but with Redwall, not only are some "good" animals omnivorous, they even eat other "good" animals. I'm thinking of badgers, which eat small mammals and are an especial threat to hedgehogs. This seems like a problem for your setup, Mr. Jacques!
Exactly! Like otters aren't just weasels with better press and waterproof guard hairs!
Jacques doesn't even try to tie Outcast to real-world animal behavior—I wouldn't have liked it, but I might have been able to rationalize it better if as Veil matured, he began to see his adopted community as food rather than friends. Instead, Jacques is very clear that he's just bad—lying, sneaking, ungrateful, malicious, always out for himself and delighting in his petty acts of meanness, and every time Veil's adoptive mother Bryony raises the possibility that Veil is acting out because the entire Abbey has been waiting for him to turn out evil since he was a tiny kit, some other character shoots it down by reminding her that vermin are vermin are vermin and eventually the text bears them out. Hence the ending which just sort of busted my trust in Jacques as a writer, where Veil sacrifices himself for Bryony and then the novel just decides he didn't mean it, he wouldn't have saved her if he knew what he was doing, so sad, he's better off dead, the world is better off without him. I haven't read this book in twenty-two years and I'm still angry with it. And there's nothing to be done about it, since the author is literally dead.
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Exactly! Like otters aren't just weasels with better press and waterproof guard hairs!
Jacques doesn't even try to tie Outcast to real-world animal behavior—I wouldn't have liked it, but I might have been able to rationalize it better if as Veil matured, he began to see his adopted community as food rather than friends. Instead, Jacques is very clear that he's just bad—lying, sneaking, ungrateful, malicious, always out for himself and delighting in his petty acts of meanness, and every time Veil's adoptive mother Bryony raises the possibility that Veil is acting out because the entire Abbey has been waiting for him to turn out evil since he was a tiny kit, some other character shoots it down by reminding her that vermin are vermin are vermin and eventually the text bears them out. Hence the ending which just sort of busted my trust in Jacques as a writer, where Veil sacrifices himself for Bryony and then the novel just decides he didn't mean it, he wouldn't have saved her if he knew what he was doing, so sad, he's better off dead, the world is better off without him. I haven't read this book in twenty-two years and I'm still angry with it. And there's nothing to be done about it, since the author is literally dead.