The series has quickly and consistently put out content every year for over two decades.

No matter what the quality of any individual book is, the quantity of material they have,

the number of characters and plots they have explored, and the number of expansions they

have made to the world are too vast for any other member of the genre to match, at least

so far.

To keep up that pace, Warriors has always had to rely on a team of people to conceive

of and write the books, distinctly separating those jobs in almost all cases, and that team

has only grown with time to include comic artists and writers, artists for special books,

more ghost writers, and many more editors since Victoria Holmes left.

That does mean that we as readers always have a lot of material to draw from for discussion,

art, roleplay, games, writing, or analysis depending on our preferences and investment

levels, but it also means that over 20 years and many, many people giving their input to

the canon, we have had to grapple with several different sources of information.

Were there a single, definitive source that the various creators had made from which to

gauge all existing lore, characters, relationships, and otherwise in the world, in other words,

a series bible, some of the problems we have grown into could have been avoided, but by

now, the damage has long since been done, and we have to live with the contradictions

our disparate sources have made.

Many, many books across the series have needed to or decided to retcon in elements that weren't

discussed or were actively contradicted in previous material, when the new idea would

better fit the story they were currently writing.

In addition, even outside the books, various members of the Erin team have said things

about the characters or world that weren't in the published material and often weren't

agreed upon by the team, instead being thought of hastily in the moment.

All these different sources: different people and even different books have been considered

canon at different times over the years.

As a fandom, many of us, especially those less invested in the books, get our information

second or third hand from artists or writers who have already reimagined or invented materials,

or from people who didn't check the original source for their own information.

But even when we look at the same canon published material, we can still interpret it differently,

especially considering what other pieces of canon we may or may not have read for context,

and whatever ideas we may get can then spread among the rest of the fandom and be considered

as commonplace an idea as something in a published work.

All of this is undoubtedly confusing, which is why, today, I would like to go through

a map of sorts to show how Warriors information gets to us, and from there, maybe we'll

be able to figure out what to do with it.

Starting at the top, we have the elements that go into a published work of Warriors.

There are, of course, a lot of factors, but I have split it broadly into three categories:

Editor Notes, the extremely lengthy guidelines the editors come up with for the plots, character

arcs, lore decisions, and so on for a book they're currently writing, Author Interpretations,

the small amounts of personal choice or interpretation of a character that ghostwriters are able

to inject while fleshing out the editors' outline, and Publisher Guidelines, whatever

the needs of the publisher and team might be absent of what they would like to put into

a story.

Putting all of these together is already bringing in a lot of voices, but they do work together,

and it is still a relatively small and finite number of people.

Once the book is published, though, things become much less contained.

First, sometimes even before the books come out, fans of all ages will summarize the story,

or parts of the story, for other fans to get a sense of what happens.

These summaries are almost certain to contain bias of some sort, be it leaving out some

details the summarizer didn't care about, focusing positively or negatively on a character

or plot they have strong feelings about, or adding in or taking away details they genuinely

didn't remember because they aren't summarizing the whole story word by word.

Despite this, these summaries are, for many, the only ways they consume certain books,

either because they didn't have interest in this entry to begin with or because the

summary itself told them all they needed to know to make their decision.

Off of these summaries, fan discussions can erupt which may or may not end up accurately

discussing the book thanks to the inherent bias of the source.

There have been times where discourse has erupted over something that, as it turns out,

was never in the books to begin with.

My best advice around these is to take any summary with a grain of salt.

No matter how intent on honesty the summarizer is, avoiding bias in a situation like this

is impossible and there will almost certainly be some context somewhere that you are missing,

context that could make a situation in the books either better or worse.

Aside from general summaries, several people make active reviews of the books as they come

out, giving their opinions on how the story is coming together, what they think of the

characters, plot, and lore, and how it fits into the overall world and narrative of Warriors,

given what they can remember coming before.

These tend to be significantly more biased than summaries, by design, and they rarely

even claim to include a comprehensive look at the whole story.

Instead they tend to follow specific plot threads, characters, or details that the reviewer

has interest in and can fold in content from elsewhere in the series, personal theories,

or even fandom jokes and ideas if the reviewer finds them to be relevant.

People who view these reviews will get one person's take on the published material

and almost always will get several true facts on it, but without having read the material

itself it is hard to say you have a clear view of it, and especially hard to form an

opinion of your own distinct from what the reviewer thinks.

Out of these reviews, analyses, or theories, fan discourse can sprout up among larger groups

of people, many of whom will not have read the books.

This isn't a problem, and I'm not telling anyone they are wrong for not having read

a book, but it should be obvious from here how easy it would be for details to become

distorted, inflated, erased, or even made up over time.

It isn't just individuals who review or analyze books, though.

Entire groups on various platforms will often discuss the books as they come out, and those

discussions will almost inevitably end up focusing on a few key talking points and land

on a few key opinions over months or even years of discussing the new materials with

each release, leading to entire sectors of the fandom having precise, generally uniform

conceptions of different books or characters and often having little contact with other

spaces where opinions might differ.

