I... Did Not Know That 6 Month Old Cats Were That Big I Kept Imagining Them As The Size Of Slightly Bigger

I... did not know that 6 month old cats were that big I kept imagining them as the size of slightly bigger kits

Yeah man, this is the lie that the warriors animation community has been perpetuating for a while. Mostly out of ignorance haha Here is a growth video of a kitten to ten months old which is about the time between kit to warrior in canon (though it might be more like warrior at 12 months, but it varies quite a lot), and here is a picture of that cat at 6 months old, seen at 0:16 in the video. It starts to make a lot more sense that this is the age that kittens are allowed to start battle training and even participating in defending their clan, because they are at six months old physically capable of doing so. Many breeds of cats keep maturing in their density and weight until 3-5 years of age, but the bulk of growth always happens in the first six months.

Truthfully I think a lot of people depict apprentices as tiny children because that is easier to differentiate on screen, especially if animation designs are exaggerated where certain characters are huge for dramatic effect (think often tigerstar the first and characters like lionheart). This isn't actually wrong to do, and can be a very effective choice in communicating the age of certain characters without having to tell the audience in neon lights that this character is an apprentice.

but it should be a choice, and some discussions I have seen about the warrior cats online makes the assumption that all apprentices are tiny and helpless (maybe based on these depictions? unkown) when the reality is that at six months old, non-fictional cats enter adolescence, they are almost always desperate for independence and 'leave the nest' so to speak, and can in fact raise their own litter of kittens (not an uncommon occurrence in wild cats, but I do not recommend this for the health of the animals and discourage owners from this practice). I'm not sure that there is much point in comparing the physical development of cats to people especially regarding a fictional series, (and granted I'm just a fan and not an expert) but If we are talking about real-live physical cats at six months old, they're more comparable to 14-16 year olds than tweenagers 11-13, by ten months we're talking about late adolescence, maybe 18 year olds. Think about it, plenty of people in high school get misinterpreted as adults, that's the age range we're talking about. I understand that this is a hot debated topic in fandom as apprentices are often interpreted as younger characters, but I find it more interesting to depict them closer to a feline's realistic development, at least in an artistic sense, and probably will continue to do so.