and she now holds an even more special place in my heart because she is featured in the logo of my channel.

So at this point, I feel it's necessary to explain why I love her so much.

Because as far as her canon actions and personality are concerned, she doesn't have much to work with.

As a kit and an apprentice, Hazel was almost always lumped in as a group with one or both of her brothers.

Even at their warrior ceremony only Berrynose is given important attributes, brave and enthusiastic,

while Hazeltail and Mousewhisker are skipped over.

Other than a couple uses of her heritage, which I will get back to,

she's mostly just used as a generically nice cat.

She's excited to do apprentice duties, polite, and her biggest motivation is just becoming a warrior.

Then, when she is a warrior, she fades even further into the background,

going along with the crowd's opinions on events and only speaking out individually with,

again, the very boring and basic motivation of generally being a help to the clan.

In Sunrise she mostly serves as a foil for Hollyleaf,

who is dark, bitter, and jaded while she is excited and experiencing new things.

Even when they get back, Hollyleaf destroys a piece of prey in front of her and it is Hazeltail who notices her anger and is scared by it.

She shows herself to be a bit of a coward and fairly incompetent,

being injured and needing significant encouragement to accomplish their tasks multiple times.

This puts her more on par with Birchfall,

who she is actually paired up with a few times on the Sol patrol

as well as in Long Shadows on a Shadowclan border patrol that ends in both of them fighting and getting injured.

Her personality is jerked around wherever it needs to be to round out the cast in a certain plot,

leading to, among other things,

her having wildly different reactions to Sol when she meets him in Sunrise and The Forgotten Warrior respectively

with no reason given for the change.

And then, as soon as Omen of the Stars ends, she gets a mostly off-screen death from sickness.

So for the bulk of her canon portrayals she's a generic nice cat

with her opinions on the world informed mostly by what the plot needs them to be.

And sometimes, when she's lucky she gets the bonus of being a basic damsel in distress too.

That's not a very interesting character, especially since plenty of other cats fill that role already,

and honestly without Paws of Stars that's probably all she would be to me.

But as I went into the material of Power of Three and Omen of the Stars as a writer, with the intention of rewriting it,

I wanted to recognize the strengths of the books that I could capitalize and expand on as well as the flaws I would need to fix.

As I've mentioned before, Power of Three had a great background cast,

and I wanted to use this by making sure every character had a unique and fairly interesting personality,

especially if they would be interacting with the main characters to some extent.

Birchfall would already fill the role of the incompetent warrior, so her one book of characterization wouldn't really help,

and otherwise she has the standard female warriors personality of nice and polite without any other stand out characteristics.

This wouldn't do for me,

since she does have a lot of canon interaction with Hollyleaf, one of our point-of-view characters.

I needed to find her a personality and story,

something that would explain why she and Hollyleaf manage to become and stay friends.

Of course, I didn't want to pull a random character out of my head and give her Hazeltail's name.

Instead, I looked to her relationships and situation to find out what sort of character she might become to fit into this world.

Ironically, making her a believable friend of Hollyleaf was the easiest part for me.

Hazeltail's mentor was Dustpelt,

who I had already blocked in as a secondary father figure to Hollyleaf due to his traditionalist attitude

that might influence her towards the warrior code

and the fact that Ferncloud, Dustpelt's mate, was said to spend more time with Hollykit and her brothers in the nursery than Squirrelflight.

Since Hazeltail was trained by Dustpelt and was roughly Hollyleaf's peer while being older than her,

Hollyleaf could look up to her, and Hazeltail could appreciate the same traditionalist attitude that Dustpelt had instilled into her.

The second element to work in was her parentage, which was briefly touched on at moments in the canon.

Hazeltail and her littermates have no clan blood in them.

Both their parents are from the horseplace, even though Daisy joined Thunderclan after having them.

We know that they were too young to remember living in the horseplace,

but every cat in Thunderclan knows where they came from,

and at the beginning of Power of Three the clan is going through a phase where some cats believe

the cats not originally from Thunderclan are hurting their reputation with the other clans.

Hazeltail and her littermates are poised to receive flack for this, which I definitely wanted to take into account when designing her.

But unlike her friendship with Hollyleaf, Thunderclan's prejudice wasn't something she was uniquely going through.

Berrynose and Mousewhisker would also be put through the same scrutiny,

and I wanted to decide how each would react in forming their sibling dynamic.

The relationship between littermates was really important for me,

since this period of time had so many litters.

Cinderheart, Poppyfrost, and Honeyfern,

Hollyleaf Jayfeather and Lionblaze,

and Icecloud and Foxleap, all also appear within the first book alone.

This gives a chance to compare what different sibling dynamics may be like, and distinguish them from each other.

The biggest difference that stood out to me about Hazeltail, Berrynose, and Mousewhisker

was how different they were from each other,

and how little their paths crossed once they were warriors.

Berrynose was an arrogant braggart well known in the clan with Lionblaze as a rival and Honeyfern and then Poppyfrost as mates.

Mousewhisker seemed much more laid back and lacking in ambition,

but that led him to stepping outside his clan with his “""friendship""” with Minnowtail

and his place training in the Dark Forest.

Hazeltail was instead somewhere in the middle.

She cared about her clan and wanted to be a good warrior but didn't feel the need to stand out as much as Berrynose.

This would mean that, faced with the possibility of not being a true Thunderclan cat,

the three littermates all distanced themselves from their heritage, along with their mother and each other,

and forged their own paths in a world unfamiliar to them.

Berrynose tried to be the best warrior there was so no one would dare even remember he was from the horseplace.

Mousewhisker would move away from the ridicule and the clan as a whole to find a more welcoming place in inter-clan relationships.

And Hazeltail didn't care as much as either of her brothers.

She was a Thunderclan cat without question, and it was her job to do the best she could. No more. No less.

And of course she got this outlook from her mentor Dustpelt,

who would expect her to fulfill her duty and not look back to where she came from.

Whatever she was before, she was a Thunderclan cat now.

So she would follow the warrior code, obey her clan leader, and do all she could for her clan.

That's a lot more material to work with, and all, so far, from what would make sense in canon.

I did have to solidify a few details at this point.

She's fairly hardened to emotions after focusing on duty and closing herself off from her past.

She relates with and bonds most easily with cats who share her outlook on life, like Dustpelt and Hollyleaf.

She will do everything she can to help her clan,

and likely sees very little purpose in something like mingling at gatherings.

But, for development's sake,

there are a couple cats in Thunderclan with unyielding kindness and/or insight

that might just make their ways into being her friends anyway.

Hazeltail is, at this point, a constructed character much more than she is a canon one.

But I wouldn't ever call her an original character.

She is formed by who I would expect her to be in the canon world and circumstances she found herself,

and the choices she made in response.

What emerged was one of my favorite characters to write,

and knowing what I have coming for her, I'm sure I will love her for a long, long time.

Also she's gorgeous. I mean look at that face. Prettiest warrior cat there is.

Ahem.

Anyway, Thank you for watching, and always remember

to do your duty faithfully. It's much less complicated that way.