@Goonon and @Thomas Talus, thank you guys for the suggestions and insight; I've been getting ideas on writing my own setting inspired by Redwall (to some extent), and I figured I might as well give the original setting a proper look.
Question for the thread: out of the books you've read, which one is your favorite/most remembered or your least favorite/most forgettable? For me, my least favorite is easily Salamandastron. It has good things about it but I really disliked several characters and I think there was too much going on for any of the plot threads to get the attention they needed. Choosing a favorite is more difficult but if someone put a gun to my head I would just say Martin the Warrior.
I know I read Loamhedge but all I remember from it is the wheelchair character suddenly not needing her wheelchair at the end, so that's probably my least favorite.
I enjoyed The Legend of Luke. Always figured from the way Martin the Warrior set him up that he must be having some pretty big offscreen adventures (because if he was just some chump who died in the backstory he might as well have died in that flashback instead of sailing away) so the whole segment with Luke taking the fight to the searats was just about exactly what I wanted on that front, and I'm a sucker for the kind of retracing-the-steps story that makes up the rest of the book in Martin's time - it's part of what I liked so much about the first book, the sort of scavenger hunt for Martin's relics.
Cool intro aside, I hated how much they changed from the first book. In particular adding new characters and scenes that weren't necessary and making it so Methuselah survives long enough for Matthias to say goodbye. I also seem to recall the third season pussifying things too much. The second season is most accurate to the source material, and Tim Curry as Slagar was cool.
I know I read Loamhedge but all I remember from it is the wheelchair character suddenly not needing her wheelchair at the end, so that's probably my least favorite.
I enjoyed The Legend of Luke. Always figured from the way Martin the Warrior set him up that he must be having some pretty big offscreen adventures (because if he was just some chump who died in the backstory he might as well have died in that flashback instead of sailing away) so the whole segment with Luke taking the fight to the searats was just about exactly what I wanted on that front, and I'm a sucker for the kind of retracing-the-steps story that makes up the rest of the book in Martin's time - it's part of what I liked so much about the first book, the sort of scavenger hunt for Martin's relics.
That was my least favorite thing about Loamhedge too, because there's no explanation for it and the solution they bring back to the Abbey is also unsatisfactoy. Willpower? Really nigga? Legend of Luke is patrician taste, good pick.
Edit: If the Redwall wiki is to be believed, the Netflix adaptations are cancelled and they no longer have the rights. Probably a W considering the state of animation/entertainment right now.
We Are So Back, a new Redwall book was mentioned in the description of a new box set listed on Edelweiss. Never heard of the site before today but it appears to be a place for publishers to show off their catalog. Orphans of Redwall, it's called. After the Netflix cancellation I don't think it likely that the series would get revived for brand new, not touched by Jacques content, so I will choose to believe it was at least started prior to him passing away.
I loved Redwall as a kid, but rereading it as an adult, I find the villains way more interesting. Reading about the society and power struggles of a pirate emperor or tribal weasels is way more compelling than the effortless wholesomeness of the Redwallers.
I feel like it never quite commits to building its own fantasy world. There's hints of deeper lore and worldbuilding but it doesn't explore them with much depth
I loved Redwall as a kid, but rereading it as an adult, I find the villains way more interesting. Reading about the society and power struggles of a pirate emperor or tribal weasels is way more compelling than the effortless wholesomeness of the Redwallers.
I feel like it never quite commits to building its own fantasy world. There's hints of deeper lore and worldbuilding but it doesn't explore them with much depth
That's true, I especially like when different villain groups either team up or fight each other. Their interactions are more fun since most of them don't care about honor or have lines they won't cross. I think Jacques' dedication to his target audience of young children was ultimately the limiting factor, I read in an interview that he believed kids benefitted most from being given definitive definitions of right and wrong and that they aren't getting it as much from school or church as did older generations. He often wrote to fill that need.
That's probably the limiting factor for worldbuilding as well, most Redwall books you can jump into and not be completely lost because the basic underlying structure of the world is laid out each time, leaving less room for deeper development. You know how sometimes a new tradition will be introduced, but absent in the next and previous books in the timeline, even if they're only a few generations apart? I personally think that was Jacques' way of spicing things up for those who read them all without putting new readers jumping in at a disadvantage.
I think a more egregious example of things existing without the proper literary infrastructure is the castle in The Bellmaker. It was inhabited exclusively by a royal squirrel family, a badger, and their otter guards. How long was the castle there? Why is there a castle complete with a moat and bridge but no surrounding town? Do the otters grow the crops for the squirrels? What exactly is the squirrel the king of, with no subjects? Even I must raise an eyebrow at that.
I loved Redwall as a kid, but rereading it as an adult, I find the villains way more interesting. Reading about the society and power struggles of a pirate emperor or tribal weasels is way more compelling than the effortless wholesomeness of the Redwallers.
I feel like it never quite commits to building its own fantasy world. There's hints of deeper lore and worldbuilding but it doesn't explore them with much depth
I watched all three seasons of the cartoon not too long ago, and I'm reading the books now in the order the show did adaptations, though I've got more books to possibly continue. Not only villains, I'm in agreement with the adjacent concept of side characters being more interesting than the leads (Basil and Log-a-Log grew on me as two examples. Also Sir Harry was great and was underutilized - Warbeak feels similar in that regard though I was sad to see her bumped off).
