#watership down strawberry

[cinder-starlight]

Watership down fandom, settle something for me

I’ve been trying to watch the Netflix adaptation for a while—I’ve only really made it to episode 2 but even then I’ve seen a bit of discussion here and there about strawberry.

Before I continue—really quick: I’m not very word savvy so I just wanna give an FYI that I’d like for this to be a genuine discussion, I’d like to hear other peoples’ takes on the matter especially since there will always be different ways to see things.

Continuing: I don’t have any solid thoughts on Strawberry yet, design wise she is very cute but what absolutely grinds my gears is the fact she is only really there to be a romantic interest between hawkbit, dandelion and bigwig.

I usually don’t have a big problem with love triangles (or squares in this case) and think they can be pretty entertaining but after learning strawberry was male through other variants such as the graphic novel (if I’m correct), book and TV series—which is the majority. It kinda has me confused, why change Strawberry into a doe for the sake of romance?

I’ve seen people argue that strawberry works better as a doe or that strawberry isn’t a male name—which I’m well aware the series doesn’t exactly do female characters much justice since the majority of the story is about bucks. But also Strawberry totally works as a male name! It’s a fruit, by that logic, blackberry should also be a doe.

I still have yet to finish the Netflix miniseries and look into one of the books but Personally: I think it would’ve been nice to see male strawberry in the miniseries, especially to be there to prove the group wrong on their “bucks don’t dig” statements. It would’ve been nice to see a chipper and eager strawberry look to help out with the warren and sort of just be a fresh perspective to them all from his time in cowslip’s warren.

Again this is just my take, but I’m also curious as to what others think or wish could’ve happened.

[spinnysocks]

i made a watership down personality quiz based on the 2018 miniseries!!

this is one of my favourite shows ever, and it gets so little love and attention compared to the book, tv series and the original movie. i saw there were very little personality quizzes for wd on uquiz, so i decided to analyze some of the characters from the miniseries and create one myself!

all feedback is appreciated and i'd love more people to talk to about watership down and especially the miniseries!!

[augment-techs]

Watership Down graphic novel reaction/icon images: PART I

[saturncoyote]

Started missing drawing rabbits so here’s a bunch of em

[blueylovesssanimating]

THE PLAGUE DOGS!! + some Watership Down doodles!

[blimbo-buddy]

Wanted to try drawing some Watership Down characters just to get used to drawing rabbits differently

[willowbirds]

Watership Down part 2: Electric Boogaloo 🐇

Colour/Pattern palettes below

[hazel-jane]

Strawberry

[the-end-poem]

Been thinking about Watership Down a lot recently, both from a literature perspective and from a xenofiction perspective! It has it's clear biases and flaws but I still love it all the same! Had to draw some of the main crew while they were in my head! In order: Bigwig, Hazel, Fiver, Strawberry, Blueberry, Holly, and Dandelion ! Almost the entire Sandleford crew but not quiet!

——

If you like this design it’s up on my Redbubble !

[namedafterflowerstournament]

Botanic Tournament : Berries Bracket !

Round 2 Poll 1

[fantasywatershipdown]

Strawberry and Nildro-hain doodle!! Love these two. Wish Nildro-hain had wayyy more screentime though 😔I think I know why Adams did that but. Still. 💀

[augment-techs]

Watership Down graphic novel reaction/icon images: PART II

[watership-down-garden]

"Strawberry tried all he could to help me. He spoke very well about the decency and comradeship natural to animals. "Animals don't behave like men," he said. "If they have to fight, they fight; and if they have to kill, they kill. But they don't sit down and set their wits to work to devise ways of spoiling other creatures' lives and hurting them. They have dignity and animality."

Holly recounts how Strawberry addressed the Efrafan Council From Watership Down chapter 27: 'You Can't Imagine It Unless You've Been There' by Richard Adams

The strawberries pictured above are wild strawberries. The fruits are much smaller than the kind you find in shops, but the plants are far less fussy and require very little effort to maintain.

In my garden they serve the purpose of a low-level ground cover plant, which easily spreads about by sprouting runners, and they look quite pretty between the taller wild flowers and trees.

