What a baby.
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Them big cats are gay
I know I'm like the only one who reads Bamboo Kingdom but I just finished book six and I can't help but ship Shiver and Nightwalker hehe. Their interactions just really worked for me.
Also yes I imagine Nightwalker as a Maltese tiger. I don't know, something about the "night" part of her name makes me imagine her with a darker coat than tigers would normally have. Somehow I don't have the same thing with her uncle, Shadowhunter, whom I DO imagine with an orange coat.
Hi there! One of your posts about Bamboo Kingdom got recommended to me, and I skimmed through it to avoid spoilers, but since I've come across a Bamboo Kingdom reader, I felt that I should ask if you recommend them? I've HEARD of Bamboo Kingdom, but I've never seen anyone talk about them, so I haven't really been wanting to read them for that reason
Hey! Yeah, Bamboo Kingdom is the least well known of Erin Hunter series and the fandom has been pretty much dead on arrival.
But it is pretty fun. I think the series strength is in its cast, the main characters are pretty distinct and unique. Rain is probably the best PoV Erins did in years and Ghost is the best execution of his archetype that they did as well.
The setting is pretty colourful and creative, though admittedly, it only gets expanded later, it's pretty small at the start. And for a series with panda protagonists, the panda culture and society is probably the least interesting part of it.
The villains are kind of underwhelming. They start all right, but the writers don't have a good idea of what to do with them, so they don't quite work out.
So yeah, this is the typical Erin Hunter uneven level, but overall I had fun with Bamboo Kingdom. And from what I could find, it's possibly the only xenofiction that has any focus on snow leopards, who are my favourite animals, so I'm biased. And the snow leopards in Bamboo Kingdom are so cool.
The final book of Bamboo Kingdom is about to be released and I'm sitting here thinking how Thunder on the Plains could have been the best Erin Hunter series. The Shattered Horn was such an amazing start, but the rest of the arc never lived up to its potential. Characters walk in circles, characters, worldbuilding and lore end up being abandoned and plot points don't get the satisfying resolutions they deserve.
- The first contact Breathstealer has with the Great Devourer is when she's visited by the white vulture. She notes that the vulture is white because creatures can't come in contact with the Great Devourer and keep the colour of their fur. But this is never brought back again. And neither is the white vulture.
- In Breakers of the Code, Breathstealer gets a mysterious wolf companion, Graypelt. I didn't really like the guy and his main story reason for existence is trying to keep Breathstealer on the side of good, which he fails to do. In the epilogue of the book he is revealed to be a wolf/bat shapeshifter. Again, I didn't really care about him that much, but there is story to be told here and something to explore. Is his original form the bat or the wolf? How does he react to Breatstealer becoming a monster? Surely he is proud she finally makes the right decision? Well, we never know because he doesn't show up in the third book. It's utterly baffling that he's missing here. I get that Valiant gets that role in this book and I like him more, but Graypelt could at least show up in the finale to give Breathstealer a nice congratulatory speech about how he believed in her all along.
- The Great Devourer keeps promising Breathstealer the power to bring back the dead... And it never really materialises. Breathstealer deciding to use that power, or deciding not to use it would both be interesting exploration of her character and the setting. And Breathstealer has a lot of people in her life that she wouldn't want dead. Gutripper, Nosebiter, Cub. Of course, The Great Devourer probably doesn't want to bring them back to life (TGD is directly involved in killing most of them to push Breathstealer into his control) and it's not exactly confirmed if he can do that - he never brings anyone from the dead. But all these questions and doubts would be interesting to be resolved and they are just left hanging.
- Stride often gets told to "Never look back", so much that it feels like his arc words. Combined with his Orpheus like story of travelling to the world of the dead to find his loved one... There seems to be an obvious direction to where his character and the conclusion should go. But it really doesn't. His storyline would be much stronger if he made the decision to leave Flicker on his own, rather than it being forced on him. And the death tunnels are rather underwhelming and so literal, but that's a separate story.
The covers and blurbs for books from the second arc of Bamboo Kingdom have shown up! China is quite a bit ahead with them, but it's nice to see what's coming.
Book 1 is called The Frozen Forest and book 2 is called Silence of the Dragon. There's no cover for book 3 yet, but there is title - though since we don't have a cover, we don't know the official translation. Machine translation gives me Bamboo Heralds the Arrival of Spring as the title of book 3.
What's more, there are blurbs for those books, but they are obviously super spoilery and they are also autotranslated, so they go under the read more:
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Crowfeather's probably talking about the Twoleg issue while Tawnypelt can't focus at all
I like how exasperated/annoyed Tawnypelt is at herself right now about the fact that she's crushing on him. My hope right now for Tawnycrow is that for a while Tawnypelt is the only one crushing on the other while Crowfeather is oblivious; Tawnypelt is the one to try to initiate a relationship in a sense which is what gets Crowfeather to become interested and to consider a relationship with her
