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Hate-Senpai posted:I mean, even the mouse who raised, uh... Vile? I think that was her name? Yeah I just read a summary of the book and it's all flooding back, what the gently caress was the point of that subplot
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Sep 4, 2017 17:14
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Redwall is a trilogy of good if not particularly deep YA novels, followed by a series that might as well have been made by throwing the first books into a Markov chain generator.
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Sep 4, 2017 17:40
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My knowledge of Redwall is basically that it's about animals in a sort of medieval fantasy-ish thing or something, it's kind of racist at times, and it has really, really lavish descriptions of food. Is that about right?
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Sep 4, 2017 19:38
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Roland Jones posted:My knowledge of Redwall is basically that it's about animals in a sort of medieval fantasy-ish thing or something, it's kind of racist at times, and it has really, really lavish descriptions of food. Is that about right?
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Sep 4, 2017 19:44
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Some books are better then others. But yeah Outcast seems to get across the wrong message in the end and is one of the weakest books. Veil turned out lovely cause lots of the Redwallers treated him like poo poo. So when he finally crossed a line and tried to poison someone who he hated they kicked him out. His adopted Mom went after him and he died saving her life. Then she called him evil all along. Which I feel was the wrong message. Some other verminous characters were decent. The Boat maker for example. There was also a ferret pirate that becomes good friends with the Redwall Abbot. There was a weasel that spent the remainder of his life at Redwall along with an old lady that lived there and left his treasure he found to her. (Then she hid it and made a game out of it after she passed away.) There were also a pair of Stoats that were ok. Stupid but ok. Their stupidity lead them to accidentally hitting a monk with an arrow so they had to leave. Those are the more decent vermin I remember.
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Sep 4, 2017 20:23
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I also remember liking the books where mice only played a periphery role, or not at all. Wasn't there one about the badgers either finding or reclaiming their home? And one about a pirate squirrel who hit people with a rope flail?
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Sep 4, 2017 20:28
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PMush Perfect posted:I also remember liking the books where mice only played a periphery role, or not at all. Wasn't there one about the badgers either finding or reclaiming their home? And one about a pirate squirrel who hit people with a rope flail? I think there were a few badger ones.
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Sep 4, 2017 20:52
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The Long Patrol is the best part of the Redwall setting, don't @ me
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Sep 4, 2017 21:25
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 Am I doing this right
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Sep 4, 2017 21:54
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Rhaka posted:
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Sep 4, 2017 22:14
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Also, Mouse Guard is a very good RPG.
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Sep 4, 2017 22:14
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Roland Jones posted:My knowledge of Redwall is basically that it's about animals in a sort of medieval fantasy-ish thing or something, it's kind of racist at times, and it has really, really lavish descriptions of food. Is that about right? I liked the books as a child but even then I saw the blatant racism.
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Sep 4, 2017 22:59
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Mystic Mongol posted:Early on in the first book, Redwall, we see some liberal mice explaining that not all rats are bad and some of their best friends are rats. It turns out that all rats are bad and the only sane response is to kill all of them. As said we meet some decent rats and other vermin later. They just tend to ether die or be stupid as well.
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Sep 5, 2017 00:18
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I remember what a relief it was in...Mossflower I think? That the the mice actually let the rats leave alive after defeating them instead of mercilessly slaughtering every single one. Most of the later books blur together for me now but there was one where one of the protags was traveling with an old squirrel lady, some vermin tried to rob them, and after chasing them off she chided him for being willing to spare them because it was wasted on their kind. Later she of course turned out to be right because the robbers followed them and tried to kill them in their sleep. I do remember boat builder rat. Was he in Mattimeo? One of the earlier books anyway. The 'good ones' even as rare as they were were usually too stupid to be a threat. The pirate ferret lady is the only exception I remembered and she died in battle instead of coming over to hang out at the abbey and make things awkward for everyone. Like the gloriously detailed descriptions of food, I think the simplistic morality of the series was supposed to be a result of the author's experiences in WWII. He wasn't exactly trying for anything edgy or deep tbf.
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Sep 5, 2017 01:25
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Confession time: In the 9th grade I wrote two Redwall fanfics about a traveling family of foxes who were in fact, Good. This however was when I was young and naive and before I discovered the dark corners of the internet and learned that writing about anthropomorphic animals was in fact, Bad.
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Sep 5, 2017 01:36
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Zoe posted:Like the gloriously detailed descriptions of food, I think the simplistic morality of the series was supposed to be a result of the author's experiences in WWII. He wasn't exactly trying for anything edgy or deep tbf. That makes sense. There was some real antagonism to the failed attempts at appeasing the Nazis back then. Diplomacy failed, stomping worked, ergo never stop stomping nazis. Unfortunately the moral that "the enemy is objectively evil and can't be reasoned with, you have no choice but to destroy them" is really bad if applied to other situations.
