Apologies like the birds in the sky
I have been having an absolutely miserable night, but after venting at length to
spatch about Brian Jacques' Outcast of Redwall (1995) I spent at least an hour reading about various mustelids online, including several species (tayra, hog badger, ferret-badger, grison) I hadn't known existed, and I think that was good for me.
(I liked ferrets. I found them clever, beautiful, charming creatures. I had had a stuffed animal black-footed ferret since late elementary school. By the time Outcast came out, I even knew several domestic ferrets in person; they were playful and I did not object to their smell. That was the novel where I realized that Jacques' species essentialism was immutable, and I felt painfully betrayed. I understood the long shadow of The Wind in the Willows, but I couldn't understand how Jacques could miss that his readers would at some point identify with Veil, the orphaned ferret kit adopted into a society of mice and voles and moles—the outsider, the one who feels there's something wrong with them for just being what they are—and then fail to see how it would hurt them to have Veil confirmed as irredeemable, genetically evil after all. He went so far as to give a morally ambiguous character a selfless death scene and then retract it a few chapters later. That ending accomplished what endless recipes for damson and chestnut and Mummerset dialect could not: I burnt out on the series on some deep level and have never even now gone back, despite positive memories of the first four books and their unique combination of cozy talking animals and total batshit weirdness. If you can't appreciate ferrets, I'm out of time for you.)
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(I liked ferrets. I found them clever, beautiful, charming creatures. I had had a stuffed animal black-footed ferret since late elementary school. By the time Outcast came out, I even knew several domestic ferrets in person; they were playful and I did not object to their smell. That was the novel where I realized that Jacques' species essentialism was immutable, and I felt painfully betrayed. I understood the long shadow of The Wind in the Willows, but I couldn't understand how Jacques could miss that his readers would at some point identify with Veil, the orphaned ferret kit adopted into a society of mice and voles and moles—the outsider, the one who feels there's something wrong with them for just being what they are—and then fail to see how it would hurt them to have Veil confirmed as irredeemable, genetically evil after all. He went so far as to give a morally ambiguous character a selfless death scene and then retract it a few chapters later. That ending accomplished what endless recipes for damson and chestnut and Mummerset dialect could not: I burnt out on the series on some deep level and have never even now gone back, despite positive memories of the first four books and their unique combination of cozy talking animals and total batshit weirdness. If you can't appreciate ferrets, I'm out of time for you.)
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Right! What was that? What kind of moral was that? Brian Jacques, I know you're dead, but what the hell!
It's especially weird because IIRC there are a few good cats in other books - Gingivere in Mossflower, I think? - so clearly some species are capable of moral choice/complexity in the world of Redwall. Just not ferrets, apparently.
Both Gingivere in Mossflower and his presumed descendant (although it's a little unclear, what with one book taking place in our world and the other . . . not) Squire Gingivere in Redwall are good guys. I also feel like there's at least one non-evil fox. So there is really no reason not to have morally complex ferrets.
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A dog tried to eat me when I was a toddler! I don't write versions of Cujo!
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My father shoved his arm between its jaws like Tyr with Fenris and my mother grabbed me and ran with me into the bathroom and locked the door. It was the dog of a close family friend, nobody knew it was ill, it saw year-and-a-half-old me running around its living room and all of a sudden, instead of the pocket edition of a human, it saw prey. I believe it was a German Shepherd. It actually got my head in its jaws, although did not follow through with the crushing part due to my father making like a Norse god and its owner physically flinging himself on top of the dog a few seconds later. I have almost no memory of these events; I was in high school when a friend's Dalmatian nipped me and I burst into convulsive tears which were all the more terrifying because I didn't feel any emotional upset in the moment, certainly no fear of Perdy herself, but I couldn't stop crying. My friend's older brother handed me boxes of Kleenex through the door of the bathroom. I was rattled enough when I got home that I described the incident to my parents and they told me the story of the dog that tried to eat me when I was a toddler. I was amazed because I had previously thought that sort of buried response was an invention of fiction. And that is how I learned that triggers are real.
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I can believe that buried responses to very early trauma works just like that, but if it were happening to me I would probably also have a moment of "that sort of thing only happens in books" initial hesitation. It's different when you're learning something previously unknown about your own experiences.
Not to be a me-too terrifying dog story, but there was a moment when I was six and chased by two He's A Nice Dog, Just Being Friendly big mean dogs, and my mother stood between me and them and clubbed the leading dog on the head with a pocketbook full of quarters. Amazing what parents can do when they are pressed.
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It is kind of dramatic.
It's different when you're learning something previously unknown about your own experiences.
Exactly. Plus a lot of reactions which are normal for other people are not normal for me, so I never know where my emotional responses are going to fall—maybe it happens in books for other people, but not for me.
Not to be a me-too terrifying dog story, but there was a moment when I was six and chased by two He's A Nice Dog, Just Being Friendly big mean dogs, and my mother stood between me and them and clubbed the leading dog on the head with a pocketbook full of quarters.
That is an excellent moment of parental heroism.