that's something you want to avoid, step away now. The fifth book of A Starless Clan, Wind,  

is now only a month away, and before that book  makes whatever impact it will on the overall story  

and characters, I wanted to take stock of the  wonderful things this arc has already done, and  

why I personally, at this point, consider it on  track to be on of my favorite arcs in the series.

Let's start off with the main new feature  of any main series arc: the protagonists,  

and specifically, I'll begin with  our darling little Riverclan gal:  

Frostpaw. The medicine cat protagonist has been  a staple in every arc after the first, save for  

Dawn of the Clans where medicine cats didn't yet  exist, and in the last three arcs especially,  

with the new team in charge, that protagonist  having a difficult connection to Starclan, a clan  

that doesn't trust them, and a generally anxious  and reactive rather than proactive personality has  

become the standard. Frostpaw was set up to, at  this point, be a boring retread of several ideas  

that were done badly to begin with. But she has  managed to set herself apart in a few ways. First  

is that cats she actively trusted and loved ended  up being the ones manipulating her, rather than a  

phantom Starclan spirit or a cat she barely knew.  Second is that she actually forms positive and  

sustaining relationships, as well, with cats who  she can trust. But third, and most importantly,  

she has an arc around learning to trust herself  and balance the needs of her clan with her own  

need to be safe, happy, and comfortable in her  own skin. After a moon or more of distrusting  

everyone around her in case they turned out to  be a murderer, her resolution came in going away  

from the clans to learn about meditation and grow  a sense of safety with the cats there so that she  

was capable of acknowledging the harm Curlfeather  and Splashtail had done to her. The solution was  

one she actively took part in and grew from  internally rather than just letting the source  

of her problems fade away externally. Frostpaw  is not the same cat now that she was at the  

beginning of River, and that's great. I just hope  this growth keeps up for the rest of the story.

Sunbeam is up next, who also looked like she might  head in a poor direction when it appeared like she  

would fill the role of she-cat who falls for  a tom and loses her personality and arc in the  

process. However, she managed to begin as and  remain a compelling and complex protagonist,  

definitely my favorite without outshining  the other two. From my point of view,  

the biggest advantage of Warriors as a series has  always been that the large and closely-connected  

casts provide chances for plenty of engaging  relationships, rivalries, torn loyalties,  

and growth through those relationships and  trials. Sunbeam takes full advantage of that,  

having a story almost entirely focused on her  personal relationships rather than an overarching  

plot. She began in a comfortable relationship with  Blazefire as an established warrior hoping to be  

a mentor, lost that mate to her best and most  reckless friend, and shut herself off despite  

prods from both Gullswoop and her mother. Then,  she found Nightheart on their quick journey and,  

even if they didn't make a strong connection  then, and the relationship seemed fairly shallow,  

she came to appreciate him when  he stayed in Shadowclan with her,  

and eventually chose to leave all of her crumbling  and destructive relationships in Shadowclan to go  

to Thunderclan with him. This too, could have  been a point where they stripped her of her  

personality and arc and made her nothing but  a mate, but instead they actively chose this  

moment to remove Nightheart from the lake and had  Sunbeam forge new relationships and establish a  

sense of self in a new clan on her own. She  and Finchlight developed a good friendship,  

she had a fiery rivalry with Cherryfall, and got  to briefly live out her original goal of being a  

mentor with one of her unique challenges: teaching  the kits to hunt in a day. I'm just crossing  

my fingers that this lovely characterization  and culture keeps up when Nightheart returns.

Speaking of the man himself, he is easily the  biggest shock to me. With his story in the  

first and especially second books, it looked  like he would be following some of the worst  