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Sep 5, 2017 01:37
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I guess until the next comic drops theres no harm in continuing the derail; I liked how in the first book Cluny's entire army is in a cart pulled by a single horse. I kind of wish he'd kept that scale and just never explained it
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Sep 5, 2017 02:42
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Zoe posted:I remember what a relief it was in...Mossflower I think? That the the mice actually let the rats leave alive after defeating them instead of mercilessly slaughtering every single one. Man this poo poo is bringing back all sorts of memories. The squirrel was from, uh, the Long Patrol? I think? And the boat builder was from, uh, the Bellmaker, I think. Mattimeo was the sequel to the very first novel, featuring the son of, uh, Matthias. Featured the entire population of Redwall being drugged so their children could be stolen and sold as slaves, though the villains never thought to, you know, kill any of the adults to prevent them from following them. For some reason.
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Sep 5, 2017 02:59
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RentACop posted:I guess until the next comic drops theres no harm in continuing the derail; I liked how in the first book Cluny's entire army is in a cart pulled by a single horse. I kind of wish he'd kept that scale and just never explained it The shifting scale of the series is downright fascinating.
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Sep 5, 2017 03:02
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It was always weird to me that Redwallers were willing to eat fish.
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Sep 5, 2017 03:08
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Zoe posted:Confession time: In the 9th grade I wrote two Redwall fanfics about a traveling family of foxes who were in fact, Good. This however was when I was young and naive and before I discovered the dark corners of the internet and learned that writing about anthropomorphic animals was in fact, Bad.   crazy, I mean "wrote 100,000 words about Harry Potter, for free, just because they love Harry Potter and people like reading what they write".It's kind of surprising how few of them successfully make the jump to published fiction.
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Sep 5, 2017 03:12
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Hate-Senpai posted:It was always weird to me that Redwallers were willing to eat fish. A single fish could serve as the main course for a feast for the entire abbey at around the same time armies were being carried around in a hay cart. e: Who built the cart and strapped a horse to it is another big mystery...
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Sep 5, 2017 03:12
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PMush Perfect posted:Fanfiction writers are loving crazy sometimes, and I don't mean Oh, I have an online acquaintance that has written somewhere in the neighborhood of half a million words about her original character jumping between the Harry Potter, Skyrim and Stargate universes and building a magical interdimensional fortress or something. I read the first six paragraphs and they were pretty uninspiring but I guess whatever keeps her entertained...I mean there are far more questionable hobbies out there.  I dabble in terrible fantasy and space opera garbage of my own just for fun now and then which is an extremely dumb use of my time, but somehow it still feels more fulfilling than fanfic? I went through a phase of reading a lot of fanfic in the late 90s, but attempting to write it always felt like a lot of time spent pointlessly mashing someone else's action figures together. I always wanted to drastically alter certain things based on my own whims to the point it would not interest/piss off any actual fans and yet the settings would still be too recognizable to call my own. ...Is that basically what they call head canon now?
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Sep 5, 2017 03:28
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PMush Perfect posted:Redwall is a trilogy of good if not particularly deep YA novels, followed by a series that might as well have been made by throwing the first books into a Markov chain generator. Man, I wish I'd figured that out earlier when I was young. I did eventually realize it, after reading something like 30 of the books. But then I got into Discworld, and that saved British books. After Hitchhiker's Guide, at that.
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Sep 5, 2017 03:39
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Hate-Senpai posted:It was always weird to me that Redwallers were willing to eat fish. Fish did not seem to be sentient. And also things like Pikes were presented a vicious. Adders were made the Redwall equivalent to Dragons as well.
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Sep 5, 2017 03:54
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Dumb question from someone who's never read any of these books - what exactly distinguishes the mice as being different from other "vermin" beyond "because the author said so"?
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Sep 5, 2017 05:01
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Zoe posted:...Is that basically what they call head canon now?
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Sep 5, 2017 05:10
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W.T. Fits posted:Dumb question from someone who's never read any of these books - what exactly distinguishes the mice as being different from other "vermin" beyond "because the author said so"? It's basically just that. There's no explanation. Though the lines on what was and wasn't evil was often a little confusing. Like badgers, which you'd think would be antagonists to smaller mammals, ending up being a line of good aligned warrior kings who live in a mountain and are told how they will die when they take the throne.
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Sep 5, 2017 05:25
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SpaceViking posted:It's basically just that. There's no explanation. Though the lines on what was and wasn't evil was often a little confusing. Like badgers, which you'd think would be antagonists to smaller mammals, ending up being a line of good aligned warrior kings who live in a mountain and are told how they will die when they take the throne. Warrior kings with bloodlust who would snap into blind rage mid battle. Badgers were the best.
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Sep 5, 2017 05:44
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As a metaphor for Nazi's and other Fascists the metaphor works but oh god does it too easily seem too similar to other things...
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Sep 5, 2017 06:03
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Raenir Salazar posted:As a metaphor for Nazi's and other Fascists the metaphor works but oh god does it too easily seem too similar to other things...
