#watership down liveblog

[sparring-spirals]

me, less than four hours ago: ok, make no promises to yourself about watching burrows end in a timely manner, you have literal days of content of other things to catch up on (CR! the last 2 seasons of d20! vox machina s2! candela obscura!!! midst, even! etc!) and have extremely limited time and attention as is. even if it looks rad as hell and the cast looks PHEnOMENAL and youre SO intrigued and you did a report on stoats in 6th grade and like, hey, time to shine, and you also read watership down on a whim after seeing the trailer and you really enjoyed it.

me now, after seeing a total of maybe three gifsets and rewatching the trailer: hrhrhrgrgghrhgrhrhrh want the tragic stoat storytelling

[s1lv3rp4w3dc4t]

Warriors Kid reads Watership Down; a live blog

[thenightisland]

Hey mr adams. Why does your children's book about rabbits start with an epigraph from agamemnon

[firstofficerrose]

Okay. I'm gonna read the messed up rabbit book. Watership Down, here we go.

[glimmersea]

It’s becoming quite a pattern for Meren to start trying to talk their way out of a problem, Astarion to loudly express his disapproval, and then Meren successfully talks their way out of the problem and Astarion gets a point of inspiration for his charlatan background. Astarion could you please just learn to trust me. Jumping right to “let’s attack this enemy that’s way more powerful than us” is a fool’s strategy. Yurgir calls you a rabbit and I’m like, actually yeah, perhaps we (Astarion) could stand to learn from the rabbit!! When they catch you, they will kill you, but first they must catch you!! Be cunning and full of tricks!! You should know this, rogue.

[docholligay]

I just want to vent my frustration so I can get over it and be done with it

Here are the things I had planned for my birthday week, tell me you would have loved them even if it isn’t true:

Writing day

Ask a drunk Doc

I pitch you Liveblog (Choices: Deadwood, The Haunting of Hill House, The Green Knight)

Jackbox games Saturday

Holligay’s inaccessible pretentious foreign film night

Watership Down book club

Noted English Scholar Doc

[ellynneversweet]

There’s a swearing....seagull?

[mylordshesacactus]

Watership Liveblog 1.2

Oh this is EASILY the best version of the Warren of the Shining Wires to date. The main hindrance in other adaptations has been that you just don’t have time to capture that agonizing slow burn of realization--the way no one will answer questions about the history, or where anyone is, or where they went, or where--

Also the first time they’ve visually been shown as...different. Big. Fat. Sleek. No scars, no scruffy fur. They are not wild rabbits like the protagonists. Not anymore...

...They made Strawberry female and I’m not sure why but I’m concerned. Killing Strawberry doesn’t make much sense, and frankly I’ll be sad to lose the “We don’t care for rabbits who deceive us” thing and the absence of his character later--but it’s a foregone conclusion that no does join the party.

All right, Bigwig and Hazel’s relationship is getting closer to the book--friendly rivalry and Bigwig viewing Hazel as the leader but not as his Chief Rabbit, an important distinction. If this continues, I’ll be okay with it.

Bluebell has his proper personality back, even if he doesn’t belong at this point in the story and I’m unhappy with his presence robbing Dandelion of his place as the....hymnist, essentially. Dandelion is the talented, hardcore storyteller, the bard; and Bluebell is the court jester. They’re both important, but they’re not interchangeable.

And dammit, Bluebell is important to Holly. Hraka one end, jokes the other, rolling a joke along the ground and we’d both follow it. I wish an adaptation would understand how important that is.

Interestingly, Silverweed is so always interpreted as an older rabbit that I forget he’s meant to be around Fiver’s age--but that was a fantastic portrayal of Fiver’s terror at his poem

Ugh, here it is again! Bigwig would never attack Hazel. He cuffs Fiver for luring Hazel away--his exact words are “the best rabbit we’ve got” and he blames Fiver for pressuring him into a suicide mission because the idea of Hazel dying for no reason makes him furious.