Warriors tropes of being a self-centered  and volatile tom who is only warped into  

being sympathetic to the reader by making every  cat around him, especially all of the she-cats,  

act needlessly and illogically cruel, or at  least making the protagonist think of them in  

that way. Not to mention, he was following the  same loathed-by-me pattern as Rootspring in that  

he fell for the older and more emotionally  mature she-cat across the border who was  

just getting over a lost love and didn't return  his feelings until late into the relationship,  

at which point it felt more like stealing the  she-cat's agency and dignity for the sake of  

the young tom's satisfaction or arc. However,  Nightheart has managed to surprise me. Once he  

left Thunderclan out of blind love and spite,  he had time in Shadowclan to become more mature  

and develop a genuine rather than superficial  connection with Sunbeam. I still wish Warriors in  

general was better about showing gradual rather  than sudden changes in their character arcs,  

which is an issue I have with both Nightheart  and Frostpaw, but it was a nice direction to see  

him grow in, and it was made all the better  when he then returned to his clan and had a  

resolution with his mother where he got an  apology from her and apologized himself for  

assuming the worst of her, which retroactively  make the earlier books somewhat better as we  

now know this to be the perspective of an angsty  teenager coloring the view of cats around him,  

rather than being exactly what the readers are  supposed to see the world like. He also had a  

nice friendship with Frostpaw on their journey,  dropping everything to help this stranger out and  

reaching out to her when he could. And uh,  like I said in regards to Sunbeam, I think  

getting him away from Sunbeam for this book was  the best decision they could have made once they  

moved her to Thunderclan. It helped them to each  spend time growing independently from each other  

rather than being established in this second half  of the arc to only be relevant as part of a pair.

Our protagonists aren't the only ones making  this arc great, either. Our antagonists are  

equally as intriguing. Curlfeather was a loving  but controlling and manipulative mother who  

wanted to use her daughter and get her into  a position of power in order to fulfill her  

ambitions and make herself Riverclan's leader.  Splashtail is a spunky and equally ambitious  

upstart who posed both as a loyal Riverclan  warrior, a supportive friend to Frostpaw,  

and a willing lackey to Curlfeather in order to  eventually subvert all of them and instate himself  

as Riverclan's de facto leader instead, even being  so young and without an apprentice. Berryheart is  

a volatile and bitter woman who hates the changes  to the code and the potential for outsiders to  

hurt the clans, as happened with Darktail when  she was younger. She is using her influence and  

seemingly righteous anger to not only go against  the code changes and anyone who uses them,  

but to ally with like-minded cats in an attempt  to plant a new leader in her own clan and show  

how easy the new code is to abuse. All three  have a large amount of active impact on the  

story and characters along with clear goals  that are revealed over time and underhanded  

actions they are willing to take to achieve those  ends. All three are also definitively clan cats  

with clan-related problems rather than being  another ambitious, cruel, or scorned outsider,  

which is a very welcome change. So far, with  Curlfeather killed and sent to the Dark Forest  

on the way to become leader and Berryheart's  plan foiled when Puddleshine turned out to  

be working against her, Splashtail is easily  succeeding the most, and none of their plans or  

actions have been the key driving focus of recent  books. However, in such a character-driven arc,  

I don't find that to be such a problem, and  one of the biggest things that makes these  

antagonists so engaging to me is that they all  have close relationships to our protagonists.

Berryheart is a demanding and sometimes  manipulative mother to her daughter, who often  

knows she is wrong but occasionally slips into her  rhetoric as well, when her friend seems to betray  

her or when the cat she was beginning to love back  leaves on a whim. Curlfeather and Splashtail both  

forcefully took up the role of Frostpaw's  confidant as a good mother or friend to the  

vulnerable and overwhelmed young medicine cat and  both became very trusted by her. Even outside of  

the antagonists, the clan culture among all three  protagonists' clans has been richer in this arc  

than it has been in a long time, arguably since  Power of Three. In addition to cats like Duskfur,  

Icewing, Lilyheart, Spireclaw, Fringewhisker,  Gullswoop, and other mostly-background characters  

having distinctive personalities and roles in  their clans and the story, the protagonists also  

have several important relationships outside of  romance that change and develop as time goes on.  

