribly and will kill anyone who doesn't follow his orders.
• Bathroom Break-Out: In The Darkest Hour, Darkstripe is being watched by Brackenfur since he's suspected of being a traitor. He tells Brackenfur he needs to make dirt, so he goes behind a bush for privacy and sneaks off.
• Battle Cry:
  • The Clans are mentioned as having them.
  • The Dark Forest also has, "Kill the Clans!"
  • In the first book, Firepaw's seems to be "Gr-aar!"
• Battle in the Rain:
  • In Bluestar's Prophecy, the battle between ThunderClan and WindClan takes place in rain.
  • The battle between ThunderClan and ShadowClan at the end of Into The Wild also happens during a storm.
• Bears Are Bad News: In the Adventure Game campaign Mission of Mercy, the cats protect a young girl who gets attacked by a bear. Notable for being the only time bears appear in the series.
• Beast Fable: Into the Wild is analyzed as such in the Nikolajeva book Power, Voice and Subjectivity in Literature for Young Readers.
  ...The book is an example of (ab)using cats as a disguise for human beings, since the feline appearance is not inherent to the plot. It certainly adds excitement and not least novelty to the well-trodden narrative, appealing to cat lovers and adventure lovers equally.
• Because Destiny Says So: Most medicine cats get screwed over by this.
  • Bluestar gets hit pretty hard by this trope as well: allow a bloodthirsty, needlessly violent cat to become leader and destroy your Clan... or abandon your newborn kits in order to become leader yourself and prevent that tragedy?
  • Jayfeather has to become a medicine cat for this exact reason.
• Because You Can Cope: Millie did this to two of her children when the third broke her back. One of the deciding factors in bringing Blossomfall to the Dark Forest.
• Because You Were Nice to Me: In the graphic novel Shattered Peace, Minty stops her mate from killing Ravenpaw because Ravenpaw was nice to her kits.
• Becoming the Mask: Scourge was a product of this: When he was little, he was tricked into running away from his home and happened to end up in the city. To survive, he managed to fool the other rogues residing there into believing that he was a cold-blooded killer so they would fear him and bring him free food. However, by the time he actually kills someone, he slowly starts to become the unfeeling, cold-blooded monster he was portrayed as in his debut.
• Berserk Button:
  • Don't try to say Tigerheart is in the Dark Forest in front of Dovewing.
  • Don't break the warrior code when Hollyleaf is around.
  • Don't suggest to Crookedstar that he is like Rainflower.
  • And for the love of StarClan, PLEASE don't tell a Clan cat that they sharpen their claws on bones and eat kittypets! (Although they do take advantage of the myth occasionally, just to watch the freakout.)
• Best Friend: The first Clan cat the main character Firestar met was Graystripe, and when he joined the Clan they instantly became best friends. Throughout the series, they go through thick and thin together, and while Firestar is leader he makes Graystripe his deputy. Even in Graystripe's Vow, when Graystripe is the oldest cat in ThunderClan and Firestar is long dead, he still thinks about his best friend frequently and regularly speaks of him to younger cats.
• Betrayal by Inaction: In the second novel, Fireheart's suspicions about Tigerclaw being a traitor are confirmed when, during a battle, Fireheart is pinned down by Leopardfur, who is trying to kill him. He calls to Tigerclaw for help, but Tigerclaw ignores him and just stands there watching it happen.
• Better Living Through Evil: Tigerclaw promises that any cats that come with him will be well rewarded later on; despite this, nobody follows him into exile.
• Better to Die than Be Killed: Thunder and Shadow features a bonus scene in the Barnes and Noble edition, in which Needlepaw (prior to us meeting her in the series) is picked up and carried off by an owl. She decides she'd rather die by falling (by her own choice) than let it kill and eat her, so she fights until it lets go (and survives the fall).
• Betty and Veronica: There are several of these. Cats tend to prefer Veronicas if they're in love triangles. Bluestar prefers Oakheart over Thrushpelt, Storm prefers Clear Sky over Gray Wing, and Dovewing prefers Tigerheart to Bumblestripe.
• Beware the Nice Ones: In A Starless Clan, Splashtail is normally a gentle cat, so it terrifies Frostpaw to see how fierce he is when he's prepared to defend his Clan.
• Beyond the Impossible: Scourge when he takes out all of Tigerstar's nine lives at once. A leader is supposed to be temporarily dead once killed, only to revive later. To take out all nine at once is unprecedented.
• Big Bad: Tigerstar is generally considered the main antagonist of the series, but the arcs and some individual books have their own main villain.
  • The Original Series: Tigerstar
    • Into The Wild has Brokenstar by virtue of his leadership of ShadowClan and attempt to rule the forest.
    • Fire and Ice, Forest of Secrets, and Rising Storm split the role between Tigerstar, Brokenstar, and Nightstar, each of whom are major enemies of ThunderClan.
    • A Dangerous Path sets up Tigerstar as the true villain, but has the dog pack as the main antagonists.
    • The Darkest Hour has Tigerstar again, until Scourge kills him and takes over the campaign to rule the forest.
  • The New Prophecy: Appears to be Hawkfrost, but it's actually Tigerstar, albeit with Hawkfrost as his chief enforcer.
    • Moonrise: Sharptooth, the mountain lion terrorizing the Tribe.
    • Starlight: Mudclaw, due to his rebellion against Onewhisker.
  • Power of Three: Sol, the traveling cat who turns the Clans against each other.
    • Outcast: Stripes, the leader of the Tribe Invaders.
    • Eclipse: Other than the main villain of the arc, we have Onestar, who turns on ThunderClan and tries to destroy them.
    • Long Shadows: Ashfur, who becomes a major enemy of Lionblaze, Jayfeather, and Hollyleaf during his insane crusade to destroy Squirrelflight.
    • Sunrise: Hollyleaf, who is the murderer the Clans are trying to find.
  • Omen of the Stars: Either Tigerstar or Brokenstar, depending on who actually leads the Dark Forest.
    • The Fourth Apprentice: The beavers, whose dam is draining the lake and causing the Clans to struggle with thirst and starvation.
    • The Forgotten Warrior: Sol, back for one more attempt to destroy the Clans.
  • A Vision of Shadows: Darktail, for the first half of the series. For the latter half, there is no villain, and instead focuses on conflicts between the five Clans and the main characters.
  • The Broken Code: Ashfur, who now commands the cats of the Dark Forest.
• Big Badass Battle Sequence:
  • The BloodClan battle in The Darkest Hour. BloodClan, a huge group of city cats (enough to take on around 100 forest cats) with a leader who can kill a Clan leader's nine lives in one blow, gives the forest Clans three days to either leave the forest or meet them in battle. The forest Clans spend the three days weighing their options, training, having medicine cats prepare herbs, and coming up with an escape strategy for the defenseless kits and elders if they fail. All four Clans join together to face BloodClan, and the battle itself lasts about a day.
  • The big battle in Eclipse. All four Clans fighting, until the massive battle is broken up by a solar eclipse which scares them all to death.
  • That's nothing compared to what happens in the fourth series' last book. Basically, the cat versions of Heaven and Hell start fighting an epic war on Earth, and dozens of cats both living and dead kick ass.
  • In the sixth-arc book Shattered Sky, the now five Clans team up to face Darktail and his Kin, each Clan using the unique battle skills they specialize in.
• Big Bad Ensemble:
  • In the first arc, Tigerclaw and Brokenstar were this for a while. Then they teamed up and Brokenstar died.
  • In the Power of Three arc, both Sol and Tigerstar were vying for the spot of Big Bad, and the arc ends with Sol leaving.
  • And then you've got the end of the Omen of the Stars arc, which brings all the Big Bads back to try and get revenge from beyond the grave.
• The Big Bad Shuffle:
  • The series descends into this in the Dark Forest storyline. Every major villain in the series, and a few new ones, team up to destroy the Clans. The story leads us to think that Tigerstar, Hawkfrost, Brokenstar, or Mapleshade is the main villain, without ever giving a definitive answer on who's behind it all. Even Ivypool is confused, and the information she relays to the other characters reflects it. Not that this is a bad thing.
  • Very much so in Dawn of the Clans. The first novel sets up Clear Sky as a villain. This continues throughout the second and third novel. However, Clear Sky regrets his actions and tries to makes up for them. The fourth book introduces One-Eye and Star Flower as villains, with the former dying that very book. In the fifth book, we are introduced to Slash, and the story makes Star Flower's choice of side unclear. By the last book, Slash is the final boss, and Star Flower is good.
• Big Bad Wannabe: Sol in Power of Three: he takes over ShadowClan, but then is easily defeated by Lionblaze, Jayfeather and Hollyleaf.
• Big Ball of Violence: In The Rise of Scourge, young Tiny/Scourge invents a story about him fighting a dog. His "story" is drawn in a very rough, sketched style, and the "fight" is drawn as a ball.
• Big Brother Bully:
  • In The Rise of Scourge, Tiny, the runt of his litter, is teased by his sister Ruby and brother Socks.
  • In Thunder Rising, as soon as Clear Sky sees Jagged Peak (who he'd driven out for breaking a leg), he drops the niceness and politeness he showed Gray Wing and acts ugly towards Jagged Peak, taunting him and accusing him of being lazy and selfish. Gray Wing stands up for Jagged Peak, and Clear Sky begins to apologize only to be rejected by Jagged Peak, calling him out for making him leave the forest just because of a broken leg. He gets better toward the end of the series, however. In fact, he even apologizes to Jagged Peak for kicking him out of the forest.
• Big Damn Heroes:
  • In Fire and Ice, Graystripe shows up to save Fireheart from Clawface.
  • In Forest of Secrets, when Tigerclaw leads Brokentail's rogues to attack the ThunderClan camp, a RiverClan patrol - who had been on their way there to discuss Graystripe's kits - arrive and help fight them off.
  • In Rising Storm, a RiverClan patrol shows up to save Fireheart and his patrol from Tigerclaw's rogues.
  • In The Heart of a Warrior, the dogs repay Ravenpaw and Barley for saving them by showing up and defeating Neo BloodClan.
  • In The Last Hope, Hollyleaf saves Ivypool when she was cornered by Hawkfrost, giving her life in the process.
• Big Eater: The characters often joke that Graystripe is one.
• Big Good: Firestar in series two through four. He is the leader of the main Cast Herd, ThunderClan, and is always trying to stop evil and create peace between the Clans.
• Big "NO!": Bluestar (then Bluepaw) makes one of these in Bluestar's Prophecy, when her mother is killed in battle. Complete with eight o's.
• Bigot with a Crush: Tigerstar is racist against kittypets (cats owned by humans) and cats who are half-Clan by birth, to the point that he wants them all dead or driven out of the Clans. Despite this, he falls in love with Sasha, a kittypet who recently lost her owner. He says that she's not like any other kittypet and guesses that her mother might be Clanborn or rogue-born, insists that she's not really one anymore anyway since she lives in the woods, and orders her to tell his Clanmates that she's a rogue and to never reveal the truth.
• Big, Screwed-Up Family:
  • Every Clan is so inbred at this point that every Clan-born character is related to everyone else. It isn't uncommon for someone to have an affair with their cousin, or even sibling. One character even went out with her half-uncle for a while.
  • At best, they're suspicious of each other, at worst, they're constantly trying to kill each other... yeah.
  • Subverted with inter-Clan mating, and the (very) rare newcomer.
• Birth-Death Juxtaposition:
  • Cinderpelt dies shortly before Cinderkit is born.
  • Larksong dies as he and Sparkpelt's kits are being born.
• Bitch Alert:
  • Sandpaw's first appearance. She snarls that Firepaw smells revolting, and then makes a comment about how he's a kittypet.
  • Foxheart and Lizardstripe of Shadowclan. The former is constantly rude and mocking towards Yellowfang while the latter occasionally joins the former as well as being cross with having to be a queen and mistreating Brokenkit.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing:
  • Hawkfrost fits this trope to a T. Brambleclaw can't believe at first that his half-brother may be evil.
  • Ashfur behaves normally around most of his Clanmates, and seems especially kind to Squirrelflight until she rejects him. Then his true self comes out and he tries to kill her father and adopted kids, and then later tries to destroy the entire forest since he's so jealous that he can't have her.
• Bit-Part Bad Guys: Duke, a villain from The Lost Warrior, is one of these. His only reason for existing was so that Graystripe could fight someone in the first book, and out of all the villains in the series, he is one of the quickest to go down.
• Bittersweet Ending:
  • Forest of Secrets. Tigerclaw is defeated, and Fireheart is now Clan deputy, but Silverstream is dead, Bluestar is shaken, and Graystripe has left the Clan to raise his kits in RiverClan.
  • Sunrise. Hollyleaf is presumed dead, and almost everyone's lives have been ruined, but the prophecy still hasen't been completely fulfilled, and there's going to be another series. From Jayfeather's point of view, the continuation of the series preventing this ending from being final apparently makes all of this less sad.
  • A Light in the Mist. Although Ashfur is defeated and the Clans are saved, it came at a great cost. Many cats have died, including Bristlefrost, who sacrificed her spirit and the place in the afterlife. The surviving protagonists are left broken and traumatized: Rootspring never gets to tell Bristlefrost that he would change the Clans for her and he won't meet his love even in death. Shadowsight is left with the feelings of guilt for everything that happened and realizes he doesn't have connection with StarClan and that he had never had it, making him question his purpose as a medicine cat.
• Black-and-White Morality:
  • Hollyleaf starts out with her absolute trust in the Warrior Code, and believes that all who follow it are good, while those who don't are evil. After using the code to justify most of her actions, she learns that her very birth broke the code, and that someone she had respected had broken one of the code's core principles, but for a good reason. After learning this, Hollyleaf's mind was completely shattered, and she realized that her morality was flawed, leading her to attempt to murder her own mother, then flee from the Clans.
  • The series in general is at first an example of Grey-and-Gray Morality with ThunderClan and ShadowClan each having their good warriors (Firestar, Graystripe, and Yellowfang come to mind) and their bad warriors (Brokenstar, Tigerstar, and Darkstripe) but in the fourth series... Black-and-White Morality is in effect as the Clans go against The Dark Forest cats who are indeed evil. Also in effect during the fight with BloodClan who are (with few exceptions) very black.
• The Blank: In Forest of Secrets, Fireheart has a nightmare of a faceless queen losing her kits.
• Blasphemous Boast: In The Darkest Hour, Tigerstar claims that he is more powerful than StarClan because he changed the number of Clans in the forest from four to two.
• Blessed with Suck: The Three's powers all have their downsides. Lionblaze can't be harmed in battle, but he also suffers from bloody nightmares of him murdering others. Jayfeather can see into other cats' dreams and memories, but this causes him to learn things he shouldn't (which he constantly has StarClan cats nagging him about), and he is also blind in life. Dovewing has super-strong senses, which leaves her sometimes distracted, and it also causes a rift between Dovewing and her sister.
• "Blind Idiot" Translation: An error in the Traditional Chinese translation has caused Blackstar to have black claws instead of black paws. Apparently, they've also referred to Hawkfrost as Brambleclaw's older brother (he's really his younger half-brother), among other minor errors.
• Blind Seer: Jayfeather. He's blind, but he's very perceptive and his power gives him the ability to gain a huge amount of knowledge that he wouldn't otherwise have.
• Blonde, Brunette, Redhead: Fans have noticed that Warriors has its own variation, with main character groups tending to follow a pattern of ginger/black/gray:
  • The first series began with the best-friends trio of Fireheart the ginger cat, Ravenpaw the black cat, and Graystripe the gray cat.
  • Power of Three focused on the ginger Lionblaze, the black Hollyleaf, and the gray Jayfeather.
  • A Vision of Shadows centers around ginger Alderheart, black-and-white Violetshine, and gray Twigbranch.
  • The Broken Code's protagonists are the yellow Rootspring, dark gray-black Shadowsight, and gray Bristlefrost.
  • A Starless Clan follows the brown-and-white Sunbeam, black Nightheart, and gray Frostpaw.
• Blood from the Mouth:
  • Hawkfrost coughs up clots of blood shortly before he dies at the end of Sunset.
  • Tigerstar at the end of the Rise of Scourge manga.
  • Non-fatal example: At one point in Forest of Secrets, Graystripe has blood bubbling from his mouth.
  • After he is hit by a car, blood trickles out of Whitethroat's mouth as he tries to speak.
  • In Moonrise a doomed Tribe cat has blood coming out of its mouth after being slammed against a wall.
  • Snowfur, when she's hit by a car.
  • In the short story The Clans Decide, blood comes out of an injured she-cat's mouth as she tries to speak. She gets better, but she is near death at this point.
  • In Night Whispers, Jayfeather has a vision in which he sees blood spilling from the mouths of every cat in ThunderClan except Ivypool.
• Blood Is Squicker in Water: Hawkfrost's death: he stumbles into the lake bleeding from stab wound in his throat, fulfilling the prophecy Blood will spill blood and the lake will run red. To a lesser extent, Ashfur's death, since his body was dumped in a stream after his throat was slashed.
• Bloodless Carnage:
  • Blood is rarely referenced in regards to prey except when specifically plot-relevant, such as in Midnight where it mentions that Brambleclaw knows the taste of salt because he'd sometimes taste it in the blood of prey. The cats never get blood on themselves while hunting or eating, which is odd considering how bloody some battles get.
  • In the Tigerstar and Sasha manga, those squirrels and frogs and hares they kill look quite clean. The illustrator, Don Hudson, even had a scene where the editors thought that even a clean dead rabbit looked too creepy.
  I am working on the Cat book for Tokyopop and I am at an interesting point in the story. The story involves Feral cats and life in the wild. A Feral cat stops and kills a wild hare as described in the script. I drew the layout and it was approved, but at a certain point, the powers that be wanted a change. The dead rabbit looks too creepy. I understand that the pre-teen market may not be into dead rabbits, but why write it into the script? They wanted me to change the angle to obscure the hare, messing up the storytelling. My compromise was to turn the rabbit around, and closing his eyes. It's not dead, just sleeping! No trauma, just a sleepy, knocked out bunny. (Comparison of original and revised sketches◊)
• Blood-Splattered Innocents:
  • Lionblaze. Although most of the times he ends up splattered with blood, he's responsible, the times in Long Shadows when Tigerstar shows him visions of himself killing Heathertail in a series of violent fashions may count.
  • Generally averted with everyone else.
  • Jayfeather's vision of blood spilling from the mouths of every ThunderClan cat.
• Blunt "Yes": Tigerstar's response to Firestar:
  Firestar: Has it been worth it, Tigerstar? All the hate? All the death?
  Tigerstar: Every moment.
• Bodyguard Betrayal: In Shattered Sky, Rain offers to watch over the wounded Darktail for a while. Violetpaw decides to bring a piece of prey for Darktail to eat when he wakes up, and she returns to find Rain suffocating their leader. It looks for a moment as if he's successful, but it turns out that Darktail was just Playing Possum: when Rain turns away, Darktail jumps up and kills him in revenge.
• Bolt of Divine Retribution: This conveniently happens to Mudclaw, a minor villain. StarClan may or may not have been behind that one, as they have a strict rule of non-interference in the physical plane. It was, in any case, an extremely convenient lightning strike for the Clans: not only was Mudclaw killed, but the lightning felled a tree which created a very handy bridge to a nearby island.
• Bond Villain Stupidity: Originally, it was believed that the only reason Tigerstar doesn't go into Firestar's dreams and kill him was because he couldn't. However, Word of God revealed that he can, but he just doesn't want to.
  Iceclaw: If Tigerstar can harm cats like he can and walk in their dreams, why doesn't he just do it to Firestar, take revenge, and get it over with?
  Vicky: Because Tigerstar wants a long-drawn out kind of vengeance, involving as many cats as possible, so that Firestar truly suffers. ...
• Book Ends:
  • When Omen of the Stars was still intended to be the ending of the main Warriors series, the series began with Firestar entering the forest for the first time and ended with Firestar's death. Kate Cary was also the one to write Into the Wild and also the one to write The Last Hope, so she felt that was fitting and was very pleased to have been the one chosen to write it.
  • The last lines of The Last Hope are this in the best way possible.
  There will be three cats, kin of your kin, with the power of the stars in their paws. They will find a fourth, and the battle between light and dark will be won. A new leader will rise from the shadows of his death, and the Clans will survive beyond the memories of his memories. That is how it has always been, and how it always will be.
• Boomerang Bigot: In The Power of Three, Berrynose complains that the ThunderClan leader Firestar is letting too many kittypets (house cats) into his Clan and tainting the blood of the Clan. Another cat immediately points out that Berrynose himself was a kittypet that Firestar let into the Clan, only for Berrynose to try to claim that it's different.
• Boring Return Journey: The trip back from the beavers, and also the portion of the sun-drown-place journey from the Tribe back to the Clans (which was described in one paragraph).
• Born During a Storm: In Crookedstar's Promise, Shellheart and Rainflower's kits are born during a storm that had flooded the RiverClan camp. They name them Stormkit and Oakkit after the storm and after the tree that sheltered them during it.
• Borrowed Catchphrase:
  • In the first book, Fireheart accidentally attacks his friend Graystripe. When Graystripe complains that he was taken by surprise, Fireheart replies, "Surprise is the warrior's greatest weapon." He then mentally notes this to be the catchphrase of Graystripe's mentor, Lionheart.
  • In Yellowfang's Secret, Yellowfang borrowed this phrase from her mentor Deerleap: "Look, listen, scent!"
  • In The Apprentice's Quest, Alderpaw quotes one of Jayfeather's favorite phrases: "You're fine when I say you are."
• Bowdlerise: The manga, which, despite following mostly non-violent (except for Rise of Scourge) backstories, still manages heavy Bowdlerisation in the form of Bloodless Carnage. The fact that these mangas still manage to get a 10+ rating makes this one wonder what they would do with an uncensored adaptation of the original novels. However, they're still allowed to say "die", and one significant character in the Tigerstar and Sasha manga does die a somewhat unpleasant death. Somewhat averted by Shattered Peace. Although the art style still makes things seem Lighter and Softer, the artist clearly wasn't trying to hide any blood in the chicken coop scene.