Having two people who only know the books from these discussions, but on different platforms,

speak to each other can often sound like these people couldn't have possibly read the same

series, and it is where many, though not all heated arguments sprout from.

On a lighter note, the published material also inspires plenty of fandom material…but

as you can see, those have their own categories, so we'll come back to this later.

With the published material through, it's time to take a look at the second source…author

statements.

These can be made on a forum, on facebook or instagram, during an interview, in a letter,

or otherwise, but what binds these statements together is that they were made by one member

of the Erin Hunter team alone and often were made on a whim in answer to a spontaneous

question, considering only their opinion in the moment and not the long term ramifications

or researching what had been written before to choose an appropriate answer.

From my point of view, which like anyone else's is not an objective one, these are not as

strong a source as anything in a published book would be.

Even the people who made the statements don't have infinite faith in them, as in cases where

authors later realized the implications of their words and went back on them, and many

that weren't retracted simply never came to pass in the books or were even contradicted

in the material we had.

These statements aren't often even seen by a wide body of people.

They aren't published in many places, aren't advertised, and sometimes are only shown to

a few select people who were relevant to the initial question.

In a series made entirely by one person, comments like this could have more, though not total,

canonical weight thanks to being followed by more people and only filtering through

the mind and memory of one person, but in this series with so many people working together,

I honestly believe the only reason these statements have held power as long as they have is because

of…well, we'll get back to that.

First though it's time to go into what seems to be the modern version of author statements

in the Warriors World: content on the Warriors website, the new version that came out in

2019.

The website gets content from three main sources.

The first is the “Story Team,” a label members of the Erin Hunter team use when speaking

about their reasons for writing certain things in the past or teasing ideas to come, along

with occasionally speaking on specific in-story topics.

Considering this comes straight from people who actually write or conceive of the stories,

these tend to be the most valuable in terms of telling what is true in the Warriors universe,

but even then, like with Author Statements, we don't know that every member of the team

agreed to anything said by the “Story Team,” and anything said on the website isn't guaranteed

to be in the published books.

The second is the “Editors,” staff who work specifically on the website that we,

as a general audience, know little to nothing about.

They put up articles on different Warriors topics and keep the website updated with announcements,

quotes, and quizzes for people who follow the site regularly but there isn't much

they can offer in terms of deciding what is canon for the books, since they have no direct

relation to them.

The third is the fans, some who are sought out to provide their input on different topics

and many more who are showcased for their art, fan theories, or otherwise as a tribute

to the fandom that has stayed alive for so long.

It is genuinely great to see so many fans get a chance to see their hard work recognized

and for some to provide their own thoughts on the books, but this position doesn't

hold any sway over the books themselves.

However, all three of these sources are displayed on the same website, and like the published

material, anything published on the website can be and is discussed, reviewed, joked about,

and otherwise by the fandom outside the website.

The Erins themselves also go to the website sometimes to pick up what has been said about

the books and to canonize certain things that weren't stated to be true before, which

is a dangerous venture if that information wasn't thoroughly checked over first.

And of course, a lot of things that go on the website wind up on one other platform.

It's time to discuss the Warriors Wiki.

Let me clear right off the bat that this is not going to be a criticism of the platform.

A lot of work from a lot of volunteers goes into maintaining that site and it is, at this

point, an irreplaceable resource.

I don't agree with every decision they make, but that is true for just about every group

ever, and what I will talking about today is how the Wiki is used.

The wiki is most similar to wikipedia, as it name would imply.

What it does is it collects and stores information in one easy to reach place rather than forcing

you to track down each individual source.

It is not a source by itself but it does gather and, importantly, cite the sources for all

the information it has listed.

If you remember reading that Leafpool has a white chest and paws but don't see it

listed in the allegiances, you can go to the wiki and scroll over the handy citation to

see exactly where that information came from, in this case a specific page of a specific

book.

Likewise, if the information you're looking at is cited as being from a facebook post

or letter dated back to 2012, you can learn that and judge for yourself how much the source

holds up.

The issue isn't that the wiki includes information like this; that is its best attribute as a

site.

The issue is just the same as what your teachers may have said for wikipedia: the Warriors

wiki itself is not a source, and you need to look at their sources to know how credible

your information is.

It can become an issue, then, when analysis, stories, animation, discussion, and otherwise

from the fandom use the information without critically looking into or sharing where that

information came from beyond “the wiki,” as it spreads this information to people who

won't take the time to look up every piece of information they heard mentioned by another

fan and causes random debunked ideas from a decade back to be settled as truth in the

fandom consciousness.

That, though, is still far better than what else we know to be happening with the wiki:

the Warriors website and even the published material using the wiki as its source.

The Warriors website doesn't cite sources for anything, but it does uncritically take

family tree elements among other things from the information on the wiki without noticing

that, for instance, those facts came from a source that was decanonized years ago, or

that it came from an author statement made on a whim before the author in question realized