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Sep 5, 2017 06:26
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Raenir Salazar posted:As a metaphor for Nazi's and other Fascists the metaphor works but oh god does it too easily seem too similar to other things... Unfortunately it works better for racism. A nazi's baby doesn't automatically grow up to be a nazi.
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Sep 5, 2017 06:30
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Len posted:Warrior kings with bloodlust who would snap into blind rage mid battle. Badgers were the best. Hell yeah Badger Lord supremacy.
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Sep 5, 2017 06:31
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Facebook Aunt posted:Unfortunately it works better for racism. A nazi's baby doesn't automatically grow up to be a nazi. Yeah, I was about to say (as someone who's never read the books): without the context provided by goons about the author, I honestly would've thought that he had fascist leanings based on the descriptions of the world you've been giving.
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Sep 5, 2017 06:37
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Facebook Aunt posted:Unfortunately it works better for racism. A nazi's baby doesn't automatically grow up to be a nazi. I've never read the books myself. It is just that, if I were to be generous with the metaphor, if I wanted to 'make it work' so to speak without unfortunate implications. The idea would be that Fascism is insidious and cancerous. It isn't that the animals are people who happen to be Fascists, but rather represent the anthropomorphism of Fascism as a concept. In which case I'd also go further to find 'good animal' - 'Nazi Animal' pairs. Boars are Fascist pigs. Zebras are fascist horses. Etc.
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Sep 5, 2017 07:08
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My only hazy memory of Redwall involved appropriating "Bast-Imret" as the name for my edgy and brooding dark elf character.
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Sep 5, 2017 07:23
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It's actually a little interesting how the general public are pretty willing to accept the usual conceits of fantasy like "Orcs and goblins are monster-people and should all be killed", but transferring that logic to a world made up of animals we know makes the juxtaposition suddenly very awkward. Does it really make sense for rats to be inherently more "evil" than mice? This is obviously something the Order of the Stick explored quite a bit what with the fate of goblins and all, to circle this back to the original inspiration. I also started the Disccworld books some time after the Redwall ones as a kid, and remember thinking the vermin really just needed a Vetinari-style leader rather than another warlord - someone clever enough to exploit their presumptions about rats by not playing to type. Instead of invading, just make your own city and petition to get involved in commerce and diplomacy. Bounce the different woodland factions off each other by not giving them an obvious, slavering enemy to unite against, maybe peel off some of the grayer and more business-minded types like the shrews. Before anyone realizes it it's too hard to get rid of you because you're part of the local economy and everyone just gets used to Ratville being a fact of life. Which again, to circle back, is I guess sort of what happened with Gobbotopia.
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Sep 5, 2017 10:24
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I mean it's possible we're over thinking these things. Dude was a truck driver who spent the war fantasizing about food and later wrote a story about mice for blind children containing lots of delicious food and evil rats who wanted to steal it all. It became bizarrely popular and after that I'm pretty sure it was mostly 'this is how it works and this is how I get a pay check.' I'll have to try and dig up the interviews I read before, but rats are evil for pretty much the same reason orcs are, only unlike Tolkien Jacques didn't spend a lot of time feeling bad about it after. He supposedly drew a lot from animal stereotypes in English folktales and stuff like Wind in the Willows and iirc straight up said he was writing adventure stories for children and had no real interest in including a bunch of moral ambiguity. I'm honestly kind of curious about his non Redwall stuff now and how it compares in that area. Maybe I'll check out that Flying Dutchman one this weekend.
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Sep 5, 2017 11:48
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Yeah, but the weird thing is that he specifically brings it up. If you just want a universe of moral simplicity where there's a species of objectively evil orcs or whatever, fine. It's not exactly gonna be deep but as a plot device for a kid's adventure book, whatever. But he has these plots where one member of the entire vermin horde turns out to be possibly OK, mostly because he's too stupid to be malicious, but even he realises he isn't fit to actually live in the Abbey and should go off into seclusion. Or an entire book about whether it's possible to raise one of the Evil Races to be good, and it sort of turns out no. I mean it's not like Lord of the Rings has an extensive subplot where they debate whether orcs have the potential to be ok guys, including long humanising sections from an orc's point of view, and then decide that nope, they should definitely be exterminated like we thought. Ignoring the moral dilemma so you have convenient bad guys just seems like you're writing a simplistic book, specifically bringing attention to the moral dilemma and really seeming to come down on the side of "these ones are pretty much always inherently evil by birth" in books aimed at children is... weird. The scale thing was amazing too. I remember I kept switching between imagining them all roughly human-sized, and a badger is just a hulking Gregor Clegane-sized tank, versus imaging them the actual size of the animals and a battle is a bipedal badger in full plate armour just loving trampling all over rats that barely come up to his ankles and acting like it's Heroic Combat.
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Sep 5, 2017 12:10
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Now imagine a mouse with what's essentially a metal toothpick battling a wildcat. No wonder that became the stuff of legends.
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Sep 5, 2017 12:47
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