#Toad witw

[gutsofgold]

HAPPY VALENTINES DAY TINY WITW FANDOM ILYSM <333

— Toad filled toad hall with rose petals. no, he does not have a valentine. yes, he acted like someone else did it for him

— Lesser made chief and cheryl little versions of themselves out of sticks and leaves

— mole and rat have an extra gay little picnic with a pink cake and lots of giggling

[chiropteracupola]

a few friends from the Wood and the Riverbank

[pealeii]

toad you have to stop. your fads too quick. your songs too boasting. your speeches too self-praising. your motor-car too red. your adventures too triumphant. theyll sentence you nineteen years and make it a round twenty years to be on the safe side.

[shower-thoughts-last-responder]

Mr Toad is a goddamn idiot

[maybejaime]

CAN WE PUHLEAAASE GET RATTY AND TOAD OMG YOUR STYLE IS MY EVERYYYTHINGUH (If you'd like me to spam your inbox, I absolutely will-)

Why yes you can, thank you so much for your ask!! I fiddled around with their outfits a bit for fun :)

[pink-octopede64]

So I'm going down an interesting rabbit hole for a live action japanese Wind in the Willows adaptation that seemed to once be popular but went obscure overtime.

this is Keroyon / ケロヨン and he's basically Mr. Toad. He first starred in a 1964 play called The Frog's Adventure / カエルのぼうけん made by the Mokubaza Theatre Company and later on, he had a 1966 tv show called Mokubaza Hour / 木馬座アワー and finally, 2 movies from 1967 and 1968 (ケロヨンのぼうけん and ケロヨンの大自動車レース). Despite the popularity, it's kinda hard to find much and the language barrier doesn't help. The only footage i could find online wise so far is a trailer for the 1967 movie, the animated opening for the 1968 movie, and a clip of someone talking about Mokubaza Hour.

Mokubaza Hour never had any home video release but the movies did although not only you can't find them online but they're sparse and the few ones available is pretty pricey. Some audio records are available to listen to on Youtube and I made a playlist for them here, 2 are stories while the rest are simply songs.

I would LOVE to watch it because it looks cute but god knows it's not gonna be easy to get my hands on but who knows?

[pink-octodoodles64]

don't crucify me when i saw that i based this off of a barney song . i saw the video and thought that it would be perfect inspiration for some ratty and puppy art (specifically the day they met). and i tried to do a lineless style and i'm pretty proud of how it turned out

bonus doodle with moley too

[doodl-eo]

in which rat does his favourite thing !!

(picking up mole and twirling her around)

[anonymous-witness777]

toad meme my sister made based on a conversation we had 😭😭😭

[weltato]

Rating: General Audiences Warnings: None Category: Gen

Relationships: Rat & Toad (Wind in the Willows), Mole & Toad (Wind in the Willows), Badger & Rat & Toad (Wind in the Willows), Badger & Toad (Wind in the Willows), Mole & Rat (Wind in the Willows), Badger & Rat (Wind in the Willows)

Characters: Badger (Wind in the Willows), Rat (Wind in the Willows), Toad (Wind in the Willows), Mole (Wind in the Willows), Mrs. Otter (Wind in the Willows)

Additional Tags: Friendship, Temporary Character Death, Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Anxiety, you can't tell me ratty doesn't have anxiety, have you seen the musical?, Toxic friendship, toad causes toxic levels of stress, Feelings, Fear, Jetpacks, post-musical, post-show, Post-Canon, POV Alternating

Chapters: 1/1

Words: 2,438

Series: Part 4 of ‘The 12 Fics of The Holidays (2024)’

Summary:

Jetpacks! Way more fun than boring old run-of-the-mill motocars, right? Absolutely! Well, they are to Toad at the very least. To everyone else, it's an absolute nightmare. Ratty's worst fears almost come true.

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Ratty angst fans pspspspspspsps

This is an old wip but it's here now. Merry Christmas Eve and Happy Holidays everyone! I'll see you next after Christmas bc I'm busy tomorrow.

[rainbowratsstuff]

Ratty and Toad as the barbie meme? You know toad got ratty in trouble before

[gutsofgold]

Wind in the Willows Musical content you may not have seen!!

Rufus Hound entertains the audience during a show stop during Act 2!!

