So some of you might have seen my comment on the talk page for Chibb, where I mentioned that of 194 characters who appear over the course of "Mossflower" and the alleged sequel, "The Legend of Luke", only 14 are involved in both books. Now, "Luke" is hardly a sequel to "Mossflower", seeing as a good portion of the former is set before the latter. But it got me curious about how many characters appear between the two instances in the the series of direct sequels: "Mattimeo" to "Redwall", and "The Bellmaker" to "Mariel of Redwall".
As it turns out, there are only 14 who appear in both of the latter pair as well, and there are 201 characters who appear over the course of both books! The former pair, on the other hand, is a much less extreme case. There are only 150 characters who appear over the course of the two books, and there are 22 characters who make it into both.
This doesn't exactly surprise me. I felt "Mattimeo" was a very strong sequel to "Redwall"...my only real problems being the deaths of Warbeak and Ironbeak, those just really upset me. But while I thought "Mariel" was a really fun book, "The Bellmaker", on the other hand, was really disappointing. Like, it was a sequel that I felt added nothing to the original, was a huge step downward from the original, and just didn't feel like it had any reason to exist. I'm sure lots of people love it, and that's fine. Maybe I would have if I'd read it before "Mariel", but since I didn't, it just felt like a really pointless sequel. I feel this wasn't long before the books started to taper off in the consistency of their quality---"Outcast" was better, and "Pearls of Lutra" was pretty good, but then things got dull again with "The Long Patrol", which I didn't even finish until years later, I thought it was that bad. That was where I stopped reading, although I did read several later books.
I would have liked to see Mr. Jacques try doing another sequel, since it worked for "Mattimeo". Mr. Jacques stopped writing prequels after "Lord Brocktree", and from thereon pretty much all the books contained entirely new casts. I read a few of the later books and they were good stories on their own, but for the series as a whole, I feel discontinuing "origin stories" and recurring characters was a huge creative misstep, as it prevented the books from feeling as "connected" as the earlier ones were. Sadly, Mr. Jacques passed away before he could correct these errors.
Anyways, this was just supposed to be a page about how many recurring characters are in those four books, but it turned into something of an personal analysis of the series as a whole. Sorry about that. ~~~~