Basil, On The Phone: I Realize That, But I Cannot Miss Cheek’s Bassoon Recital.

Martin the warrior sketch

Scrolling through your blog and every single hot take on here strikes me to my very core. No creature to ever walk this earth has been so correct about anything ever. This entire book series is just a where's waldo but "waldo" is gay people and the "where" is Positively Everywhere

I need “This entire book series is just a where's waldo but "waldo" is gay people and the "where" is Positively Everywhere” on a t-shirt please and thank you.

Anyhow thank you for stroking my ego hfdgjk, the joy I felt from reading this was immense /gen

Old unfinished drawing

Rose but like… she is the guardian of Martins sword… yeah

Guess I just have a fondness for heroes' that started too young, lost their whole families because of the baddie, went on grand adventures that took them over the world, met a girl who they associate strongly with a particular flower but who then dies and leaves them embittered and hurting as they continue to wander the world, searching for a purpose or just waiting to be killed, only to eventually find life again when some Dorky Little Guy with a Gimmick (and perhaps is somewhat dishonest but on the whole very polite about it) who then prompts them to take another journey at the end of which they decide to settle down and just try to enjoy life

They do not, of course, get to enjoy a totally peaceful life, but it's okay because they need the enrichment sometimes <3

They then go on to become a well storied hero that is spoken of widely throughout the rest of whatever series of media they feature in, naturally.

martin the warrior

I AM THAT IS

The one thing I did not expect when showing my friends Redwall was them being indescribably horny for Friar Hugo

Got a apple pen as an early bday gift and playing around with the pressure features

So it's been a hot second since I took a break from my full series reread, but I found myself once again thinking about Outcast of Redwall and the raw deal that Veil Sixclaw got.

What kills me is that before the poisoning, the one thing Veil got in trouble for--the only thing, in fact--was stealing. This kid didn't even get into fights, he just stole food from the kitchens, which as Bryony points out is normal Abbey kid behavior. Another character shoots back that stealing is something most kids outgrow implying that the fact that Veil hasn't is suspicious, which is frankly a wild thing to say to the great grand-daughter of Gonff the Mousethief.

(In a kinder version of events, the adults in Veil's life might have shaken their heads with long-suffering fondness and remarked that he was following in his adopted ancestor's footsteps.)

The whole point of Redwall is that it's the woodland utopia where no one goes hungry and everyone has what they need, which is why kids stealing pies off the windowsill is no big deal... except when Veil does it, apparently. Veil's the one that gets physical punishment when he's suspected of stealing--not even proven! I can't recall off the top of my head any incidents in the rest of the series of corporal punishment in Redwall beyond idle threats that the kids know not to take seriously. But Veil gets scrutinized from the moment Redfarl and Skipperjo pick him up out of the mud and they and Bella look at this literal infant and say "oh yeah, he's gonna be evil for sure."

And then a thought occurred to me: it's generational trauma.

Most of the characters in Outcast are two generations removed from the characters in Mossflower. Bella of Brockhall is in both books. Verdauga and Tsarmina are still within living memory. Until the end of Outcast, as far as she knows, Bella lost her entire family to vermin warlords. Mossflower opens on a scene in which a ferret kicks in the door of a family of subsistence farmers, threatens their children with slavery, and takes all their food as taxes leaving them with none for the winter--and the Stickles were the last holdouts. The other farmers in the area had already run off to join the resistance at that point, so this kind of treatment was normal.

And we're left with a close-knit society of people who've grown up with this shared history, with a venerated authority figure who still carries the scars and memories of what they lost--and suddenly another warlord comes within a hairsbreadth of discovering the peaceful society they built in the aftermath, and leaves behind a starving neglected baby whose first impression is eating frogspawn in the mud and biting his rescuers while being the spitting image of the warlord they just narrowly avoided.

All of that gets thrown into this caustic mixture of fear and paranoia that gets projected onto a literal baby and results in their completely out of pocket response to a child taking food from the kitchens in the We Share Everything Abbey.

It also might explain why Bryony, who's young enough to be three generations removed and may have been born after most of the survivors of Kotir had already passed, is the only one who isn't scared and suspicious of Veil on sight.

Tsarmina greeneyes