August 19, 2019
This section goes in depth with how to apply common tropes in Warriors to your own fanfictions. It also discusses how to incorporate said tropes without copying the scenarios from canon outright. This is not a guide on what tropes to use and when, nor will it give general knowledge on those outside Warriors.
Tropes are elements in fiction that are common enough to be seen in multiple works. For example, if real life was a fictional work, then eating would be a trope. It is done differently depending on who and where you are in the world, but it is common enough to exist across the entire 'genre' of real life.
There is a reason common tropes are used in works of fiction. Whether they be movies, books, TV shows, graphic novels, these tropes serve to unite individual stories into a genre. It is why romances usually have love triangles, or why action movies have well-timed hazards. Without these tropes, these genres would be hard to distinguish from each other. And without subtropes, works within these genres would tell the same story. A common problem in literature, however, is a genre that relies too heavily on the common form of its tropes to tell its story. This is amplified for YA and fantasy fiction, and even more so for the fanfiction that it spawns. So let us delve into the tropes of Warriors and see what makes them work so that we can write better fanfics from it.
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WHY WARRIORS HAS ITS TROPES
Warriors, like other long, sprawling fictional works, use many tropes to tell its story. Most of the ones used are sub-tropes of the common ones to keep things consistent. This creates its own problems sometimes.
Some of the most common tropes in Warriors are the animal characters (obviously), "blank-slate protagonist" (Firestar), the no-frills setting, nature vs nurture, forbidden love, and life being unfair. Obviously, these tropes are common because they appear so often between all of the arcs and side stories. Not every single story needs every one of them for it to be common usage. These are a few of the main tropes that the Erins used for the framework of Warriors. So why these over other tropes? Our blank-slate Firestar allows us to easily relate to his motives and desires, as they are the same as basic human instinct. The common settings (a forest, a lake, foothills, etc.) let the young target audience easily imagine the details (as I discussed in a section dedicated to setting). Tropes like nature vs nurture, forbidden love, and unfairness are added to help the series stand on its own, and it stands pretty far apart from other animal stories; it has more in common with Star Wars then it does with, say, White Fang or Animal Farm.
This whole section exists because the main tropes used in Warriors are often overused or exaggerated greatly by the fandom. The same goes for any other fiction/fanfiction relationship. Fanfics have a reputation for going overboard when following canon tropes. They exaggerate them, revolve whole stories around single ones, and mash them up with other tropes to create a monstrosity of a story. Depending on which tropes are amplified, a Warriors fanfic can be overly violent, dark, or sad for no good reason. Sometimes, the Erins overuse their tropes. Most of the time, fanfic writers do.
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CANON TROPES IN FANFICTION
When it comes to fanfiction, we tend to take the canon tropes and overuse, overcomplicate, and bash them together to make our stories. It is not like other YA fandoms do not do this, and it is not like we are professionals or anything. Still, it can get out of control most of the time for a few key reasons.
First, the tropes used in canon tend to be overused or over exaggerated in fanfics. I bet you have noticed how in almost all fanfics there is some kind of omen from StarClan, or friends from enemy territory are made, or how they always seem to start as kits. But not every canon book has a prophecy, and not every main character started out as a kit. Writers tend to write what they know, and if these tropes stuck with them better than most then they will use them. Other times it is simply their favorite aspect of canon, so they exaggerate it.
One other reason could be that they are trying to use as many canon tropes as-is as possible to attempt to make a better Warriors story. As with all fanfics, some remnants of the canon series must exist. If we use no tropes from canon, than our fanfic strays too far away to even be considered AU; it might as well be an original book at that point. And once you have made an original cat book, this guide stops helping you. There are those out there who believe filling a fanfic with exaggerated canon tropes is the only way to justify said fanfic to the audience. After all, casual fans of Warriors do not read fanfiction.
This is not a trend unique to the Warriors fandom, however. Across the many other YA fandoms, the most popular stories tend to be the ones that stay the closest to the canon, or exaggerate one single aspect of it. Many of these core and hardcore fans are not fans of the series as a whole, but of a few notable peices of it. Some Warriors fans may like that the story takes place away from human civilization. Others might find the religious-based politics mixed with the disadvantaged life circumstances (i.e. no trade, science, etc) intriguing. Most just like that the story is about cats. These fans tend to be the reason that the grammatically questionable trope-filled mess you just read is way more popular than what you would say is a 'good' story.
All of this just comes down to identifying your audience and what kind of fan you want to write to. Most want to see familiar tropes. That is fine. Some want to see something different. Even fewer want to see something that pushes the concept beyond its canon limits. And many want to read about cats having human-like sex. Your story's popularity somewhat depends on your target audience, or the audience it picks up. But what if you just want to write your best? What if you want to actually target an audience and taper expectations?
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USING TROPES BEYOND EXPECTATIONS
No, it is not just figuratively and literally writing a better story.
While quite a few readers in the fandom prefer close adherence to canon formulas or physically intimate romances, it does not bar you from doing something different. Tropes are not something you have to pick and use as is; you can mix, match, and alter them as you see fit. This allows you to write the story you really want, assuming you are not writing the standard Warriors fanfic. But for our example, we should use an expected trope. How can we make "kit-to-leader" different?
Our goal here is not to change the trope, but to alter it to our liking. One way to reliably do this is to trim the trope down, taking what we want from it and leaving or incorporating the rest elsewhere. Personally, I find the kit stage useless in most fanfics, so I want to remove that and start my protagonist as an apprentice. But to retain our trope, I still want their kit-hood to be an important part of the story. Our main character could always reminisce about it. StarClan could revert them to this form in their dreams. They could forget about it, with clanmates hiding a terrible secret. As long as we show the stage at which they were nothing (hence the 'zero-to-hero' aspect of this trope), the trope stays intact.
Furthermore, we can mix this trope with others to make a new variation of the standard. Starting as an apprentice is enough for me, but you want more. Nothing is stopping you from taking a trope you like and mixing it with our common one. For the sake of the example, you choose to mix our "kit-to-leader" trope with the bleak undertones of a grimdark world. Now to successfully mix, you ideally make an outline and plan this out before writing a single word. Have to make sure you did not try to mix oil and water. But your grimdark rise through the ranks works. Seniors die off unexpectedly and unfairly, leaving junior cats like the protagonist to fill spaces they are not ready for physically or mentally.
Congratulations. We have taken the standard "kit-to-leader" trope and made it into what we wanted. There are so many more ways to mix this, and many other, tropes the way we want while leaving the core of them whole. Nondestructive altering will leave us well in the green for what constitutes a Warriors fanfic.
Now, there are other ways to alter, replace, or use tropes in unexpected ways. Most will not, of course. But if you want to, nothing is stopping you from making seemingly impossible combinations. This can be especially useful for drawing in those readers who do not want to read about not-Firestar leading not-ThunderClan against not-Tigerstar.
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IN CONCLUSION...
When writing Warriors fanfics, we do not have to stick to a copy-paste formula for using tropes, nor do we have to exaggerate them for the sake of views (unless we want to, of course). To put it bluntly, most fans prefer the reliably processed foods as opposed to doing more for less. There is nothing wrong with that so long as you know your target audience and what kind of story you want to write.
Tropes are the core of our fanfiction. Balance is not necessary, but knowing how to manipulate it can make for some truly memorable stories.
- Tyto