• Braving the Blizzard: Happens frequently, usually with warriors braving the elements to hunt for their Clan. One notable moment is when Cloudtail, as a kit, sneaks out of camp to go hunting even though he's not old enough. As a result, Firestar and Sandstorm need to brave the weather in order to find him.
• Brawler Lock: In The Lost Warrior, during Graystripe and Duke's second fight, a panel features them locked in combat and snarling, forelegs pushing against the other, trying to pin the other down. Duke ended up coming out on top for a few moments, but Graystripe was able to turn it to his own advantage and win.
• Breaking the Bonds: In the first book, Longtail doesn't want Rusty to join the Clan because he was owned by humans, and the two fight. There's a moment during the battle where Longtail grabs the back of Rusty's collar and begins using it to strangle him. Rusty struggles forward until his collar snaps, and the Clan leader stops the fight, saying that it's a sign that Rusty is meant to join the Clan.
• Breaking the Fellowship: After the great journey, the chosen cats have to split and return back to their Clans.
• Breakout Character: Crookedstar, who stars in his own Super Edition. In the Ultimate Leader Election in late 2008, it was he who made it far enough to go up against Firestar at the end. He lost, which is understandable considering that Firestar's the main character that introduced us to the series, but Vicky said in the next Authortracker that even though she expected Firestar to win, she was surprised that out of all the leaders in the running, Crookedstar would be the one to make it so far. Perhaps this is why she decided to have a Super Edition from his point of view. Not bad for a minor character that died in book 5.
• Break the Cutie: Any and all "cuties" will be broken, and how.
  • Ashfur first appeared as a timid but determined apprentice that soon had his mother brutally murdered by Tigerstar, lost the cat he thought would be his mate (Squirrelflight) to the son of Tigerstar (Brambleclaw), and then had to mentor their "son". Finally, in Book 5 of series 3, he goes insane, attempts to murder the main characters, has his throat bitten, thus killing him, while his body gets pushed off a cliff into a river, where his lifeless corpse gets snagged on a rock and be seen bobbing limply in the water by the rest of the Clan. Ouch.
  • Scourge was a curious, adorable little kitten. He wandered into the forest and was attacked by Tigerpaw. This made him hate Clan cats. It didn't help that his siblings drove him away.
  • Brightheart was a sweet, eager apprentice. When Bluestar made Cloudtail a warrior but refused to promote any of the other apprentices, she and Swiftpaw went to look for the dogs, which resulted in the latter's death, and with Brightheart losing half her face (including an eye and an ear) in the attack. Bluestar then renamed her "Lostface", a name that the young she-cat had to carry with her for months. Even after Cloudtail continued to love her and remained her constant rock, she still avoided puddles so that she wouldn't see her face, and constantly had to deal with cats being afraid of her because of her appearance.
  • Hollyleaf. A strong young apprentice who wanted to follow the warrior code do the best she could for her Clan and also was one of the Three with a special power... or so she thought. She later learned that Squirrelflight and Brambleclaw weren't her real parents and that she was the product of a doubly-forbidden relationship: her very existence shattered the beliefs she'd held so long about the warrior code. She then murdered a Clanmate before deciding to run away from the Clan, nearly dying in the ensuing tunnel collapse, and then lived a lonely life outside the Clan for several years. Also, she was never one of the Three.
  • Briarlight gets this in perhaps the most literal fashion possible: her spine is broken in an accident, leaving her paralyzed for life, feeling worthless due to not being able to continue any normal career in the Clan and relying on the others to survive, and being treated differently by her Clanmates.
• Breaking the Glass Ceiling: The Clans believe that only Clanborn cats make good warriors, and taunt Fireheart for having been born a kittypet (pet owned by humans), but he eventually becomes the first kittypet-born Clan leader in the Clans' memory. In the second series, Mothwing becomes the first rogue-born medicine cat (The Medic / her Clan's spiritual leader), and Firestar was even used as an example when cats protested her becoming a warrior: "If a kittypet can become a Clan leader, why should rogues not be welcome as warriors?"
• Break the Haughty: Lionblaze started out arrogant and battle obsessed, and trained under his grandfather Tigerstar to become a great warrior. Then in at the end of the Power of Three arc, he learned that he was actually a bastard, and Tigerstar was just using him for his power. He still remained somewhat arrogant, until Night Whispers, where his love interest Cinderheart left him because he had to focus on his destiny and couldn't be distracted, leading to him becoming much more humble and less battle-hungry.
• Brick Joke: In the beginning of The Fourth Apprentice, Jayfeather says that if Mousefur starts acting sweet and kind, he'll know the drought has gotten to her. At the end of the book, this happens to Blackstar!
• Bring Help Back: Happens several times.
  • There are many examples where cats - often apprentices - are sent to fetch patrols for help in battles.
  • In Fire and Ice, a WindClan cat runs to ThunderClan to bring them back to help, since the other two Clans are trying to drive them out again or kill them.
  • In Dawn of the Clans: The First Battle, Clear Sky and his cats trap Thunder, Gray Wing, Tall Shadow, and Jackdaw's Cry on top of the Great Rock at the Four Trees. Thunder manages to escape, and has to get back to the Moor Group so that he can bring cats back to save the other three. This involves a harrowing Chase Scene.
• Broken Aesop: When Firestar has to choose between reinstating his old deputy, Graystripe, or keeping Brambleclaw, StarClan tells Leafpool that Firestar should make his decision with his head, not his heart (oh so subtly hinting at Brambleclaw), completely ignoring all the times in the series characters have been told to listen to their heart or do what they feel is right. In fact, the whole reason Firestar chose Graystripe in the first place was because he was told to follow his heart.
• Broken Pedestal: Happens often, especially where Tigerstar is concerned.
  • In the first book, Into the Wild, the main character Fireheart puts Tigerclaw/Tigerstar on a pedestal. Then he finds out that Tigerclaw is a team-killing psycho, and they become arch enemies.
  • Similarly, Dustpelt in Forest of Secrets turns his back on Tigerclaw after learning that he's a traitor.
  Dustpelt: I looked up to you. I wanted to be like you. But Redtail was my mentor. I owe him more than any cat. And you killed him. You killed him and betrayed the Clan. I'd rather die than follow you.
  • In the Tigerstar and Sasha manga Spin-Off, Sasha is in love with Tigerstar until she finds out about his evil actions.
  • In the Omen of the Stars arc, all of the Dark Forest apprentices except Breezepelt and Redwillow eventually have this when they realize how evil the Dark Forest is.
  • Jagged Peak from Dawn Of The Clans used to look up to Clear Sky, his older brother, until the latter kicks him out of the forest for having an unhealed broken leg. The pedestal crumbles to dust when Clear Sky starts bullying him in front of Gray Wing, causing Gray Wing to defend their brother and Jagged Peak to call him out on his behavior.
• Brooding Boy, Gentle Girl:
  • Leafpool and Crowfeather are this; as is Crowfeather's first relationship with Feathertail. Crowfeather is prickly and warms up to few others, while Feathertail and Leafpool are friendly and gentle - Leafpool is even a medicine cat.
  • Jayfeather and Half Moon are worth a mention, even though they have limited interaction in the books, since they don't even live in the same time. Jayfeather's grumpy and sarcastic; Half Moon is friendly and cheerful and later becomes the first Tribe-Healer of the Tribe of Rushing Water.
• Brother–Sister Incest: Unintentionally. The authors said that Willowpelt and Patchpelt are Graystripe's parents. In Bluestar's Prophecy, the two end up being brother and sister - the authors didn't realize that, because they're born in different litters several seasons apart. When it was pointed out, they just decided to leave it because it can happen with cats. After Vicky retired from the series, the new story team did canonize Willowpelt as Graystripe's mother, but distinctly left his father off the new official family tree.
• Brutal Bird of Prey: Ordinary birds of prey such as hawks and eagles are portrayed as terrifying predators. Justified, since they're cats, after all, and the birds are very large to them — large enough to carry off a kit, or, with an eagle at least, a full-grown cat.
• Brutal Honesty: Wind Runner from Warrior Cats: Dawn Of The Clans does this for Bumble. While the other cats are wondering whether Bumble should join them or not, Wind Runner bluntly tells her that she can't because she doesn't know the ways of a wild cat.
• Buffoonish Tomcat: Both averted and used, male Clan cats are portrayed as normal cats, yet male kittypets tend to be goofy and friendly. The latter is probably because male kittypets are not really "male", as discussed in the books.
• Buffy Speak: The Ultimate Guide's first official description when it was added to HarperCollins Catalogs claimed that the book had an "oversized, gift-y trim".
• Bullying a Dragon: Tigerstar dies because of this. He tries to push around Scourge, who gets tired of him and kills him. Nine times. In one blow.
• Buried Alive:
  • Oakheart in Into the Wild, killed by falling rocks.
  • Hollyleaf is buried by a collapsing tunnel in Sunrise, though she is later revealed to have survived in The Forgotten Warrior.
  • Tallstar's Revenge mentions, though never shows, the death of Leafshine in a collapsing tunnel, and later Sandgorse is killed in a collapsing tunnel while trying to save Sparrow.
• Bury Your Disabled: Snowkit gets killed in Dangerous Path because his deafness prevents him from noticing the hawk until it's too late.
• The Bus Came Back:
  • Graystripe was captured by Twolegs early in the third book of the second series and ultimately presumed dead or permanently lost by his Clanmates. In the first book of the third series - taking place half a year after the second series ended - he returned, having escaped and found the Clans in their new home.
  • Stormfur and Brook (and heck, the Tribe itself, which hadn't been seen since 2011), come back in Tawnypelt's Clan, released in 2019.
• Bus Crash:
  • Happens several times after timeskips; for instance in The Sight we learn that Rainwhisker was killed in between books by a falling branch.
  • Leafpool is killed by a rockslide in between The Raging Storm and Lost Stars, which is notable as she was once a protagonist and is still a pretty major character.
• But Now I Must Go: Several characters leave the Clans, most notably Cody, Shortwhisker, and Snookthorn.
• Butt-Monkey: Darkstripe and Snowtuft from are always getting picked on by the other Dark Forest villains. In Snowtuft's first appearance, his belly is violently sliced open, and later Mapleshade thinks that he was spying on her so she forces him into a battle where he gets wounded horrifically. Meanwhile, Darkstripe is repaid for his Undying Loyalty to Tigerstar by being constantly mocked and beaten up when he so much as looks at the others.
• By the Lights of Their Eyes: In Shattered Peace, Ravenpaw and Barley go underground into the Moonstone cave. All that is visible is their silhouettes in the tunnel and their eyes glowing white.

C

• Cabin Fever:
  • In The Lost Warrior, Graystripe gets this, since he's lived outdoors in the forest his whole life and is now shut in a house as a pet. Results in him desperately searching for a way out and clawing up some of the furniture.
  • In Bluestar's Prophecy, Rosetail comments that Snowfur seems to have den fever after spending so much time in the nursery after the birth of her kit.
• Caged Bird Metaphor: When Millie's trying to decide whether to leave her owner and live in the wild, she looks at her owner's pet bird in its cage and wonders aloud, "Would you fly away from here, if you could?"
• Cain and Abel:
  • Brambleclaw and Hawkfrost, with the older Brambleclaw being the good half-brother who kills his evil kin.
  • In The Darkest Hour Firestar kills Scourge who is his half-brother, though the fact that they're related is only hinted at in one of the side books (neither one is aware of it) and confirmed by the authors.
  • According to Word Of God, Graystripe's parents are Willowpelt and Patchpelt, and Darkstripe's parents are Willowpelt and Tawnyspots, so this makes another pair when Graystripe kills Darkstripe.
  • Clawface and Nightstar. One was the leader of ShadowClan, and one was an evil rogue opposing ShadowClan, although they don't fight each other directly and weren't stated to be siblings at the time Into the Wild came out.
• Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": The cats have their own vocabulary: "monsters" for vehicles, "Thunderpath" for roads, "Twolegs"/"housefolk"/"Upwalkers"/"No-Furs" for humans (depending on where the cat's from) and "Twolegplace" for towns, "kittypet" for a cat owned by humans, "The Cutter" for veterinarians, "sun-drown-place" for the ocean, and "Thundersnake" and "Silverpath" for trains and train tracks.
  • The Clans also have their own vocabulary for time and seasons: a quarter moon is one week, a half-moon is two weeks, a moon is a month, a season is a quarter of a year/three months(a year is four seasons), sunhigh is noon, and moonrise is when the moon rises. Newleaf is spring, greenleaf is summer, leaf-fall is fall/autumn, and leaf-bare is winter.
  • Rogues and loners are cats who aren't a Clan cat or a kittypet, though they might live near Twolegs or in Twoleg buildings. Rogues are hostile and don't care about trespassing Clan boundaries, while loners are more neutral and are sometimes friendly and helpful to the Clans.
• Call-Back:
  • In The Last Hope:
  Firestar: "I guess fire will save the Clans once more."
  • Also in The Last Hope, Tigerstar's "The Dark Forest is endless" line is a call back to Night Whispers.
• Call-Forward: In the Interquel Firestar's Quest, Firestar wonders if there is another afterlife for evil cats, and if Brambleclaw will ever go there. The Dark Forest, which is exactly that, was previously revealed in The New Prophecy, which Firestar's Quest precedes. And Brambleclaw trains there.
• Calling Parents by Their Name: It's usually only young kits that might call their parent "Mama" or something to that effect. It's most common for characters to call their parents by their actual name, so it stands out and really emphasizes the family bond when they don't call them by their name. For instance, in Dawn, when a tree falls on Firestar, Squirrelpaw first cries his name, and then yowls "Father!".
• Canon Discontinuity: Secrets of the Clans was the earliest guidebook; however, in the years following its release, several other books had come out, contradicting some of the things it said. When asked whether it or Yellowfang's Secret was correct about one such instance, Vicky Holmes stated: "I'm afraid Secrets of the Clans is a bit of an anomaly, in that it strayed off the path of rightness in several areas. Please take the Super Editions, and other Special Editions, as canon!"
• Can't Have Sex, Ever: Medicine cats are forbidden from having kits, so they aren't allowed to have mates. That's not to say nobody breaks the rule, but for the most part they adhere to Clan standards.
• Can't Kill You, Still Need You: In The Darkest Hour, Tigerstar decides to spare Featherpaw and Stormpaw because he thinks they may still be useful to him.
• Career-Ending Injury: Happens several times. For the most part, the cat is already considerably old when it happens:
  • Stonepelt retires early due to a shoulder injury that didn't heal properly.
  • Longtail also retires early when he goes blind from infected scratched eyes.
  • The most notable example in the series, though, is Cinderpelt, whose hind leg was permanently damaged when she was hit by a car when she was only an apprentice. She dreamed of being a warrior, but decided to serve her Clan as a medicine cat after it became clear her leg would never heal.
  • Another major example is Briarlight, whose spine was broken when a tree fell on her just before she was about to receive her warrior name. Though she survived, her paralyzed hindlegs made her unable to fight or even move around much, so she just helped out around the camp, especially in the medicine cat's den.
• Career Versus Man: Male deputies and leaders are allowed to have a mate and kits, but female leaders aren't because it might get too in the way of their responsibility of the Clan. Leafstar even thinks about how unfair this is, and by the end of the book she decides to follow the "The word of the Clan leader is the warrior code" rule and declare that SkyClan female leaders are allowed to have kits.
• Car Fu: In Into the Wild, Firepaw is trying to cross a road when a car suddenly drives off the road and heads straight at him. That's right - they swerved off a presumably 55 MPH road, drove on the grass, and leaned out of their window, jeering, just to hit a cat.
• Carnivore Confusion: This seems to be averted in the series with the cats being the only sentient animals. Dogs are portrayed as dumb brutes; foxes are sly, vicious predators; badgers kill mercilessly; and prey species (rabbits, voles, mice, birds, fish) are unintelligent, so it's okay to eat them. However, in The New Prophecy, it is revealed that other animals also communicate and are somewhat aware. They meet a badger who speaks the cats' language, as well as the languages of foxes and rabbits. You might think this would raise eyebrows about what the cats have been eating all along, but it's stated that, while badgers can be intelligent as a plot device, rabbits are stupid and don't talk about (read: think about) much of anything at all.
• Cassandra Truth: In Dark River, when a crisis on RiverClan territory forces them out of their camp, the other Clans all start preparing for invasion, since they believe that RiverClan will now try to steal territory. Hollypaw is seemingly the only cat on the lake that notices that all these fears are founded on nothing but paranoia, and that by preparing for a battle, everyone is making it that much more likely to happen. Naturally, nobody listens to her when she says they should try to help RiverClan with their problem, or at least get more information about it before jumping to conclusions, because she's just an apprentice and they are all "more experienced".
• Cast Herd: The series starts off book one with ThunderClan, WindClan, ShadowClan, RiverClan, StarClan and the Twolegplace kittypets. The story has since grown to include the normal Clans at different time periods, SkyClan, BloodClan, The Dark Forest, The Tribe of Rushing Water, The Tribe of Endless Hunting, The Ancients, the cats that founded the Clans, and many, many side groups such as Daisy's barn, Jingo's group, the traveling rogues, the mountain rogues, Stick and Dodge's groups, Darktail's rogues, the "guardian" cats, the Sisters, etc.
• Cat Concerto:
  • Thunder Rising contains a bonus story at the back that shows how one character came to the forest. It begins with Ripple and all the other cats of the park yowling together to greet the morning.
  • In Squirrelflight's Hope, the Sisters perform a ceremony for a deceased cat that involves them all yowling to the sky.
• Cats Are Magic: When cats die, they go to StarClan, where they can enter living cats' dreams, influence real-world events by creating omens, and even enter the physical world from time to time.
• Cats Hate Water: Three of the Clans do, at least. RiverClan doesn't.
• Cats Have Nine Lives: The Clan leaders are gifted with nine lives by StarClan. The first eight times they die they enter a trance for a few minutes and are healed by StarClan, though there are rare instances of injuries that can take multiple lives, like Tigerstar when he got his stomach torn open. There are also a rare few cases of new leaders only getting eight or less lives when meeting StarClan: Sunstar of ThunderClan and Nightstar of ShadowClan because the previous leader was still alive, and Windstar of WindClan because she was dying when she arrived at the Moonstone.
• Cat Stereotype:
  • Breeds:
    • The "bratty, showy, and aristocratic" part of the Siamese stereotype is played straight in Firestar's Quest. When trying to recruit cats to join the new SkyClan, he encounters two Siamese females who are disdainful of the idea of living wild.
  "What, us?" Rose's eyes opened wide. "You're joking, of course."
  "Us live in a cave? With no warm blanket?" Lily added. "No creamed chicken?"
  "To chase mice and kill them?" Rose's tongue rasped delicately over one brown paw. "How vulgar!"
  • Fur colors/patterns:
    • White: Most white cats tend to be good, with the exception of Snowtuft, a Dark Forest cat, in the fourth series (who does pull a Heel–Face Turn in the seventh arc). Whitewing in particular tends to be gentle and kind. Whitestorm is one of the earliest stereotypical The Mentor characters. The Warriors series does make note of the fact that white cats with blue eyes often tend to be deaf; one character comments that one of her first litter was, Fireheart is thankful that his nephew is not, and Snowkit is a deaf kit who died because he couldn't hear the others warning about a hawk.
    • Red/Orange/Ginger: For the "heroic and humble" type, there's the main character of the first series, Fireheart/Firestar, who is named for his bright orange fur. There's also his grandson, Lionblaze, one of the protagonists of the third and forth series. For the "spirited" type, Firestar's mate, Sandstorm, is known for her sharp tongue and temper. Their daughter, Squirrelflight, who also has a sharp tongue (and is especially wisecracking as an apprentice), is explicitly compared to fire, and her warrior name reflects her flighty nature. A character named Red in the Super Edition SkyClan's Destiny is also a fiercely independent young female.
    • Black/Dark-colored: If there's a villain, chances are it's a dark brown tabby male - Brokenstar, Tigerstar, Hawkfrost, Dodge (even a few other characters such as Thistleclaw were mistakenly referred to as dark brown once or twice) - and it wasn't until fans pointed out just how many of them there were that the authors added a female tortoiseshell villain. Other villainous dark-colored cats include Scourge (black) and Darkstripe (dark gray with black stripes). Some examples of stubborn black cats include Tall Shadow and her brother Moon Shadow from the prequel series.
    • Black and white: There's not too many standouts with this fur color, so this apparently fits the "Average Joe" part of the stereotype. Tallstar of WindClan (at least as seen in the main series, not his Super Edition) is an example of an even-tempered character. Blackstar of ShadowClan is an interesting Zigzag: Deputy to Brokenstar and later Tigerstar, he's a loyal Clan cat at heart, cordial to the other clans, and really just wants the best for ShadowClan. That said, he also tried to kidnap kits, and killed an elder who tried to stop him, an action he regretted for the rest of his life. Most of him is white; the only black part of him is his paws, from whence he got his name.
    • Gray/Blue: Bluestar and Yellowfang are old, wise mentors (and Yellowfang is snarky, too). Graystripe is mellow, mischevious, and a Big Eater.
    • Tabby: A large percentage of the cast is tabby. The most common stereotype is the "aloof/snarky" one, with Jayfeather, Longtail, and Speckletail being some examples.
    • Tortoiseshell: The spunky but kind stereotype tends to come up most; notably, Sorreltail. Most tortoiseshells are female, but two males do appear: Redtail and Sol.
    • The shaded/chinchilla and colorpoint/lynxpoint fur patterns do not appear commonly, if at all.
• Cat Up a Tree: In Dark River, Mousewhisker gets caught in a tree while chasing a squirrel and is too scared to come down. So Cinderheart has to go up there to get him down... and ends up breaking her leg in the process.
• Caught in a Snare:
  • The climax of Sunset involves Firestar getting caught in a fox trap.
  • Rabbittail in a short story in Battles of the Clans gets caught in a net meant for rabbits.
