#mattimeo

So here are Matthias...

... and Basil Stag Hare!

(I used the color palettes from the TV series).

It was SO much fun making them. If I get any comments or requests for other characters in this style I might add more! (@girlscarpia you gave me the idea!!! XD)

Update - I couldn't start something like this without at least trying to draw the villain from the first book. So, here is Cluny the Scourge...

(I’m ACTUALLY really happy with how he turned out lol. This illustrator doesn't usually do particularly monstrous creatures, except for the occasional wolf, so I actually used one of her wolves as a reference to make him).

Update (again) - Slagar the Cruel

(Oh shit... the villains turn out SO well in this style. I think I’m gonna keep going with a few more villains…)

Update (again 2) - Ferahgo the Assassin

(I think he's my favorite villain...)

Update (again 3) - Urgan Nagru the Foxwolf... That’s enough villains for a while. Who knows who the next one will be…

...Meldrum Fallowthorn and his four nephews!

Slagar the Cruel is ready to kidnap some kids!!

Basically, just as the war between Redwall and Cluny the Scourge, all of Moss Flower woods is hit by a nuclear bomb. Killing off and horrifically injuring woodlanders and vermins. Most die in the initial blast itself but more die soon after from the extensive injuries and/or from radiation poisoning.

By the time of Mattimeo, Redwall is mostly rebuilt but it’s not the same as before. No one knows what ‘the blast’ was or how it happened and everyone is anxious about it happening again.

Also, Cluny and some of his rats survived but now live in the abbey with the Redwallers. It’s complicated but everyone was so desperate to survive in the immediate aftermath that they were forced to work together and it just became part of life.

Slagar comes to Redwall with some of his followers but as fellow survivors looking for refuge. ‘Not cruel’ Slagar is more broken and deeply traumatized by the blast rather than evil. Poor Chicken Hound was never the same after his mother’s brutal death in this AU.

Vitch is a random orphan Slagar and Three Claws found on their way to Redwall. Yeah he’s still kind of a bully but it more from a place of distrust, suspicion of others and fear of being abandoned again rather than actual malice.

Now to address the question here: No, this is not based on any real life event. In fact the bombing itself isn’t the main plot of the fanfic. I just want to explore what it would be like if Matthias and his friends had to team up with their enemies in order to survive despite their qualms or dislike of each other.

I guess we could just say the bomb itself was from human wars (if humans exist in the Redwall world which I doubt so instead let’s say) OR came from a different war that happened to be going on at the same time (I dunno maybe wolves or bears live in a more advanced civilization than Moss Flower??) and Moss Flower woods was just collateral damage.

Let me take you back. Back to my teen years. Back when renowned paleoartist Emily Willoughby was merely Redwall fanartist Ferahgo the Assassin.

(She's not really in this story, I'm just putting it in historical context)

Character was referred to as a polecat. Wiki included him in category: weasels. I knew polecat was another name for ferret so I pointed it out but admin insisted I was wrong because Wikipedia defined a polecat as a kind of weasel which was technically correct, but only in the sense that all Mustela species are broadly referred to as weasels and in a traditional British context which Redwall was written in, only one species is commonly called a weasel, while the others are called stoat and polecat. I explained all of this to him and even got multiple other users on my side, but he wouldn't budge and his word was law, so it stayed.

I was like "the European polecat is literally the ancestor of the domestic ferret" and he goes "there are no domestic animals in Redwall because there are no humans." R/woosh

Bitch, that proves my point!!! If there are no domestic animals, then the "ferrets" in Redwall have to be polecats by definition!!!

Someone even pointed out that even IN THE CONTEXT OF THE REDWALL SERIES ferrets are sometimes called polecats but he dismissed that on the grounds that Redwall was fictional

THIS WIKI IS ABOUT SAID FICTIONAL WORK, YOU PEDANTIC ASSHOLE!!!

I even brought up the scientific names and he goes "you can't just come to your own conclusions based on latin derivations. Science has already stated it is a weasel."

THE FUCKING SCIENTIFIC NAMES

But no, we had to bow to the superior scientific authority of the wikipedia disambiguation page 🙄

That was the extent of his research but he thought he was the last authority.

To this day, that character still isn't categorized as a ferret.

Look at this shit.

"Single species." Go fuck your mother.

Of all the dumbass bitches I have argued with on the internet, he still stands out as one of the dumbest.

One would hope, given this level of obstinate pedantry on the fucking Redwall wiki of all places, that he was like 12 or something but nope. He was in college.