Source: @leicestermark on tiktok

[penguinofspades]

Honestly this is a huge part of why if I were to write something based on The Wind in the Willows I'd portray Mr. Toad in a more sympathetic light than how I've usually seen him seen as ("Oh he's a rich asshole billionaire who escapes all the consequences of his actions!").

Alastair Grahame deserved better.

Thoughts about “The Wind in the Willows”(I HATE IT) as a Person with ADHD 

So I finished listening to the Audiobook of the Wind in the Willows

(And figured out a difficult illustration composition while listening to it, GOOD!)

AHHHHHHHH I have THOUGHTS

I love everything around the Mole and the Rat.

I hate, I HATE everything the narrative writes about Toad.

SERIOUSLY I AM FUCKING MAD

As a person growing up with ADHD I hate the way Toad was written, I HATE IT SO MUCH

——————–

Having quick, intense obsession over one thing following another, having SO MANY hobbies then getting bored and dropping them one by one

Your strong obsessions hurt you, hurt your health and hurt your life and hurt your reputation

You mean well, you try so hard, you want to have everything IN CONTROL because you have so little control over your crazy obsessions

AND PEOPLE SAY YOU ARE IMPATIENT AND WANT YOU TO BE NORMAL AND RESPECTABLE LIKE EVERYONE ELSE

And you know there is something wrong with you, but you do not know what is exactly wrong, you just know there is something wrong with you because why it is so hard for you to just be like everyone else

And you believed, you believed these well-meaning people older than you, who know better and love you and are concerned about you, that you are impatient and ungrateful and you just need to try harder to be GOOD and NORMAL

You want to believe them because then that means there is nothing wrong with you you just need to try HARDER

But you do not really believe them. Because you tried and you are trying and you have been trying all your damned life and IT JUST DID NOT WORK and you are exhausted and you do not want to try anymore

Because no matter how HARD you try you cannot be “good and normal”, you just cannot. These people are supposed to love you, and you love them, and they looked at you and see someone impatient and not trying enough. FOREVER.

They want to fix you and then they can love you but you know you cannot be fixed so they will never love you the real way they just love the potential fixed version of you but that fixed version of you is an illusion and no one will love you the way you currently are

——————–

In my teenage and early 20s that nearly drove me mad. I got into crippling depression and anxiety. It still drives me mad, the condescendence from a parent figure that just want you to be fixed and be normal and blame you for not trying hard enough.

I did not actually yote myself over some metaphorical cliff. Mostly thanks to school counsellors, extremely supportive friends, and accidentally stumbling into a reddit post about ADHD (I never knew the term before, growing up in a social environment extremely blind to mental illness). However it was a kind of close call, before I realized oh it is really not something wrong with me, it is just something different.

——————–

Then I searched the author Kenneth Grahame and I was like WHAT

He based Mr. Toad on his SON

Alastair Grahame. Who was born disabled. An only child. Committed suicide 5 days before reaching 20 in 1920

His demise was recorded as an accidental death out of respect for his father. - Wikipedia, Kenneth Grahame

LIKE WHAT. WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK

According to Cardiff University Professor Emeritus Peter Hunt, Grahame shared a house in London with a set designer, W. Graham Robertson, while Grahame’s wife and son lived in Berkshire. - Wikipedia, Kenneth Grahame

So yeah.

I think he was figuring out things about himself. But he was also a distant father. He had his own troubles to figure out. But I think he sucked at being a father.

The way he wrote Mr. Toad. The way he wrote Toad’s obsession as something BAD and PATHETIC and FUNNY.

The way he initially created the whole story to entertain his son. Created something with LOVE. Tried to connect with this son he just could not understand with metaphorical stories. 

But the metaphors were BAD. The story is biased and condescending and the story JUDGES.

He tried to teach his son maturity and respectability by creating a character and mocking the character.

His son, Alastair Grahame, who was a child with disability and was sent away to boarding school, tried so hard to have his father love him. His son called and called for helps in letters and letters. But this respectable author turned away because he saw troubles in his son and he could not understand and he probably had his own bucket of troubles to deal with and it was all too overwhelming. So he turned away. 

And he escaped into his stories where everything can be FIXED and Toad would learn his lessons and be A GOOD TOAD.

——————–

I cannot stop thinking about it.

