[ SECRET POST #2188 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2188 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.


__________________________________________________



02.


__________________________________________________



03.


__________________________________________________



04.


__________________________________________________



05.


__________________________________________________



06.


__________________________________________________



07.


__________________________________________________



08.


__________________________________________________



09.


__________________________________________________



10.


__________________________________________________



11.


__________________________________________________



12.


__________________________________________________



13.


__________________________________________________



14.


__________________________________________________



15.


__________________________________________________













Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 05 pages, 102 secrets from Secret Submission Post #313.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[fscom]

04. http://i.imgur.com/98pkf.jpg

[morieris]

REDWAAALLL!

*ahem*

In the later books, there was a little species and morality blending, but never as much as I would have liked.

BUT...Tagg/Deyna was raised by the Juskawrath and /somehow/ managed to avoid killing goodbeasts (apparently, I forget) and his journey was about self discovery and Veil was outcasted....

I need to go read these again, my details are a little sketchy.

[(Anonymous)]

Maybe I can refresh your memory.

Deyna was an otter raised by vermin but he was inherently good ~cuz he was born that way~. He knew he was 'not one of them' because there were no other Otters in the Juskarath, so he went on a journey of self discovery that led him to Redwall.

Veil's story is vaguely the opposite of Deyna's, except without the happy ending and a ton of *bad guy schemes* littered here and there.

[(Anonymous)]

Yay! A Redwall secret!

I'm with you OP. I don't think Veil was evil.

[(Anonymous)]

*cough* Blaggut *cough*

[(Anonymous)]

True, Blaggut was the rat accepted into Redwall, but then he goes off to some river to build boats afterwards. They tell him he's always welcome there, but I still think he wasn't considered a true redwaller.

I wished so badly that one of the 'vermin' types could become good. I still do. I would read fanfic of it, but reading Redwall stories not written by Brian Jacques just puts me off.

[(Anonymous)]

There needed to be more Blagguts in the series. Especially foxes, which in the original book (for what all that means, considering how much else changed) were supposed to be a sort of wildcard neutral but end up being universally evil anyways.

[truxillogical]

There's Blaggut and Gingivere (and his descendant), but other than that...nothing. In how many books?

I love Redwall too, but that was always my biggest problem with it. Especially since I, y'know, like rats and ferrets and foxes and stoats. Heck, rats are smarter than mice.

[(Anonymous)]

Same.

[visp]

At least no one's saying he's misunderstood just because he's hot.

[(Anonymous)]

The whole... good animals/bad animals thing bothered me so much as a kid that I used to pretend there was a whole order of vixens who were good. :3 /random

No, Veil wasn't evil, but it was hard because the expectations were there for him to be. It was more of a self-fufilling prophecy imo than anything else. He ended up redeemed through sacrifice, which kinda sucked.

[(Anonymous)]

I loved Romsca from Pearls of Lutra.

It's been a long time since I actually read it, but what pisses me about Veil's storyline is that throughout the novel Bryony, who acted as his mother, continually saw evidence of his horrible actions and insisted he was still a good person. then at the end, Veil sacrifices his life to save her, and that's when she decides to accept he actually was a bad person after all.

[(Anonymous)]

Byrony was so wishy-washy about her feelings toward him. Sucks that she thought he was a 'bad guy' after his sacrifice for her. I seriously wanted to slap her after that.

[(Anonymous)]

That was always one of my problems with the books. But I like rats! But I like foxes! And why do we get the occasional sympathetic cat or bird of prey, but not a lousy weasel? If things got blurrier in the later books, maybe I should go read them.

ferret/rat lover :(

[(Anonymous)]

I read a bunch of these books when I was a kid, because I liked medieval fantasy type stories, and I liked animals. But I was always irrationally bothered that my favorite animals were "the bad guys". I had pet ferrets and rats throughout my childhood (and of course cats, who I think were the bad guys in the first book?) and so I was offended on SJW levels that they were always evil.