I’m sure this will end well, and it’s being very well-written; it’s just sad to lose the complexity of their relationship when I love it in the book so much, that’s all!

My god, Strawberry survived. That’s unexpected. There was really no NEED for her to die--one doe does not the future of a warren make--but I’m pleasantly surprised regardless

...A little skeptical that it’s the soft, naive one the writers made female, if they were going to do it; but also, this way avoids fridging Nildro-Hain, and also gives Strawberry a more complex arc than grief for his dead mate suddenly giving him a conscience. “I don’t--I don’t have...We don’t like to make friends here, in case they...” has the same power as his half-mad dash across the open.

BOOO NO COME ON Y’ALL RUINED IT

Thlayli doesn’t call Hazel “Hazel-Rah” for AGES yet ugh come on that was the most emotionally powerful moment in the entire BOOK don’t be like this writers.

Oooh, unexpected glimpse of Efrafa this early. Good capture of the horror of the warren, and Woundwort has an excellent voice. However: book!Woundwort doesn’t have a scratched-out eye, that was something from the movie, and let’s stop using that as a shorthand for a villain please and thank you.

[evilneo]

do u hav watership down hot takes

I don't interact with the fandom enough to know if these are ACTUALLY hottakes but:

Rabbits are transgender 👍 all of them. And Kehaar too. Prommy

I REALLY hate the adaptations. I don't think they're good at all. One day I hope to make an adaptation that's actually decent.

THE EL-AHRAIRAH STORYS WERE P MUCH ALL GOOD AND I ENJOYED THEM. THEYRE IMPORTANT TO ME OK :) my favourite was El-ahrairah and the Black Rabbit of Inlé! I used to read it all the time :)

Uhhhh. Idk any others? As I said I don't really interact with the fandom so as far as I know my opinions abt stuff are undisputed, also I haven't read the book in AGES so my knowledge is a little rusty shhdhdkdjdj

[lightofthemagdalene]

“Rabbits need dignity and above all the will to accept their fate."

-Cowslip, Watership Down

[paradife-loft]

part 2 of Watership Down thoughts.... a lot longer than part 1, oops.

BLACKAVAR, oh my gosh, Blackavar is also my favourite and I love him a lot ;____; (this is also a lot of what I mean w/ the Efrafans behaving like humans - the specific punishment given to him is very much a calculated thing to make an example, and a wound that even once healed is never going to look normal and unmarked. it doesn’t seem like the sort of thing most other rabbits would come up with, since they tend to be so much more concerned with what’s right in front of them.)

the part where Hyzenthlay is also a prophet like Fiver! I’d completely forgotten that angle as well; it’s very cool.

re: my earlier note about the purpose of Efrafa’s social structure - it’s interesting; the line about preventing the white blindness is what Holly brings back to tell the rest of the warren, but then when we get the bit of Woundwort’s POV, that seems like only a latecoming portion of the rationale for all of it? I wonder if that’s an intentional discrepancy to point out, maybe what the lower-ranking members of the warren are told and believe, versus Woundwort’s actual power-centric motivations? but it explains why I’d forgotten the former bit, in any case.

BLACKAVAR FEELS 2 ELECTRIC BOOGALOO or: oh my god, the bit where he follows Hazel under the bridge just because he figured well, it was an order? and then went to go find the others anyway even though he was exhausted???? the part where he tries to convince the group to continue on because it’s fox country out of nothing but general patrol intuition, gets voted down, and then up and forgets he made the suggestion bc that’s how you do things under Totalitarian Hell Warren, even though he’s later proved right??!?! I love him and I love the insight into Efrafan culture, and everything. also when we find out that he and the Efrafans in general have A DIFFERENT ACCENT? how is this fellow so precious. how.

