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.)
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
(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
Thank you.
The plot moves fast, and it's a really well-fought siege on everybody's part, so you only get to see the rats, ferrets, etc., in the context of their being this specific group of villains who have shown up to kill our heroes. I find that easier to accept without its being a sweeping judgement on all rat-ness.
That makes sense, and is good to know.
It also has the sparrows, who are hostile and scary to mice but who aren't set up as intrinsically evil, I recall. And from the other direction, Squire Gingivere is a lovely guy, but he's still a cat. I can accept "mice need to be afraid of everyone except other mice, until trustworthiness is proven" more easily than I can live with "mice are genetically good, vermin are genetically bad."
Redwall actually takes place in our universe, which means it's perfectly reasonable for mice to worry about being eaten by even friendly predators! I wonder if retconning the books into a secondary world accelerated some of the species/race issues: without an actual ecosystem to drive their behavior, what would be the big deal about rodents and small carnivorous mammals living together (I don't know what the vermin of Redwall eat, but it really doesn't seem to be mice), except that it's anathema according to Jacques?
Then again, the foxes are chock-full of Romany stereotypes -- I think the mom fox even gets referred to as "that Gypsy" at some point -- so it's not like Redwall is free of weird animal-surrogate racism, it just goes in a different direction.
I remember when I finally figured out that Killconey the ferret was supposed to be Irish. I was not good with written accents as a child.
I want to reread Mattimeo now. Damn that was such a good adventure.
Everything I can remember about Mattimeo is gonzo. I don't mean it as a bad thing.