(dusts off community)

[matsushima]

Nobody has updated this community for a very long time. I've been on a Redwall kick lately and I'd love to find some other fans.
Here's my prompt, for anyone who happens to see this: What's your take on the biological essentialism of the worldbuilding?
Personally, I'm OK with saying, "I love Redwall and I can acknowledge that it's not perfect, and this is probably its biggest flaw." I was surprised to see people tweeting about the possible Netflix show and saying they were glad it was maybe-canceled because the "woke mob" would "ruin" it by changing that.

Comments

Re: Thoughts

[matsushima]

I think the biological essentialism of Redwall bothers me because it doesn't feel particularly well thought out. One of my favorite things about the series is that it's quite thrown together. Are they mice living in a human-size world or not? It seems to shift scale to whatever is cooler, which I genuinely admire. Where it falls apart for me is when Jacques tries to respond (Outcast of Redwall, Taggerung*) and it becomes clear that the worldbuilding was never particularly sturdy. Why are badgers the "good guys" if badgers eat mice? Rats don't eat mice.

I doubt the Netflix show would change much about it, honestly. The whining about the "woke mob" were not good faith questions that you raised about paranoid and reparative reading, etc., but more in line with the Star Wars fans complaining about ""white genocide"" because a Black man used a lightsaber on screen. Like you said, I think there are ways for thoughtful adaptations to change fundamental aspects of a text (Interview with the Vampire, e.g., engages deeply with questions of race in the original books) but I think the text needs to be sturdy enough to stand up to it.

I genuinely, deeply love Redwall (I'm literally wearing a Tapestry of Martin t-shirt right now!) but one of the things I really like about it is that it doesn't come out of the Tolkien School of World Building. It's much more closely aligned with Narnia, where Father Christmas shows up and there are satyrs and Mrs. Beaver has a sewing machine because Lewis thinks that's neat. (Like I said, I actually prefer that style of storytelling.) That changes how much an adaptation can push back against the original text without toppling the whole thing over. You can question some of the stuff in Narnia but you can't take out the Christ narrative of Aslan's death or it doesn't make sense. I think the biological essentialism in Redwall is less intentional but equally foundational.

I also wonder how much it matters that Dr. Watson and Louis de Pointe du Lac appeared on screen in pretty faithful adaptations before Elementary and the HBO Max versions? There was a Redwall TV show (I watched it!) but it didn't get the same mainstream recognition as the 1994 Interview with the Vampire film.


*It has been a very, very long time since I read either of those, because I didn't particularly care for them, so I'm willing to be wrong about this.

Re: Thoughts

[rc88]

Rats do eat mice, they just don't hunt them: https://www.quora.com/How-do-rats-react-to-mice And the bioessentialism in Redwall is based on folkloric portrayals of the species, not reality.

Re: Thoughts

[matsushima]

Fair enough, especially the point about how the good:neutral:evil alignments are based more in folklore than biological reality. (I'm thinking also of cats who are, surprisingly, neutral and even good!)