Top 5 favorite Warrior Cats of Vicky Holmes

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Transcript Hello, and welcome to the Warriors hub website. I’ve been invited to talk about my top five Warriors characters today. I’m Vicky, by the way, I don’t work on the current series, but I created the original books. Now, it’s always very hard for me to find my top five characters. They change in a day-to-day moment. Today my top five characters are mostly she-cats, which suggests I’m going through a bit of a feminist phase, but I will say that my absolute number one is Ravenpaw. That’s because he’s the cat that’s most like me, so I really feel like I understand him. He’s a little bit shy, and a bit awkward in social surroundings, and he loves to make up stories. Writing his farewell, in one of the shorter stories, was a real gift for me and best of all, I got to quote an actual line from a Marvel movie*. Brownie points if you can spot it. My next favorite character is Cinderpelt. She’s the cat I’d most like to be friends with, I think. And the thing I like about her is that she really wanted to be a warrior, and she was working so hard as Firestar’s apprentice, then, of course, she had the accident and she had to become a medicine cat. And even though she wasn’t naturally talented, she was the best medicine cat she could be, I really admire her for that. Now, the thing I love about her is that she was always in love with Firestar that she never breathed a word. I love some doomed romance. Number three on my list today is Mothwing. This might seem like a slightly odd choice. She’s not really a central character as such, but I’m really interested in religion and faith, and what the cats believe and how that makes them act. And Mothwing is an example of a good atheist. She isn’t clanborn, she doesn’t believe in StarClan, and yet she becomes a medicine cat. Okay, she was manipulated into that by Hawkwing, her brother**, but she really does her best, and I think she is an excellent example of how a cat can live the values of the warrior code and embody exactly what StarClan would want them to be without having that nugget of faith. I think that’s a very interesting contrast to cats who do believe in StarClan but don’t necessarily behave like it. Fourth cat on my list today is Squirrelflight. Now, Squirrelflight and I have something in common. We both have the great privilege of raising children that are not biologically ours. And this was really important to me when I wrote Squirrelflight’s story. It becomes very autobiographical in parts. Especially the bit where she’s on top of the burning cliff and Ashfur is threatening to throw her children off because he wants to hurt her by destroying the things she loves most. And to save them, she says, ‘I don’t love them. They’re not mine, you can kill them if you wish,’ and that is such a powerful moment because, I know, we all know, that Squirrelflight loves those kits more than her own life, and so there’s a little piece of me in there, in that moment. Interestingly,

that scene came to me before I started to write the whole of that arc, and so, the whole six books were built around that moment. Finally, the cat I chose today is Yellowfang. She’s feisty, and she says what you want, and you know, in a bad mood I could always write her very well. And also she’s the reverse of Squirrelflight, she has raised a son and he’s just disappointed her and betrayed her and become so wicked that she kills him in the end because that is the right thing to do. And her final scene with Brokenstar, one of the very earliest scenes I ever wrote, was incredibly powerful because I had to really think how could a mother get to this point. So, that’s today’s five cats, lots of me in there and a sneaking admiration, always, for Cinderpelt. Thank you.

*”But there is a secret that I have kept from you without meaning to: I have always been a warrior.” —Ravenpaw, Ravenpaw’s Farewell Ch.10 **She means Hawkfrost