Eulalia, motherfuckers! Redwall's been my special interest fandom since I was eight, and I'm now twenty-six. I can talk about it for hours, seriously. I was fortunate enough to be able to take a trip to Liverpool five years ago in order to attend Brian Jacques' public memorial on behalf of the internet fandom; I brought roses and a card and cried a lot. I'm forever thankful I had that opportunity. I can also talk for hours about the terribly hilarious bad fanfic the books get. I think I'm going to be laughing at Ultamite Nineball on my deathbed.
...Do tell (about the fanfic). I don't think I've even read any - my participation in the fandom was limited to a bit of roleplaying on Lancepaw's Fort and maybe a couple of other sites. But I love the books and read them over and over after my mom read Redwall, Mossflower, and (I think) Mattimeo to me and my siblings when I was eleven-ish. I'm less familiar with the ones after Triss, though. Also when I was thirteen I knotted the tie on my bathrobe and named it Gullwhacker. Mariel is the best.
I started rereading my collection of Redwall again recently but didn't get all that far. Oh man. I always loved the hares and the squirrels best. My username on the very first little baby message board i frequented was Rufe Brush, pf. what was that book with the scottish squirrels, i read it so many times. it was the combination of squirrels and scottish accents that did it for me, i think.
All I know about Redwall is from the badfics and the sporkings thereof. I wonder what I'm missing, but I don't have money right now, so :P
@TwoBrokenMirrors - that would be Rakkety Tam. I have a signed copy! Love that one. @palindromordnilap The Nelvana cartoon show might be a good intro point while you wait, and the books are available on Kindle for fairly cheap so you can grab one at a time. Keep in mind they're aimed at pre-teens so don't be too disappointed if you hate them. @Elaienar Here is the best badfic: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Creator/UltamiteNineball There is also a bunch of horrible Rule 34 which I made fun of relentlessly as a teen. You probably don't wanna hear the details. Then there were a few minor cases, like the genius who persistently spelled "Martin" as "Martian".
YES Rakkety Tam. I need to bring my copy of that back home with me when I go see my parents in June. Redwall for me is the same sort of thing as the Cadfael medieval murder mysteries- that is, books with a set formula where you know what you're getting, and are therefore absolutely prime comfort reading when your brain can't deal with the stress of not knowing how things will work out.
An especially popular part is the strong female characters; "strong" is never confused for "needlessly violent", and no big deal is made of the female characters being as awesome as the males. Plus no big deal is made of male characters taking nurturing non-fighting roles. Pretty good as 1980s-90s kids' lit goes in those terms :)
@ChelG Everyone's eyes seem to sparkle. Also I definitely want to hear the details if you want to tell about them.
I and a bunch of friends in the Protectors of the Plot Continuum sporked a terrible Rule 34 series into oblivion in my teens. Recently I felt bad about it because I have since developed writing habits involving even more disturbing content than they had (I'm using Redwall to fill the 33 Day Guro Challenge, among other things), but on checking again I decided I shouldn't feel bad because it was ridiculous even without being scarred by the content. For one thing, in a non-magical continuum objects longer than the orifice's owner is tall should not disappear entirely in there, and the correct response from characters who are supposed to be likeable to hearing the screams caused by these goings-on is not to start having sex.
Your missions were very cool. The problem with the fics wasn't the kink, it was the very bad writing.
Thanks. The kink has its issues, but those are all down to how it was used, which counts under "bad writing". For example, hyper-sized penetrations would work fine in a universe which had magic. I could also see maybe a dose of "OMG we might die let's have life-affirming sex" when overhearing someone be murdered, but not just suddenly throwing it in there, and not in the one place where the entire population of the building would see them. These days I have much better grasp of the writing inconsistency issues than I did when I was sixteen, sex-repulsed, and Screaming At Squick; for example, now it bothers me a lot more that Sawney's motives suddenly flipped mid-fic for no reason. Consistency isn't really the canon's strong point (though I do like to imagine these days that Diggum and Gurrbowl simply transitioned between books) but it was never that careless. Speaking of consistency, the TV show annoys me unreasonably because the characters are neither animal-sized nor human-sized (both of which seem to appear in the books, again consistency not the strong point) but just go with whatever. Badgers are maybe twice the size of mice, crows are twice as big as badgers, rats seem to change from scene to scene, a mouse fits in a cat's mouth and the rat which was only slightly bigger than the mouse is proportionally pretty large next to a horse's head. It's a lot more noticeable when things go weird in that way in a visual medium.
Oh, oh, just remembered. It's too bad the TVTropes page for aforementioned awful Rule 34 got taken down, because the bit where the entire population of the Abbey conveniently vanishes to leave the walltop unobserved is a very literal case of What Happened To The Mouse.
i always loved the group of birds who lived in the abbey's attic. and the rabbits at the mountain. and the squirrels. and the otters. ahhh that series.
How did I not know about this thread Redwall was my CHILDHOOD and strongly formative in my writing (the food, man, the FOOD) *screeing*
Ooh Marlfox was great, in my top 5. Loved Mossflower too. He didn't do female villains often but when he did hooboy. Tsarmina is definitely one of my favorite examples of villain-crazy.
*KICKS DOWN THE DOOR* hey i loved redwall as a kid. admittedly, i haven't read the last couple of books of it because i kind of, in a way, grew out of it. they're so formulaic, but also so comforting. i love the redwall world. i used to do some redwall rp back in the day and even now i have a redwall OC that's a good guy wolverine cuz i hate redwall's X RACES ARE GOOD Y RACES ARE BAD VERY FEW EXCEPTIONS shtick. she's an elderly druid-ish type that's blind in one eye and spends most of her time gathering herbs and stuff to make medicines. taggerung was actually my very first redwall book and it inspired me to literally get every single other one. taggerung is still one of my faves though, tied with the long patrol. i loved stories that had a big badger focus a lot.
Taggerung is great because otters are great. I also really enjoyed how the books around that time had a bit of continuity. Some of them time skip around a lot but iirc Pearls of Lutra -> The Long Patrol -> Marlfox -> Taggerung were pretty obviously connected with characters from the prior becoming abbot/abbess or other important figures in later ones, and of course multiple appearances from Cregga Rose Eyes who was such a great badger character. Also really loved Mariel of Redwall and The Bellmaker because familiar characters happening twice, basically. I wish Brian Jacques had done more stories with Mariel, she was my absolute fave mouse character.
speaking of tiny-us's-redwall fursonas, mine was a squirrel god we did not see enough of them. orrrr i didn't have many squirrelly books, i only had hand-me-downs from my bro
first animal crush was Veil, tiny-me was 'problematic' or something (i wish we saw more of his mam tho, bluefen sounded interesting and we saw 'she existed, she got wed, she served food now and then, she had son, she died')