Sunbeam was best friends with Lightleap who has  become more reckless lately in response to her  

perceived cowardice in the last arc and was mates  with Blazefire who started to grow apart from her  

when he realized she was too uptight in comparison  to her friend. The three of them fragmented bit  

by bit until Blazefire and Lightleap became mates  instead and Sunbeam was left unhappy with both of  

them. Sunbeam's relationship with her new mate's  family, Sparkpelt and Finchlight in particular,  

is heartwarming, with Sparkpelt nearly adopting  her and standing up for her against her mother  

and Finchlight becoming her closest friend in  her new clan. Yet even in this clan, she and  

Cherryfall had a distinctive rivalry that Sunbeam  clashed against and worked through, and that was  

fun to see play out. Nightheart, as I mentioned,  has a complex and developing relationship with his  

family, and though I still wish he had shown his  friendship with Bayshine in more than one scene,  

his new friendship with Frostpaw is very sweet  and a rare occurrence given their complete lack  

of romance. Frostpaw also has a nice relationship  with Whistlepaw, even though they haven't spent  

many scenes together, amicable and with a fair  bit of trust and care, especially after Frostpaw  

was nearly murdered and Whistlepaw saved her and  snuck her away. The Erin team still hasn't made an  

effort to check past portrayals of characters,  especially more supportive or minor ones,  

to keep those personalities consistent, but they  have kept and, importantly, used, the ones they  

introduced in this arc which makes reading about  life in these clans so much more satisfying.

Another important factor is in how this arc has  carried over elements from A Vision of Shadows and  

especially The Broken Code, making it feel like  one continuous story about the lives of these  

clans. The changes to the code, mentioned but not  made explicit in the end of The Broken Code, are  

now the forefront of Berryheart's storyline and  have already caused three distinct couples to come  

together, two of which have been central focuses  to the story. Bramblestar was deeply affected by  

his experiences across all of The Broken Code and  it caused him to be a depressed, disconnected, and  

ineffective leader and eventually to step back,  using that new code again, and let Squirrelstar  

take charge, also giving both of them the chance  to have the calmest and most amicable dynamic  

they have *ever* had, yes including in The New  Prophecy and Power of Three. Squirrelstar is also  

a much more assertive, strong, and sometimes even  pushy leader thanks to her experiences effectively  

leading the clan in the last arc. Meanwhile  Ivypool, the new deputy, and Rootspring are more  

subtly affected by their grief over Bristlefrost's  death, even though neither have been especially  

prominent characters. Shadowsight has calmed down  since his time as a protagonist and became a good  

voice of reason friend to Sunbeam, and even the  usually disconnected events of A Vision of Shadows  

are relevant as they are Berryheart's  internal justification for her actions.

The pacing across this arc, so far,  is also the best it has been in years,  

as the mystery driving Riverclan's conflict  and the pieces in Shadowclan connected to  

it have been revealed slowly and has yet to be  totally resolved even at the end of the fourth  

book. All of the new team's arcs have been  distinctly divided into the first three books,  

where a planned conflict occurs and is resolved,  and a latter three books that tend to flounder in  

both direction and quality. This arc, even if it  messes up the last two books, has already broken  

that pattern, which is fantastic. It is a joy  to be this late in the arc and still be able to  

wonder what Splashtail will do now that he is in  charge, if Berryheart still has a part to play,  

what Lightleap was doing at the border  near Reedwhisker's death, how Frostpaw,  

and maybe the other protagonists, will solve their  issues, who Riverclan's new leader really will be,  

how Sunbeam and Nightheart will continue their  relationship, and so on. They even managed the  

phenomenal task of integrating super edition  material, from Riverstar's Home, nicely into  

a story, by using the Cats of the Park as a way  to teach Frostpaw about facing hard truths and  

developing self-esteem and confidence. With that  and the fact that the team has already stated they  

actively planned and are excited for the next  super edition, Ivypool's Heart, which will tie  

into the sixth book of this arc and involve her  grief over her daughter, I think it's safe to  

say we may still have things to look forward  to even now, though I don't want to jinx it.

To put it simply, I have loved this arc so far,  

and I hope it manages to stick the landing in  the last two books. Even if those disappoint me,  

however, I think I will still be able  to look fondly back on these four books  

for how many tired Warriors tropes they  have managed to break away from and how  

uniquely engaging it has managed to be. Good  luck, A Starless Clan. I'm rooting for you.

Thank you for watching, and always remember  that hope isn't always crushed. Sometimes,  

it's okay to be optimistic.