Okay so, hear me out. I offer you both Irisdream and her daughter Kitepaw - Irisdream as a former mentor and Kitepaw as perhaps a familiar/friendly face? Irisdream’s mother was a similarly obsessive cat who was manipulative and emotionally and mentally abusive. This has left Irisdream working through her OCD. While she has taken to willfully trying to rebel against her mother’s teachings now, at the time that she trained Jackdaw she would’ve been strict with him, but also maternal - as she has always actively tried to avoid passing on her mother’s ways to others. But she can’t always help it.
Her relationship with Kitepaw was strained until recently, now they are closer. But before Iris was so scared of screwing up her daughter the way her mother did with her that she kept Kitepaw at arm’s length. Regardless, Kitepaw has picked on having neat and tidy manners. She does struggle with anxiety, and still has a bit of a stutter. Her posture isn’t always perfect due to her lack of confidence, but her manners are impeccable and her work ethic unquestionable.
If you agree to go this route, it would be interesting to see what Jackdaw would think of Iris’s more recent life developments, as a lot has happened in recent moons! It’s canon to Iris’s lore that her family was considered up-standing with some prestige, so whether Jackdaw feels like she’s betraying that image by moving away from her mother’s teachings or not is up to you! You can also decide what kind of influence he’ll have on Kitepaw’s development (if any), and whether or not he sees her as kin or just the daughter of his mentor (since her and Iris wouldn’t have appeared close at the time and wouldn’t have interacted much).
Kitepaw is currently 15 moons (I need to update her bio for this month), but Irisdream would have continued to train Jackdaw even having recently given birth to her daughter. What opinions he drew from the distance between Irisdream and Kites (at the time Kitekit) is entirely up to you!
I would encourage you to take a skim through Iris’s interactions with Wavebreaker in her thread tracker (linked in my signature), as that’s where most of the family history is discussed openly. Some of Kitepaw’s posts also go over her strained relationship with her mother, and of course you can skim through the development of Irisdream and Duskleaf’s romance (spoiler alert: they’re adorable).
@
nyme