Quote Originally Posted by Iscah View Post
On a side note, I don't understand why we act quite so traumatised by the beavers. The pixies are terrified of them but we've surely recognised what's happening, and they've never caused us any harm.
I mean, I can give you two answers there, on different sides of the fourth wall.

1. Because it's funny. The WoL has faced down murderous armies, demons, abominable parodies of gods, biblically-accurate angels, unkillable ghost wizards trying to destroy everything they hold dear, and the embodiment of depression and entropy, and yet the thing that gets them to react with revulsion and fear is beavers. (Well, and Rowena, which works on the same principle.)

2. In-universe, because it's unknowable. Yeah, we know that HAPPENS, but we don't know how, we don't know why, it seems harmless to us but we can't honestly be sure. It's something I generally call 'Doctor Who Horror', because it's something Doctor Who does extremely well; it's absolutely family-friendly and nothing clearly and recognizably horrifying is happening, but there's this intensely wrong feeling about it, a much more abstract fear. Sure, it's played as comedy for us (which Doctor Who tends not to do with this stuff), but it's genuinely just unsettlingly unknown to them.