Monthly Meow LXXVI

Hello everyone! I hope that you have all had a wonderful November and will have a cozy and fun-filled December. This past November has been very busy on Warrior Cats of the Forest, with a whole cascade of both in- and out-of-character changes. In-character, we’ve delved further into the war by inflaming tensions between our two alliances, which will soon culminate in our first large battle in several months. For more information about the recent plot, see The History Page. Out-of-character, we have have discussed the role of StarClan within the universe of WCF, have evaluated the changes we made to clan hierarchies back in August, reorganized the Discord Server, and clarified our regulations surrounding appropriateness.

This Monthly Meow the second half of a two-part demographics series. Last month we went over some basic demographic information such as clan populations, age distributions, and trends in character gender. This month, I’ve done an in-depth look at more fine grained aspects of demographics, including naming style, trends in cat appearances and origin, and personality types. Thank you so much to Skyyfox for helping me to collect the data for this Monthly Meow, I would really have struggled to do it alone! If you’re interested in seeing how this kind of demographic information has shifted over time, see Monthly Meow LXX, which is the same analysis from last March. Please note that this chart is fairly rudimentary and if you guys are interested, I can draw this Monthly Meow series into a third part, where I delve into how specific traits may be correlated with each other. This will be labor intensive, however, so I’m only going to do it if members do express interest. Finally, if you’re interested in noodling around with the raw data yourself, you can find it here.

The purpose of this demographics overview is threefold: to see whether roleplayers value the clans’ identities and choose to follow them when making their characters, whether clan demographics change substantially over time, and, finally, just because they’re fun to delve into! Without further ado, here is our in-depth demographics overview from October 19th.

This table is a lot to take on its own, so I’m going to break it down by sections and point out only what I find interesting from each. I’ve already analyzed the clan populations and gender distribution in November’s Monthly Meow, so I’m not going to cover that again here. If you’re curious about how we defined each category, see this demographics instructions document.

That leaves us to begin with the cats’ origins. Overall, I do not see anything particularly interesting here. EclipseClan has the lowest percentage of clan-born cats, with fits in with their identity in that EclipseClan kits are not all-but-guaranteed a spot in the clan and EclipseClan has actively sent recruitment patrols out into the city recently. As such, they have high percentages of kittypets and cats from outside groups, primarily city gangs.

There are far more blue-eyed cats than you’d expect to see in a realistic population, but that’s held steady from last April and I expect that it’s a pretty common attribute for roleplays like Warrior Cats of the Forest where cats aren’t required to have realistic appearances. Notably, MoonClanners have the highest percentage of blue-eyed and odd-eyed cats and a relatively low proportion of green-eyed cats. This may be related to MoonClan’s relatively high percentage of white cats, but I doubt that totally explains the trend. Do you guys have any idea of why that might be?

Primary coat color is one of my favorite parts of these demographics overviews and this one didn’t disappoint. From the clan descriptions, we would expect to see many dark-colored cats in MoonClan, such as black cats as well as dark brown and grey tabbies or tortoiseshells, alongside dull pale cats in SunClan, bright colored cats in EarthClan such as white or ginger cats, and finally a wide variety of cats in EclipseClan. The clan demographics don’t follow these patterns, however. While MoonClan has many brown cats, it also has many white cats. EarthClan, likewise, has lots of black cats-- just the opposite of what you would expect to see!

Alongside primary coat color, we have coat length. However, we should be more skeptical of what we gather here, because most cats have no specified coat length and it’s likely that members only mention coat length when it’s on either extreme. With this grain of salt, we can see that there are some general trends. MoonClan has the most medium-furred cats, which does suit their description. Likewise, EclipseClan has the highest proportion of long-haired cats, which makes sense given their kittypet origins; long fur would likely be pretty heavily selected against in a population of wild cats, as it would be susceptible to mats, so the further you get from a starting population of kittypets, the less likely you are to see long-haired cats. However, EarthClan has a disproportionate number of short-haired cats-- exactly the opposite of the clan description.

Cats’ builds have a similar problem to coat lengths in that members usually only mention them when their cat falls at either extreme, so these numbers may be unreliable. MoonClanners are the most evenly divided, while SunClan and EclipseClan cats tend toward being small and EclipseClanners tend to be large. This falls roughly within what you’d expect, given the clan descriptions.

Personality category is one of the most interesting categories, however, it’s also the most difficult to categorize based on character descriptions and the categories that we do use are flawed. While I initially created a new system that we could have used, I ultimately decided to use the same categories as a few months ago in order to allow us to more easily compare across time, should we wish to. MoonClan was expected to have higher than average percentages in aggressive, dedicated, dominant, and possibly entitled; SunClan was expected to have higher than average percentages in dedicated, reserved, and sharp; EarthClan was expected to have higher percentages in spirited, warm, and entitled; and EclipseClan was expected to have higher than usual percentages in aggressive, dominant, secretive, and sharp categories. In general, our cats did fall into these trends. MoonClan did have higher than average percentages of aggressive, dedicated, and entitled cats, while SunClan has many dedicated and reserved cats, EarthClan had many warm cats, and EclipseClan had many dominant and sharp cats. There were a few surprises however. MoonClan scored highly in secretive cats, while EclipseClanners were not particularly aggressive or secretive.

That brings us to the end of this demographics overview. Have I overlooked something that you think is really cool? Should I make this a three-part series and go into how certain traits are correlated or compare what we have here to what we found back in April? Let me know in the comments below.