Firestar's Allegory of the Cave

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there is a very interesting quirk that i've noticed in the warrior cats fandom.

now, i don't really pay attention to fandom in modern days. that said, i read the books growing up, i drew fanart, i roleplayed! even as recently as, like, 2018. and i have a lot of friends who still have their fingers on the pulse of the modern wc fan-community at large. so, needless to say, i still hear about ripples of it.

something that i noticed more frequently in recent years, though, is something that most people in the fandom might not realize is a 'tell'.

did you know? some people never read the books, but still enjoy the warrior cats media. there are a sizeable amount whose only exposure to the "books" is written guides to the way the worldbuilding is set up, stuff like clan structure, tradition, medicinal herbs, and a sort of oral history of the biggest events in the books, at most.

i'm not here to say they're lesser fans. i think that's a great way to get into it. honestly. the books are not that well written; i will admit this, as the kind of person who enjoys the concept more than the actual thing. i think roleplayers put the erins to shame in a lot of respects. not only do they make more lgbt characters than the erins could possibly comprehend, they also put together plots that are so incredibly foreign to the book material that they're actually GOOD. like, there's some bonkers shit that happens in fan-stories and roleplays that are pulled off so much better - and tackled in more comprehensive fashion - than the books would ever consider.

the funny thing, though, i'm getting to it.

browsing sites like toyhou.se, i noticed a pattern. see, ever since the dawn of the fandom, people have certainly punctuated names in a unique way. most of the time, for example, the cat names are two word parts put together, such as Firestar - fire and star - or Leafpool - leaf and pool. the first word is capitalized, no space between, etc. however, i did occasionally see the names punctuated or capitalized differently for readability purposes. ie, i had a dyslexic friend who would often capitalize both words (FireStar, LeafPool), or put a space between them (Fire Star or Leaf Pool).

and so, i noticed a similar naming scheme on toyhouse. however it was a little.... different.

i would see names with really interesting punctuation. oftentimes it wasn't even consistent between members of the same story, clan, roleplay, etc. a name like Flame'pelt. a name like Swift`fur. it was usually something like an apostrophe, in addition to the previous capitalization in-word (FlamePelt, SwiftFur). and it bothered me, for a while, because i figured it was so consistent across fans of certain age groups that there must BE a reason.

so, as a well-adjusted adult does, i went ahead and asked, politely, why one user did it. because, well, you never learn anything if you don't ask.

(and i made sure to make it known that i wasn't judging them for it. cuz, obviously, this is part of a larger pattern, and it's possible they didn't realize it was abnormal.)

the reason? Roblox.

see, roblox has been a hub for warrior cat rp for years, over a decade, certainly. however, it especially started booming when WC:UE, the officially endorsed roblox wc fangame, became popular.

also well-known is roblox's tendency to over-censor words. even words that really don't need censored, or have no bad words at all within them, even coincidentally. (iirc, they have some sort of ai or bot that does this, so there's not always a rhyme or reason aside from Vibes.)

so, when warrior cat roleplayers found themselves at this wall, they did what any online roleplayer has done in the face of a lexicon or limited chat: they added punctuation.

like, for years, people have used punctuation to circumvent word filters. this has been true since the invention of word filters, though they certainly evolved over time and incorporate more 'wildcard' characters than the past.

but it explains... so much. these players, the ones who knew the game, went, oh, okay, well, it's just one more thing to explain to newcomers. cat names are structured this way, with the apostrophe. that's just how it is. and, you know, the new players didn't notice at all that there was any sort of circumvention occurring here. it was, to them, how the source material must have done it.

and no one corrected them, or could correct them, because of the way the filters blocked anything "weird". and that's what makes me lose my mind the most. there's no way they could have known without having read the source material.

and ever since finding this out from the person who explained it to me, i can't help but see it all the time. and it is a massive tell when you know what it means. it means this person's first - and maybe only - experience to the source material was through users running it through a bot sieve and making beautiful bread with it. apt metaphor, since it's cats, i guess.

and now you can see it, too. let it bury itself in the crevasses of your mind for many moons.