The leaves are also edible (though in my opinion taste quite bland). They will cope with shade but flower and fruit much better if they get a decent amount of sun (the ones pictured here seem to thrive very well in partial shade and have even managed to produce some fruit underneath an evergreen spruce tree).

My children love them.

[cardinalcompass]

The relationships in the BBC show is one of the reasons I downright hate it. I've never seen the 1999 show, but I hope it does certain characters and their relationships better. One of the things I love so much is the platonic love between so many of the characters, and all of the shoehorned romances made the BBC show SO hard to watch. My family and I will ALWAYS hate that Strawberry got gender swapped just to have a stupid love triangle between Hawkbit and DANDELION of all characters (who they completely changed his character for, he has none of his original personality, rip to my favorite non-protagonist character) only to then slot Strawberry with Bigwig (BIGWIG) right at the end.

I always loved the bond in the book between Bigwig and Hyzenthlay. It wasn't romantic, but it came out of mutual respect and a mutual goal. If I'm remembering correctly, when Bigwig was thought to die after the Woundwort fight, Hazel and Hyzenthlay would barely leave his side.

So many relationships are so artfully written in this book, and I understand that in adaptations it can be difficult to translate them well, but it felt like the miniseries shunted them ALL to the side in favor of romances that didn't even work.

This is with all barely mentioning how some characters don't have their original personality or role in the story, taking away their ability to create some of their closest bonds. Bluebell taking over Dandelion's original role means that (Dandelion was stuck in a love triangle that shouldn't have existed--) he was never with Holly when they were escaping from Sandleford, saving his life by giving home something to cling onto (his jokes) taking away one of Holly's most important relationships in the book.

Strawberry, too. By making him a female character, Nildro-hain never existed, one of HIS closest bonds before joining the main group and literally the reason he joins them in the first place (which is fridging unfortunately but it is known that the main book had an emphasis on the male characters. I believe that if they wanted an important female character earlier on they could have made her live rather than gender swapping a different character)

I have so many more thoughts but this rant is already long enough lol.

Tldr, I'm disappointed with the BBC adaptation both in terms of relationships and how different characters were changed in ways that were infuriating

What do you think of relasionships in watership down?romantic or friendly or brotherly etc?in different adaptations and fave to worse?

That’s a lot of things to comment on, but I feel that it’d be obvious to say that the book(s) handled these kinds of relationships the best. Holly and Clover, or Hazel and Hyzenthlay, or Fiver and Vilthuril, were all handled subtly but with obvious devotion and care. The same went for characters that had a close friend or companion or even sibling, like Hazel and Fiver, or Holly and Bluebell, or even Strawberry and Nildro-hain. The book takes time to express fondness, even if only briefly.

In the animated series, Hazel falls for Primrose out of nowhere. And them making Blackberry a doe is bad enough, but for them to throw in some random romance with Campion was ridiculous. All the romances in this one were handled badly. However, the relationships between close friends or siblings, for instance, Hawkbit and Dandelion, were done well.

The BBC adaptation did a pretty sour job of it. Dewdrop wasn’t necessary. Clover’s romance with Hazel came out of nowhere to the detriment of more important relationships, like Hazel’s relationship with Fiver or even Bigwig. Hyzenthlay’s romance with Holly was literally just there to be a gut-punch when Holly ends up getting killed, and Strawberry’s romance with Bigwig came out of Frithing nowhere.

I think the main issue is that the book(s) made clear that rabbits are rabbits, and while they are sometimes devoted to their mates, they’re still a colony-type species first and foremost. The romances in the book(s) are downplayed because the characters are RABBITS, but in the series, they’re written more as humans, which isn’t a change that works. Romance as a subplot doesn’t work when the characters are non-anthropomorphized rabbits.

I liked the mate pairings in the book just fine, Most of them work very well. In fact, I can’t really think of any that don’t. The close relationships between Hazel and Fiver or Holly and Bluebell or even more downplayed, trusting friendships, like between Hazel and Blackberry, are artfully done. Hyzenthlay’s respect for Blackavar shows through. Pipkin’s vast admiration for Hazel is incredibly sweet and heartwarming.