• Cavalry of the Dead: The Dark Forest is a villainous variation of this. In The Last Hope, StarClan and The Tribe of Endless Hunting pull this for the Clans, along with Midnight.
• Cave Behind the Falls: The Tribe lives in one of these.
• Cave Mouth: The Moonstone cave is called "Mothermouth" by the cats because the entrance resembles a mouth.
• Celestial Body: The warriors of StarClan have stars in their pelts.
• Celibate Hero: Medicine cats take a vow never to have kits.
• Cerebus Syndrome: The series is normally very serious, but the third series starts off with one of the most lighthearted and optimistic books in the series, and then gradually became more and more dark until it ended with one of the most dark and depressing books in the whole series. Since the third series was mostly character driven, this was likely done to show the Three's loss of innocence and more mature outlook on their responsibilities.
• Cessation of Existence: When a StarClan or Dark Forest cat is completely forgotten by living cats, they gradually fade away into nothing. However, if either receives an injury that, in life, would be fatal, they just disappear instantly. Whether said "nothing" is this isn't exactly clear, though: even cats who died ages before the beginning of the series—indeed, long enough ago that even a human would struggle to remember them—are shown to still interact with others and give advice to the living.
• Chain of People: A couple RiverClan cats do this to pull Blackclaw out of deep mud in Mothwing's Secret.
• The Chains of Commanding: It ain't always easy to be a Clan leader. Onestar in particular is noted in Cats of the Clans to have been forced to give up his long friendship with Firestar in order to focus on his Clan. And all in all, it's just a stressful job, with the lives of all of your Clanmates relying on you.
• Changing of the Guard: The first series started off with Firestar as the main character. He was then replaced by Brambleclaw, his former apprentice, in Warrior Cats: The New Prophecy. In Power of Three, Brambleclaw turns into a background character like Firestar, and is replaced by his adopted children Jayfeather, Lionblaze, and Hollyleaf. Omen of the Stars has Ivypool and Dovewing, two younger cats, as its main focus, with the Power of Three characters still in tow. And then in A Vision of Shadows, Bramblestar and Squirrelflight's kit Alderheart is the main focus, as well as Violetshine and Twigbranch, with Ivypool, Dovewing, and Jayfeather as background characters. In The Broken Code, Rootpaw, Bristlefrost, and Shadowsight are the POV characters, with Violetshine, Alderheart, Dovewing, and Ivypool as background characters.
• Character Focus: Starting in The New Prophecy, the character focus tends to shift in each book.
• Character Name and the Noun Phrase: The Super Editions and novellas are a possessive version; for instance Firestar's Quest, Bluestar's Prophecy, Hollyleaf's Story, Mistystar's Omen.
• Characters Dropping Like Flies: The series has killed off 560 characters so far, and counting. Anyone Can Die, indeed.
• Character Shilling: Mostly in material written by Vicky Holmes, Ashfur and Hollyleaf tend to be characterized as good and noble cats in tragic circumstances they couldn't help, playing down their crimes and motivations for committing them.
  • Ashfur is described as a "good mentor" to Lionblaze in the Ultimate Guide, which is debatable since they didn't get along at all - they even fought each other once - and he also possibly taught Lionblaze some moves incorrectly (at least Lionblaze thought so and accused him of it). More than once Ashfur's attempted murders of the father and three kits of the she-cat who rejected him is handwaved as "his only fault was to love too much" (including in a scene where he made it to the cats' equivalent of heaven.)
  • Hollyleaf's behavior was whitewashed at least once (in the Ultimate Guide): her murder of Ashfur was described as an accident where she didn't mean to fatally wound him, he fell into the stream himself, her self-imposed exile from the Clan was due to guilt, and her motivations were basically fear and being overwhelmed by the secret. In the book where it actually happened, her brother saw in her memories that she intentionally tried to kill Ashfur, she even stated that she threw his body in the stream to hide it, she ran from the Clan because they wouldn't view the murder as her doing "the right thing", and her motivations were more along the lines of Knight Templar/Black-and-White Insanity.
• Chaste Hero: Firestar in the first arc. He doesn't get it until Cinderpelt directly points out to him in book 5 that Sandstorm loves him. He also never realizes that Cinderpelt herself has feelings for him. In the words of Vicky, "Stupid man-cat."
• Chekhov's Boomerang: The fox trap from Sunset. First, Berrykit loses half his tail in it. Then later, it turns out to be instrumental to the villain's plot, and to beating the villain.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • The Stick from Dark River. It shows Jaypaw that he can still escape the tunnels because it floated into them from the river.
  • In Sunrise, ThunderClan brings deathberries into the camp to try to kill the snake that had killed Honeyfern. Hollyleaf later uses the same deathberries to try to kill Leafpool.
  • In Sign of the Moon, the reflection of the moon that Half Moon sees means that she has to become the first Stoneteller.
• Chekhov's Gunman:
  • Clawface, one of Graystripe's idols who is mentioned early in Into the Wild, kills Spottedleaf in the book's climax.
  • In Into the Wild, there is a casual mention of a litter of kits that Bluestar lost one leaf-bare. Forest of Secrets reveals that two of her kits are still alive and living in RiverClan. They then become very important to the plot.
  • Barley, who turns out to be an ex BloodClan member in The Darkest Hour.
  • In Bluestar's Prophecy, Tigerpaw brutally attacks a kit on Thistleclaw's command. That kit turns out to be Scourge, a cat who later kills Tigerstar.
  • Used in Twilight. Near the beginning of the book, the ThunderClan cats have to drive a badger and her cubs off their territory. Fast-forward to the climax, and the cats are facing a massive ambush by the badgers that leaves many cats wounded and Sootfur and Cinderpelt dead.
  • Harry, a random cat hanging around in SkyClan and the Stranger turns out to be Sol, the villain of the Power of Three arc.
  • Thistleclaw was mentioned in Forest of Secrets and said to be Bluestar's rival. He's very important in Bluestar's Prophecy and even revealed to have been a major contributor to Scourge's Face–Heel Turn. He's also later revealed as a leader of the Dark Forest, meaning that he was manipulating events in the forest and lake for a long time.
• Chekhov's Skill: Jayfeather's swimming ability comes in handy when Flametail is drowning. It doesn't save Flametail from dying however.
• Chew Toy: Percy in SkyClan's Destiny. Most of Stick's group gets away with just wallowing in Dodge's incredibly vague Offstage Villainy, but Percy is singled out for both having his eye ripped out and getting fixed. In fact, he doesn't have any role in the story other than having horrible things happen to him.
• Chickification: Poppyfrost from is initially portrayed in The Power Of Three as a fearless warrior. By the next series, she's an anxious wreck who stays in the nursery taking care of her kits and fretting over them.
• Chick Magnet: Berrynose manages to attract several she-cats, much to the surprise of other cats.
• Child Hater: Lizardstripe appears to not like having any kits, showing dismay at Hollyflower for missing her kits at one point. She even directly says to Raggedstar and Yellowfang that she wished that she hadn't had her own kits.
• Child of Forbidden Love: The Clans have two types of forbidden relationships: medicine cats taking a mate, and inter-Clan relationships. Nevertheless, there are several characters who were the result of such relationships. For the most part, the parents are thrilled (or, sometimes, at least one of them is, while the other worries about what will happen in the future). There are also a few cases where the father isn't told until later (by their own children).
• Child of Two Worlds:
  • Fireheart and his nephew Cloudtail struggle with this in the first series; Fireheart was born a kittypet but joined the Clan when he was young, and he brought Cloudtail to the Clan shortly after Cloudtail's birth. Both have to deal with prejudice from Clanborn cats, Fireheart feels torn between loyalty to his kittypet sister and his loyalty to the Clan, and Cloudtail struggles with the allure of kittypet life while learning to become a Clan warrior.
  • In the prequel series Dawn of the Clans, Thunder is the son of Clear Sky, the leader of the group of cats living in the forest, but when Clear Sky refuses to raise him, Thunder's uncle Gray Wing takes him in and raises him in the moor group. As Thunder grows he feels loyalty to the group he was raised in and views Gray Wing as a father, but also wants to earn Clear Sky's approval and feels more at home in the forest itself than on the moor, so he tries living in each group. Ultimately his relationship with Clear Sky remains rocky and he forms his own group in another part of the forest.
• Children Are Innocent: Most kits are portrayed as innocent, energetic young cats who contrast with the hardened, shell-shocked, and weary warriors. Even Tigerstar (basically cat Hitler) was adorable and innocent as a kit. It's only when the kits start training to become warriors that they lose their innocence. Subverted with Brokenstar in Yellowfang's Secret and Shrewclaw in Tallstar's Revenge. You can see the seeds of Brokenstar's evil right from his kithood, and Shrewkit is a bully who picks on Tallkit and calls him a worm.
• Children Are Tender-Hearted: In Thunder Rising, when Gray Wing takes his kits hunting for the first time, they're upset because they think the rabbit's mother and father will miss it if they kill it. Gray Wing has to explain that they can't take their hearts hunting if they want to survive in the wild.
• Children as Pawns: Ashfur used his apprentice, Birchpaw, to deliver the message about Firestar being in danger to Brambleclaw, as part of his and Hawkfrost's plan to goad him into killing Firestar. At the time of New Prophecy, this was one of the only clues as to Ashfur being Hawkfrost's accomplice at all.
• A Child Shall Lead Them: In Sign of the Moon, Jayfeather realizes that Half Moon, who isn't yet considered a sharpclaw (an adult cat, to the Ancients), is the rightful cat to lead the Ancients and transform them into the Tribe of Rushing Water, due to her wisdom and her ability to read supernatural signs. The Sun Trail shows that Half Moon is still leader into her old age, and is considered great and wise.
• Child Soldiers: One of the laws in the warrior code is that kits must be six moons old (the feline equivalent of about age 10) to begin training, and they don't see battle until they're more experienced. This rule stemmed from too many kits being trained at too young an age; it took their mothers refusing to fight in a battle to make the Clan leaders see sense. This law has been broken once during the books: Brokenstar trained ShadowClan kits to fight when they were barely weaned from their mothers, and as a result many of the Clan's kits died in battle.
• Chocolate Baby: Two of the three kits in Squirrelflight and Brambleclaw's later-revealed-to-be-adopted litter. Jayfeather is a small gray tabby. There's no gray fur in this cat's supposed father's line, but there sure is in the real father's, not to mention the WindClan scrawniness. And Hollyleaf is black, again probably inherited from the father, who is very very dark grey.
• The Chosen One: Or four, or three... StarClan isn't very picky about the number of cats they choose to do things.
• Chuck Cunningham Syndrome:
  • It's not uncommon for characters, often ones that only appear in the Allegiances list with minor speaking roles (or none at all), to just plain disappear from the Allegiances between books with no mention of their death.
  • Clawface is mentioned to have gone to the Dark Forest after his death, but is nowhere to be found during the plot with The Dark Forest plotting to take over the Clans in Warrior Cats: Omen of the Stars. He does appear in Tigerclaw's Fury, but he isn't even supposed to be in that one considering he died before Tigerclaw was exiled.
• Circle of Shame: In one of the Graystripe mangas, Graystripe has a nightmare that StarClan cats are surrounding him and screaming that it's all his fault that bad things happened to ThunderClan.
• City Mouse: Pretty much every kittypet (cat owned by humans). Most of them seem surprised that wild cats have to hunt for their food, and can't imagine doing it themselves (in fact, some of them find the idea of hunting to be messy and disgusting) or sleeping anywhere but a warm bed.
• The Clan: Four... er, Five of them, to be exact.
• Climbing the Cliffs of Insanity: It seems like the only way to travel through the mountains is to walk along narrow cliffs. Naturally, there's a couple Literal Cliffhangers and a minor character's Disney Villain Death.
• C-List Fodder: Minor characters get slaughtered left and right. Some characters like Rosetail and Whiteclaw in the Original Series exist only to die. Others, like Talonpaw and Sootfur from The New Prophecy do nothing for a whole arc, then bite the dust near the end of it.
• Cloud Cuckoo Lander: Tree. His methods are seen as strange by the other cats, such as his "think bush" hunting strategy which he pretends to be a bush to catch prey, which actually ends up working. He actively encourages his children to be their own cats instead of completely adhering to the Clan's rules, something that causes his son Rootpaw to resent him.
• Clueless Chick-Magnet: Firestar didn't know Sandstorm and Cinderpelt were in love with him until the latter tells him about the former.
• Code of Honour: The Warrior Code. It's eventually deconstructed in the Power of Three arc when Hollyleaf, who had used the code to determine morality, realizes that the code is imperfect and goes on a murderous rampage. Then it gets reconstructed in SkyClan's Destiny and The Forgotten Warrior, when the characters realize that the code is a guideline that can be changed, and also when Hollyleaf uses it to atone.
• Cold Snap: Usually 1-2 books in each story arc take place in winter, and oddly enough they seem to have the biggest events happen in them. The fact that it's winter becomes plot-relevant as well, as winter makes it more difficult for the Clans to hunt and usually causes an outbreak of sickness, and the weather occasionally causes events to occur (such as a cat falling through the ice - which leads to a death once and a forbidden romance another time - or the thaw causing floods).
• Colon Cancer: Every single book from the second series onward. Each book has the initial title Warriors, and two subtitles to indicate which specific series it belongs to, and the title of the book itself (for example: Warriors: The New Prophecy #3: Dawn, Warriors: Power of Three #2: Dark River, and Warriors: Omen of the Stars #1: The Fourth Apprentice).
• Colorization: Most of the manga were originally drawn and released in black-and-white. A decade later, James Barry colorized the ones he'd illustrated and they were re-released.
• Colour Coded Eyes: Most of Firestar's family (and at least one other major bloodline) have green eyes, although the trait seems rarer outside of ThunderClan. When someone's green eyes are brought up repeatedly, it usually signals a bold or strong character. And the eyes are usually described as emerald-green or leaf-green, even though brilliant green eyes are usually a purebred trait. Real Life cats tend to have the duller yellow-green kind, especially in populations that have been feral for many generations.
• Colourful Theme Naming: The first part of cats' names come from things a forest cat would know, such as plants, animals, and natural objects. They also use a lot of colors — every basic color except orange, purple, and pink. They even use some more unusual colors, such as "golden", "silver", "copper", "russet", "tawny", "amber", and "fallow". Oddly enough, out of over 1000 characters, "white" is the most common prefix of all, and even "fallow" got used about five times, but "brown" only got used once, and the cat in question disappeared from the cast list before receiving his warrior name.
• Combat by Champion:
  • In Crookedstar's Promise, one of the battles for Sunningrocks is decided like this.
  • In Hawkwing's Journey, Hawkwing offers to fight Dodge when Dodge takes Curlypaw hostage and insists SkyClan must help him drive out Stick's group: if Hawkwing loses, SkyClan will do as Dodge says, while if Hawkwing wins then SkyClan goes free.
• Combat Medic: The few medicine cats who were warriors before they became medicine cats are basically this. Regular medicine cats also get basic training in fighting skills, even though they usually don't end up using them much.
• Comic-Book Adaptation: The manga, of a sort. The stand-alone volumes all tell stories the regular books don't. Played straight in a couple of the manga stories at the back of the books:
  • Bluestar's Prophecy: The manga in the end of that book shows a classic scene from the very first Warriors book: Rusty joining ThunderClan.
  • Tallstar's Revenge: The manga at the end shows Tallstar's death scene from Starlight.
• Community-Threatening Construction: In the second series, a new road is being built through the forest. The loss of territory and starvation after the prey leaves forces the four Clans to leave the forest.
• Companion Cube: Jayfeather and his stick. To the point where he always looks for the stick when he needs answers, and was horrified when he almost lost it in the lake.
• Compelling Voice: Sol seems to able to persuade anyone to do anything. The books constantly remind us of how powerful and unnatural his voice sounds, and most conversations with him seem like a struggle not to fall under his influence.
• Completely Different Title: The French translation uses the name La Guerre des Clans (War of the Clans).
• The Compliance Game: When Bluefur (who would later become Bluestar) needs to bring her kits to RiverClan in the middle of the night, she tells them they're playing a game called Secret Escape, and they need to be very, very quiet while sneaking out of the camp or they'll get caught.
• Confession Cam: Secrets of the Clans has a variant of this: there are brief sections called "_____ Speaks", and the characters talk about their feelings during a major event that occured in the main series, their motivation for doing something, and things like that.
• Conflicting Loyalty: The Warrior Code forbids taking a mate from another Clan to protect against this. Also a frequent accusation against half-Clan cats. And then there's the fairly common occurrence of a cat's loyalty being split between what they think is right and what the Warrior Code or their leader is telling them.
• Constantly Changing Name: Most Clan cats will have their name change at least twice during their life to reflect their rank in the Clan. As a kit, their name ends in -kit (Bluekit, Nightkit, etc); at the age of six moons when they begin their warrior/medicine cat apprenticeship, their name ends in -paw (Bluepaw, Nightpaw). Once they earn warrior or medicine cat status and are considered an adult, they receive a more unique suffix (resulting in names like Bluefur, Nightpelt, Fireheart, Jayfeather, Leafpool, etc). If a cat becomes the leader of their Clan, they receive the special suffix -star (Bluestar, Nightstar). There are also rare occasions where a cat's name is changed an extra time due to a significant injury, the idea being that the new name suits them better (such as Sparrowpelt becoming Halftail).
• Contemplation Location: In the short story "After Sunset: The Right Choice?", Leafpool has a spot at the top of a hill where she likes to sit and look at the lake as she thinks about things; the story begins when she finds Brambleclaw sitting there.
• Continuity Cavalcade: During the big battle in the then-Grand Finale The Last Hope, most characters from the original series, several minor characters who hadn't appeared for a while, and a ton of other characters from the backstory of the series, all show up as Backup from Otherworld.
• Continuity Drift:
  • At first, battles were a lot more common and weren't treated nearly as seriously as they are in later books - for instance, it's not particularly considered out of the ordinary that Raggedstar was allegedly killed by an enemy patrol. In later stories, a border skirmish is a big deal and cause for concern about Clan wars, where in the early books it was the standard response to finding a trespasser: fight first, ask questions later. ShadowClan driving WindClan out in the first book was taken seriously, but if that happened in later books it would have been an instant Moral Event Horizon rather than the other Clans just raising a slight protest over the aggressiveness of the action.
  • A more minor example: The first book states that each apprentice must visit the Moonstone before becoming a warrior: they travel there with the leader when he or she decides to speak with StarClan. While we don't actually see it happen for the rest of the first series, it still gets mentioned occasionally. It's totally forgotten in the second series, and after it was pointed out by fans, the authors later lampshaded it by having Leafpool say "We seem to have left that tradition behind in our old home." In the prequel Super Editions that take place before the first series, they do have the "each apprentice must visit the Moonstone" requirement again, but oddly enough it's the apprentices themselves, rather than the leader, that receives the visions from their ancestors at the Moonstone.
• Continuity Nod: In Sunset, Firestar says to Brambleclaw, "Remember when I had to go away for a while, when you were a new warrior?", and talks about how Graystripe said he'd wait for Firestar to return, as a reference to Firestar's Quest. Interestingly, Sunset came out over half a year before the release of Firestar's Quest, so it referenced a scene that fans didn't know about yet.
• Continuity Porn:
  • Definitely present in Bluestar's Prophecy. Scenes from later books replicated in full with detailed explanations of what was going on, lots of cameos of Field Guide characters, and backstories for all the major villains of the first arc. As well, the book did its best to give backstories to almost all the characters in the main group. It even gave a large role to a character who was only mentioned once in the entire series and didn't get on the cast list in that book (Rosetail).
  • Though the entirety of Omen of the Stars has it, The Last Hope especially. Not only does it include appearances by many cats from the earlier series and the Expanded Universe, but after Firestar's death, all nine of the cats who gave him nine lives appear to take him to StarClan, with their gifts they gave repeated.
• Continuity Snarl:
  • In The Fourth Apprentice, Yellowfang witnesses Breezepelt and Brokenstar attacking Jayfeather and tells him that the Dark Forest is rising. In Fading Echoes, a book written by a different author, Jayfeather tells her about the attack and the uprising within the Dark Forest and she is shocked and apparently doesn't know anything about what he's talking about. Ummm...
  • In Secrets of the Clans, Raggedstar is the leader when his son, Brokenstar, is born. However, in Bluestar's Prophecy and Yellowfang's Secret, he is deputy. (Although in the scene in Yellowfang's Secret where she gives Brokenkit to Lizardstripe, there's a few accidental mentions of his leader name; the scene appears to have been copy-pasted from Secrets of the Clans and edited.)
  • "The Elders' Concern" is a short story from the official Warriors app about the elders discussing their disapproval of Fireheart as deputy and how they would have preferred Tigerclaw... but the story takes place the day after Lionheart's death. Fireheart was still an apprentice at the time of Lionheart's passing, and Tigerclaw was the deputy between the two of them.
  • The series has several inconsistencies about when and how Firestar loses some of his extra lives. He first lost a life in The Darkest Hour to Scourge, and then Dawn to the falling tree; at the beginning of Sunset, it said he had seven lives left, and then at the end after he's caught in the fox trap and is noted to be lying motionless, it says he has six left. Then Firestar's Quest came out - which takes place after The Darkest Hour and before Dawn - which said that he had six lives left, and then he lost one to rats in the book. When asked why it said six, Vicky said that he lost one to Scourge, one to the rats in the book (even though the line was before it occurred), and one helping Ravenpaw (the Ravenpaw manga was not released until years later, and when it was released, it took place after Firestar's Quest and he didn't lose a life in it), so that didn't clear up matters at all and just caused confusion; the "six" line is generally assumed to be an error. Vicky also said that he didn't lose one in the fox trap (and the short story "After Sunset: The Right Choice?" would later support this), despite Sunset itself claiming he had. He lost one in Long Shadows to greencough, and one just before The Fourth Apprentice to a fox. In Fading Echoes, Yellowfang says that five of Firestar's lives are in StarClan, leaving him with four remaining. If you count all the lives we actually saw him lose in the books minus the fox-trap one - Scourge, rats, tree, greencough, fox - this is correct. He lost a life at the end of Fading Echoes to Russetfur, evidently leaving him with three left. And then he lost a life - his final life - in The Last Hope to wounds from the Dark Forest battle. The only way that this count is accurate is if you count the fox trap (which one book said did happen, and Word of God and one short story said it didn't), and the supposed "Ravenpaw" one which didn't actually happen in the manga nor was referenced whatsoever in the books, or perhaps you can just headcanon that his wounds in The Last Hope were bad enough to take more than one life. No matter which book directly references his life count, it's always incorrect each time.
