Except Brokenstar and Scourge. (Spoiler tagged because some who is still on Fire and Ice is on the thread.)
Personally, my favourite villains are Sol, Mapleshade, and Shredtail, in that order. Sol because he's just aweseome, Mapleshade due to her creepiness and insanity, and Shredtail because I've sort of latched on to him. His quote on character page is awesome.
"Oh great! Let's pile up all the useless cats and hope a tree falls on them!"Tigerstar terrorized the clans for generations EVEN AFTER HE DIED. Sorry, he's worse.
Tigerstar is pretty much the worst of the baddies.
I'm reading the super edition SkyClan's Destiny. It's pretty good and it's nice and thick (450-something pages). Lots of Lampshade Hanging, though, mostly about some SkyClan cats' less-than-perfect names (Harveymoon, Tinycloud, Bouncefire, Snookpaw...) Most often these mentions will begin with, "What kind of name is [cat name], anyways?"
Overall, I like the character of Leafstar, she's likeable and makes a good main character. Poor Snookpaw's original kittypet name sucks terribly so no wonder he changed it. His owners must've either watched quite a bit of Jersey Shore, or were innocent and had no idea how bad the name was. His name is Snooky, duh.
edited 6th Sep '12 1:34:35 PM by QuarterDollar
Dawn Of The Clans 2 is coming December 2013, and will be called Thunder Rising. Sounds awesome.
"Oh great! Let's pile up all the useless cats and hope a tree falls on them!"I need to read Dawn Of The Clans. It sounds interesting. I have two books I plan on reading simultaneously (SkyClan's Destiny and Moonrise), and even then I doubt I'll be able to finish three freaking arcs before the new one is released.
edited 6th Sep '12 6:43:31 PM by QuarterDollar
So, how about those minor characters from other Clans? Sedgewhisker is one of my top ten favourite characters, Snowbird was awesome in The Last Hope, Hollowflight is adorable, and I ship Ivytail with Crowfrost.
"Oh great! Let's pile up all the useless cats and hope a tree falls on them!"Finished Forest of Secrets, and I guess I'll have to get used to Fireheart being hit with the stupid stick whenever there's a mystery to unravel, but I don't care, because the side characters are awesome. Especially Yellowfang. Yellowfang is the shiz. Joseph Campbell can take a long walk off a short pier; if this series followed Yellowfang since, say, the time of Raggedstar's death, it would be a masterpiece. (So far. I imagine she gets a little too peripheral by the next book, which would rather offset the part where Tigerclaw's backstabbitude would have come off as a decent plot twist. We'll see.)
Hail Martin Septim!I've said it before and I'll say it again. LOUDBELLY.
My stance on the first arc is that the plot is pretty generic, and Fireheart is a boring character, but the worldbuilding and characterization of the supporting characters is absolutely amazing, and makes it worth reading. Yellowfang is also my favourite character in the first arc. She's even getting a Super Edition called Yellowfang's Secret, which follows her from birth to some unspecified time period.
Also, the characterization of the point of view characters is vastly improved in the future arcs. Characters like Jayfeather, Dovewing, and Ivypool have well-written personalities, vibrant character arcs, and make plenty of mistakes along with their successes (meanwhile, the only thing Fireheart ever does wrong in the first arc is getting caught). Also, Hollyleaf is an utterly brilliant deconstruction of Fireheart, whose character arc needs to be read to be believed.
I still need to reread The New Prophecy sometime. It's the only arc I haven't fully reread.
"Oh great! Let's pile up all the useless cats and hope a tree falls on them!"A new e-book called Mistystar's Omen is out. Also, we're getting a print compilation of the e-books sometime in 2013. YES!
"Oh great! Let's pile up all the useless cats and hope a tree falls on them!"Fireheart isn't that boring,and he seems to be the only protagonist doing the right thing in and of itself,and even then he got called out for being so soft-hearted. He's also the only protagonist that was the Blue Oni instead.
