Visiting a beloved children's franchise late in life has been a trip

Sometime around last summer I started reading the Redwall books with my kids; I've known a lot of people who'd read them growing up or for whom those books meant a lot but they'd missed me entirely until the year of our Abbot 2025 and so I'm coming at this from a probably more critical lens than the one expected of the target audience from the 90's but man,

If you, like me, have somehow missed out on this franchise - the premise of the first book is pretty straightforward; low fantasy Europe where animals are confusingly anthropomorphized into people but also depicted as animals simultaneously; there's hints that humans (and Portugal!) exist but that's quickly dropped by the second book and never commented upon again, so instead of a NIMH or Warriors type situation where the creatures live as creatures and hide, they like...have jobs and houses and fishing vessels. It's pretty wild. I don't go here but it's like a third thing, a mid-point between NIMH and furry basically.

Anyway, a group of mice have built a big-ass Abbey out of red stone that while not religious, features an order that's centered around the memory of a "Warrior mouse" from ages ago. They tend to crops, help the sick, take care of an alarming number of orphans (that seem to have no official source), cook more food than is reasonable¹ and occasionally fend off their territory from invaders.

The books are pretty line-in-the-sand clear on the "good" animals being mice (and to a lesser extent voles) who are depicted as "good honest English folk", moles being their labor force that are incomprehensible simpletons with like, Welsh or Summserset accents (written phonetically²!!), hedgehogs written as either Scottish or maybe Mancunian beermakers, otters being depicted as effectively Irish sailors, and shrews showing up regularly as a "so we needed an army to come in an mop up the bad'uns" plot device (while also a parody of how unionized workforces apparently argue all the time? Not sure what is point was trying to be with the whole "Union of Shrews" thing).

Badgers play confusing gendered roles as the books go on because the females are all written like horrific southern mammy stereotypes who not only are in charge of the orphans but also are regularly physically abusive to them, and the males are warrior lords who abandon their families in pursuit of honor and often go berserk, killing friend and foe alike when hit with "the bloodwrath". There's also rabbits who are almost always in military adjacent roles and speak like 1940's RAF pilot stereotypes: "'bout that time, don'cha know chaps, wot wot". It's a little jarring lmao.

These are all, again, ostensibly the "good guys".

The "bad" animals are all "vermin", you see. Rats primarily, with weasels, stoats, ferrets, foxes (including two pine martens to date) as either "invasive warrior hordes" or "lowlife seascum pirates". They always speak either with a cockney British accent or in stereotypical "pirate dialect". Ahoy, avast, messmate, etc etc - and almost every primary "vermin" antagonist is depicted as having either some kind of disfigurement or physical disability.

Every book so far with few exceptions follows some primary character from the Abbey faction (usually a mouse) at a various point in an ongoing timeline³ where some adventure happens in or around the Abbey; most often, the Abbey itself is threatened by "vermin" in some way and has to be defended by these peace-loving creatures, with the protagonist mouse being at the center and guided by visions from the ancient warrior mouse via like, the ghost parade or some shit.

In some rare cases, the Abbey dwellers open their hearts to a "vermin" character; one wounded, or left behind by their comrades, or a roving band of performers - etc, and every time the books prove them correct to have been mistrustful of these "evil" creatures. Again, nine books in and we've had one sympathetic rat...ever?? and they are only forgiven because they turned from their life of "evil" and helped save some orphans. Most "vermin" aren't given any grace, and the books go at length to show how they're more or less all press-ganged into the barbarian hordes or pirate life with no other choices which makes me wonder why we try to garner sympathy from the reader before stating why it's ok they were killed.

When trying to pin down why "vermin" are evil you might automatically assume (as I did when hitting the second book and the main villain is a Cat who rules the kingdom like a despot) that the threat to the Abbey dwellers is being eaten - but by anthropomorphizing the animals (again, more so as the books go on) there's effectively never an existential threat of rats or stoats like, canibalizing the mice. The foxes border on this early on but it's kind of dropped so the "vermin" are usually just unruly barbarians or pirates who want to steal plunder and baked goods or add to their slave labor force.

Sapient birds and snakes also feature into the setting with the former being a mixed bag of "these birds are good!" (Owls, despite them absolutely IRL being mouse predators and that being incongruous) and "these birds are bad" (Crows, ravens, y'know...the black birds, y'know, side eye forever), with the latter being an actual "they're going to eat us" threat.

I get that I'm coming to a children's book series about animal people from the 90's with the lens of the mid 2020's and a background in racial studies but it's frankly astounding how each book gets my hopes up that this time we'll get some justice for the stereotypes we're putting on the non-Abbey creatures, and each time I'm fucking Lucy Footballed with some "it's in their nature, they couldn't help it" Clinton-era suerpredator line justifying why the evil vermin was evil and why it was ok to kill them, hurt them, mistrust them, betray them, etc.

The book I had the most hope for was book 8 (Outcast of Redwall, 1995) which from title alone could imply a lot of things. The back of the book synopsis describes a situation where we might see some sort of redemption for 'vermin' OR some comeuppance on the Abbey folk for being so fucking xenophobic all the time... but not only is the back of the book not relevant for over 200 pages, when it does become relevant it's even more disappointing than the priors⁴!

Book nine, which again, we're in the middle of right now, is not showing any sign of beating the above allegations (Though this book's Badger mother is the least abusive of the franchise so far, so hey - progress!!) but I'm comitted to the long haul of reading the whole franchise.

There's plenty in here I do like, but it's got huge cactus in the cage vibes basically whenever the word "vermin" is used and that's hard to overcome.

Anyway, thanks for reading. Here are your end-of-post cat photos. Snowapple says good morning to some moving boxes.