My only true complaint when it comes to non-romantic pairings is just that the adaptations, sadly, don’t often tell the full stories of El-ahrairah, with the sole exception of the animated series, which isn’t always faithful. And probably one of my favourite relationships in the series is that which is between El-ahrairah and Rabscuttle. And the latter, sadly, hasn’t been in any of the adaptations, as of yet. 

[sparkylurkdragon]

A detail I really love in the Watership Down comic is how every rabbit in Cowslip's warren is almost constantly smiling widely. It is incredibly unsettling, given the characters usually have minimally anthropomorphised expressions.

Like, here's a smile from (I think) Pipkin. Note how it still reads as a small little bunny mouth and is just barely enough to tell he's smiling.

And then there's THESE SHADY MOTHERFUCKERS.

Like, here's some with Strawberry side-by-side with Hazel and Bigwig so you can see the contrast.

It's a wonderful tell that Something Ain't Right.

[krinsbez]

A Watership Down Meta/Headcanon/Rant

So, both @jaybutnotthebird and @stavarosthearcane have stated that, to their knowledge, I've not posted this on tumblr, and indicated that they would like to hear it, I'm posting it now!

So I don't recall if it was stated explicitly or was, like, a rumor, but everything about Gen. Woundwort makes so much more sense when you realize he's a hutch rabbit.

Why is he so enormous? Cuz he was bred to be big and fluffy, was fed flayrah everyday, and was taken to the vet if he got sick.

Why is he so afraid of humans? Because they were the first elil he ever encountered.

Why is everything he does in complete opposition to proper lapine culture and behavior? Because he grew up not knowing anything about it.

Efrafa is, in essence, an attempt to make a warren into a hutch.

OK got that? So, here's another thing to think about. Cowslip's Warren, or Strawberry's Warren, or the Warden of the Shining Wire, or whatever you want to call it...they also completely disregard traditional Lapine culture and behavior; they don't tell stories of El-ahrairah, they make weird poetry about the inevitability of death, they keep babbling about dignity, they make ART, etc. This, by the way, is why it and Efrafa come off as so viscerally wrong, because Mr. Adams went to the trouble of putting us in a rabbit headspace, so we can understand the full horror; it's not just Woundwort's tyranny or the farmer's snares, it's that they're unnatural and rabbits aren't meant to live that way.

Now, I know what you're thinking when I say that word, "unnatural", but put down the pitchfork.

Because Hazel and Co. do a LOT of things that is outside the realm of typical rabbit behavior:

Despite being Chief Rabbit, Hazel let's the others argue with and talk back to him.

They made friends with mice and a bird.

He adopted Cowslip's Warren's idea of using tree roots to create a big central chamber

Tales (the sequel short story collection) has them adopt a (obvs. less aggro) version of the Efrafan practice of having the Owsla run patrols

They busted out hutch rabbits.

They used a boat

Meanwhile, Sandleford, the Warren that our heroes fled, was apparently the epitome of a traditional Warren and of course they all died horribly.

So, what's the difference?

It goes back to the last lines of the first myth, part of which was used as the first animated film adaptation's tagline:

“All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a Thousand Enemies, and whenever they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you, digger, listener, runner, prince with the swift warning. Be cunning and full of tricks and your people shall never be destroyed.”

(I bolded the important part)

Sandleford's Chief Rabbit (EDIT: The Threarah) decided he liked things as they were and refused to change, and his people died. Cowslip and Co. allow themselves to be farmed and treat death as an inevitability, and they're slowly going mad and dying one by one. Gen. Woundwort teaches his Owsla to respond to every situation by fighting, and they break and flee when the unexpected happens. The ordinary rabbits of Efrafa are forced to live like hutch rabbits and they're miserable and not having babies.

Hazel does weird stuff…but he does so because he's in a weird situation and has to adapt. He listens to the other's concerns and ideas, he keeps an open mind, he figures out what resources are available to him, and then figures out how he can use them to protect his people.

In short? Unlike Woundwort, Cowslip & Co., or the unnamed Chief Rabbit of Sandleford EDIT: The Threarah, he is cunning and full of tricks.

(I think one of the reasons the BBC miniseries from a few years back didn't hit right is that they failed to get this)

Anyways, thanks for coming to my TED Talk