Guess who decided to return to this series after an entire calendar year? Yeah so but anyway.
Redwall had a pronounced case of Gender Equality But. This is extremely common in speculative settings of all kinds, where there is no officially stated bias against women doing things (these are not generally setting hep to gender, so we’ll say women for now) but the authorial bias in actually writing women doing things persists. Dragon Age is a good example of this, where ostensibly this is a world of lady soldiers and girlboss pirates and equity for all, but very few women actually get speaking roles and massive plot holes open when a town needs to be defended from zombies and all the women and children are sent to hide because not one person thought it through.
Brian Jacques was a man with some classist preoccupations and some suppositions about the bioessentialism of evil. He was an old British dude. But I do get the impression that he was kind of trying when it came to writing girls. His stated goal with Mariel was to give the girls a violent mouse they could look up to, and he did. He, like so many writers, unthinkingly gave most of the good roles to dudes and the homey, nurturing roles to non-dudes, and there were like 2-3 canonical Badgerladies, and sometimes characters would say things like “’tis no place here for a young maid.” But. It’s like someone suddenly asked him in the early 80s, Brian, you’re giving mice swords, just swords hither and yon. Is it cool if lady mice have swords? And he said to himself, Self, he said, lady mice can have swords, now, back to pie. He meant well. So I extrapolate.
Anyway, this is a book I tried to reread like five years back. I gave up, because it turns out Redwall is utterly unfathomable if you are an adult. Like, I was looking for comfort and nostalgia, I’m sure, but I just could no longer sink into the morass of fights and feasts and puzzles in prophetic rhymed couplets. I got like a third of the way in. But that is closer to a reread than anything else has gotten here.
Here is the map for Mariel of Redwall.
This one is exciting! It has an inset of distant lands.
Do this one starts in a very exciting fashion. Not at the abbey. They’re not doing shit. It is the vaguely peaceful doldrums between the events of the founding and the events of Redwall. Jacques threw a lot of midquels at the wall here. There are some guys. One of them will become a main-ish character and Mariel’s sidekick. I don’t remember his name so I’m gonna call him Sprinkles. He is a descendant of Gonff from Mossflower, and he is not very exciting. He’s whining about how the abbey is boring now that they live in peace and prosperity, because he sucks.
Mariel, meanwhile, is a child mouse-slave, which is a very common thing to happen in Redwall. Been thinking about how I was exposed to a lot of the rhythms of really old school pulp fantasy through these things. Weird cults, freeform warlording, so many child slaves. No wonder Conan the Barbarian always seems faintly familiar despite my having no head for his source material. Jacques drew very heavily on the schlockiest weird fiction of his youth and nobody stopped him because these were cute animal stories for children.
So Mariel’s dad is The Bellmaker. (He gets a book later. He has a name, too, but it’s not important.) He is being held captive, even though the captor already has the bell, because the pretty bell has symbols on it that he wants explained? And he torments this guy’s small mouse child daughter because he’s evil. This guy is a pirate king, which is the kind of thing you get to be in Redwall. His name is Gabool. I think. I looked up the spelling but that’s still very silly.
But Mariel is a scrappy child slave and does defiance, so he throws her into the ocean and her father Despairs. But! She washes up on a distant shore with amnesia. Seabirds attempt to eat her and she beats them off with the saltwater-soaked remains of her own bonds. She refers to this waterlogged improvised flail as her Gullwhacker and it becomes her sobriquet. It is metal as hell. Mariel would kick Martin’s ass, is all I’m saying. Mariel belongs in a wuxia drama.
Mariel just beats the living shit out of the ecology of the seashore for a while and then she meets The Long Patrol. I don’t think this is the first appearance of the Long Patrol, but to recap if it is, they are the hare warriors of Salamandastron. They’re like the only actual army anybody has in any of these books. The bad guys have loose conglomerations of mercenaries who hang on out of opportunistic greed. The good guys have collections of pure hearted hedgehogs and shit who go into battle with garden tools. And then the Long Patrol are just soldiers. They wander around being dashingly heroic and saving small mouse children from seagulls. They all talk like a Hugh Laurie character in a Blackadder show, but we forgive them because they are cool. This is what I wanted to be when I grow up.
The Long Patrol, determining this violent mouse baby should go to Redwall, take her to Redwall, where food is served and it is good. Meanwhile, on Cool Pirate King Island, various escapes are planned, and the pirate king… decides to expand into the peaceful lands of Mossflower, I think? Who gives a shit why. They all do that. Mariel and Sprinkles go about doing a hero’s journey for a bit, toads are there, and then they get to Salamandastron and then go save her dad and defeat the pirate king. The current Badgerlord of Salamandastron, who the cool bell was originally meant for, reveals that the secret carvings on the bell were actually the story of how it would go to Redwall Abbey.
And that is the origin story of the bell that fell on Cloony the Scourge. No. Really.
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