Loamhedge - Tumblr Posts
This is from 2016 and I HAVE to reblog it
saro and brag are both aroace and trans and they’re qp partners it’s canon
Did someone call for a nice clever guy who’s not great at villianry but, yk, he’s fun
Honestly Flinky is one of my favorite Loamhedge characters. I just love it when vermin characters get the opportunity to be intelligent or interested in an at least mildly peaceful life. He gets both!! Pop off!! Genuinely don’t remember if he lives or dies, we’ll see when I finish this reread
Whenever I see the words “Lonna Bowstripe,” I am transported to last winter when I was reading Loamhedge, and I hear Brian Jacques’ accent reading the name in my head. Lonna Bowstripe. What a good badger.
“my family was murdered by pirates so now I obsessively hunt down all searats and corsairs in vengeance by shooting them with my special bow and arrows”
Hehe
Horty, looking at the map: it really is a featureless, barren wasteland out there, isn’t it
Bragoon: other side Horty, that’s the back
These answers are all so perfect. I love his work so much.
I was looking for information about Redwall not being meant to be published and I found an Ask Brian collection from redwall.org which has been a delight to read through today. Here are a few of my favorite answers:
Q: How do you come up with all those cool names for your books? A: Imagination.
Q: Who decides who rules Salamandastron with so many badgers? A: It is written in the stones and is a mystery.
Q: In your books you state that the first ruler of Salamandastron was Lord Brocktree, was there a ruler before that? If not, what became of it before the Badgers ruled it? A: It was waiting for the badgers to arrive.
Q: Brian, when you were writing the books with badgers, was it hard to think up names and desriptions for each badger lord? A: Not particularly.
Q: When the mice of Loamhedge still lived in the Loamhedge area how did they live? in Mossflower it says that they couldn’t have built an abbey because there was very few natural stone to use for an abbey, so how did they eat and sleep and all that stuff? A: A village community.
Q: I noticed that in the first book, Redwall, that you used large animals such as horses and a large cart that Cluny traveled in. Were you trying to start your books out in a human-like setting? Or was it something else? A: Redwall was my first novel, I didn’t expect it to be published! After Redwall I decided not to include reference to humans again.
Q: In Redwall, it says that the climb Jess was attempting to take was never recorded in history. However, both Rufe Brush and Samkin made the same climb in other books. Is this a detail you put in your first book and did not think about later? A: It must not have been recorded.
Q: Where do the North and South Paths lead? A: North and South
Q: How do you plan on ending the Redwall series? A: Why should there be an ending?
Bragoon: Plan F. We follow Plan F, right now.
Horty: Is that the one where we run away?
Saro: Not at all. It’s the one where we beat a dignified emergency retreat.
Bragoon: You’re thinking of Plan G, Horty. They’re similar.
Speaking of Cluny's characterization, did you know that four out of the twenty-two books have rats as their main villain?
Mariel of Redwall with Gabool the Wild, a searat
Redwall (of course) with Cluny the Scourge, a bilge rat
The Long Patrol with Damug Warfang, a greatrat (apparently)
and Loamhedge with Raga Bol, written in the wiki just as "rat."
Interesting, huh? That's 18%
Ooooooo do I have the mind to bring an old project backkkk!!
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I know there's definitely a lot of competition for it, but I think Raga Bol might actually have the dumbest death in the Redwall series. His great plan that gets him killed is to TAUNT THE FURIOUS BADGER into a BLOODWRATH INDUCED KILLING HAZE, get said badger to charge directly at Raga Bol HIMSELF, while four of his minions hide in the bushes with spears to try and kill Lonna before he gets to him. And of course only one of the minions actually manages to hit the badger, which doesn't slow him down at all, and Lonna uses Bol's dumb body to block all the others. Because of course he fucking does!!!! Bol what were you thinking!!!! You could have at least dug a big hole for the badger to fall in or something, like even boring ass Gabol the Wild managed to do that much!
Fenna: *Gently taps table*
Springald: *Taps back*
Martha: What are they doing?
Horty: Morse code.
Fenna: *Aggressively taps table*
Spingald *Slams hands down*: YOU TAKE THAT BACK–
Bragoon: Watch out. There's chasms out there Horty: Oh wow, thank you....I would certainly have fallen to my death without your warning! Is there anything else in the world I should know about? Bragoon: Yeah
Horty: Someone could stop time right now and resume it whenever they wanted and we’d never know
Martha: Horty, it’s 3 am
Horty: For all we know it could’ve taken you 100 years to say that sentence
Martha: Horty
That write up about the book is going to be fairly long because it's surprisingly good for a latter entry in the series and really harkens back to the earlier books in a way others don't but -
the synopsis for Loamhedge calls it a "cursed Abbey" which, it isn't, it was just built on a fault line that ended up swallowing it as a well as the great sickness (So huh I guess it was cursed, but at least it isn't constantly beseiged upon liked Redwall).
I found that interesting. esp. knowing that spirits (Martin, the lineage of Badger Lords and Ladies) and foresight are a canon thing in this world