This Fucking Passage, omg - ““Probably he really has. But whether or not, you’d never get him to admit that he warned you or to listen while you told him he’d been right. He could no more do that than pass hraka underground.” // “But you’re an Efrafan. Do you think like that, too?” // “I’m a doe,” said Hyzenthlay.”

this occurred to me several times beforehand, but I kept forgetting to include it - everything takes such a short period of time, by human standards! there’s barely a day or two between every major event that happens; I think in total the novel can’t cover more than a month of time, and that’s on the far side? it’s such a weird position to occupy, because you naturally want to stretch the events out to a longer timescale that better “matches” the intuitive/emotional sense portrayed (and allows for all these injuries to heal, holy shit?), but in the context of a rabbit’s lifetime, the way they experience just a few days feels very different from how we think of just a few days.

this is just a hypothesis, but - I’ve been trying to figure out what’s going on between the switching between Lapine and English translations, w/ names especially, and - I think it essentially works in the same way as how/why I switch between standard Sindarin names in narration, and Quenya in dialogue, when writing Silm material?? which is very cool. something something old English dudes who like plants and language...

Bigwig getting bad language past the radar and literally saying “eat shit, stinklord” XD fucking iconic. (also frequently quoted, as I recall, by all of us ten year olds reading the book for class who were delighted by any and all ways of insulting people in words the adults around wouldn’t understand.)

it’s honestly fascinating just how many different non-rabbit animals the main characters end up establishing alliances with or otherwise using to their advantage in their conflict with Efrafa? Kehaar, the fox, the mouse, the dog? most of them due to Hazel’s instincts and strategising, too, aside from the fox, which is pretty cool as an even further extension of his main strength as a Chief Rabbit, knowing his people and their particular gifts and trusting them to use them. and beyond that - this idea that the Efrafans, who aggressively suppress their natural instincts as rabbits, despite being very skilled at perception and analysis of their surroundings, end up repeatedly at the short end of the stick in interactions with all sorts of other parts of nature? I dunno; there’s no exact dividing line “this group acts rabbit-like and this group doesn’t” to try and force on the dynamics here, and I’m really quite glad of that and think it makes for a much better story than the alternative, but. it definitely feels like some manner of emergent theme, for sure.

there’s something that just hits fucking deep about the passage: ““My Chief Rabbit has told me to defend this run and until he says otherwise I shall stay here.” // It had never occurred to Woundwort or any of his officers that Thayli was not the Chief Rabbit of his warren.... And if he was not the Chief Rabbit, then somewhere close by there must be another, stronger rabbit who was. A stronger rabbit than Thlayli.” -- especially in context with Woundwort’s meeting/failed parlay with Hazel earlier. like damn.

FUCK YEAH SCARY FIVER!!! “I am sorry for you with all my heart... Believe me, I am sorry for your death.”

“Come back, you fools! Dogs aren’t dangerous!”

god the last like, three chapters of this book have the most metal goddamn quotes ever

Vilthuril telling an embellished version of the first quarter of the book as a story of El-ahrairah’s people to her kids??!! I love that as a worldbuilding detail so much, oh my gosh. (also uhhhh, telling that the snare warren is rewritten in as “the rabbits of Prince Rainbow”, lmao. Prince Rainbow is an asshole XD)

aaaand that’s all! what a good ending. what a good book.

[cozy-possum]

Bluebell “I’ve gone on an adventure by mistake” I’m sorry did you mean bilbo baggins?

[fairestfall]

A rabbit in a cage: I think humans believe they’re being kind. They’re not all bad. They just lack understanding. 

Snow: 

[mandareeboo]

Maybe liveblog the new Watership Down series? :3

Another option for the list!!!

[rorykillmore]

they didn’t include the part where they escape efrafa on the boat which like, kind of eliminates the point of that idea being foreshadowed much earlier on, but ah well

[logarithmicpanda]

So... I finished the first part of Watership Down and so far I don't get the hype at all? I guessed what was up with Cowslip & Co super early, and I'm a bit tired of the rabbits being clueless about some things but very knowledgeable about other things without real explanation (like, they know what guns are, but pegs? Nah, no idea)