  • In Into the Wild, Graypaw mentions that Bluestar normally only trains the kits of deputies when she declares she'll take on mentorship of Firepaw. However, Bluestar's Prophecy confirms that Redtail was the only deputy she'd ever had prior to the first book's events; as Redtail never had children, it's impossible for her to have had any of her deputies' kits as apprentices prior to Rusty entering the forest. Furthermore, Bluestar's Prophecy and Onestar's Confession establish that her only known apprentices prior to Firepaw were Frostfur and Runningwind, neither of whom are the offspring of any cats who were or became deputies during Bluestar's lifetime.
• Contrived Coincidence: In Tree's Roots, the protagonist belongs to a group of cats who travel around and don't stay in one place long; they also only allow she-cats to stay with them past the age of six moons, and mates aren't permanent relationships for them. When the main character eventually is forced to leave and begin his own journey alone, he is attacked by dogs, but is rescued by an older cat that happens to be passing through... who, they realize shortly afterward, is his father.
• Convenient Cranny: This happens many times, when they are chased by dogs or other predators, such as badgers: cats will hide in places such as under a thick bush, or in a rabbit hole, or in a crevice between rocks, where the larger creature cannot reach them.

• Cool Teacher: Several mentors are seen as cool by their apprentices. Bluestar in particular was thought of as awesome by her student Firestar.
• The Corrupter: The Dark Forest cats have been convincing Clan cats to train with them and betray their Clanmates by joining their army. Out of all the Dark Forest trainees, only two stayed evil: Redwillow and Breezepelt.
• The Coup: Several.
  • In the first series, Tigerclaw plots to kill Bluestar in order to become leader himself by inviting some rogues to attack the camp and passing off her death as part of the battle. Fireheart jumps in and rescues her during the attempt.
  • Successfully done in the first series by ShadowClan elders, with some help from ThunderClan. They depose the evil Brokenstar and Nightstar takes over.
  • In the second series, Tallstar, in his dying breaths, names Onewhisker as his successor instead of Mudclaw. As the only cats who witnessed this are Onewhisker himself and two of his friends, Mudclaw doesn't believe Onewhisker should be leader, and leads a rebellion against him before the younger cat can receive his nine leader's lives. ThunderClan helps out Onewhisker and he wins.
  • Also in the second series, Tigerstar and Hawkfrost come up with a plan for Brambleclaw and Hawkfrost to kill the Clan leaders at a Gathering and forcibly take control of all the Clans. Brambleclaw disagrees with it, and it is never attempted.
• Courier: Apprentices play this role during the battle against the Dark Forest cats - traveling through a battle-filled forest where any enemy will kill them on sight so that the Clans can send messages to each other on the status of their warriors.
• Covered in Mud:
  • The Tribe rolls in mud to cover their fur in order to disguise their scent and blend into the rock better so that prey doesn't spot them so easily. It also supposedly insulates them better. The visiting Clan cats try this, and aren't too thrilled at the idea, but it works.
  • In Dark River, when Hollyleaf is stuck with RiverClan, she has to roll in mud so that if she encounters a WindClan patrol, they won't realize she's a ThunderClan cat.
• Covered with Scars: Tigerstar has a pelt covered in scars. He even has a scarred nose and an ear nearly split in two.
• Covers Always Lie: In the manga Escape From The Forest, Tigerstar gets the cover all to himself, implying that he will be important in it, however he only appears once to ask the protagonist a question. After she answers it, he is not seen again.
• A Crack in the Ice: In Night Whispers, Flametail falls through some thin ice and drowns.
• Cradle-to-Grave Character: This happens a lot due to the long timespan of the series; the most notable examples are Tallstar, Bluestar, Crookedstar, and Yellowfang, who have Super Editions that feature them born as a kit while they die in the main books, with Bluestar and Tallstar having their death included in the Super Edition itself.
• Crash-Into Hello:
  • There was a positive variation in the first book, Into the Wild. Rusty decided to visit the forest neighbouring his home, only to get attacked by Graypaw. However, after they crashed into each other, they stopped fighting and became fast friends.
  • In Night Whispers, Ivypool crashes into the villainous Mapleshade (due to Mapleshade's near-invisibility) during their first meeting. Mapleshade does not respond well to this, but she later becomes an Evil Mentor to Ivypool.
  • Happens in The Sun Trail. Gray Wing is running freely and happily on the moor he recently arrived on, only to crash into Wind and Gorse, the future founders of WindClan, and ruin their hunt. They get off to a bad start, but later they do become pals.
• Crazy Cat Lady:
  • Millie and Sol's owners, both elderly women, are portrayed as this in the manga - not so much due to the number of cats, because as far as we know they each only have one, but because of the level of obsession. Millie's owner has cat toys everywhere, as well as a custom cat bed with Millie's name, cat pictures on the wall, and a cat calendar and refrigerator magnets. Sol's owner also has cat pictures and decorations around her home, as well as sofa cushions with a cat design, and a subscription to Cat Fancy magazine.
  • In Pebbleshine's Kits, Pebbleshine encounters two young kittypets who know of a lady a few houses down from them who has many cats, and they're sure that she'd take Pebbleshine in if she's looking for a home.
  • Graystripe's Vow has a tragic example; the main plot of the "now" portion of the book involves an elderly cat hoarder who is strongly implied to have Alzheimer's or a similar mental condition. Thankfully, in the end, the cats escape, and the postman notices the conditions she's living in and gets help.
• Crazy Jealous Guy: Ashfur, who was willing to murder four cats (one of whom was his own apprentice) to hurt Squirrelflight — who had rejected him the year before. Later on, his resentment continued to grow and he attempted to destroy all of the Clans, including StarClan, to hurt her.
• Creator In-Joke: Kate's son once joked that instead of Warriors, the series should be called Worriers since that's all they seem to do. Kate included a reference to this in one of the books, having a character say "We're warriors, not worriers."
• Creepy Hairless Animal: Rock is an incredibly ugly, hairless cat with bulging, sightless eyes. He's pretty creepy from the start - he haunts the tunnels where Fallen Leaves died in ancient times and has been around since then - and is eventually revealed to be a spirit around since the dawn of time, able to see every prophecy but powerless to change things.
• Creepy Souvenir: Members of BloodClan collect teeth from cats and dogs they have killed, wearing them as Spikes of Villainy on their collars. (This started when Scourge, as a young cat, attempted to use a loose dog tooth he found to try getting his collar off, only to get the tooth stuck. When others asked about the tooth, he claimed he killed a dog and took the tooth as a trophy, and from there the idea took off and became true.)
• Crisis Crossover: The Last Hope is as close as you can get to a self-contained Crisis Crossover, with loads of screentime for all past and present protagonists, the final battles with all the past villains, and cameos by nearly every ThunderClan cat from the first arc.
• Crisis of Faith: A recurring event in the series:
  • In A Dangerous Path Bluestar spends the book losing her faith in StarClan and becoming paranoid that her Clanmates are all traitors, but in the end she regains her faith.
  • In the Super Edition Firestar's Quest, SkyClan, particularly Cloudstar, believes that StarClan has abandoned them.
  • In the Power of Three, Sol begins to convince Blackstar that StarClan has abandoned them and that leaving the forest was a bad idea, to the point that Blackstar rejects his leader name and refuses to visit the Moonpool or bring his Clan to Gatherings. Lionpaw, Jaypaw, and Hollypaw fake a sign from StarClan, which turns into a real one when Runningnose and Raggedstar appear.
  • In Hawkwing's Journey, SkyClan begins to lose faith in StarClan as they endure hardship after hardship and their Clanmates die, disappear, or leave one by one.
• Cross Player: A variant. ShadowClan are defeated by ThunderClan in a major battle at the end of the novel Fading Echoes. In the next novel, Night Whispers, the ShadowClan cats decide to roleplay the battle and figure out tactics they can use to counter ThunderClan the next time they fight. Oakfur, a tomcat, is chosen to act as the ThunderClan she-cat Hazeltail for ShadowClan's roleplay.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Tigerstar. Tigerstar, Tigerstar, Tigerstar. Having his stomach torn open probably hurt a good bit.
• Crying Critters:
  • Many fan-works depict crying cats (partly because not all readers are aware that cats don't cry, partly intentionally for emotional impact), but the books themselves mainly avert this, showing sadness with body language instead and only using tears in cases of eye irritation and sickness.
  • The graphic novels occasionally play this trope straight with cats crying to show pain or grief.
• Cryptic Conversation: For no discernible reason, StarClan is often cryptic when speaking to or giving prophecies to the Clans. This is lampshaded by Jayfeather in Shattered Sky when their advice for defeating Darktail is "the Clans must remember their names", and he complains about StarClan always being vague.
• Cue the Sun:
  • The Darkest Hour ends with a rising sun.
  ...and it seemed to Firestar that no dawn had ever been brighter.
  • Forest of Secrets also ends with the sun rising as Fireheart races back to the Clan, gradually growing more eager to face his new life as Clan deputy.
• Cultural Posturing: Most cats believe that their own Clan can do no wrong, and that the other Clans are all weaklings or heartless bastards. This often works in ThunderClan's favour, since the majority of the series is from their POV, but the series does occasionally show that the other Clans are no different. For example, the same is done with RiverClan when they become the protagonists in Crookedstar's Promise.
• Cultural Translation:
  • The old forest map was based on an actual forest in England, meaning the first series was set in England, which is also somewhat reflected by some of the wildlife. However, the second series featured a mountain lion, which cannot be found in the UK, and had a change of location, the new setting being entirely invented for the books.
    • Word of God actually specifies Sharptooth as being not a mountain lion, but based on rumours of big cats roaming the British countryside which come up in the news every few years (the "sightings" usually involve panther-like cats said to have escaped from zoos or circuses, and their accuracy is debatable). There was a particular influx of these articles around the mid-2000s when Moonrise was written.
  • For some reason, the 2015 reprinted editions of the books changed all instances of the more-common-in-the-UK term "catmint" to the phrase most common in the US, "catnip".
• Culture Clash: The Clans and the Tribe are rather similar, but there's enough difference in them that they can clash at times - especially when the Clan cats insist that the Tribe try to live like them in order to drive off intruders.
• Curb-Stomp Battle:
  • Scourge manages to kill Tigerstar, one of the forest's most feared warriors, with a single blow.
  • Pretty much every fight Lionblaze participates in. With his powers granting him ultra-quick reflexes and extraordinary strength, he often fights multiple warriors without getting hit a single time.
  • Hollyleaf's battle against Sol is extremely one sided, with Hollyleaf demonstrating her practiced battle techniques while Sol attempts to defend himself by flailing randomly, ultimately proving that he is not a warrior.
• Cute Kitten: They manage to even make Tigerstar and Scourge look adorable when they're written/drawn as kittens.
• Cuteness Proximity: At the end of Crookedstar's Promise, the jerkass egomaniac Beetlenose comes flying out of the Nursery, squeeing about how cute Crookedstar's daughter Silverkit is. Keep in mind that he's a very nasty cat, and even he found her cute.
• The Cutie: Leafpool is one of the cutest kitties in the forest in terms of overall sweetness, next to Spottedleaf.
• Cynicism Catalyst: Talltail fantasizes about (and almost goes through with) killing Sparrow as he believes Sparrow was the cause of his father's death.

D

• Damage Control: A forest fire burns through ThunderClan's territory in Rising Storm. In addition to killing several cats and driving out all the prey, the camp itself was destroyed. They have to try and rebuild it with whatever little they have left to work with, and try to get back to a normal lifestyle, before the other Clans take advantage of their vulnerability.
• Danger — Thin Ice: In Night Whispers, Flametail decides to go play on the ice with some other members of his Clan. The ice shatters, and he falls through, drowning. Jayfeather attempts to save him, but is stopped by Rock, and so though Jayfeather lives, Flametail dies.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Many major characters, such as Bluestar (had a prophecy about her, mother and sister died untimely deaths, had to fake her kits' death and give them up to another Clan in order to become leader), Crookedstar (rejected and abused by his mother, trained with the Dark Forest, lost his mate), Yellowfang (spent her life feeling other cats' pain and had to become a medicine cat, later had a kit with the Clan leader and had to give him up)...
• Darkest Hour: The aptly-named The Darkest Hour, as well as various other points throughout the series, like Dawn, or the later books in Omen of the Stars.
• Dark Horse Victory: The whole first arc was focused on the rivalry between Firestar and Tigerstar. Then, when the final book of the arc, The Darkest Hour, reached their final showdown, Tigerstar revealed that he had an ally named Scourge, who proceeded to kill both Tigerstar and Firestar. Fortunately, Firestar came back from the dead with eight lives remaining, or else Scourge would have ruled the whole forest.
• Dark Is Evil:
  • It's no surprise which Clan is portrayed as the "bad" Clan early on in the series: ShadowClan.
  • The bad cats stay in the extremely unsubtle Dark Forest after they die.
  • Most of the major villains are dark brown, dark gray, or black (Tigerstar, Brokenstar, Thistleclaw, Hawkfrost, and Breezepelt, to name a few). Averted with Sol and Mapleshade, who are both tortoiseshell, and subverted with Hollyleaf, a black cat who suffered from a Sanity Slippage but ultimately ended up on the side of good.
• Dark Is Not Evil: ShadowClan may seem malevolent at first, and have their fair share of evil cats, but they are not all bad. The POV of the books favour ThunderClan, seen as ShadowClan's direct opposite (aka: archenemy), which does not help ShadowClan's reputation.
• Dark Secret: Many cats' forbidden relationships, and the parentage of kits born to said forbidden relationships. Visiting the Dark Forest.
• A Day in the Limelight:
  • Many minor and supporting characters get to star in spinoff books, whether it's a graphic novel, novella, Super Edition, or short story in a Field Guide.
  • Some main-series books have minor characters as a point-of-view character for that book alone:
    • Half of Moonrise was told by Feathertail and Stormfur, who haven't been narrators since.
    • Night Whispers gave the ShadowClan medicine cat Flametail a handful of chapters, while also having a plot that focused heavily on ShadowClan.
• Dawn of an Era:
  • In Bramblestar's Storm, Bramblestar adds a new rule to the warrior code: in times of trouble, Clan cats must forget their rivalries and help each other. When the danger passes, then they can split apart again. This is triumphant concerning that for twenty-four books, the Clans had been learning to work together.
  • As the name implies, at the end of Dawn of the Clans, the villains have been defeated, the characters have found peace, and the groups are newly established as Clans.
• Daydream Believer: Though not as common now that the fanbase has grown older, there used to be quite a few who claimed to genuinely believe in StarClan, the warrior afterlife, even though the author said she made it up.
• The Day of Reckoning: The coming of BloodClan in The Darkest Hour, and the Dark Forest invasion in The Last Hope.
• De-aged in Death: It's mentioned that cats appear in StarClan (the main afterlife for clan cats) at the age they were happiest in life, not necessarily the age that they died.
• Deader than Dead: Once a StarClan cat or Dark Forest cat is forgotten and fades away over time, or is "killed" by a wound that would have been fatal in life, they never come back. Examples include Spottedleaf, Antpelt, Brokenstar, Hawkfrost, and Tigerstar.
• Dead Guy Junior:
  • One of Sorreltail's litter in Twilight. The camp is attacked by badgers, which are trying to get into the nursery as she is kitting. Cinderpelt dies protecting her and the kits. When telling Leafpool her picks for names, a gray kit is named in her honor as Cinderkit. It turns out she IS Cinderpelt reincarnated as her niece so she could Set Right What Once Went Wrong in her life and be a warrior.
  • Another example occurs in the next generation. Out of that same litter that included Cinderkit, Molekit died. Cinderkit and Molekit's littermate Poppyfrost ends up naming her son after her dead brother.
  • Lionblaze and Cinderheart's kits Fernsong, Sorrelstripe, and Hollytuft were all named after cats who died in the Dark Forest battle. (Ferncloud, Sorreltail, and Hollyleaf). Ferncloud was a queen who had nursed their father when he was a kit, Sorreltail was their grandmother, and Hollyleaf was their aunt and their mother's best friend.
  • In Bluestar's Prophecy, Sweetpaw is noted to be named after the leader Pinestar's mother, Sweetbriar.
  • Violetshine and Tree's daughter, Needlepaw, is named after Violetshine's friend Needletail.
  • Spireclaw and Shadowsight are named after Spiresight, who gave his life to help save them and bring their families back to ShadowClan.
  • In Squirrelflight's Hope, two of Moonlight's kits, Moon and Leaf, are named after their dead mother and Leafpool, the medicine cat who died trying to rescue them.
  • In A Starless Clan, Spotfur's three kits are named after cats who died trying to defeat Ashfur: Bristlekit, Stemkit, and Graykit, after Bristlefrost, Stemleaf, and Graystripe. Dovewing and Tigerstar's kit Rowankit is also named after Tigerstar's father Rowanstar.
• Deadly Graduation: The trainees of the Dark Forest are forced to fight to the death as their final assessment.
• Deadly Sparring: When Lionblaze was an apprentice, he was mentored by Ashfur, who'd act very cold and distant towards him. During battle practice, both of them had the tendency to go a little overboard, drawing blood and attempting to hurt each other for real. This happened once when he was Lionpaw, and then once when he wanted to keep sharp after receiving his name. Ashfur would later be revealed as wanting Lionblaze and his siblings dead the entire time, to get revenge on his ex-mate Squirrelflight. These battles serve as foreshadowing the later twist, while also being examples of Ashfur trying to kill Lionblaze as early as him being an apprentice.
• Deadly Training Area: The Dark Forest. Unlike in real life, they train with claws unsheathed, and unlike in normal dreams, wounds sustained in the Dark Forest become real and physical: training can very easily result in a fatal injury. It's Training from Hell, both figuratively and literally, since the Dark Forest is feline Hell.
• Dead Person Conversation: Talking to StarClan, the spirits of their ancestors.
• Deathbed Promotion:
  • If a dying Clan apprentice is found worthy, he/she may be given a warrior name to take to StarClan. When Brightpaw has been savagely mauled by dogs and is on death's doorstep, her leader Bluestar decides to make her a warrior. Unfortunately, the name she chooses is "Lostface" to show her anger against StarClan, who she believes sent the dog pack. After she fully recovers, Firestar gives her a proper warrior name, "Brightheart."
  • Badgerpaw is a kit who is not old enough to become an apprentice, but he is made one by his leader Brokenstar and sent into battle against WindClan before he is ready. As he lays wounded and dying, he asks his mentor Flintfang if StarClan will make him a warrior, to which the older cat sadly responds in the affirmative. With his last words, Badgerpaw chooses the name "Badgerfang" to honor his mentor.
• Death by Childbirth: Silverstream and Brightsky.
• Death by Falling Over:
  • An elder, Graypool, is flustered when Tigerstar snarls in her face, so she takes a step backward, only to lose her footing on the steep riverbank and hit her head on a rock.
  • During a battle, a dog accidentally runs into Rainflower; she falls and hits her head on a rock. This one's a little more realistic in that she doesn't die instantly; her son debates whether to first fetch the medicine cat or drive away the dog. He chooses to fight off the dog first, and in that amount of time, she dies, and he feels responsible for her death.
• Death by Looking Up: Happens to mountain lion Sharptooth when Feathertail knocks a stalactite off the ceiling of the cave.
• Death Equals Redemption: Juniperclaw dies saving Shadowkit and Violetshine from drowning in the flood. Subverted. He was still sent to the Dark Forest, although he was given the task of guarding the tunnel between StarClan and the Dark Forest for helping defeat Ashfur.
• Death Faked for You: Firepaw realizes that Tigerclaw is trying to kill Ravenpaw for witnessing something he shouldn't have. To protect his friend, he sends Ravenpaw to live far away on a farm at the distant edge of Clan territory, and returns to the camp telling everyone that Ravenpaw was killed by an enemy patrol.
• Death Glare: In After the Flood, Leafstar proves herself very capable of giving death glares. One of them is enough to make her mate drop the prey he's carrying.
• A Death in the Limelight:
  • Flametail in Night Whispers.
  • Bright Stream from The Sun Trail got a short story about her death, written from her point of view.
  • Several novellas and Super Editions include the death of their protagonist, including Bluestar's Prophecy, Onestar's Confession, Tallstar's Revenge and Moth Flight's Vision (if you count the manga epilogues), Mapleshade's Vengeance, Redtail's Debt, Shadowstar's Life, Pebbleshine's Kits, and Winds of Change (Mudclaw).
• Death Is Cheap: When Clan cats die, they move on to StarClan most of the time, which is basically heaven for cats. If they were evil, then they're trapped in the Dark Forest. Regardless of which place cats end up in, they can still interact with some Clan cats, particularly medicine cats. They can even injure cats who dream-walk into their domain. Death became so cheap that by the fourth series, the Hunters had to invent a second death so that cats could be killed Deader than Dead.
• Death Is Dramatic:
  • Tigerstar is ripped open from throat to tail and loses all nine of his lives from blood loss.
  • Hawkfrost gets a wooden stake driven into his throat by his brother and yanked out. He stands right back up as he's gushing blood, and then falls into the lake, causing the nearby water to turn red from his blood.
  • Feathertail dying after she impales Sharptooth with a stalactite.
  • Bluestar's death, also a Heroic Sacrifice.
  • Cinderpelt was ripped apart by badgers, let's not forget, with lotsa blood indeed. This also served as her Heroic Sacrifice, since she was protecting the nursery during the birth of Sorreltail's kits.
