drawn from a photo reference which i dont do nearly enough
ive made some little changes to his design: eye and nose markings are a brighter white than his base color, i also lightened his base color a little bit, whole tail is orange now, and the additional gradients are new

applestrike's infamous mentor! the one who turned her into a killing machine and then lost control of her oops!
for a long time redstar had nothing going on but his role as Evil Leader. he's still vague in some places but over the past year or so ive developed more on him. there's also a lot of annoying timeline adjustments i still need to solidify, his litter is too young for his rise through the ranks to be feasible.

redfoot assisted in mentoring several apprentices while he was young. he was familiar with all the apprentices and beloved, sort of functioning like the teacher equivalent of a relative that lets your parents rules slide when youre with them. his active presence in training convinced emberstar to give him an apprentice earlier than she normally would have; she always preferred to see how a warrior matured before putting the responsibility of mentorship on them. redfoot and asterpaw were a great team, until their patrol was chased by a coyote into shadowclan territory. a patrol found them and helped fight the coyote off, but were unaccommodating of the circumstances and tried to get them off the territory as fast as possible. asterpaw had been injured in the fight, but the shadowclan patrol insisted they get back to their camp and be seen by their own healers. asterpaw died on the way home, bleeding internally in the abdomen.

an amount of time i havent determined passes where redfoot grieves and adjusts. he doesnt go back to helping with training very often. when emberstar's deputy dies unexpectedly, she appoints redfoot. his incomplete mentorship was made up well over by his experience helping. and when emberstar's mate amberstrike had kits and their apprentice ceremonies came along, she assigned applepaw to redfoot. redfoot had taken up emberstar's responsibilities while she was helping in the nursery, and after losing his own apprentice, emberstar wanted to thank him by entrusting one of her kits to him.

unfortunately we (my audience of me and the random people and friends i post to) all know that redfoot squanders that trust a million times over when emberstar dies and redstar uses applepaw's grief to make her bitter and reactive. and when she starts getting away from him and he tries to cut her down again by killing the rest of her family she's already too far gone. he has completely lost his grip on her and she leads a revolution against him. bye bye mr hubris