Every other frickin' protagonist is just so selfish (The T Pot trio,Leafpool in her chapters) or too lawful (Every TNP protagonist that isn't Squirrelflight)
Maybe I'll give this prologue arc a chance,maybe it'll clean the mess that every book after Starlight has been,from the Tribe's Jumping the Shark status,the whole characterizations of Daisy and Onewhisker. The only good things since Hawkfrost died was Sol and Graystripe returning
However maybe this 5th arc will bring back the hardness the original series had [Lets face it every leader would go batcrap crazy if Blackstar tried to exile Wind Clan,they were just disturbed originally],then I can still call Discontinuity to everything after Graystripe's return [which should've happened in Sunset anyway to end the damn thing]
Luminous beings are we, not this crude matterGood, 'cause I don't have a Kindle.
I hope so. The Original Arc was the best out of them all imo.
Bah. I loved OotS although Hollyleaf's return was way too obvious (Never Found the Body, eh?) and I actually didn't like the earlier books as much. As for TNP...yeah, it wasn't too good.
edit: TNP is actually the codeword for PoT, which is what I meant to say. /facepalm
edited 21st Sep '12 5:00:16 PM by Troliolio
Really? Personally I would have to say that Power of Three/Omen of the Stars are my favorite story arcs. Still need to actually finish Omen of the Stars though as I have yet to read the last book.
I also like Power of Three and Omen of the Stars the best. The characterization and development of the heroes is top notch, and it deconstructs much of the elements that the series has gone out of its way to set up.
I hope that Thunder is a full deconstruction of Firestar. We've already seen how blindly following the Code can turn out with Hollyleaf, but Firestar's philosophy has some serious problems with it. It would be fantastic to see it turned on its head in Dawn of the Clans.
Also, The Sun Trail is about how several cats from the Ancients follow the rays of the setting sun in hope that it will lead them to a paradise. (That being the Old Forest.) They've never seen twolegs, roads, cars, or many of the other things of the world before, so it will be interesting to see how they react. I hope the cats who go on the journey are Thunder, Lightning(tail), Wind, River, Shadow, and Sky. It would be cool to see them as friends before they became rivals.
"Oh great! Let's pile up all the useless cats and hope a tree falls on them!"(Sorry for double post.)
Yellowfang's Secret, a Yellowfang based spinoff is out today. I already read it and found it lackluster, but if you like ShadowClan it's worth checking out.
"Oh great! Let's pile up all the useless cats and hope a tree falls on them!"Hmm, I'll wait till it hits libraries.
Also, I heard that the Erins wrote a book in the style of their other titles about dogs. That idea sounds reprehensible (the Seekers books were already a bit much), but I don't really know if it's true.
It's true, but it's not being written by the Erins; it has a new author using the same pen name. The title is Survivors.
Oh gosh. After the End With Dogs! Even Seekers at least made an iota of sense underneath all that Green Aesop.
Okay, maybe I'm being a little harsh, considering that I've never even seen it. But I still don't think it's my thing (I'm a cat person, after all ).
edited 9th Oct '12 5:01:58 PM by Troliolio
From the excerpt-dog I read, it was pretty bad-dog. (No really. "The sun-dog was shining.")
"Oh great! Let's pile up all the useless cats and hope a tree falls on them!"The characterizations absolutely suck in everything after TNP,that's why I gave up.
The Grey-and-Grey Morality is very horribly applied,Onestar is a Jerkass,Squirrelflight is literally all over the place. The three are barely sympathetic. There are too many characters to still keep track of,making them one-note. And Firestar forgot that Star Clan can only watch
No no TNP and TOS still have the best plot and characterizations,... more specifically the first half of TNP.
Luminous beings are we, not this crude matterBahahahahahaha...that is too hilarious.
Eh, it's not so bad. I read the books mainly when I'm bored. They're not high art or anything, but nonetheless I've stuck with them since I started reading in fourth grade (wow, has it really been that long?).
Just rereading scenes from The Last Hope. Oh StarClan, I forgot how awesome Mothwing was.
Anyway, my top ten favourite characters in the series are, in no particular order:
- Jayfeather
- Ivypool
- Shredtail
- Sol
- Mapleshade
- Yellowfang
- Sedgewhisker
- Berrynose
- Squirrelflight
- Hailstar
EVERYONE'S better than Tigerstar.