  • Subverted with Flametail's death. It wasn't in battle or any other major disaster; it simply was an accident when he was playing on ice that broke beneath him and he drowned quietly beneath the ice.
• Death of a Child: When they say Anyone Can Die, they mean it. One particular example is Snowkit, a deaf kitten, who is eaten by a hawk.
• Death of the Hypotenuse: Brambleclaw and Ashfur both love Squirrelflight, and Ashfur ends up dying. Subverted in that the hypotenuse dies long after the relationship issue ends.
• Decapitated Army: After Firestar kills Scourge, the leader of BloodClan, one of the BloodClan cats notices and yowls that Scourge is dead. The fight goes out of all the BloodClan cats and they flee.
  • Most of the Dark Forest cats flee after Yellowfang kills Brokenstar a second time.
• Deceptive Disciple:
  • Tigerstar was noted by other cats as knowing the Warrior Code by heart. He really was planning to kill his leader and take over ThunderClan, something that, obviously, is against the code.
  • Brokenstar did the same but succeeded, with the added bonus of the cat he killed and usurped being his own father.
• Deceptive Legacy: In Tigerstar and Sasha, Sasha gets pregnant with Tigerstar's kits before she realizes that he's a power-crazy murderer bent on ruling the entire forest. She raises her kits on her own, only telling them stories about how their father Tigerstar was strong and brave and that he'd be proud of them. A while after Tigerstar's death, Sasha takes the kits to RiverClan. Imagine the kits' shock when they see young RiverClan cats pretending to be the evil Tigerstar and reenacting his death.
• Deconstructed Character Archetype: Stormfur is a deconstruction of Mighty Whitey. He's a cat from the main group in the series who gets discovered by the Tribe of Rushing Water, a group with strange customs, and finds out that he's The Chosen One destined to save them, and even gets to date a native she-cat, and eventually chooses to stay with the Tribe. Plus he gets to train the tribe cats in his fighting skills to later save them from some rogues who they're utterly helpless against without him. But not only is he not really The Chosen One, but his strategy only ends up failing and leading to the deaths of many Tribe cats rather than saving the Tribe like he believed it would, and once he finally gets to come back and make up for everything by saving them for real, he and the other cats realize that, however they want to defend the Tribe, they don't want to force their culture on them or constantly be their rescuers. Criticized by some as an indecisive deconstruction because Feathertail still plays being the Tribe's savior straight and, although the Erins intended Outcast to provide a lesson on the complexities of interfering with another culture, the Tribe is still presented as unable to handle the danger of the rogues on their own.
• Defiant to the End: Stonefur, who, when given a chance to kill Featherpaw and Stormpaw to prove his loyalty, tells Tigerstar that he'll die before he kills them. Tigerstar obliges by ordering Darkstripe to kill him. Even though Stonefur has been starved for an extended period of time and is weak, he manages to have the upper paw for a while until Tigerstar sends in Blackfoot to help and finish Stonefur off.
• Demonic Possession: Bramblestar after his revival in Lost Stars by an unknown cat. It's an odd variant in which Bramblestar himself isn't possessed, rather it's his body, as Bramblestar is dead and walking the earth as a ghost.
• Demoted to Dragon: Brokenstar was the Big Bad of Into the Wild, the first book of the Warrior Cats series. Then he gets driven out of his Clan and killed, leaving Tigerstar in control of Brokenstar's rogue army. Later in the Omen Of The Stars arc, Tigerstar and Brokenstar meet up in the afterlife and Tigerstar becomes Brokenstar's dragon.
• Demoted to Extra: The major characters in each series become less important as the focus shifts to the younger generation. One example is that fans were trying to figure out whether Graystripe, The Hero's best friend and therefore a major character in the first series, even got mentioned once in Sign of the Moon.
• Denied Food as Punishment: If a cat is assigned to hunt and eats his catch rather than sharing it with the kits and elders of the Clan first, they have to give their share of fresh-kill to the elders and go hungry until the next day. This is often one of the first things a new apprentice learns.
• Depending on the Artist: In the manga, since all the art styles are radically different, seeing cats appear in two different styles is quite jarring. This especially applies to Bluestar and Tigerstar.
• Depth Perplexion: In the online Hunting Game, enemies could travel through tree stumps that you couldn't get past without jumping over them.
• The Determinator: Tigerstar. And how. He will do absolutely anything to rule (kill the Clan deputy in an attempt to become deputy himself, attempt to kill his leader multiple times - including trying to trick her into running onto the Thunderpath and conspiring with rogues to make it look like a rogue killed her - in order to become leader himself, become leader of another Clan, try to join all the Clans together, and bring in the bloodthirsty BloodClan in order to make the other Clans do what he wants). And then later he tries to get revenge on the Clans from beyond the grave, first by visiting his children in their dreams and trying to make them take over their Clans, and then by organizing the Dark Forest's armies and visiting even cats not related to him in order to get them on his side and ultimately declare all-out war on the living Clans.
• Deus Angst Machina: Leafpool. In Twilight, her mentor dies (and she blames herself for her death), she has to give up the love of her life, and she essentially becomes isolated from the rest of the Clan. She seems to have been able suck it up, but then in Sunrise it is revealed that she was actually pregnant and had to give up her kits to be raised by her sister, she can no longer be a medicine cat (the only joy in life she had left), she gets insulted by the aforementioned love of her life, her own daughter tries to kill her, and she apparently blames herself for Ashfur's death. All this isn't really a Contrived Coincidence though, since it all just originates from one bad decision... and another bad decision to cover up the first one...
• Deus ex Machina:
  • The main reason Firestar was able to win his fight against Tigerstar in Forest of Secrets was because Tigerstar slipped on some blood.
  • For that matter, Brambleclaw picking up a wooden stake and twisting around just in time to impale Hawkfrost with it as he was about to deliver his killing blow at the end of Sunset seems a bit too convenient.
• Diabolus ex Nihilo: The sudden appearance of Scourge in The Darkest Hour. Tigerstar had nine lives at the beginning of the book. In order to avoid making him seem like a pathetic weakling, the authors had a random cat called Scourge show up, instakill all of Tigerstar's nine lives, kill the protagonist Firestar, and try to take over the Clans.
• Did Not Get the Girl: Ashfur did not get Squirrelflight, Thrushpelt did not get Bluestar, and several notable genderbent examples include Cinderpelt and Firestar, Spottedleaf and Firestar, Mapleshade and Appledusk, Feathertail and Crowfeather, and Leopardstar and Tigerstar.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: In SkyClan's Destiny, SkyClan takes it upon themselves to defeat the Twoleg who keeps abusing cats. Also averted when, in the same book, the cats save a Twoleg kit with a broken leg.
• Disability Superpower: Jayfeather is born blind, but learns he has the ability to read minds. As well, he can creep into dreams, in which he gains perfect vision.
• Disabled Snarker: Jayfeather. "Oh great. Let's lump all the useless cats together and hope a tree falls on them!"
• Disappeared Dad:
  • Tigerstar leaves his kits and their mother to join ShadowClan. There is a lot of bitterness involved as Tigerstar attempted to murder Bluestar, the leader of Thunderclan, and also murdered Redtail, the former deputy. Unsurprisingly, ThunderClan does not want his kits, Bramblekit and Tawnykit, to turn out like their father.
  • Tigerstar's own father was absent - left the Clan to be a kittypet - and this is a major part of why he's evil.
• Disc-One Final Boss:
  • Brokenstar is built up as the Big Bad in Into the Wild, but by the book's end it is apparent that Tigerclaw/star will be the true villain. Then in The Darkest Hour, Tigerstar is killed by Scourge, who usurps the position of primary villain.
  • In The New Prophecy, Hawkfrost seems to be the villain, but he turns out to only be the Dragon-in-Chief to Tigerstar's lingering spirit.
• Discontinuity Nod:
  • In the first book, there was a ThunderClan cat named Rosetail who was killed defending the nursery; she was not listed in the Allegiances or otherwise mentioned in the book. It became a well-known error, and in a book that came out five years later, a character comments, "There was an elder named Rosetail who died back when I was nursing Swiftkit..."
  • Similarly, in the first series, apprentices would always travel to the Moonstone before becoming a warrior. Fans pointed out that the characters hadn't been doing it in recent books, even though the Clans had found a replacement for the Moonstone in their new home. Leafpool comments in a scene in Outcast, "We seem to have left that tradition behind when we came to our new home."
• Dishonored Dead: If a dead Clan cat has committed a grave crime, they may be denied the traditional funeral rites of sharing tongues and their Clanmates sitting the night vigil by the body. When Clawface, a ShadowClan warrior turned rogue, is killed on a raid on the ThunderClan camp, his body is buried without any ceremony, as punishment for his crimes.
• Disney Villain Death:
  • Whiteclaw falls into the gorge and dies.
  • Smokepaw falls to his death when a ledge breaks underneath him. This doesn't stop him from coming back in later books, though.
  • A pair of ShadowClan warriors fall over the top of the quarry to their deaths in Starlight.
  • Ancient cat Dark Whiskers is killed this way when blown off a cliff during a storm.
• Disposing of a Body: Hollyleaf attempts to dispose of Ashfur's body by tossing it in a stream, hoping he'll be swept into the lake, the Clan would think he just mysteriously vanished, and that would be the end of it. Things don't exactly go as planned.
• Dissonant Serenity: Sol stays calm and composed all the time, even when surrounded by enemies and accused of murder. He is so calm, other cats often find it unsettling. The only times he's lost his cool is whenever he's making a speech (and he's really more "incensed" than "angry"), and when Hollyleaf apparently pushes his Berserk Button, and even then he recovers in less than half a second.
  "What are you doing here?" Hollyleaf demanded. She could feel every hair on her pelt bristling, her tail fluffing out to twice it's size, and her belly churning with distrust of this powerful cat. "I thought you'd gone."
  Fury flashed in [Sol's] eyes, and his claws dug into the ground. Yet a hearbeat later he was cool and controlled again, so that Hollyleaf almost believed she had imagined the anger he had betrayed.
• Distant Finale: Bluestar's Prophecy ends many years after the main story of the book, with Bluestar making a decision which causes the events of the first book.
• Distant Prologue: Several books have prologues which take place long before the main story.
  • The most notable ones are Firestar's Quest and SkyClan's Destiny, which take place several generations before the story begins, long enough that SkyClan - the Clan featured in the prologues - has been forgotten by the modern Clans.
  • Also notable is Dark River, which takes place at least twice as early as those: before the Clans were formed, and before even the Tribe of Rushing Water was formed.
• Disproportionate Retribution:
  • Ashfur gets dumped by Squirrelflight in favor of Brambleclaw. What does he do? He tries to murder her father, the Clan's leader, and get Brambleclaw blamed for it; when that fails, he waits over a year until he has the chance to try again, this time targeting her kits. All because she picked another cat over him. Later, he posesses her mate's body and tries to destroy all of the Clans to hurt her.
  • Long before that, Thistleclaw ordered his apprentice (who would grow up to be Tigerstar) to attack and almost kill a kit who had accidentally wandered into their territory. This Disproportionate Retribution was eventually met with more Disproportionate Retribution, as the kit was a very young Scourge, who eventually disemboweled Tigerstar, after Tigerstar tried to give Scourge's followers orders.
  • Scourge having Violet nearly beaten to death because she dared to look for her missing brother.
• Distant Sequel: The Dawn of the Clans series takes place in what the modern Clans would describe as being ancient times, focusing on the very creation and foundation of the Clans, generations before The Prophecy Begins took place. By the time of the main series, the events of Dawn of the Clans have long since faded into fuzzily remembered legend.
• The Ditherer: Gray Wing from Dawn of the Clans has trouble making decisions. He repeatedly changes his mind over whether to follow the Sun Trail, and has a hard time deciding to ask his crush Storm to come and live in the hollow. This comes back to bite him when Storm gets together with Gray Wing's brother Clear Sky, and later dies.
• Diurnal Nocturnal Animal: In the books, the cats are active mainly in the daylight. Word of God states that it is to prevent most of the scenes from happening in the dark. Real life cats can be active anytime of the day or night and cannot see in complete darkness, needing at least some light in order to see (which is usually provided by the moon).
• Divided for Publication: The Graystripe manga trilogy was originally meant to be a single volume, roughly the same length as standard volumes of manga. Then someone decided that it should be released on the same day as the first book in a new series, but the illustrator wasn't done with it, so they decided to split it into three shorter volumes. Many of the manga afterward followed suit, although funnily enough they were later reprinted in color and had the three volumes combined into a single one.
• Divided We Fall: In Dovewing's Silence, Bramblestar says this phrase after the distrust towards the Dark Forest trainees goes too far. That involved getting them to attack an injured fox, which prompts Bramblestar to tell everyone that the time of mistrust must end.
• Diving Save:
  • Willowpelt leaps in front of her young son Sootpaw to save him from a badger in front of her. The blow meant for her son breaks her spine and kills her.
  • In SkyClan's Destiny, Red leaps in the way when her father Stick aims a killing blow at her mate Harley, and she's fatally wounded.
• Doctor's Orders: There are plenty of times when a medicine cat says "As your medicine cat, I'm ordering you to rest." One of Jayfeather's favorite phrases is "You're fine when I say you are."
• Doesn't Trust Those Guys: The Clans often say this about each other. "You can't trust a ThunderClan cat!"
• Dogged Nice Guy: Thrushpelt spends most of Bluestar's Prophecy complimenting and helping Bluestar, but to his chagrin, she is not really interested in him like that. He remains her friend to the end, and when he realizes that the father of her kits isn't in the picture, he offers to step in, in order to help her avoid any awkward questions.
• A Dog Named "Cat": Many of the cats are named after various kinds of other animals, such as Tigerclaw, Ravenpaw, Jaykit, and Squirrelpaw.
• Dogs Are Dumb: The most intelligent dogs shown in the entire series had a vocabulary of about eight words, the two most frequently used being "pack" and "kill". (Although it's later noted that dogs and cats speak different languages, so presumably most dogs have a larger vocabulary in their own language.)
  • It's also worth noting that the dogs mentioned above are defeated by being tricked into running off a cliff.
  • One dog in Sunrise was even stupid enough to stick his head through a fence and right into the claws of a bunch of cats with a grudge.
    • And don't we all know dogs like this? Truth in Television.
  • Don't forget the dog in Rise of Scourge who was scared of kitten Scourge's shadow (it was a rather fierce looking shadow, but still).
• Don't Ask: In Into the Wild, Firepaw jumps into a cold stream to wash mouse bile off his paws after using it to help clear the elders' ticks. Graypaw and Ravenpaw show up and stare at him like he's crazy, so he says, "Mouse bile. Don't ask."
• Don't Go in the Woods: What kittypets seem to be raised on.
• Don't Try This at Home: Leafpool narrates a guide to herbal medicine in Secrets of the Clans in which she notes that humans reading it should not use these remedies and take their cats to the vet instead (due to the large amount of Artistic License – Medicine involved).
• Don't You Dare Pity Me!: Jayfeather (also his Berserk Button). Also don't be too nice to him, or he'll think you're pitying him. And don't mention his blindness, but then again, don't seem like you're trying to avoid it, either.
• Doomed by Canon:
  • In the prequels, we never heard about characters like Snowfur, so they have to die.
  • The leaders have to die so they can be replaced.
• Doomed Hometown: The traveling cats learn in Midnight that Twolegs will destroy their forest home.
• Don't Split Us Up:
  • In the Super Edition Moth Flight's Vision, Moth Flight realizes that she cannot raise kits while being a medicine cat, so she gives up her four kits - one to each of the other Clans.
  • In the sixth series, A Vision of Shadows, Alderpaw and Needlepaw find two orphaned/abandoned kits that they name Violetkit and Twigkit. When they return to the Clans, the kits foster in ThunderClan for a while, but ultimately it is decided that Violetkit will be raised in Needlepaw's Clan, ShadowClan, since she had an equal share in finding them and the kits are believed to be important, part of a prophecy. Alderpaw considers it cruel to split them up and the kits are heartbroken, meeting in secret on occasion as they grow.
• Double Don't Know: In The Darkest Hour:

  Firestar let out a long breath. "I don't know, Bramblepaw," he admitted. "I just don't know."

• Downer Ending:
  • Cloudstar's Journey: The main character's home is destroyed, he is permanently separated from his mate and kits, he entirely loses his faith in StarClan, and he and his entire Clan are banished from the forest.
  • Hawkwing's Journey: the modern SkyClan has been driven from the gorge, and most of the Clan is dead, missing, or have left. Echosong did eventually receive another prophecy to lead them toward the other Clans, but it's only a tiny spot of hope after the Clan has lost so much, and she is mentioned to have died by the time of the epilogue.
• "Down Here!" Shot: In the novella Mistystar's Omen, Mistystar is about to receive her ninth leader's life. She looks around and doesn't see anyone, and is confused because she knows she has one more life to get yet. She hears a squeak, looks down, and sees that the ninth cat is her son who died as a young kit.
• Dragon-in-Chief: Hawkfrost in The New Prophecy. Tigerstar, the Big Bad is just as strong and fearsome, but he's hindered by his being dead.
• Dragon Their Feet: Tigerstar, the Big Bad, becomes Brokenstar's dragon in the Dark Forest. However, since Tigerstar is eternally the true Big Bad, in The Last Hope, he shows up after Brokenstar's death as the final villain.
• Dramatic Irony: Jayfeather is unable to understand why Leafpool and Crowfeather act so weird around each other, but any reader who has read the second series would know that what he is detecting is pure Unresolved Sexual Tension, and they also would probably have guessed that the two are his real parents.
• Dramatic Necklace Removal: Happens to Firestar early on. He was a kittypet who wore a collar with a bell on it, and several ThunderClan cats disagreed with him joining the Clan due to all the trouble the collar would cause. His collar gets torn off in a fight with Longtail, causing Bluestar to declare it a divine sign that Firestar is meant to join the Clan, and Firestar to win the respect of the Clan as well as losing his ties to being a pet cat.
• Dramatic Spine Injury: Briarlight's spine is broken when she's trying to save an elder from a falling tree and both cats are crushed. Sadly, the elder dies, and it ends up being a Career-Ending Injury for Briarlight as her hind legs are paralyzed for life.
• Dramatis Personae: Each book has an "Allegiances" section at the beginning, listing all characters that appear in that book and many that don't.
• Dream-Crushing Handicap:
  • Jaypaw just wants to be a great warrior, and won't listen when other cats tell him that he can't because of his blindness. He does get the chance to train as a warrior apprentice, but when a patrol he's on gets into a fight and he's easily beaten by an enemy apprentice because he can't make sense of what's going on, he has to come to terms with the fact that he'll never be a warrior. He ends up becoming a medicine cat instead.
  • Snowkit is born deaf. His mother refuses to accept that he won't be able to become a warrior, and even tries training him herself. Then Snowkit gets carried off by a hawk because he couldn't hear it coming or hear other cats warning him.
• Dreaming of Things to Come: A standard part of being a medicine cat.
• Dream Intro: Several books start out with dreams. Many of them involve the characters receiving a prophecy/warning from StarClan or speaking to other dead cats. At least one involves Gray Wing talking to another living, dreaming cat over a great distance, and there are also several "ordinary" dreams/nightmares as well.
• Dream Spying: Jayfeather has the ability to walk in dreams, so he uses this to walk in other cats' dreams, mainly that of the other medicine cats when they speak with their deceased ancestors. Leafpool tries to make him do this once to figure out where his sister is when, as an apprentice, Hollyleaf goes missing.
• Dream Walker: Jayfeather has the ability to enter other cats' dreams, as do the members of StarClan and the Dark Forest.
• Driving Question: The "Three" arc of Warrior Cats (Power of Three and Omen of the Stars) has many questions. "Where did the three come from?" "What is their purpose?" "Who is the fourth?"
• Dr. Jerk: Jayfeather, who even at one point proclaims, "I'm a medicine cat. If you want sympathy, go to the nursery." He never gives up on a patient however, and legitimately cares for his Clan, making him more of a Jerk with a Heart of Gold.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him:
  • Hollyleaf's "death". Instead of dying in a battle, she was crushed as the underground tunnel collapsed. (Turns out she escaped the worst of the collapse and managed to survive with some injuries, and she eventually dies in a battle for real.)
  • Rainwhisker, who was killed by a falling tree branch. In between books.
  • Mudclaw, who got an entire TREE dropped on him when it was struck by lightning. Said tree was then used as a bridge, therefore literally dropping a bridge on him...
  • Leafpool, who is killed by a rockslide.
• Drowning Pit: The tunnels underneath WindClan territory flood whenever it rains, threatening to drown any cats inside. Fallen Leaves dies this way while traversing the tunnels in a ritual to become a Sharpclaw (the ancient equivalent of a warrior), and the same nearly happens to Lionpaw, Jaypaw, Hollypaw, Breezepaw and Heatherpaw while trying to rescue three WindClan cats.
• Drowning Unwanted Pets:
  • As a kitten, Scourge's bully siblings told him that Twolegs throw unwanted kittens into rivers. Scourge, then known as "Tiny", was so scared that he ran away from home, which ultimately led to his Start of Darkness.
  • In the second volume of the Tigerstar and Sasha manga, Sasha notices a bag floating in the river that she draws the Captain's attention to; inside is a kitten that she nurses back to health and raises.
• Dub Name Change: Firestar's kittypet name is Rusty in English, but it is "Sammy" in the German version. Most of the other names, which are composed of actual words, are translated directly to German, e.g. Redtail to Rotstreife or Tigerclaw to Tigerkralle.
  • In the Spanish version, Firestar's kittypet name (Rusty) is Colorado.
• Due to the Dead: When a Clan cat dies, a vigil is held overnight for the family and friends of the deceased to say their last goodbyes, and in the morning, the Clan elders bury the body. There have been occasions where enemy warriors have been returned to their own Clans for their Clan to mourn them. On at least one occasion where a rogue was killed, it was decided that a couple of young warriors would bury the body, with no elders and no vigil.
