Redwillow! First Listed In The Eclipse Allegiances With Whitewater As His Mentor. He Has Some Appearances

Redwillow! First listed in the eclipse allegiances with Whitewater as his mentor. He has some appearances in the first few omen of the stars books, but mostly is a generic background character. By Night Whispers however he is in my opinion characterized as a seasoned warrior, even though he is very new to the books. He is put in charge of leading a boarder patrol, and is seen after the battle of the border covered in wounds. Later in the book however he is part of the group that plays on the frozen lake, skidding across the surface on his belly. I love this segment because he is mentioned alongside senior warriors Crowfrost and Ratscar who yowl in amusement at his antics.

There is some of what I'm going to call fan interpretation of Redwillow that he is a loner in Shadowclan, but in the books his moderate regard by his own leader and senior warriors suggests to me instead that he was well liked, and integrated into the clan, even though it's never established who his kin is. That's why to me he becomes an example later on of a cat who's ambition is used to radicalize him to the Dark Forest. He doesn't start out a traitor to Shadowclan, on the contrary Redwillow spends his time in the dark forest close to his living clanmates. It isn't until the Forgotten Warrior that Ivypool points out Redwillow specifically multiple times when she's looking for cats that may have loyalties outside their clans. He never says anything to that point, rather his body language and exchanged glances are what makes her think so. Within the Last hope he makes several remarks in the Dark Forest about becoming the best warrior he can be, and that training in the Dark Forest makes training with Shadowclan feel like working with kittypets. Ivypool confronts him in a conversation with Hollowflight asking if he would let his weaker Clanmates die and he says "O-of course not" just that they had a lot to learn from the Dark Forest Warriors. Even with that I remember finding his final moments in the Last Hope a departure from his character, where he declares the Dark Forest his new clan, and that Blackstar's time is over.

Idk I just wanted more out of the radicalization of the clan cats while it was happening. I guess as someone who grew up with the internet I'm not a stranger to what anarchy and rebellion look like behind closed doors and personally felt that the concept of being isolated in a toxic in group extremely interesting, I found the the non-committal conversations of the dark forest trainees to be much more innocent than the showy posturing of competitive vitriol I've known such spaces to inspire. The fact that Redwillow and Breezepelt at the end of the battle were the only two warriors we know by name that sided with the Dark Forest to the end seems like such an underestimate to me. All I'm saying is that while I do love Redwillow for being an example of this, Clan cat rebellion to the Dark Forest could have been much more catastrophic than it was, and especially for the amount of plot and hype that it was given in universe. Add to all that the possible reading of Redwillow as a transmasc character that is radicalized into toxic masculinity and I want it to be known that i do love this character, but that most of that love comes from meta analysis and not from the text itself. He shouldn't have died twice in the Broken Code because truthfully he just didn't deserve it.