Today's Pissed Off Vaguepost about some asshole that I blocked because their attitude demonstrates that there's no point engaging with them but I need to talk about this shit anyway:
That one user in the Redwall Fandom whose take is "Redwall's dehumanization of Vermin species is real, but it's Good and Based actually because because the Vermin are actually a stand in for White People and the Goodbeasts are a stand in for indigenous people" who keeps linking the same fucking essay about a different fandom.
1: Dehumanization is bad, period, I don't fucking care if the vermin are "Evil colonizing imperialists." Imperial Japan was a colonialist power that committed horrific atrocities. My country throwing hundreds of thousand people in fucking concentration camps for sharing an ethnicity with them was also a horrific atrocity and it still would have been even if the US wasn't also a colonialist power.
2: Redwall is riffing on European history, come on, dude. The vermin are mostly based on white cultures in the same way that WH40K Orks are, but the Woodlanders aren't "indigenous (implicitly non-white) coded" either. Ethnic conflicts other than "White People vs POC" exist, and Redwall is very much a part of the European tradition of stories about defending the peaceful, Civilized(TM) homeland of your people from Evil Barbarian Invaders Who Come From Nowhere In Particular And Have No Culture Other Than Violence. Those tropes are very ironically applicable to the behavior of European imperial-powers but if you want to call Redwall allegorical, you have to look at, like, the Vikings, or the Normans, or the Anglo-Saxons, or the Huns, or Mongols, or whoever.
It can't be divorced from that tradition, and the reason people are uncomfortable with it is because this narrative has a long, long history including in the present day of being used to justify xenophobia and racism. Far-right parties in Europe are portraying immigrants as evil barbarian invaders who want to take advantage of European countries' prosperity without contributing to it and replace the culture with their own evil barbaric one RIGHT NOW.
Also, like, you can't just ignore the portrayal of reptiles and amphibians, and "tribes" in general, that's right there, because uhh those are NOT white-coded. Or the frequent Romani-coding of foxes and other vermin "fortune tellers." Or the sparrows.
3: "It's rational for mice to be scared of ferrets because ferrets are mice's natural predators IRL and vermin are shown killing and eating sapient creatures" is a bullshit argument because Redwall does not actually take any interest in the morality of predation or the material realities of how obligate carnivores can ethically survive in a world where most of the available prey are sapient, at least when it comes to mammal species. Birds of prey are portrayed as predatory and inherently dangerous to the protagonists pretty frequently but they're not treated as evil for it, and the series ignores real-life predator-prey relationships when it's convenient, e.g. shrews and badgers are not depicted as evil species even though they can and do eat other mammals.
4: Which leads me into: the other reason Redwall tends to invite fans to not take its portrayal of species morality at face value is because it is a series that tries extremely hard to divorce itself from all the historical context of the tropes it's building on and just have the aesthetics. Which isn't inherently a bad thing but it doesn't replace that context with anything because it is almost completely uninterested in politics, or economics, or religion, or sociology, or ecology, and so on. E.g. the sea is full of pirates stealing vast amounts of treasure like precious metals and silks and so on but there's not much mention of maritime trade for them to steal all this loot from, or where Redwall gets metal goods from, etc. It's a series that wants to be Children's Adventure Stories for children who like hearing about food and sword fights and don't like to think about things too hard. I'm not trying to be a "But what was Aragorn's Tax Policy?" douchebag here, but if you're trying to get anything in Redwall's setting to make sense you have to address things like "Who's doing all the maritime commerce that's supporting all these pirates?" and "If Vermin aren't indigenous to Mossflower and the surrounding region, where are they from and why do they keep invading in such a disorganized way and getting slaughtered?"
And ultimately the only real answers to those questions are either the common fantasy trap of "Uhh well in this setting 19th Century Race Science is objectively true" or "There's something more complicated and nuanced going on" and I think the latter is preferable to anybody who's not a massive racist.
Also at some point you start having to explain why over two dozen books most of which take place a generation apart or more, there has been basically zero vermin assimilation into Mossflower society other than occasional individuals even though there have been cases like the water rats at the end of Marlfox where you had defeated vermin factions throwing down their arms and forming a peaceful society after their oppressive leaders got taken out. Because semi-integrated vermin farmers in the original book and Gingivere's family at the end of Mossflower were pretty much retconned out of existence. Meanwhile there seems to be a mostly continuous vermin presence in the form of dispossessed bandits and brigands.
At some point this becomes really hard to explain without factions within Mossflower being actively hostile towards vermin existing. Like, you can't use the "Vermin don't know the land because they're colonizers and they're too lazy to farm / forage (not in the medieval army sense of the word that = pillaging) because farming sucks" argument because subsistence farming / foraging is clearly not as hard in Mossflower as it is in real life judging by how prosperous Redwall is without collecting taxes from the populace, and trying to make a living robbing a population that's generally pretty well armed obviously is not a safe, easy way to make a living.
5: The user being vagueposted about also had a take of "Veil Sixclaw had all the social power here" referencing the scene when the Redwallers adopted him. This is so fucking deeply unserious. This is referring to a fucking infant, and talking about him having social power as the son of a vermin warlord, in Redwall Abbey, makes zero sense because there is no overlap between vermin and woodlander society. Vermin are completely, unambiguously the outgroup within the abbey. The fall of Kotir was three generations ago for non-badgers, and since then vermin do not have any social standing in Mossflower society by virtue of being vermin, they only have any power if it's backed up by an army, which Veil is not because he is a literal child in their care.
Also, Veil's plot, taken at face value, is literally "Transracial Adoptee of outgroup race grows up into entitled monster because he was coddled by his adoptive mother who accused people of being racist every time they tried to hold him accountable for his actions."
Sorry but that is an utterly fucking horrific message to put in a book for primary school aged children. Especially with the way it's advertised. I generally don't want to ascribe malice to Brian Jacques's writing decisions, because I think the primary reason Redwall is Like That is because he lifted his worldbuilding uncritically from works like Wind In the Willows and Peter Pan, but I don't know how you can be writing this book, in the 90s, and not think about the possibility that real life children who are being discriminated against for their race will pick it up expecting to see experiences like theirs represented, and read fucking Outcast of Redwall instead.
