Name: How Power of Three Failed – Sunny's Spiel | Warriors Analysis
Uploaded: 2024-02-18T14:50:12.000Z
Duration: 20 min 1 s
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Hello everyone! Sunnyfall here and as  I'm sure you've already read the title,  

I suppose I have to jump right in and say that 

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despite the level of nostalgic fondness many fans have for it

Power of Three is a bad arc  the pacing is incredibly slow but it's difficult  

but it's difficult to tell that sometimes thanks to the complete lack of direction that the arc has, 

being more of a meander around different random events than a cohesive plot

and consistency of either the dramatic tension, relationships, or character arcs can pretty much be thrown out the window as a possibility. 

Some of this is a build up of several smaller  problems with particular characters or plot points  

which i won't get into in this video, but  I'll likely cover many of them in the future.  

For now I want to know why the arc as a whole failed.

Is there anything we can point to that would explain why The Power of Three is so flawed?

Well, while there are a multitude of problems that likely contribute a  piece,

the main factors are the way the series is written, and the vision for this arc in particular.

Warriors has a team of editors who give outlines of the books to writers so they can be fleshed out.

General ideas or sparks of ideas are thought out for arcs,

but it doesn't take much to get the ball rolling

which forces writers to essentially fly by the seat of their pants when trying to put  out the next book in an arc.

So it's essential for the inspiration to an arc to not just be good but be something a whole plot can be built from.

I'm sure it's no secret to most people where I'm going with this.

The Power of Three's inspiration was "the fire scene,"

about Ashfur confronting Squirrelflight as he threatens to murder her three kits,

and then her revealing them to not be her kits to save them.

This is a genuinely good scene. Let me be clear about that.

It's easily one of the most memorable, quoted moments from the series: one that fans still draw and discuss today.

But there are issues with it as an inspiration for a whole arc.

Because of this scene, and working backwards from it Vicky Holmes was able to form a clear vision for exactly how Squirrelflight and Leafpool,

and by extension Ashfur, Brambleclaw, and Crowfeather  would feel throughout the arc but the arc.

But the arc couldn't be from any of those points of view.

She needed it to be from the kits' point of view so the shock and impact could be seen firsthand,  

and their lives proven a lie. And for this, she  needed to not only figure out who those kits were,  

but come up with a plot for them to go  through while they were living in blissful unawareness of the secrets surrounding their birth.  

(Which would have to be a pretty long one since she planned for the reveal to be at the end of book five of six.)

None of that was helped along by the fire scene.

The Erins needed a completely new  idea to make a mini-arc within The Power of Three  

and for this...they turned to superpowers.

The Erins presumably considered "children with superpowers"  a weighty enough premise to carry the ark until the fire scene came up,

and under this light they only had to answer the question of what power each cat had to keep up the dramatic tension.  

For Jaypaw they evidently found this the easiest. 

His power isn't well defined, but none of them are  

and he's already using it and learning  about the prophecy in the first book.  

For Lionblaze I'm sure they figured out early  on, though not necessarily in the first book,

that he would have some sort of fighting power.

But his fighting abilities and possible invincibility are contradicted over and over from book to book and even within some books.

In Eclipse, his entire arc centered around his being afraid of his power and the bloodlust making him turn out like Tigerstar.

But it's difficult to sympathize when we don't know what his power really is,

or even if he's just a normal warrior who happens to have a good build.

Vicky mentioned recently that she was able to learn the personalities of Jayfeather and Lionblaze in the early storytelling phases,

and from there what powers they would have came out easily.

It's no wonder then that none of the Erins could think of a power for Hollyleaf,

who was written very inconsistently even through to her death.

She was a complex character but none of the writers or editors ever pinned down exactly how complex, or what her traits and values were.

So, for many fans, she didn't even become a compelling character until she murdered someone:

a very strong character moment that all the Erins could much more easily focus on when they wrote for her later.  

Now she had regret and that could be understood.

So instead of deciding on her powers and characterization early in the arc,

very late in the arc it was decided that Hollyleaf didn't have a power. 

But that would be a big, dramatic moment  for her, enough to carry the arc on its own,  

and the end of Power of Three was already  laid out for the fire scene and its fallout.  

We did get some Hollyleaf drama at the end of the arc,

but it never got to be exclusively focused on her not having a power.

She never even realized that until she thought, alongside her siblings,  

that none of them were part of the three since Firestar might not really have been their kin. 

The things tormenting her were still the code, her bloodline, and now, being a murderer.

Even with Jayfeather and Lionblaze, who the powers were roughly set for,  

how they were invented works in direct opposition to the reader's expectations, set up both by past precedent and the ark's writing.

The way the characters tend to discuss it, as well as the way it's eventually used and used up by the battle with the Dark Forest,

suggests that the powers they were born with were made for a specific purpose. 

Cats in the Warriors universe don't normally have magic powers like this.

But even in the one prior case we had: Leafpaw and Squirrelpaw having their sister telepathy,

It was for a particular purpose: so the traveling cats had a link back to the clans at home.

And without any fanfare, when the quest was done, the powers went away.

A reader would expect these powered  protagonists to function in the same manner. 

So if you give us a cat with vaguely mixed  telepathy, empathy, and dreamwalking,

another cat with vaguely defined fighting abilities, or maybe indestructible powers?

and a third cat who thinks she has a power but doesn't,

what is the problem these powers are supposed to solve?

Whatever the answer may be, that isn't a question that was ever asked in The Power of Three

and by the time Omen of the Stars was saddled with this problem...  

well they still didn't have much of an answer

but they decided there would have to be a battle against the Dark Forest to justify the scale.

Power of Three on its own didn't have a story about these powers being used for anything,  

which is why it seemed acceptable for them to only even learn about the powers between the third and fourth books.

But these cats lives also weren't  spent primarily focused on being someone's kits,  

as the Erins seemed to be based on the fire  scene inspiration.

They were focused on just growing up in Thunderclan, going through a series of mostly unrelated adventures

and eventually navigating the notion that they do, or do not have superpowers.

So both the original foundation for the story: the fire scene and the injected plot of the powers have no bearing on the plot the story ultimately puts forward for the majority of the arc.

You may not be convinced as of yet so I'll go through a rundown of the plot relevant  events in the arc.

I'll preface this with the fact that there are moments I'm leaving out,

but I have included everything that is relevant in any way, character or plot-wise, outside the plot of the exact book it is in.

Our protagonists are born. They  get into trouble even as kits

and Jaykit/paw and Hollykit/paw do a little  dance for the next 15 chapters to find out who will be the ark's next medicine cat.

Hollypaw takes it for a while but she's not good at it and Jaypaw is so they switch.

Lionpaw really likes a Windclan cat named Heatherpaw, who he gets to meet in chapter 10 and chapter 21.

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How Power of Three Failed – Sunny's Spiel | Warriors Analysis

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