• Dying as Yourself: Bluestar has a stage lasting a couple books where she develops some dementia, being confused and extremely paranoid: she is convinced that their ancestors have abandoned them and that all her Clan are traitors; she does not even trust Fireheart. Right toward the end of her life, she realizes she's been wrong, and performs a Heroic Sacrifice saving Fireheart from the dog pack. She has just enough time to reconcile herself with her long-lost kits before she dies.
• The Dying Walk: In Sunset, Brambleclaw stabs his half-brother Hawkfrost in the throat with a stake from a trap. Hawkfrost, despite struggling to breathe and speak, gets up, stumbles toward Brambleclaw to call him a fool, and then, for some reason, turns around and walks toward the lake, collapsing at its shore. His blood mingles with the water to complete the prophecy "Blood will spill blood and the lake will run red".
• Dwindling Party: By the end of Hawkwing's Journey, most of SkyClan has either gone missing, died (including major characters like Billystorm and Sharpclaw), or left the Clan of their own choice one by one, leaving only a very small group out of the almost 40 members of the Clan that the book started with.
• Dysfunction Junction:
  • In the third series, Crowfeather is using his "mate" just to get his Clanmates to trust him, and he emotionally abuses his son (who also has related issues), and is in denial of how much he loves Leafpool and that he had kits with her, Lionblaze goes Ax-Crazy from time-to-time, and is usually horrified by the results, Jayfeather has some serious attitude problems, Hollyleaf is obsessed with the warrior code and eventually goes insane, Ashfur is trying to kill Squirrelflight's family to get revenge, Leafpool, who can't seem to succeed at anything, is incredibly depressed, and a lot of other cats throughout the course of the series become depressed because of the authors' cruel treatment of their characters.
  • It continues on into the fourth series, with Dovewing (who just wants to be normal, because she can't handle all of the responsibility that has been thrust on her, and hates the way it has distanced her from her sister), and Ivypool, (who is insanely jealous of her sister and wants to be noticed as much as her, to the point where her feelings of jealousy and loneliness became manipulated by the Big Bad). Then we have Millie and her kits. Millie's daughter, Briarlight, becomes paralyzed from the waist down when a tree falls on her and it keeps her from ever becoming a Warrior, having to live in the medicine den, and her main activity for each day is to drag herself to and from the fresh-kill pile. This causes Millie to become obsessive over her crippled daughter and completely ignore the fact that she has two other kits, which in turn affects Blossomfall (Millie's other daughter) to visit the Dark Forest and learn from Tigerstar because she's feeling unloved and unwanted at home all thanks to Millie. Bumblestripe, Millie's son, takes the developments surprisingly well.

E

• Eager Rookie: All new apprentices are eager to go into battle but their mentors won't allow them till they've had proper battle training.
• Early-Bird Cameo:
  • Thistleclaw is mentioned in Forest of Secrets and shows up for a scene in Rise Of Scourge before his real debut in Bluestar's Prophecy.
  • Tawnyspots and Goosefeather were first mentioned in Forest of Secrets, though the latter not by name. In addition, Sunstar and Featherwhisker were mentioned in Secrets of the Clans before their debuts in Code of the Clans and Bluestar's Prophecy, respectively.
• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • Each Clan keeps mostly to itself and doesn't know much about what's going on elsewhere in the forest, and the other Clans' territories are generally a mystery to them. Tigerclaw freaks out in the first book when they take Yellowfang as a prisoner because he thinks that now ShadowClan will know where the ThunderClan camp is, and that they'll need to move, while in later books (even ones that take place around the same timeframe) they actually visit each other's camps on a fairly regular basis. Likewise, in the first book, they say a few times that "that cat must have been killed by an enemy patrol" and just forget about it - most notably the ShadowClan leader's death - when later on such an event would be huge news and they would actually confront the other Clan and try to figure out what happened. This is probably partly because since the first book they've established exact rules for the previously-vague warrior code, one of which forbids killing except for rare circumstances.
  • The rules and usage of language in the Clans shifts during and after the first arc:
    • The hyphenation, capitalization, and spacing of Clan terminology gets slightly adjusted, such as "Clan mate" becoming "Clanmate".
    • The term "queen" is used for all female cats in the first book. This soon changes so that "queen" is only used for cats who are currently pregnant or nursing kits, while "she-cat" becomes the default word for "female".
    • The Clans are a lot more formal early on; cats refer to parents by their actual names rather than calling them "mother" or "father", and there is almost no use of slang such as "cool".
  • Gatherings in the first series often feature different groups of cats mingling and talking about current events - for example, a senior warrior talking to a group of apprentices, or a young warrior joining a bunch of elders and medicine cats in a discussion. Later arcs have cats tend to stick with their own age group and gossip.
  • Mates aren't, for the most part, treated as major relationships in the first series, and it is mentioned that warrior fathers don't stay close to their kits (with one or two rare exceptions). In the third series, one cat who had kits as the result of a one-night stand (which in and of itself is rare later on) is criticized because he doesn't want to play with his kits, and in the third and fourth series especially, everyone gossips about young couples and young cats talk about who they like.
  • Early on, cats are rarely mentioned by name unless they actually have speaking lines in a scene, and sometimes not even then. This is easily seen in how cats are referred to when several leave the camp at once; The Prophecies Begin will mention one named character and "a patrol of warriors", while Power of Three or Omen of the Stars will name every cat that leaves. Cats at Gatherings and in battles are more likely to be described by their appearance than by their names. Kits are also rarely referred to by name until they're apprenticed, leading to the odd effect of their seemingly lacking names at all for the first six months of their lives.
  • The timing of cat's apprenticeships compared to their ages is weirdly off in the first series, even when taking retcons into account. Ravenpaw says that Dustpaw has been an apprentice longer than he has, even though they're littermates and should have started training at the same time. Fireheart and Graystripe become warriors before Sandstorm and Dustpelt; even though the former two did earn it through helping recover their Clan's stolen kits, they'd only been training for three moons at most when it happened. Thornclaw and Brightheart start their apprentice training in the book after their siblings Brackenfur and Cinderpelt do, for no discernible reason.
  • In Fire and Ice, Tigerclaw suggests that Darkstripe and Longtail be given a second apprentice each, and Bluestar replies that she'll consider it. Aside from Dustpelt later asking to mentor Fernpaw too - which is mostly played for laughs - there’s no other reference in the series to cats being the official mentor to more than one apprentice at a time.
• Ear Notch: With large groups of fighting cats, someone's bound to get a ripped ear, and it does happen often. One example is Tigerstar; it's one of his more frequently noted physical characteristics.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: By the end of The Last Hope, every character has gone to hell and back (sometimes literally), but they still pull through and earn happy endings for themelves and all the Clans. The Clans have survived nearly being taken over by Tigerstar, almost being killed or driven out of the forest by BloodClan, the destruction of the forest by Twolegs and the resulting starvation and journey to the new territories, and the Dark Forest (feline hell)'s attempt at destroying the Clans. Not to mention all the hardships and heartbreak in between.
  • Bluestar. Most of her family dies at the time she becomes leader, as well as having a father who neglected her and a forbidden relationship with Oakheart, leading her to give her kits to RiverClan. She's forced to watch them grow from afar with no memory of her as their mother. She becomes leader, and all is well until her first two deputies and her mate die, and she appoints Tigerclaw. After being betrayed by Tigerclaw, she becomes insane and paranoid. However, she dies happily with her mental state restored, shares tongues and gets closure with her kits, and knowing that Fireheart will succeed her as a great leader for the moons to come.
  • Crookedstar, like Bluestar, had to watch most of his family die. As a kit, he was disowned and neglected by his mother for breaking his jaw on a rock, and had to deal with the injury for the rest of his life. He does become leader, and his daughter Silverstream becomes a warrior. Oakheart and Silverstream, two of the only family members he has left die. He then confronts Mapleshade, who caused his suffering, and realizes that he has family waiting for him while she has nothing. He then dies happily, forgiving his mother and being reunited with his family.
• Easily Forgiven:
  • During the fifth book of Omen of the Stars, Hollyleaf returns to ThunderClan and nobody cares about her crimes, even when they find out that she killed Ashfur.
  • An unintentional example in the Expanded Universe manga Ravenpaw's Path. During Shattered Peace, Ravenpaw and Barley are chased off the farm they live on by the farmer because he is tricked into thinking they killed his chickens. The farmer says that if he sees them again, he'll shoot them. However, when they come back and defeat the rogues who took over their home in The Heart of a Warrior, the farmer doesn't care, despite still thinking they killed his chickens.
  • A rather odd example in Tigerclaw's Fury. In the Warriors universe, fleeing from battle until your leader tells you to do so would be considered treachery and cowardice. Fleeing from battle when Tigerclaw is your leader would be considered suicidal. But the cats who abandon him when it looks like he's losing don't get any sort of comeuppance.
• Easter Egg: The official website of the books has a link labeled "MEOW" hidden among the legal links at the bottom of the site. Clicking it will replace every word in the book quotes with the word "Meow".◊
• Edible Theme Naming:
  • Apparently the Erins were hungry when they wrote the Warrior Cats book SkyClan's Destiny... it introduces cats named Egg, Onion, Nutmeg, and you could even count Velvet if you think of red velvet.
  • The Erins seemed to be craving breakfast foods when writing Darkness Within, given that the four kittypets introduced are named Cheddar, Pancakes, Bacon, and Eggs.
• Either/Or Prophecy: StarClan seems to give a lot of these. Take the prophecy "Fire alone can save our Clan", for instance. Note that it does not say that fire will save the Clan. A minor prophecy in the second arc is misinterpreted as well due to this trope.
• Election Day Episode: Warriors Ultimate Leader: The Clans Decide. Around the 2008 Presidential election, HarperCollins decided to teach children about voting by creating a subsite where users could vote on their favorite out of several Clan Leader characters, and the winner would have a short story (involving voting) written about them. Ultimately it was Firestar that won; the story was released when Barack Obama took office, and it focused on the Clans deciding to work together to survive a harsh winter and voting on whether Firestar should temporarily lead them all.
• Electricity Knocks You Out: In the book Lost Stars, Shadowpaw is struck by lightning and knocked unconscious. He is otherwise unharmed, however.
• Eloquent in My Native Tongue: Smart is Midnight, but she no speak cat good.
• Embarrassing Rescue: In Fire and Ice, Fireheart saves Sandpaw from falling into the gorge. Considering that up until this point Sandpaw has done nothing but insult Fireheart and call him useless, it's not surprising that she's angry at him for saving her - and pretends that she didn't need the help.
• The Empath:
  • Jayfeather is able to sense other cats' emotions, which can be a useful skill for a medicine cat.
  • Yellowfang is revealed in her Super Edition to be able to feel other cats' pain, which is a huge hindrance in battle, but again, very useful for a medicine cat, which is why she changes careers.
• Empathic Environment:
  • The night sky tends to cloud over and become stormy at Gatherings when there is arguing. The cats believe that their warrior ancestors are controlling the weather and expressing their displeasure, but one medicine cat does point out that sometimes a storm is just a storm.
  • Firestar thinks at least once that it seems like the weather fits the mood:
    A vast, unnatural silence covered everything. With the rational part of his mind, Fireheart realized that all the prey had been scared away by the rampaging dog pack, but in the grip of his grief it seemed that even the forest was stunned into mourning Bluestar.
  • During Bluestar's Prophecy, the sky becomes cloudy and stormy before ThunderClan is about to attack the WindClan camp based on an omen from Goosefeather. When the ThunderClan warriors lose the battle and have to return home in disgrace, it starts to rain.
• Empowered Badass Normal:
  • Lionblaze starts out as a very strong, yet very normal, warrior. Then in Outcast, he starts developing the powers of invincibility, becoming exceptionally strong.
  • Becoming a Clan Leader works this way. They start out as normal warriors like everyone else, but when they become a leader, they receive nine lives, the powers of StarClan, and any other gift the authors decide to give them.
• Enigmatic Minion: Sol. Although he isn't a minion and also a Hidden Agenda Villain, he has many Enigmatic Minion tendencies, such as randomly coming and going whenever the plot requires.
• Ensemble Cast: Each arc after the first focuses on a group of characters with roughly equal screentime and importance, with each of them getting various turning points and focal segments.
• Enthusiastic Newbie Teacher: Sometimes characters become mentors shortly after becoming warriors themselves.
  • In the second book, Fire and Ice, Tigerclaw questions Fireheart and Graystripe becoming mentors due to their youth and relative inexperience, and Fireheart himself isn't sure if he's ready since it can be hard to keep his excitable apprentice Cinderpaw in check. He even jokes to Graystripe after the first day that he kept forgetting that he was the mentor.
  • In Crookedstar's Promise, Crookedjaw's new apprentice is excited to have someone so young and cool as a mentor.
  • In The Raging Storm, Twigbranch has just been made a mentor after becoming a warrior in the previous book. Although excited at first, she finds herself struggling with what the best way to train her apprentice is, and both mentor and apprentice become discouraged and resentful of each other. By the end of the book she comes to understand Flypaw better and plans their lessons in a way that works for them both.
• Epiphany Therapy: When Firestar fears that Scourge will crush the Clans, he laments that there were always four Clans in the forest, but Scourge is trying to change that. Then StarClan tell him that there were never four Clans, there were always five. Cue Firestar realizing that StarClan is always with him, and that while he has StarClan's support and the gift of nine lives, Scourge does not.
• Equal-Opportunity Evil: The Dark Forest is made up of cats from all four Clans, which are treated like races in the series.
• Escaped Animal Rampage: In A Dangerous Path a pack of dogs gets loose from the tree farm that they were being kept in to guard, and they end up living in the forest. While escaped dogs might not be the scariest thing to a human, they were a big threat to the cats living there.
• Establishing Character Moment: Bluestar describes Clan life to Rusty, and the joys of participating in it...but also warns him that a warrior's path is not an easy one, and that Rusty will be expected to follow Clan rules. This foreshadows her position as Rusty's mentor and lawful beliefs.
• Even Bad Men Love Their Mamas:
  • Despite being a hammy bad guy, Hawkfrost loves his mother Sasha. In fact, he scolds the ThunderClan cats for chasing her and bids farewell to her when the Clans move.
  • In Onestar's Confession, Darktail refers to his mother Smoke as the only cat he ever cared for.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Tigerstar, the Big Bad of Warrior Cats had a mate and kits. So did his brutal, Blood Knight mentor Thistleclaw, and the eventually villainous Antpelt also had a mate.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • In Tigerclaw's Fury, Tigerclaw is horrified by the fire because even he wouldn't wish a death like that on another cat.
  • Mapleshade is so screwed up every other resident in the Dark Forest is either scared of or disgusted by her.
• Everyone Is Related: The Clans have a rule against mating with outsiders and familial relationships outside of littermates tend to be deemphasized by the narrative, resulting in everyone born within a given Clan being related to one another in some way within a few generations. By the time of A Starless Clan, much fuss is made about Flamepaw being Firestar's kin despite half of ThunderClan being related to him at this point (being descended either from Firestar himself, or his nephew Cloudtail).
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Hawkfrost's plan to take over the Clans fails because he literally cannot understand why his brother would rather earn the position of Clan Leader than kill the current leader and take it.
• Evil Counterpart:
  • Scourge is one for Firestar. Both were originally kittypets who ran away to the forest and became leaders. However, Scourge was brutally beaten and then chased off by a young Tigerstar, and went on to be the leader of a large gang in Twolegplace, while Firestar joined ThunderClan and eventually became leader. Their key difference is that Firestar has faith in his warrior ancestors and would die for his Clanmates, while Scourge treats those he rules over as mere pawns to be discarded when they've served their use. To highlight the evil counterpart-ness, Scourge was revealed to be Firestar's half brother.
  • Hawkfrost for Brambleclaw. Both are the sons of Tigerstar, but while Brambleclaw had to fight every step of the way to prove to his Clan that he was different from his father, Hawkfrost's parentage was a secret for a while and he had an easier path. And both are ambitious like their father, but while Brambleclaw is also loyal to his Clan and does not share his father's dark ideals, Hawkfrost devotes himself to following his father's ideals, and ultimately dies when he betrays all the Clans.
  • Mapleshade is one for Spottedleaf. Both were involved in a forbidden relationship, but had to watch as their former loved one moved on from them and took another mate, this time in a relationship permitted by the code. Spottedleaf's love for Firestar was so great that she approved of his choice and, as a spirit, cared for his loved ones and descendants like her own. Mapleshade, however, was blinded by vengeance, and as a spirit she tried to corrupt and destroy the descendents of her former mate. Suddenly The Last Hope having Mapleshade be Spottedleaf's ultimate opponent makes perfect sense.
• Evil Is Deathly Cold:
  • In The Rise of Scourge, Scourge describes feeling an icy cold feeling in his belly when he kills his first cat, and he embraces the cold and lets it fill him.
  • The Dark Forest/Place of No Stars, the Clan cats' equivalent of Fire and Brimstone Hell, is a cold, empty place under a black and starless sky, where no warmth or sunlight ever comes and cats must wander alone.
  • The power of the Dark Forest freezes over StarClan territory in The Last Hope.
• Evil Matriarch: Mapleshade, a villain with an "evil mom" vibe. What drove her to evil was when, after she was exiled from ThunderClan for having a RiverClan mate, her kits drowned in the river when she was trying to bring them to RiverClan. Her mate blamed her for this, and she ends up getting rejected by RiverClan as well.
• Evil Plan:
  • In the first arc, there's Tigerclaw, who wants to become leader of his Clan. He starts out by killing the current cat who is next in line for leader. When that is over and he's next in line, he plots to kill the current leader. Fortunately this doesn't work out so well, and he's banished. After that, he becomes leader of a different Clan and plots to kill the hero and take over all four Clans.
  • In the same series there's Scourge. His real motivation is to kill Tigerstar, who once beat the snot out of him. He successfully does this, but after that he decides the forest is a pretty cool place and that he wants to stay; he just has to drive out those pesky Clans first.
  • In series two, Hawkfrost has a similar plan to his father Tigerstar's. He even has help from his dad's spirit. He manipulates Mudclaw into staging a coup in order to weaken WindClan, and Hawkfrost nearly succeeds in killing the ThunderClan leader Firestar.
  • In the third series, Sol wants to destroy the clans because SkyClan cast him out. This cat is a master manipulator and tends to play the cats against each other.
  • One of the most elaborate plans actually stretches across generations of cats. The Dark Forest (where evil cats go when they die) walks in the dreams of many Clan cats, training them in vicious battle moves and fostering their ambition and bloodthirstiness. Like most villains, they want to destroy the Clans as well. They nearly succeed.
• Evil Sounds Deep:
  • Tigerstar is described as having a deep voice.
  • Inverted with Scourge, whose voice is high and cold.
• Evil Stole My Faith: In Sunset, Mothwing tells Leafpool that the reason she stopped believing in StarClan is because her brother revealed that he'd faked the omen that made the medicine cat choose her as apprentice, and that if StarClan really existed they wouldn't let him threaten/blackmail her and do evil deeds to gain power.
• Evil Versus Evil: Tigerstar vs. Scourge.
• Exact Words:
  • In Midnight, after Leafpool sees Squirrelflight leave for her journey, Cinderpelt asks if she knows where Squirrelflight is. Leafpool is able to say no because she didn't know where Squirrelflight was at the exact moment.
  • The warrior code rule "The word of the Clan leader is the warrior code" was chosen so that cats obey the decisions of their Clan leader - suggested when a leader gave away part of their territory to another Clan, and the deputy protested, undermining his authority in front of the other Clans. This gets used as an excuse for cats to follow their leader into evil deeds, and Leafstar uses it to decide that the forest Clans' rules don't totally fit SkyClan and that she can make her own amendments to the warrior code.
  • Crookedstar promises to put his Clan above all else. Mapleshade later points out that this means before kits, before family, anything else.
• The Exile: Stoneteller exiles six of his own cats (they're meant to kill Sharptooth or never return), Bluestar exiles Tigerclaw because he tried to kill her, and RiverClan exiles Graystripe because he saves Firestar's life.
• Expanded Universe: Manga, Super Editions, Field Guides, novellas, short stories, etc.
• Expecting Someone Taller:
  • In The Darkest Hour, both Firestar and Tigerstar initially think that Scourge's much bigger deputy is the leader of BloodClan, as they're not expecting such a small cat to be leader. When Tigerstar meets Scourge for the first time, he even blurts out, "That's Scourge? He's no bigger than an apprentice!"
  • In The Sight, when Graystripe returns, one of the apprentices comments that they expected Graystripe to be bigger.
  • In A Forest Divided, Minnow remarks, "This is Gray Wing? I thought he'd be bigger."
• Extra Digits:
  • Blackstar is from a long line of polydactyl cats.
  • A prophecy in the sixth series claims that the cats need to find a six-toed cat, who ends up being Tree. Tree shares this trait with his father, Root, and it's part of what makes him realize that they're related.
• Extruded Book Product: The authors have admitted that they deliberately wrote the books based on what was likely to sell from the beginning. Some of them don't even like cats!
• Eye Scream:
  • Brightheart's face being mauled and almost completely ripped off by a dog. A later bit of narration in TPoT implies her parts of her skull remain visible.
  • Longtail going blind from an infection in his eyes after a rabbit claws them out.
  • Brokenstar gets his eyes clawed by Yellowfang and is permanently blinded.
  • Percy in SkyClan's Destiny, who gets an eye ripped out.
• Eyes Out of Sight: In the Ravenpaw's Path graphic novels, the sheepdog is almost always depicted with its hair completely covering its eyes, with only one or two examples of its eyes becoming visible to indicate its surprise or anger.

F

• The Faceless:
  • The prologue of Twilight has an unidentified cat speaking to StarClan and being told that they will die soon; by the end of the book, we know this cat to be Cinderpelt. Even the 2019 audiobook obscures the cat's identity, as the narrator, Macleod Andrews, does not do the usual voice he uses for Cinderpelt.
