Apologies like the birds in the sky
I have been having an absolutely miserable night, but after venting at length to ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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.)
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.)
no subject
The Redwall wiki tells me that they're a loving parody of the Liverpool longshoremen's union. Apart from anything else, I guess now we know how their accents sound.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIQ7rhW655Y
(not to post mystery links, this is Louisa Jo Killen singing "Bonny Bunch of Roses-O.")
no subject
No, these are encountered by Matthias and company well into their southward pursuit of Slagar and the kidnapped children of Redwall—they have already met up with the Guosim by then. I don't think the text ever identifies them as anything other than "the painted ones." They kill several shrews and almost steal a young otter before our heroes get away from them; Slagar's party suffered similar losses when it passed through the same dark pines. They do not reappear in any of the books I read, although that doesn't preclude Jacques re-using them in a later novel, probably less effectively. In elementary school, because of the bones, I think partly because there never is a real explanation of who or even what they are, they bothered me.
The Redwall wiki tells me that they're a loving parody of the Liverpool longshoremen's union.
Well, I did not pick up on that as a child.
(not to post mystery links, this is Louisa Jo Killen singing "Bonny Bunch of Roses-O.")
Louisa Killen is always welcome in comments.