oh my god i FINALLY drew something. a whole actual drawing. can my artblock be over now..........
anyways snowtuft is one of my FAVORITE warriors characters. i already liked him a lot in OOTS but once he became an actual CHARACTER with personality and wants and desires and the teeniest tiniest hints of what his life was like. he rocketed up to the top of my list. i love him.

i actually have a rant about the dark forest that i keep referring back to when i talk about snowtuft and the broken code arc as a whole:
the authors make an arc about the warrior code. the way it was abused to keep a terrible harmful person in power. everything in this arc leads up to the decision to change the warrior code, which is probably the most revolutionary change thats happened in the series since the move to the lake territories.

it feels like theres an undertone of Changing The Way Society Works. so when readers are introduced to concepts of dark forest cats regretting or not even being able to remember the things that got them there, its easy to assume theres also going to be an overhaul on how cats are sent to starclan/the dark forest.

but when the point in the story is actually reached, the handful of dark forest cats that are able to cross the starclan border to ask to be allowed in are denied. the message given in the final book is that the actions you make are set in stone. you cannot redeem yourself, even if youre remorseful, even if your punishment has lasted so long you cant even remember what you did. your immortal soul is trapped in the dark forest until you fade into nothingness.

gray wing says what someone does in death is irrelevant, and what they did in their life is what determines their place in either starclan or the dark forest. but when cats essentially continue to live in these afterlives, that doesnt make any sense. cats continue to have interactions and often affect the living world. their actions dont lose weight after they join an afterlife. theyre still themselves. its not like you get a reset on your bad actions counter after you die. “you did bad in life so no matter what happens after this youre in hell” is a nothing excuse

anyways. yeah. snowtuft! i like him. i like his character. im honestly not even mad that he dies in general, i just dont like the messaging surrounding his character with him dying on top of it. i dont like that he dies to save the protags and starclan still cant give a shit about him. they dont care about snowtuft or the still extant dark forest cats standing in front of them asking for a second chance. theyve never even met most of these cats and they still cast judgement on them and its weird! so many of these random dark forest cats are old spirits. no one knows who they are, and they probably dont even know anymore at this point. no one knows the circumstances of their placement in the dark forest but starclan cats that lived and died all within the series can continue a punishment they werent even alive to be aware of

oh fun fact about the design: i gave him the cheek scar as a reference to shion from no. 6! i absolutely love that anime and immediately took the opportunity to give this white furred scarred character a similar scar. in an earlier design i actually gave him shion's entire scar, snaking around his body as close to shion's ref as possible, but it came out kind of weird. the scar going over his shoulder is still in the same place as shion's, though!