There is something extremely, extremely cruel and UGLY with the kind of fact that your father does not understand you and he mocked (unintentionally) you in his story. Then his story got popular and everyone loves his story and LAUGHS at the character that basically (unintentionally) mocks at something in you that you cannot fix.

I don’t know. I think that is the kind of thing that can drive someone over some edge.

(And the fact that Alastair Grahame’s suicide was treated as a shame. Brushed over as an accident.)

(Okay maybe I am being emotional because I got personal experience. There was this elementary teacher who wrote me in a self-promo article as some crazy troubled child that learned to be normal because of her loving help. She got the promotion and left to teach at another school probably with higher salary. And 9-year-old me got bullied by classmates because she gifted each and every parents of kids in my class that damned book contained her article. They went back home and told their children to stay away from the crazy kid. That damned experience fucked me up extremely hard. It literally took me YEARS to realize I do not have to be extremely careful with everything I do to not be viewed as a lunatic. Also my first experience with “sometimes the bad guy wins.”)

——————–

I respect Kenneth Grahame the way I respect dead artist. His story is wonderful and nice. I really, really love the Mole and the Rat.

It just hurts a little to read Mr. Toad. And hurts a lot after learning that the Toad was an unintentional mockery based over the author’s own child with disability and likely depression who was emotionally neglected and abused by the author (probably unintentionally but abuse is abuse.)

And the book was written in this time period that the idea of Mental Illness and Disorder and Neurodiversity was NOT A THING. Like Damn it in early 20th century people barely understood psychology and had ALL THE RIDICULOUS IDEAS. Therapy? Go to talk someone in the church. Ask help from the God out there.

It is also extremely clear that Kenneth Grahame had his own struggles that he did not understand and needed help himself. Like, he probably needed so, so many therapies. How do you blame a parent who was far from mentally well themselves for not being able to meet their children’s mental needs? They are parent but they are also just another fallible human being. Yet emotional abuse is still abuse it still happened even when no one wanted it to happen.

To me it is just another “LOVE is good and powerful but LOVE does not fix your problems and LOVE itself is not enough and never enough.” Nah we need respect and listening and trust. Like trusting someone’s experience and struggle to be real even when we are not able to experience the world the same way they experience the world.

——————–

——————–

I think it is really good that people know about ADHD now. (Still not enough) (Still not enough in my country) (My relatives still deny it despite apparently having it themselves) And there are medicines and methods to deal with it or make it easier. Even without medicines and helpful methods, merely recognizing it itself is a great help. For me it HELPS to know that this is not something wrong in me.

——————–

The thing is, I don’t think it’s entirely miserable to have ADHD. (I don’t like to picture it as superpower though, it is just being different like being left-handed.) It is miserable because the society is designed for people without ADHD, or rather, the society demands efficient workers for labor, and ADHD is against that type of cold efficiency. So someone will look at you and see you as a misfit malfunctioning gear of a larger machine. And your parents fear for you because they worry you will have no space in this larger machine and be tossed out into trash. But the gear feels and the gear is not a gear and it should never be about some larger machine.

Some people say the ADHD obsession is bad. I agree to some extent. The obsession sessions is occasionally bad especially when I was not able to recognize that I was deep down in the pit of some weird obsession. But I could learn about it and recognize it and work with it. I cannot say that same obsession does not allow me to fully invest in things and bring me intense joy. The obsession comes and goes but the experience and the joy is real and I learned so much because the obsession makes me research everything madly.

(Also as illustrator I never run out of ideas despite having trouble finishing drawings. That’s like the two sides of it, the good part and the bad part.)

——————–

Yeah this whole damned writing happened because my ADHD brain yelled at me “Yeah go write about your rant over some children’s story from early 20th century in public domain at midnight before writing that ridiculous witch story that may actually bring you job”

No remorse

[regexkind]

"toad badger forcefem" has not a single relevant WitW fanfic. Unadulterated grief has laid me open

[maybejaime]

It’s finished! Not my best work but I’m trying to be less of a perfectionist… I cannot tell you the joy this musical brings me, it is truly something very special!

Close-ups beneath the break

[pink-octopede64]

so i found a version of the wind in the willows that was made for an educational device called the leappad, basically helps kids to read and stuff like that

i managed to find a scan of the book on archive.org and it got this cute moment with rat and mole ♥️