In regard to villains, I feel Cluny steals the show in the first book/season as a well-written character. He strikes me as Genghis Khan as a rat given his horde and being from the "east" among other reasons. I feel he might be a Black Death reference given the "east" since that event started in China (not Mongolia, but still). In regards to the cartoon, I felt Slagar was the most evil of all of them, and Badrang felt like a generic evil tyrant. Clogg I found to be too goofy to take seriously, I thought he was like Wario. Ironbeak subplot in season two felt like filler which the situation he causes at the abbey is ended by a plot device.
Asmodeus strikes me now as more or less an evil force of nature there to be defeated. (I liked Mingo and was sad to see him go at the former's hand, though the Gousim by and large are red shirts) There is a definite reference to old literature about "hero fights dragon" as transition from one period of life to another, I'll note. Matthias in the books Redwall and Mattimeo, the latter of which I'm reading now, strikes me as less righteous than the cartoon made him out to be. Regardless, the show was well-written and animated, but I didn't like season three's ending.
I read the series avidly as a kid. I have very good memories of them. There is a great mythology woven into the narrative that allows different books to span across hundreds of years.
It is a crying shame that kids books now are dystopia slop. Lord Brocktree was my favorite character, and The Long Patrol was fucking kino.
So do we consider Redwall furry?
The problem with any anthropomorphic or even animal-perspective fiction is people will shit on it automatically for being furry (
Peoples reaction to X, whether that reaction is deserved or not, is irrelevant to whether or not X is Y.
Redwall has anthropomorphic animals. In the most classic sense - they are bipedal animals who speak, build houses, cook food, forge swords and write books.
If its not furry then what even is?
All that aside - I read the shit out of Redwall as a kid and I think I even had an account on the old-ass Web 1.0 Redwall fanclub webpage. I remember there being an utterly ancient forum system, maybe it was on vBulletin, maybe something else.
I distinctly remember reading these as a kid, although they do run into each other at times. There was also an animated TV show that I hardly remember anymore.
I can’t recall which book it was, but one has a villain who wears an animal skull on his head who's killed by being clubbed, which causes the teeth to penetrate his brain. Good stuff, that.
Also, another where a character thinks about how foxes and weasels cannot be trusted no matter what, tries to trust them because others do, and then is right.
Edit to add: if you like this series, do yourself a favor and read the Duncton series (2 trilogys) which are about moles in the English country side. It's also about religious corruption.
The very first book is about how a dark age settles on Duncton, leading to horrible crimes being committed; the main character keeps his faith however and manages to survive. Next 2 are about a rival religion, started by one who fled Duncton in the first, that rises up and takes over moledom. This leads to mass killings, torture, ect. It's grim, and only the coming of the "stone mole" can save society.
Second trilogy follows one character in her quest to write the Book of Silence, which is a book all about death and the reality that all which happens will one day be forgotten by all. It has the return of the death cult religion under a new name and gets even darker.
Amazing series but it's long and weirdly hard to track down in full.
I read in an interview that he believed kids benefitted most from being given definitive definitions of right and wrong and that they aren't getting it as much from school or church as did older generations. He often wrote to fill that need.
And he was absolutely correct to think that. Children need that framework, they need to be shown good v bad as absolutes and they need to be shown that the bad can be vanquished. Most of the best kids stories do this - the wicked witch gets shoved in her own oven. The ogre is slain. The princess gets the prince. And they all live happily ever after.
The point is to show kids that they can overcome evil, not just that evil and good exist.
When you look at modern kids stuff all this is blurred - the morality is relative, not absolute and the outcome is often ambivalent or depressing, or hopeless . Now as an adult, that’s something you can build an interesting story or world on because flawed heroes and fallen villains are interesting in their own way, but I believe that children need that absolute moral framework AND they need to be shown that evil can be defeated.
Oh man, haven’t thought about these books in a long long time.
Late, but the best book to me was Mossflower, followed by Mattimeo.
As a kid I liked the quest to bring Boar (a badger) back to fight the cat, the kind of mythology of Salamandastrom, and the fact Boar read his fate on the walls of the mountain, and went out taking down the searats, not even returning with Martin to fight the cat.
Mattimeo because Slagar, as someone mentioned, was a truly evil villain, and the sort of loamhedge mystery.
Also as people mentioned, the side characters were usually more interesting; I still remember the sea otter in the bell maker, after Joseph was horrified a ship full of sea rats was sucked into a whirlpool, telling Joseph they were murderous scum who deserved it
I think it's crazy that we gave a concept as broad as "what if animals acted like people" to such a niche, modern subculture. It'd be like if we gave the concept of owning a vehicle to those guys who are into having sex with cars.
No, Redwall isn't "furry media" just because it has talking animals in it. Redwall wasn't written by a furry, nor was it written to appeal to furries.
Martin the Warrior was my favorite as a kid because it was the only one that had any kind of romance and also had a tragic ending.
I always thought Mattimeo was kind of boring and only read it once or twice. I also liked the books less and less after Taggerung but they were still decent. Rakkety Tam was always cool because of how violent it was lol