  • In Sign of the Moon, Ivypool and Blossomfall encounter a mysterious cat in the tunnels. Ivypool can't see any of the cat's features, and is unable to determine its gender. In The Forgotten Warrior, the cat is revealed to be Hollyleaf, alive and well, but reluctant to return to ThunderClan.
  • The prologue of The Forgotten Warrior features a mysterious cat declaring that they will have their vengeance on the Clans. It's never explicitly stated who this cat is, but it's almost certainly Sol, based on his role in the book.
  • The prologue of Lost Stars, the first book in the seventh arc, is from the viewpoint of a character referred to only as "a warrior of StarClan".
• Facial Horror: Brightheart was savaged by a pack of dogs, who mangled her face to the point that she lost an eye and parts of her skull were showing even after she recovered. She was even called "Lostface" for a while, but fortunately Firestar renamed her.
• Facial Markings: Archeye is named for the thick black stripe over one of his eyes.
• Fading Away: Cats in the afterlife — no matter whether they're in the good one or the evil one — gradually fade away over time as they are forgotten by living cats. The founders of the Clans and the most recently deceased cats, for instance, are somewhat faint but still mostly there, but some deceased cats have grown so faint that they don't even seem to notice anyone else around anymore.
• Failed Attempt at Scaring: Graypaw tries to sneak up on his friend Firepaw using his best "stealth crouch". Unfortunately he isn't as stealthy as he thinks he is, so Firepaw hears something that sounds large moving through the brush, and, thinking it's an enemy warrior or predator, attacks, resulting in Graypaw being startled instead.
• Failure-to-Save Murder: In Sign of the Moon, while at a Gathering, Dawnpelt accuses Jayfeather of murdering her brother Flametail. In reality, the death was a tragic accident (Flametail had fallen through the ice, and Jayfeather dived in and tried to pull him out of the water but would have drowned himself if he hadn't let go), but Dawnpelt was too consumed with grief to see the obvious.
• Faint in Shock: Veil of Shadows, a group of rebels tries to kill the false Bramblestar. Three of them are killed in the ensuing fight, and Bristlefrost faints when she sees that one of the dead cats is Stemleaf, who she had once wanted as her mate.
• Faith–Heel Turn: Hollyleaf, after realizing she's the product of a forbidden relationship, loses her faith in the warrior code, murders Ashfur, and tries to make Leafpool eat deathberries before running away from the Clans.
• Fake Action Prologue: Dark River begins with what appears to be the main characters fighting off an invasion by the fierce rival Clan ShadowClan, only for it to be revealed that it was only a game they were playing, and that there's no real invasion.
• Fake Defector: It appears that Tigerheart is eagerly following his grandfather Tigerstar's teachings, but he's really spying on Tigerstar and the Dark Forest, unbeknownst to the reader and other characters (even Ivypool, who worked as a spy herself after joining and realizing that they're really hell-bent on destroying the Clans.)
• Fake King: Ashfur possesses Bramblestar's body after he loses one of his lives, and uses the fact that everyone thinks he's the ThunderClan leader to punish everyone harshly for breaking the code.
• Fake Relationship: In Bluestar's Prophecy, Bluefur becomes pregnant as the result of a Forbidden Romance with a cat from another Clan. Her Clanmate Thrushpelt - who she was friends with and who had unrequited feelings for her - offered to pretend that he was the father in order to help her out. Bluefur decided to not outright tell everyone that he was, but Thrushpelt still loved the kits as if they were his own and behaved as if they were, and both of them were fine with everyone assuming that they were mates.
• Faking the Dead: In the first book, Ravenpaw's death is faked in order to protect him from Tigerclaw, who had intended to silence him for witnessing something he shouldn't have.
• Fallen Hero: Hollyleaf becomes this, when her love of the warrior code makes her turn murderous. But then she has a Heel Realization.
• Family Relationship Switcheroo: Hollyleaf, Jayfeather, and Lionblaze are raised as Squirrelfight's and Brambleclaw's kits. However, Leafpool - Jayfeather's mentor and the sister of Squirrelflight - is their real mother. When this is revealed to the three, Hollyleaf doesn't take it well.
• The Family That Slays Together: Tigerstar and Hawkfrost. For a while it looked like Tigerstar's other son Brambleclaw was going to join them, but he decided against it.
• Family-Unfriendly Death: Many - Swiftpaw (mauled by dogs), Tigerstar (split down the middle and losing nine lives at once), and Hawkfrost (stabbed in the throat and bleeding out into a lake), to name a few. Some of them would qualify for Cruel and Unusual Death. If the nightmares Tigerstar showed Lionblaze of himself murdering Heatherpaw/tail count as death, they qualify as well.
• Family-Unfriendly Violence: Pretty much every single fight. After Lionblaze discovers his power of invincibility in Outcast, pretty much every fight he gets in features large amounts of this and High-Pressure Blood.
• Family Versus Career: After Bluestar gets pregnant she realizes that having to raise the children will make her look like a less fitting candidate to be the Clan deputy than her rival, Thistleclaw. A bit unusual in that she decides to go for the career path instead of family, by giving away her children and making it look like they died in an accident.
• The Famine:
  • In the New Prophecy arc, human construction activity in the forest has driven away most of the prey, and the Clans also discover that the rabbits have been poisoned. This results in a famine for all the Clans, and, combined with the destruction of their homes, forces them to leave the forest.
  • The Dawn of the Clans arc begins with the Tribe of Rushing Water in a famine and half the Tribe leaving to find a new home, because they have become too overpopulated for their territory to feed them.
  • A devastating famine strikes ThunderClan in Goosefeather's Curse, reaching such severity that the cats are forced to eat earthworms and tree bark in order to survive while combating starvation and illness. It was so traumatizing to the Clan that most of the characters struggled with food insecurity long after plentiful prey returned.
• Fan Game: Warrior Cats: Untold Tales is the best-known one.
• Fantastic Measurement System: The most common unit of measurement is a "tail-length", which is equivalent to about a foot. "Foxlength" - about a yard - is used occasionally as well, and at least once they've used "kittenstep" (about an inch).
• Fantastic Naming Convention:
  • The Clan cats have a naming system that involves putting two nouns, verbs, or adjectives together. The first part of the names may include stuff from nature such as plants, animals, colors, etc., while the last part of their name includes the part of a cat's body, an action, plants, animals, and much more. (Fireheart, Ivypool, Whitestorm, etc.) The suffix of the name changes throughout their life: with "kit" when they are kittens, "paw" when they begin training, pretty much anything once they're an actual warrior, and "star" if they become a Clan leader. (For example, one character went from Bluekit to Bluepaw to Bluefur to Bluestar).
  • Tribe cats are named after the first thing their mother sees when they are born, and this results in several-word-long, descriptive names, such as Bird Who Rides The Wind and Brook Where Small Fish Swim. (They just go by the first word of their name for everyday use.)
  • Both naming schemes began with an early group of cats, who had names like "Moth Flight" and "Gray Wing" and so forth, which are very similar to Clan names. The Tribe's pattern branched off of this when an ancient cat, Stone Song (who was temporarily leader of the ancient group), was named by his mother for the wind that blew over the rocks when he was born.
• Fantastic Racism: From many canon characters, but also, some say, from the fans. It's another one of those things they disagree on.
  • The most explored bigotry is between Clan cats and kittypets, cats that are owned by humans. While any non-Clan cat is generally treated with suspicion, most Clan cats look down on kittypets for their dependence on Twolegs and see them as either pampered slobs, hopeless cowards, or greedy brats. Kittypets, on the other hand, view Clan cats as savages or dangerous nuisances, and are either terrified of them or shame their way of life in the wild.
  • While loners - cats who generally live outside of Clans and aren't kittypets, typically your average stray cat - aren't the targets of much scrutiny as long as they don't cause trouble, they are still usually disapproved of due to their lack of commitment to a Clan or because they pose a threat to prey and territory if they are travellers.
  • The term "rogue" as varied in terms of definition over the years, but they are mostly cats who have been exiled from their Clan due to a crime or are basically just hostile loners. Clan cats have an open distaste of those they deem rouges, even more so than they despise kittypets, and there have been several instances throughout the Clans' history where rogues have presented a very apparent danger.
• Fantastic Rank System: each Clan has the following ranks:
  • Clan Leader - given nine lives by their ancestors, StarClan; renamed to have their name ending in "-star" to denote their rank (Bluestar, Firestar, etc)
  • Clan Deputy - Second-in-command to the Clan leader, and always becomes leader upon the leader's death.
  • Medicine cat - The other of the three major ranks in the Clan: The Medic and spiritual leader; in ordinary circumstances there is only one at a time and they train just one apprentice to take their place.
  • Mediator: a position created specifically for Tree as a Take the Third Option, the mediator's job is to solve disagreements and arguments and maintain peace within the Clan.
  • Most other cats follow the path of Kit (under six moons of age, name ends in "-kit" e.g. Bramblekit) > Apprentice at six moons (name ends in "-paw", e.g. Bramblepaw) > Warrior upon completion of training (gains a unique ending to their name, e.g. Brambleclaw. The older/"senior" warriors are usually advisors to the Clan leader), sometimes Queen while raising kits (maternity leave, basically) > retiring to become an Elder (the Clan provides for them and they are no longer required to carry out warrior duties).
• Fantastic Romance: Jayfeather ends up going back in time - to the ancestors of the forest Clans before they even lived in the forest - and falls in love with Half Moon. He is able to go back to her time again later and wants to stay, but their destinies don't allow it.
• Fantasy World Map: There are two two-page maps at the start of each book. One is the "cat view" map, which is more decorative, having houses and trees and everything drawn out, and labeling it with the cats' names for landmarks. The second is a "human view" map, which labels the landmarks with human names. It also looks more like a proper map: rather than drawing the forest, there is a map key, and it just uses the symbol for "tree" lots of times.
• Fatal Flaw:
  • Scourge's lack of belief in StarClan. He doesn't have nine lives, so when he's killed, he's dead for good.
  • Hollyleaf's excessive pride led to her downfall.
• The Fatalist: Cinderheart, after hearing Lionblaze's prophecy and rejecting him. She keeps saying they can't be mates because it would ruin their destinies. Finally, Lionblaze snaps her out of it.
• Faux Affably Evil:
  • In the later Power of Three books, Sol acts like he wants to be your friend and mentor, but his main purpose is revenge on the Clans.
  • Tigerstar and Hawkfrost act polite at first when a cat starts visiting the Dark Forest, but they're really training them to destroy the Clans.
• Fear Is Normal: In the guidebook Battles of the Clans, one story is about Lionheart's first battle as an apprentice; he turns and flees as it begins and fears that he'll be punished or have to leave the Clan. When his Clanmates find him, they reassure him that even the strongest warriors feel fear and that there's no such thing as bravery without it.
• Fear of Thunder: The first official app claimed that Hollyleaf has this ever since Long Shadows, when Ashfur threatened to kill her and her littermates during a storm.
• Feathered Fiend: Birds of prey such as hawks, eagles, and owls. Justified, since these birds are larger than they are, and can carry off a kit (or in the eagles' case, a full-grown cat).
• Females Are More Innocent: In general, bad cats are most often males.
  • This trope is really present in The Prophecies Begin arc, in which nameless bad guy cats are always, or almost always, toms. The named villains are also overwhelmingly male. Tigerstar and Scourge are the main villains of series one, and both of their chief henchcats, Darkstripe and Bone respectively, are toms as well, as is Brokenstar, the villain of early series one. Blackfoot, who later becomes Blackstar, is at his most villainous in this arc as well.
  • In The New Prophecy the villain is Hawkfrost, and also Mudclaw, who plots to overtake WindClan. Sharptooth, the cougar who preys on the Tribe, is also male, although not really a character so much as a monster.
  • The Power of Three has Sol, who wants to destroy the Clans, and Ashfur, who tries to murder three of his Clanmates. The closest thing to a female villain in this arc is Hollyleaf, who kills Ashfur. Of the Tribe invaders, half are toms and half she-cats.
  • In Omen of the Stars, most of the male villains are reused from previous series, although some female villains finally get introduced. Mapleshade is the biggest female villain, and introduced in this series (after fans pointed out that most villains so far were dark brown tabby toms). Also appearing in the Dark Forest is the minor female character Sparrowfeather. Ivypool may also qualify, before she realizes that the Dark Forest wants to destroy the Clans.
  • Dawn of the Clans has the male cat Clear Sky and later One-Eye and Slash as chief villains, but also the she-cat Star Flower, although she later undergoes a Face–Heel Turn.
  • In A Vision of Shadows, Onestar's long-abandoned son Darktail is the villain for the first half of the series.
  • In The Broken Code, the Big Bad is Ashfur, who is now in charge of the Dark Forest cats, the majority of which are toms.
• The Ferryman: This role is shared by all of StarClan. They pick one of their warriors to guide a dying cat to them, usually one who was important in the cat's life.
• Fictional Age of Majority: Kits begin the transition to adulthood when they are six months old, the feline equivalent of pre-teens; this is when they become apprentices, training under an older cat, and their names are changed from ___kit to ___paw. They are considered fully adult when they earn their warrior names or become full-fledged medicine cats.
• Fictional Greetings and Farewells: An occasional Clan greeting - the equivalent of "How's it going?" - is "How's the prey running?". The usual farewell is "May StarClan light your path."
• Field Promotion: Firestar did this when Whitestorm died during the BloodClan battle, naming Graystripe deputy mid-battle rather than waiting to hold the usually performed ceremony.
• Fiery Redhead: Sandstorm and her daughter Squirrelflight are both ginger-pelted she-cats who have a bit of a temper and no problem speaking their minds. There's also Red, another ginger she-cat, who defies her father's wishes to pursue a romance with her Star-Crossed Lover.
• Fighting for a Homeland: SkyClan, when they were exiled from the forest. The other four Clans too, when the forest is destroyed - but at least they know there's good territory waiting for them.
• Fights Like a Normal: Out of the three cats with superpowers, only Lionblaze's are useful in battle (he can't get hurt in a fight). Jayfeather's power is to enter other cats' dreams (though he doesn't fight anyway, since he's a medicine cat), and Dovewing's power - Super-Senses - is actually a hindrance in battle because she gets confused and overwhelmed by the amount of noise and scents.
• Filler Villain: The re-formed BloodClan in the Ravenpaw manga trilogy whose whole existence is to give the trilogy villains. They are beaten easily, never mentioned again, and have zero impact on the plot. They don't even make sense in the overall canon. They're just... there.
• Final Battle: The BloodClan battle in the original series. The next three arcs build up the much more deadly war with the Dark Forest. It finally comes in The Last Hope, and takes up a whole quarter of the book.
• Final Speech: Most main characters that get killed off. The award goes to Bluestar, who speaks to Firestar for about four pages before she dies.
• Find the Cure!:
  • A large portion of Long Shadows deals with Jayfeather trying to find catnip to cure a recent epidemic in his Clan after his stock was destroyed.
  • In the Adventure Game included with The Fourth Apprentice, the Clans are coming down with a sickness, so they send out the Adventure Game cats to find some herbs for them.
• Fire-Forged Friends: Some of the main characters in The New Prophecy were openly hostile to each other before their journey - Squirrelpaw and Brambleclaw didn't get along, and Crowpaw was aggressive to everyone (but particularly Brambleclaw due to a border conflict) - but in the end they become true friends due to everything they've faced together.
• Fire/Ice Duo: The second book is called Fire and Ice. It may be referring to the main character Fireheart, and possibly the winter season the book takes place during, or it may be a metaphor for the conflicts in the book.
• Fire/Water Juxtaposition:
  • In Bluestar's Prophecy, the eponymous message she receives from StarClan compares Bluestar to fire, but warns that even the greatest flames can be extinguished by water. Bluestar eventually dies from drowning, but survives just long enough to say goodbye to Fireheart (her apprentice) and her RiverClan children.
  • Similar to the Bluestar's Prophecy example, Spottedleaf warns Fireheart in a dream in Forest of Secrets that water can quench fire, referring to the "fire" that can save their Clan (aka Fireheart himself). Fireheart does nearly drown during Tigerclaw's attempt to kill him, and also risks his life several times during the flood.
  • The character Flametail dies when he falls through ice and drowns in a lake.
  • In Cats of the Clans, when Rock talks about Squirrelflight and Leafpool, he explicitly compares Squirrelflight to a burning fire and Leafpool to a calm pool of water.
• First Friend:
  • Firepaw was friends with his neighbor Smudge before joining the Clans. He encounters Smudge in the forest sometime afterward, and Tigerclaw questions Firepaw's loyalty to ThunderClan for not chasing him off.
  • In Tree's Roots, Tree's first friend was Stream, a tom the same age as him. Since the group they were born to made toms leave at the age of six moons, Tree had expected the two of them to wander together, but Stream's sudden death meant that Tree had to begin his journey utterly alone.
• First Love:
  • In the very first book, Firepaw developed a crush on Spottedleaf, and she felt the same for him, but they never got to speak of their feelings before she died. She proceeded to visit him in dreams, and eventually he fell in love with Sandstorm and had to reconcile the fact that he loved her while still missing Spottedleaf.
  • Graystripe's first love was the RiverClan cat Silverstream. She died giving birth to their kits. Much later, he found love again when he met Millie.
  • Crowfeather first fell in love with Feathertail, but she died on their journey. He chose his own warrior name in her honor. Later he fell in love with Leafpool, and Feathertail's spirit gave Leafpool her blessing.
  • Clear Sky's first mate as a young cat was Bright Stream, but she died on their journey while pregnant with his kits. Her death changed him and made him obsessively afraid of losing anyone else. He later became mates with Storm, who also died, and then Star Flower.
  • After having a couple crushes that never went anywhere, Gray Wing eventually realized his feelings for Turtle Tail and they became mates, with him being an adopted father to her kits from the day they were born. After her death, he fell in love with Slate. Gray Wing was also Turtle Tail's first love; she always loved him, but temporarily left the group when it didn't look like he reciprocated, and had kits with another tom. She never got over her feelings for Gray Wing though, and the two of them ended up together upon her return.
• First-Person Dying Perspective:
  • Overlapping with A Death in the Limelight, Flametail's perspective gets added to the Switching P.O.V. roster of the Omen of the Stars arc in the third book - meaning we get to see his last moments as he drowns under a frozen lake from his perspective.
  • Bristlefrost, one of the three POV characters of the seventh arc, The Broken Code, dies near the end of the last book in a Heroic Sacrifice to kill the Big Bad. We see her death from her perspective, imagining the happy future she would have had with her lover Rootspring had she lived.
• First Snow: Happens a couple times. In Fire and Ice, Fireheart is amazed because he hasn't seen it before; he was shut inside as a kit when still living with Twolegs when it last snowed. He quickly learns that snow makes it difficult to move around, however. In The Darkest Hour, Firestar is out with his apprentice Bramblepaw when it begins to snow. Bramblepaw chases the snowflakes gleefully, and Fireheart wonders whether Bramblepaw's evil father Tigerstar ever played with snowflakes.
• Fish Eyes: A minor character named Pounce from Ravenpaw's Path has this look worn all the time. He's often seen derping in the background.
• Fish out of Temporal Water: In Long Shadows and Sign of the Moon, Jayfeather is sent back to the time of the Ancients and must adapt to their traditions, while teaching them traditions he learned from the future version of them.
• Flanderization: RiverClan's fish-loving tendencies (no, not like that), as well as the general polarizing nature of fish as prey. Princess also becomes a far bigger worrywart as the first series progresses.
• Flashback B-Plot: SkyClan's Destiny works this way, with the current-day story of SkyClan interspersed with chapters from Stick's point of view, back before he left the city, some time earlier than the main events of the book.
• Flashback Nightmare: Dovepaw has one about Rippletail's death in Fading Echoes.
• Flat-Earth Atheist:
  • Cloudtail acts like this around the end of the first series. You'd think that seeing fatal wounds stitch up by themselves and hearing actual, accurate prophecies would be enough for the kid...
  • There's also Mothwing, who is a medicine cat despite not believing in StarClan, which is essentially the cats' equivalent of an atheist priest. Apparently her explanation for medicine cats knowing things StarClan has told her is that they subconsciously figure it out by themselves and all convince themselves that a dead cat told them it in a dream, which is arguably more ridiculous than what she is trying to explain. It gets even worse in Fading Echoes, where she sees something strange happen to Mistystar while she's receiving her nine lives and manages to figure out that Jayfeather is essentially reading her mind, but she still can't comprehend that StarClan exists. After the Dark Forest battle, she comes to accept that they exist, but refuses to have faith in them or try communicating with them because she doesn't think they have the Clans' best interests at heart.
• Flaw Exploitation: Tigerstar and Hawkfrost use cats' flaws to convince them to join the Dark Forest, mainly preying upon cats who just want to prove themselves and feel unnoticed and unliked.
• Floral Theme Naming: There are lots of plant-based names in the series, since the characters name their children after what they know, and they live in the forest.
• Florence Nightingale Effect: In River of Fire, a kittypet named Velvet comes to the ThunderClan camp looking for help after she was burned when her house caught fire. She and the medicine cat Alderheart start to develop feelings for each other, but ultimately both of them accept that it wouldn't work out due to their different lifestyles, and Alderheart's calling as a medicine cat means too much to him to break his vow by taking a mate.
• Flowers of Femininity: While most name parts (including plants that the Clans are familiar with) are used for both toms and she-cats, the word "flower" itself, as well as the names of flowers such as lily and primrose, have been used exclusively in she-cats' names (Goldenflower, Lilyheart, etc). The cats with these names are often gentler, more feminine she-cats who have given birth to kits.
• Fluffy Cloud Heaven: StarClan's hunting grounds, by cat standards. It is always warm and sunny, and there is plenty of prey to catch and eat.
• Follow in My Footsteps: Tigerstar genuinely does want his children to become strong warriors. He also wants them to continue his goals of ruling the forest, however, and even after his death tries to groom them into following his plans.
• The Food Poisoning Incident: In Bluestar's Prophecy, Bluefur, Rosepaw and Sweetpaw share a mouse which ends up getting them all sick. Sweetpaw ends up dying as a result.
