sovay: (Haruspex: Autumn War)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote2017-10-18 05:29 am

Apologies like the birds in the sky

I have been having an absolutely miserable night, but after venting at length to [personal profile] 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.)
swan_tower: (Default)

[personal profile] swan_tower 2017-10-19 02:29 am (UTC)(link)
Maybe a ferret once bit Brian Jacques and he never got over it?
teenybuffalo: (Default)

[personal profile] teenybuffalo 2017-10-19 03:05 am (UTC)(link)
How'd you get out of that one?
teenybuffalo: (Default)

[personal profile] teenybuffalo 2017-10-19 03:53 am (UTC)(link)
Holy fucking smokes, YIKES. OK, that's heroic origin story level.

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.