A cat that, while trying to usurp power, attempted murder on three other cats. A cat that rejects their disabled child, and proceeds to go out of their way to abuse them for the rest of their life on account of them being disabled. A cat that threatens to set the children of someone who rejected him on fire. These are all cats that canonically made it to the “heaven” equivalent of the Warrior Cats book series.

Every couple of months or so the internet collectively recalls how weirdly horrifying the Warrior Cats book series was. But what is never brought up during these discussions is how, through inconsistent writing and generally poorly developed ideas, the Erin Hunter team accidentally created one of the most terrifying fictional religions in the media. 

For those who were invited to social functions throughout elementary school, imagine a group of authors trying to create a religion centered around ancestral veneration while being unable to relinquish the idea of a christian afterlife, therefore creating a cat heaven and a cat hell. If their religion was just that, it would be slightly more salvageable, but they go a step further by adding a cat equivalent of the Ten Commandments. The warped moral framework imposed by the Warrior Code leaves zero room for redemption, condemning violators to an inevitable descent into cat hell. 

These cat ancestors in StarClan are supposed to be treated as benevolent, all knowing entities, but they constantly make the most contradictory hypocritical decisions known to mankind. Those sentenced to cat hell to live alongside cats who have committed cat genocide and recruited child soldiers include: a cat that became upset at the fact she was suddenly and abruptly disabled, and a cat that did not save the lives of drowing kittens because she could not swim. One of the most ridiculous and outrageous moments in the book series is when a certain cat was put on trial by StarClan to decide whether or not she could enter cat heaven because she broke the Warrior Code, but only did so because her ancestors explicitly told her to do so.

With a seriously flawed judicial system, StarClans’s judgment is unfair and extremely biased. Not only that, but it is deliberately engineered to be so, as the judges in StarClan are seemingly selected based on their relationship with the defendant and if they have been in a situation similar to the defendant, forcing them to reveal their hypocritical tendencies and exposing the corrupt nature of these cat gods.

There is no book series that better stresses the importance of having a cohesive story bible than Warrior Cats. With the series having over 80 books, and being written by a team of over five people, you would think that they had some sort of method of organization. But they do not, and it is a huge aspect to why the series quality seems to decrease as time goes on, as not only have characters’ genders changed between books, there have been characters being resurrected on multiple occasions because the authors forgot they killed them off in the previous book. In essence, while Warrior Cats may be remembered for its strange and complicated plot, from being books about feral cat colonies struggling to compete for resources to them having to wage wars between heaven and hell, it also accidentally revealed a convoluted fictional religion that arose due to the lack of an organized storytelling framework.