Then I read the book in this secret, and I was sooo hoping we finally had a good ferret. I was cheering for him the whole time, hoping his "badness" was actually due to being treated differently, or as he perceived differently, rather than innate ferrets = bad. In the end, he sacrifices himself for his mom, iirc, and then... suddenly, the conclusion is that he was actually a bad guy?

What the fuck!

Can someone actually explain why this ending makes sense? Why was he bad because he sacrificed himself? I think the mom said "I don't think he thought he would die" or something, but he did it nonetheless.

Anyway, I feel you, OP, because this was the book that made me stop reading Redwall. lol

[feotakahari]

Anyone want to get involved in some good clean racewank? I'll start: http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Redwall#Racism

(Seriously, I've never been fond of any fantasy story that has good races and evil races--sorry, Tolkien, but worlds where good people fight other good people are much more interesting to me.)

[(Anonymous)]

I remember reading Mariel of Redwall and I came upon a peculiar quote from the villain of that story, Gabool The Wild.

.....

I had to grab the book off the shelf and fetch the exact quote. Here it is:

"Haharr, very stubborn, Joseph, but I can see that you're a good creature. Sometimes I wish that I'd never been born wicked, but decent like you."

If this doesn't proove Jacques' creatures are born good or bad, I don't know what does. I kinda wish Joseph had responded saying, "You can still be a good beast, Gabool. The choice is up to you." But if Gabool had changed his ways on the spot, we wouldn't have a story now, would we?

[kamino_neko]

He has the occasional good Vermin (maybe only in the earlier books, though, I stopped reading about 1/3 of the way through the series)...

'Goodbeasts' who ain't, though...well, let's just say he may have a rather more lax definition of 'good', than I do. (Seriously, screw you, Mattimeo.)

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, there's a few cases throughout the books but they're almost all questionable and "well, from this point of view ..."

Wish there'd been more side-changing going on. Kids aren't dumb, they can handle character development and changing.

[cassandraoftroy]

That was one of the last Redwall books I read; I don't remember much of it, but I remember being very irritated at the way it portrayed evil as being an inborn species-based trait, and that the main character couldn't actually be redeemed or be good.

Then again, given that his name was an anagram of "evil," I suppose that was telegraphed pretty early on, and I shouldn't have been surprised. Disappointed, but not surprised.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, that's why this was the last Redwall book I read. I can only think of one instance where an 'evil' species was good, and it was that one brother cat to... Tsarina, was her name? From Martin the Warrior, I think?

It just irritated me immensely.

[(Anonymous)]

I always liked Veil in that regard. He was a bad person, but he did care for Bryony. I'm sure he did. He was by far one of the most interesting antagonists in that splendid series. Ahhhhhh I want to read them again now!

[(Anonymous)]

god it makes me happy to see people still thinking and talking about redwall- it was one of my first fandoms in the journalfandom era, and i still have a strong fondness for it.

that said, i agree with you that veil's death qualified as atonement for his crimes in life. ultimately, he wasn't evil- the life he needed was just incompatible with the world he grew up in.

[(Anonymous)]

I agree with you. He did have a few 'vermin' characters end up being good or at the least having some redeeming qualities, but a lot of the time his characterizations were very simplistic. That it was a children's series is no excuse - see the complexity of character and blurring of good vs evil in Animorphs, for example.


On a related note, I'm still not used to the fact that he's dead and will never write any more books.

[deadcellredux]

Omg, Redwall! Such a huge part of my childhood-- so nostalgic! Anyway, your secret brought back a lot of feelings-- one thing that always bothered me about the novels (even as a child) was that the bad guys ALWAYS lost, and I can't remember any of them REALLY being redeemed. I always found something to identify with in the "bad guys", and it always bothered me how they ALWAYS got completely and utterly defeated (from what I remember). But yeah-- like you said, it's a children's fantasy series, so of course the good/evil isn't going to have any gray... but that doesn't mean I wasn't totally disappointed most of the time when the bad guys got owned, or disappointed by the fact that they were always portrayed as being TOTALLY evil (for some reason Ferago and Klitch from Salamandastron are coming to mind).