Why “The Prophecies Begin” is my favorite series by Icechill

Icechill explains why The Prophecies Begin is their favourite series – what do you think?

* Spoilers for The Prophecies Begin! * (obviously)

Ello there, I’m Icechill! You can call me by any pronoun you’d like. I’ve been a Warriors fan for quite a while, but I always return to the very first series, The Prophecies Begin (or TPB for short) in favor of other series. In my opinion, the setting of the Clans and the forest was brilliant, and much, much better than the lake setting in future books.

(Disclaimer: This is all my opinion! I’m not saying that loving the lake setting is wrong, I’m simply stating my opinion because, let me be real here, we all love to talk about Warriors.)

Starting from the very first book of Warriors, Into the Wild, we get thrown into this hostile, unfamiliar environment with strange, monster-like creatures on roads and hissing cats from the shadows. The tension between cats from different Clans is much stronger than in all of the other series. Personally, I’ve never really liked the idea that “all clans must become more peaceful and nicer to each other”. In the first series, each Clan was almost like different cultures, each having unique ways of hunting and each worshipping Starclan in a different way (of course, this changed after the Tribe of Rushing Water).

Around the third and fourth series, the Clans really never grow back into their previous, more hostile selves. Cats welcomed other cats onto their territories, forbidden romances tying Clans closer together. Mistystar and Onestar being leaders and both once being very close friends with Firestar made Riverclan and Windclan less of a threat in the coming books. The only real drama during Gatherings was petty squabbles, and brief clashes of war that was either created or interrupted by outside forces.

After the first series, the evil villains stopped coming from within the Clans and started coming from outside the Clans. The first series had Brokenstar, Blackfoot, Clawface, Tigerstar, Darkstripe. The only villain that was previously a rouge was Scrouge, who I don’t count for having basically absolutely no character development or even a character, really, in the books (but he does evenually get to tell his story in the manga books). The first series was all about the Clans, and the conflict within them. Leaders clashing, forbidden romances, the fierce upholding of the Code. As the prequel series stated, a Clan is a group of cats who have such a close bond of kinship to one other that a ‘rouge group’ is simply not a good enough name.