• Forbidden Friendship: The Clans aren't that fond of inter-Clan friendships, but they allow it (though not to the point of sneaking away, which happens sometimes - such as with Lionpaw and Heatherpaw). In the first book, ThunderClan looked down on the hero talking with his house-cat friend Sumdge because of Clan bias and even questioned whether his heart was truly with the Clan, but they got over it eventually.
• Forced to Watch:
  • In The Darkest Hour, Tigerstar, after taking control of ShadowClan and RiverClan, organizes an attack on WindClan. Once the Curb-Stomp Battle was over, he rounded up all the prisoners and forced them to watch as he brutally killed a young apprentice, as a "warning" as to what would happen if any of them tried to defy him again.
  • In the Warrior Cats: Power of Three series, Ashfur tries to burn Jayfeather, Lionblaze, and Hollyleaf alive and force their (adoptive) mother to watch as "vengeance" for her choosing another mate instead of him two years ago. Her quick thinking gets them out of it, but at the cost of her adopted kits' love.
• Foregone Conclusion:
  • Bluestar's Prophecy. As if the fact that how and when Bluestar dies is already known by the entire fanbase isn't enough, the book opens with her death scene rewritten from her point of view. A good part of the book works like this, too, such as her relationship with Oakheart, Mosskit's death, and the fact that all of the characters who aren't in the first books will end up dead.
  • Crookedstar's Promise, especially seeing as we never heard of Willowbreeze or Crookedstar's other kits. And also Stormkit breaking his jaw and being held back from being an apprentice. And that he dies at the end.
  • Yellowfang's Secret: We knew from the very first book that Yellowfang was a warrior who became a medicine cat, and from the first series in general that she had a forbidden relationship with Raggedstar that resulted in Brokenstar.
• Foreign Queasine: The cats occasionally consider prey from other Clans' territories disgusting: there's a short story in Code of the Clans where a young One-Eye and Dappletail steal some fish after hearing RiverClan boast about them, only to realize that they hate the taste, and every other Clan expresses revulsion at the idea of ShadowClan eating frogs.
• The Foreign Subtitle: In Spanish, "Los Cuatro Clanes" ("The Four Clans")
• Foreseeing My Death:
  • At the beginning of Twilight, a cat is informed by StarClan of their impending death. It's later revealed to be Cinderpelt, who dies defending a kitting queen from badgers.
  • Toward the end of one of the Expanded Universe novels, it is mentioned that medicine cat Goosefeather predicted that he would die on the day of the first snowfall, and he did.
• Foreshadowing: There are many, many hints about the impostor's true identity littered throughout the seventh arc, to the point where it's blatantly obvious. Amongst them, the impostor is said to have dark blue eyes, Shadowsight at one point has a vision of ash swirling around the impostor, and he seems to genuinely care for Squirrelflight and was heartbroken after learning about her "death". All those signs point to Ashfur.
• Formerly Friendly Family: In Dawn of the Clans, the series begins with half of the Tribe of Rushing Water finding a new home; among them are brothers Gray Wing and Clear Sky. Eventually Clear Sky decides that he'd rather live in the forest than on the moor and starts his own group. He then becomes more and more power-hungry and paranoid that the moor group wants to stop him, which leads to battle between the two groups and Clear Sky nearly killing his brother. Clear Sky's son Thunder also decides he can't stand living with his father and starts his own group. Ultimately, what was once one community splits into five. Although the family members reconcile to an extent, their groups, henceforth known as Clans, remain separate forever.
• For the Evulz: Okay, so we know that Sol wants to use the Three's powers to gain control over all cats living around the lake and eliminate belief in StarClan, ultimately getting "revenge" on the Clans, but his manipulation of the Twolegplace cats doesn't have anything to with his plans, and was seemingly done for the hell of it. Plus, he doesn't seem that committed to his goal, doesn't approach it with much urgency, and seems to get way too much enjoyment from messing with the main characters' minds.
• Foul Medicine: The main characters are known to complain about the taste of Healing Herbs. Perhaps this is because they're cats, who are carnivores.
• Four-Temperament Ensemble: In Omen of the Stars:
  • Dovewing (Sanguine)
  • Lionblaze (Choleric)
  • Jayfeather (Melancholic)
  • Ivypool (Phlegmatic)
• Framing Device: In the field guides Code and Battles of the Clans, the reader is a kittypet who is visiting the Clans and being told stories by the characters.
• Freakiness Shame: Brightheart feels like this after a dog attack gouges out her eye and leaves half her face bald and scarred. Cloudtail, her mate, insists that she's still beautiful and delivers a Death Glare to anyone who would indicate otherwise. In later books, younger cats who have grown up knowing Brightheart remark that they don't even notice the scars, and are a bit surprised when cats from other Clans point them out. By that point, Brightheart has made peace with her appearance, though she still flinches when one young kitten refers to her as "that ugly cat".
• Freudian Excuse: Pretty much every villain in the series.
  • Tigerstar had a father who abandoned him to become a kittypet, and a mentor who taught him to be violent and evil.
  • Brokenstar was abused by his foster mother, Lizardstripe.
  • Scourge was bullied by his siblings, Ruby and Socks. They told him he would be drowned in the river if he wasn't adopted by Twolegs, so he ran away, only to be attacked almost to death by Tigerstar.
  • Sol had a father who neglected his kits, and a mother who always told them stories about SkyClan cats and was upset with her life. Because she couldn't take care of them, she gave them all to Twolegs. Sol thought that, if he was a SkyClan cat, his mother wouldn't have given him away. When he later did join SkyClan, they didn't make him a warrior, and from his view it was unfair prejudice rather than his own incompetence.
  • Mapleshade was hoping to become ThunderClan leader, but they drove her out after she had kits with a RiverClan tom. She then tried taking her kits to RiverClan, but they drowned on the way. RiverClan rejected her, her mate blamed her for the kits' death, and he took on another mate within his Clan.
  • Darktail was rejected by his father Onewhisker several times at a young age, including when the Clans left and Onewhisker promised to return for him - a promise he never intended to keep. His mother died not long afterward.
• Freudian Trio:
  • Original Series
    • Id: Firestar
    • Ego: Graystripe
    • Superego: Sandstorm
  • The New Prophecy
    • Ego: Brambleclaw and Stormfur
    • Id: Squirrelflight and Crowfeather
    • Superego: Leafpool, Feathertail, and Twanypelt
  • The Power of Three
    • Id: Lionblaze
    • Ego: Jayfeather
    • Superego: Hollyleaf
  • Omen of the Stars
    • Id: Lionblaze
    • Ego: Dovepaw
    • Superego: Jayfeather
• Frequently-Broken Unbreakable Vow: The Warrior Code (which forbids inter-Clan relationships, has rules about territory, lists prerequisites to achieve certain ranks, and lists other rules about what they're allowed and not allowed to do) is broken quite often. Goes to the point of deconstruction with Hollyleaf, who is so obsessed with the code that she breaks down when she realizes that she's the product of a forbidden inter-Clan relationship.
• From Hero to Mentor: A variant where first series protagonist Firestar is the mentor of second series protagonist Bramblestar, but he trains him in the first series where Firestar is protagonist and Bramblestar is already a full warrior by the time the second series rolls around.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: Scourge - starting as a small kitten named Tiny, bullied by his siblings, he manages to become leader of BloodClan with sheer ruthlessness and one of most deadly cats in the series.
• From Stray to Pet: Both played straight and inverted:
  • Mostly inverted: The main character, Firestar, started as a "kittypet" named Rusty who ran off and was adopted into ThunderClan. He also brought his nephew, Cloudtail, to ThunderClan as a kit. Scourge was originally a kittypet named Tiny, who fled his home after his sister taunted him that any kits unwanted by humans are thrown in the river. Sasha's owner went to a nursing home, and when she realized he wasn't coming back, she became a rogue; Purdy, similarly, took to the streets after his owner died. Millie left her home to help Graystripe find ThunderClan and join it herself. Daisy and her kits were farm cats, but when the humans took away Floss' kits, Daisy brought them to ThunderClan where they could be safe. About half of New SkyClan were also kittypets that left their homes to join the Clan. Violet's kits were born as kittypets, but they dreamed of becoming warriors, and Violet had Ravenpaw bring them to the modern SkyClan.
  • Played straight: Ravenpaw was born in ThunderClan, but became a farm cat. Violet was born in BloodClan, but when she was badly injured by her brothers, Barley took her to live with Fuzz, whose owner was a veterinarian. Pinestar, a leader of ThunderClan, left the Clan to live out the rest of his final life as a kittypet. A few of the last remaining members of Old SkyClan became kittypets when the Clan finally split up. In Dawn of the Clans, after Turtle Tail realizes her feelings for Gray Wing are unrequited, she joins her friend Bumble as a kittypet (later goes back to the forest, however.)
• Full-Boar Action: One of the Clans' mythology tales features Rage and Fury, two wild boars who plagued the three great cat Clans - LeopardClan, TigerClan, and LionClan - with their presence. Fleetfoot, a LeopardClan warrior, offered to kill Rage (but not knowing about Fury, who the other leaders conveniently didn't mention), and she managed to kill both of them one at a time despite them being powerful animals. Because she had done this, Goldenstar and Shadestar let her and her Clan earn hunting rights to the river.
• Funeral Cut: In Onestar's Confession, Brushpaw is badly injured after a battle, and Onewhisker tries to reassure his friend that he'll be fine. There's a small break in the chapter, and it picks up days later as the Clan gathers to hold a vigil for Brushpaw's death.

G

• Gender Bender: A lot, most of them being one-time typos. Permanent/more major ones include:
  • Foxheart: female in Secrets of the Clans (thought by ShadowClan to be the mother of Brokentail) > male in Bluestar's Prophecy > female in Yellowfang's Secret
  • Mosskit: originally written as a male in Forest of Secrets and Secrets of the Clans, but later was female in Cats of the Clans and Bluestar's Prophecy (which became Mosskit's official gender), and mentioned as both at different points in The Last Hope.
  • Mintkit and Sagekit: Mintkit was female and Sagekit was male in the allegiances of Firestar's Quest, but they flipped genders in the actual text. SkyClan's Destiny confirms the allegiances of Firestar's Quest to be correct.
  • Rowanclaw: female in Dawn > male in Starlight and subsequent books. Fathers Tawnypelt's kits in an intentional acknowledgement of this error.
  • Rippletail: female in Twilight > male in The Sight
  • Pouncetail: female in The Sight > male in Dark River
  • Sedgewhisker: female in The Sight > male in Dark River > female in Sunrise
  • Gorsetail: female in Sunrise (was actually a mother of kits earler in TPOT) > male in The Fourth Apprentice
  • Rushpaw: male in main OOTS series > female in Battles of the Clans
• Gender-Equal Ensemble: The New Prophecy has three she-cats (Squirrelpaw, Tawnypelt, and Feathertail) traveling with three toms (Brambleclaw, Crowpaw, and Stormfur).
• Gender Is No Object: The Clans' society has almost perfect gender equality, with equal numbers of female leaders and warriors throughout. The only real difference in how they're treated is when a female warrior becomes pregnant: she spends a few months in the nursery to have her kittens, and female deputies and leaders cannot have kits.
• Gene Hunting: Jayfeather, Lionblaze, and Hollyleaf are listening when - after Ashfur tries to kill them out of jealousy that Squirrelflight chose Brambleclaw over him - Squirrelflight tells Ashfur that the three aren't her kits. Hollyleaf thinks Leafpool might know who their real parents are, since she was there at the time of their birth. Leafpool reveals that she is their real mother, which is against the warrior code since she is a medicine cat and medicine cats aren't allowed to have mates.
• Generational Saga: The Original Series stars Firestar, while his daughters Squrrelflight and Leafpool take center stage in the second series, his grandchildren Lionblaze, Hollyleaf, and Jayfeather become mains in the third, in the fourth his grand-nieces Ivypool and Dovewing are added as main characters as well, and in the sixth series a younger litter of grandchildren - mainly Alderheart - is featured. In the seventh series, we have Bristlefrost, Firestar's great-great niece and Shadowpaw, his great-great nephew.
• Genius Ditz: Moth Flight. While she spaces out a lot, leading to some near-death situations, she's an expert with herbs and healing.
• Genki Girl:
  • Squirrelpaw, though it fades pretty quickly.
  • Cinderpaw too, though that stops after she gets hit by a car.
• Get a Hold of Yourself, Man!: In Path of Stars, Clear Sky starts to panic and grieve when he thinks that his friends have all betrayed him and left his mate to die. It takes Wind Runner raking her claws across his ears and telling him to sit up and stop acting like a kit to make him realize that they actually have a plan to save her.
• Ghostly Death Reveal: In the prologue of Darkest Night, Needletail shows up as a ghost to speak to Tree, a cat who she'd met during her life, and he's surprised and asks how she died.
• Ghost Reunion Ending: Happens occasionally in the series:
  • At the end of the Tigerstar and Sasha manga, Tigerstar appears next to Sasha and promises her that he'll watch over their children.
  • In Tree's Roots, Tree's father reappears at the end to him to tell him that he doesn't regret having died to save his son, and to tell Tree not to live his life alone.
  • In the last scene of Veil of Shadows, Rootpaw sees the ghosts of all the cats who had died in the book, stuck in between worlds because StarClan is currently blocked off.
• Girliness Upgrade: Sandstorm began the series as a snarky, badass Tomboy. However, after being rescued by Firestar, and especially after the first arc of the series, Sandstorm has softened into a gentle, sweet she-cat, now much more of a Girly Girl. However, this doesn't stop her from having sassy moments!
• Give the Baby a Father: In Bluestar's Prophecy, the eponymous character has a forbidden inter-Clan relationship with Oakheart, and ends up having his children. Thrushpelt - despite also having feelings for Bluestar - offers to help her care for the kits and let their Clanmates assume that Thrushpelt was the father, in order to help her avoid any awkward questions about her kits' parentage, which Bluestar accepts.
• Glowing Flora: The Whispering Cave in SkyClan's gorge has phosphorescent moss growing inside. The cats find it odd and mysterious, and it ends up being the place where they can communicate with StarClan, the spirits of their ancestors.
• Godwin's Law: An In-Universe equivalent; the second Tigerstar gets a lot of comparisons to the first one due to both of them taking control of RiverClan, even if the comparison doesn't hold up in other ways such as this Tigerstar having better intentions and not persecuting half-Clan cats in any way.
• Go for the Eye: Cats who train in the Dark Forest learn this technique, which is considered dishonorable to use against other cats. In Spottedleaf's Heart, Spottedleaf sees Thistleclaw encouraging his apprentice to use the move on his own son. More commonly, it's used against dangerous creatures like foxes.
• Go-Karting with Bowser: Gatherings are a temporary truce between the four Clans that happens once a month. However, there are cases where these Gatherings can get broken. Also, Clans can refuse to join a Gathering in several cases.
• Go Mad from the Revelation:
  • Learning that her parents broke the Warrior Code, which she'd obsessed over for the majority of her life, pretty much shattered what was left of Hollyleaf's sanity.
  • In the original series, Bluestar after Tigerclaw's betrayal.
• Gone Horribly Right: Tigerstar convinces Ivypool to persuade Firestar to take back some land he gave to ShadowClan between Sunset and The Sight. It works... but at a cost. Russetfur gets killed, and Firestar loses another life.
• Good Cannot Comprehend Evil: In A Dangerous Path when Bluestar's suffering from dementia and is absolutely convinced that WindClan is stealing prey, she won't listen to Fireheart when he gives her evidence that a dog has been killing the prey. She tells him that he's a good and noble warrior, so he can't comprehend that other cats would have morals any less pristine than his own. He especially thinks this comment is odd, since he was the one that exposed Tigerclaw as a traitor and murderer.
• Good Is Not Nice: Jayfeather may be one of the most important heroes in the third and fourth story arcs, but his temper is notoriously short.
  Bumblestripe: [shrugs] He snapped at Hazeltail for getting in the way, hissed at Cherrypaw for trampling on Ferncloud's moss, and ordered Foxleap and Toadstep to fetch comfrey. So I guess he's okay.
• Good Samaritan: The "guardian cats" group in Tigerheart's Shadow are essentially this; they take in injured and weak cats from the city and care for them, not asking for anything in return. Tigerheart and Dovewing stay with them for moons and help them out with some of their problems.
• Good Scars, Evil Scars: Both played straight and averted. Clawface, as his name implies, has many scars running along his face. He's a villain. However, Stonefur, who has battle-scarred ears, and Brightheart who has one eye and ear missing and is horrifically scarred in that area, are both heroes. Tigerstar, another villain, has a scar across the bridge of his nose and a split in his ear. Longtail, a hero, has a V-shaped cut in his ear as well. Of course, one has to take into account that almost every character in existence is scarred somehow, but...
• Good Shepherd: Common archetype for medicine cats.
• Goshdang It To Heck: All the characters are cats with a different vocabulary, and therefore, different profanities than humans, so it's understandable when a character exclaims "mouse dung!" or calls someone a "fox-hearted traitor". Tigerstar calls Firestar, his arch-enemy, a "stinking furball". When Ashfur called Squirrelflight a "faithless she-cat", he really meant "whore" (it works in context, and explains Hollyleaf's shocked reaction).
• Go to the Euphemism: Clan cats use the phrase "making dirt" to refer to relieving themselves; the spot they do this gets called the "dirtplace".
• Grade Skipper: In a manner of speaking. Apprentices usually become warriors in the order they were apprenticed, and an apprenticeship is stated to normally last 6 moons. Fireheart and Graystripe were made warriors before the older Dustpelt and Sandstorm, and if you carefully keep track of every mention of time passing in the book, they were only apprentices for a little over two moons.
• G-Rated Sex: Beyond all of the characters that have been born to the various Official Couples throughout the series (one litter being both implied and confirmed by Word of God to be the result of a one-night stand), there was one particularly blatant scene in Bluestar's Prophecy that provoked many thoughts of"how did they get away with this?". Oakheart asks Bluestar to meet him somewhere at night, saying he wants to get to know her better. After a romantic evening, Bluestar starts begging to let herself enjoy "Just one night!". Next thing you know, Oakheart is building them a nest, and the next chapter skips to the next morning. Soon after, Bluestar is pregnant.
• Gratuitous English: In the Japanese translations of the series, the names of the characters- which are usually combinations of nouns, verbs and adjectives- are left in English.
• The Great Serpent: One figure in the Clans' mythology is a giant snake called Mouthclaw, described as being big enough to swallow a lion whole, with deadly venomous fangs. The story claims that adders exist because she tricked an ancient LionClan warrior: in return for sparing her life, he demanded she shrink to the length of his tail... but he didn't specify that she couldn't multiply into a thousand snakes as she did so.
• Greater Need Than Mine: Some cats, particularly the elders, insist upon this when prey or herbs are low.
• Greater-Scope Villain: The Dark Forest serve this role during the Power of Three arc. They are recruiting an army to destroy the Clans, and are made up of the most powerful villains the heroes have ever faced. However, this is mostly going on in the background, as the main driving point of the arc is uncovering the secrets of the past and defeating the villain Sol, who is trying to make the Clans destroy each other.
• Green-Eyed Monster:
  • Ivypool initially has this towards Dovewing. Not knowing of her sister's powers, she gets really tired of living as her sister's "echo", and how Dovewing seems to get special treatment (like going on the quest to the badgers, since she's the one who alerted the Clan about them). However, she overcomes her jealousy when Dovewing reveals her powers after hearing Tigerstar's plan.
  • The vast majority of Clan cats hate it when other cats trespass on their territory, as the species does in real life. They work extremely hard to catch enough prey as it is, and to keep the area clear of predators. It feels like trespassers are freeloading off that work- or worse, outright stealing. Especially if the trespassers are well-fed kittypets.
• Green Is Gross: One of the Clans' worst sicknesses is called greencough, named for the phlegm that cats get from it.
• Grey-and-Gray Morality: Featured very prominently from the second series onward. The authors have even gone back to write more sympathetic backstories for most of the villains, the most notable being Scourge. Tigerstar and Hawkfrost are also noteworthy because, although they wanted power and did horrible things to get it, they only wanted power because they believed they could do a better job of running the Clans and help keep the forest peaceful (Although Tigerstar's vision for running the Clans was very racist). The villains of the fourth series also consist almost entirely of cats that have been wronged or forgotten and are rising up for revenge. Then for the heroes, we have Leafpool and Squirrelflight with their (spoileriffic) lies and betrayal. And then there is Hollyleaf, Lionblaze and Jayfeather, who all seem to be much more dysfunctional than all the other characters.
• Grim Up North: ShadowClan, normally thought to be the most "evil" Clan, lives in the northernmost territory. There's even a saying in ThunderClan that the cold north wind blows over every ShadowClan cat and chills their heart.
• Grudging "Thank You": One of the mountain rogues gives this to the Clan cats and Tribe cats when they saved them from an eagle.
• Grumpy Old Man: Some elders are portrayed this way, notably Mousefur and Tangle. When a WindClan elder named Crowfur snaps at Fireheart for speaking out of turn during a Gathering, Patchpelt reassures him by saying, "Take no notice of Crowfur. He'd find fault with StarClan."
• Guilt-Ridden Accomplice: In Code of the Clans, there's a short story where Darkstripe encourages Longtail to break the warrior code by eating the prey they caught instead of bringing it to the Clan. Longtail feels guilty when they return to camp to find that one of the elders has died, and he blames himself, thinking that the prey might have given her the strength to fight off her illness if they'd brought it back earlier. Darkstripe, seeing how Longtail is feeling, threatens that if Longtail tells the Clan what they did, he'll tell them how it was all Longtail's idea and that Darkstripe couldn't stop him.
• Gutted Like a Fish: Tigerstar is killed in this manner when the cat he tried to order around got fed up with it - the wound is bad enough that he loses all of his nine leader's lives. One apprentice even refers to it in this way when a group of them reenacts his death in the Sasha manga.

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