big jarring thing in redwall was the transition from book one to book eight book one: 'don't be speciesist to rats!' book eight: 'let's name an orphan an anagram of 'vile' and 'evil' jic' (I know book one is wildly different in many respects, but it's still jarring)
also blaggut was ... i'd been waiting every book for a character like blaggut when i was little. from grade one-three/four i was Obsessed (and didnt know if we'd ever touch on 'good vermin') and when i got to blaggut's book and read his story i danced around as a kid. i was enthralled. i dogeared every passage involving him, reread them multiple times and the bellmaker is definitely my most dog eared redwall book as a result.
A couple more crop up, and there are ones who aren't exactly "good" but aren't murderous, and there's also a good sprinkling of "bad" woodlanders. Martin the Warrior has three instances of the latter - the slave-taking shrews, the hedgehog who almost poisons the gang, and the squirrels who throw others off cliffs for fun.
'If you only read up to ‘The Outcast’ you read, what, five books out of twenty-two?' You would've read 8 books in publication order, which I actually assume most people read in, and if you read those 8 books you would've met almost all the even slightly good vermin Jacques ever wrote. Looking back, I read 9 as I most definitely read Pearls of Lutra (partially because of Romsca). Spoiler Romsca is also just a short redemption equals death. I think the thing about the examples of 'goodbeasts who are bad' is they are never set up to be punished in exactly the same way. I checked myself as a kid if more good vermin were introduced. I used to look this up for every new published book Redwall released. You don't do this for something you hate. You do this for something you like, but want to see more nuance in. Man I didn't even want to get into this part but... if people are going to deny it... Imo, setting Redwall in an Abbey gives it an undeniable religious influence. If you're Christian and set something in an Abbey because it's your go to peaceful area for things to go down, than it's going to have a religious influence. Like, separate from whether Jacques intended it or not. You can't have almost all the good characters work for an Abbey and than deny the work has any religious influence or tilt to its pages. I know they occasionally went outside the Abbey for their MCs, but pretty much every story ended up in the Abbey with the title characters eventually living there (mostly. I know there might be a handful of examples that don't follow this but it's def a big trend). It does sometimes set up the feeling of the good churchfolk clucking their tongues at people who don't belong to their culture. Imo Redwall's religious influence doesn't just influence people who have had bad experiences within their religious community - when I was 12 and roleplayed on Redwall forums there was a heavy Catholic presence. From what I've seen people who value their Christianity often really dig Redwall for portraying those themes in an interesting way. Regardless of 'it not being influenced by religion' the vast majority of people who interact with it get some of that out of it, to their benefit or not. Anyway, the thing is with how the vermin are treated - I think it's a big enough issue that multiple fans wanted to see it addressed after they read the books. Actually, I'd imagined most fans would have wanted to see it addressed before having this discussion. As a kid my favourite fanworks for Redwall were the ones that addressed the Redwaller's hypocrisy and speciesism towards the vermin they ran into - because yes, Redwallers were often very aggressive and assumed a lot of someone based off of their species. Meeting starving vermin drew out begrudging 'guess we'll have to help them even if they are what they are'. Vermin often had head injuries, or were 'stupid', were pretty much always poor and uneducated and hungry and filthy. Idk, the Redwaller view of 'they do it to themselves' didn't seem so nuanced when it was like... Redwallers pretty much living in a well stocked abbey with feasts all the time.
Yeah, but then look at what's happening outside the Abbey. Thousands of woodlanders get enslaved, murdered, eaten, etc every book. Can you blame them for setting up oases?
It just hit me that Redwall is stereotypical Tumblr. The big bads set themselves up as royalty and enact horrors on the masses; they're the Privileged bogeyman. The Abbeydwellers are the sheltered kids lacking privilege on one spectrum yet wanting for nothing and never experiencing what it's really like out there, but declaring themselves experts. The rank-and-file vermin are the equivalent of poor or disabled white people or something who get shouted down when they try to get involved. Regardless of all that, Slightly Hairier Genghis Khan is about as not-underprivileged as you can get and underprivileged white people exist, so if they're trying to map it onto human race (which doesn't really work anyway), it works better to have the vermin be at the top.
Also I don't remember any bad guys who started out with head injuries or mental issues. Multiple big bads developed serious paranoia over the course of the book, usually because they were apparently genuinely being haunted, several characters of both alignments are just not very bright, I recall one rat got a head injury in the course of doing something nefarious, and a good sprinkling of the good guys had mental health issues (Corporal Rubbadub, Martha, Folgrim).
I really really want a fusion with the webcomic Goblins in which some poor hapless rat is only put in charge of a horde because his name is Chief, Minmax is an overenthusiastic badger, Kin is an actual grass snake, maybe Klik is a bug of some sort...
