Warriors Fanfics: Specialized Writing Guide

Tropes and Warriors Fanfics

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.