starlady | Prince Caspian. And a fic rec.

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Prince Caspian. And a fic rec.

So the other night (like two weeks ago) Prince Caspian was on the TV and I actually sat down and watched all of it. And I liked it, much better than I was expecting to--my sister tells me I turned down the chance to see it with her & our mother twice, which I actually really regret, but I don't remember that at all.

Prince Caspian was never one of my particular favorites of the books when I was rereading them obsessively in elementary school and thereabouts (I like them all for different reasons, with the possible glaring exception nowadays of the 7th (and I go by internal chronology)), but I started to like it better in 8th grade after my reading partner (she was a 2nd grader) said that it was her favorite and we read it out loud: it's the last time the Pevensies are all together in Narnia, which is saying something. The movie of course is quite different from the book, in ways that I liked: Warrior Queen!Susan, Caspian generally being awesome, the extended battles and strategies in the war, even the Witch showing up again momentarily. I thought it was a better movie than TLWW, too, though I liked TLWW fine. (Obviously the changes made are the sort to bother some people a lot, which is not something anyone needs my approval about, and which I can understand, if not agree with.)

I actually sort of find it difficult to talk about Narnia in any intelligible fashion: obviously, there are parts of the books that are awesome, and parts that are full of fail, but I loved them so much as a child, and I still do, but I literally never understood the Christianity until I got my best friend to explain to me in freshman year of high school that Aslan = Jesus and the Emperor = God and I was like, Oh, that's disappointingly allegorical (yeah, as you can see, Tolkien is the Inkling I came to first). And my belief in a higher power has completely fallen away from me now (Quaker, yes; theist, no), and I really found Philip Pullman's critique of Narnia pretty persuasive (and I've talked already about how much of an influence HDM have been on me), and The Problem of Susan just bothers me more and more as time goes on (WAY TO BETRAY YOUR OWN FREAKING PREMISE, CLIVE, THE CURSE OF NARNIA CLEARLY DOESN'T MATTER IF YOU JOSS IT), and…I still love the books, and there's still something about them that speaks to me deeply. Someone who may or may not want to be identified said to me recently that she doesn't believe in God, but she still believes in Aslan, and I pretty much agree (you should see the explanations and justifications that I will spout when I talk about Hogfather and the Christmas spirit). And in a way I feel like PC, the movie, came close to giving me a glimpse of what I love most about Narnia now, the going there and the being there and the coming back. And Susan being so badass with her archery, OMG. I don't even care that they were clearly ripping off Legolas, SHE KICKED ASS. YES. MORE PLEASE. (Also, I find the joint holding of the throne, well, fascinating: that moment when Edward delivers the terms to the Evil Guy, I forget his name, and he's like, "Prince Edmund," and Edmund's like, "It's King actually," YES. And then when the four of them meet Aslan and he addresses them as "Kings and Queen of Narnia," YES. I really want to write something exploring that myself. As you can see, I'm still working on de-monarchicizing my imagination.)

But when the movie finished I decided to finally check out Carpetbaggers,

cofax7's massive, and massively awesome, Narnia WIP: It's the story of how the Pevensies make themselves the rulers of Narnia in fact as well as in name, and it's just amazing. Cofax is awesome at plotting, and at teasing out how to go about nation-building, and at not flinching from the implications of 100 years of winter and never Christmas in all their deeply troubling reality, and she gets the Pevensies so right, and it's just so, so brilliant (also totally gen), I can't recommend it enough.

And all this went down just in time for TVDT, which was my favorite of the books for a good long while. YES.

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Actually, almost all the things you liked were things I liked, as well, which made the bits that were wrong itch more. (I can't like the war/battle stuff, because it's all stupid from a tactical and strategic point of view, given the weaponry and force-sizes in question.)

I will rewatch it, as much as it bugs me, for Edmund. Who is unabashedly my darling, in all incarnations.

I'm trying to think how old I was when I first read the Narnia books: third or fourth grade? I can't remember whether I actually read them or finished LotR first (because, okay, and this says a lot about the kid I was, one of my good friends in 2nd grade got the MMPB box set of The Hobbit & LotR in 2nd grade for her half-birthday (yeah), and read them in class during our breaks or whatever, and I thought to myself, I can read books that thick too! and asked for them for Christmas, but I got stuck in TTT and didn't finish RotK until 3rd or 4th grade). And at the time I rather remember thinking Edmund was an idiot, but now I am like, yes, Edmund, it's so easy to make your mistake! And you are so lucky to have had a second chance and not screwed it up. And I do think the movies have done right and deftly by Edmund; he could have been horribly overplayed in a number of directions.

One of my roommates gnashes her teeth helplessly at the end of PotC: AWE because the ships do things that ships physically can't do in the final battle sequence, despite the fact that she enjoys the movies fine otherwise.

And thinking about it, yeah, especially the middle bit in the castle is just WRONG. But I enjoyed the whole malarkey with the torch (and the Eagles! every fantasy epic needs Eagles, apparently), and Edmund, and Susan being awesome, and Evil King's wife having a crossbow in bed, and Peter and Caspian getting out of hand.

I think I was actually going to say something else, too, but I can't remember what.

I have that problem with AWE, but for some reason it bothers me less than PEOPLE making decisions they would never, ever, ever (ever ever ever) make w/r/t tactics. I think because the incongruity of bad physics is less of a problem for me than the incongruity of a character I am supposed to think has X skill behaving in a way which someone with X skill/background would never, ever do.

Also with AWE I can say "Callisto has a sense of the dramatic". >.>

Yes she does. (My roommate has a sailing background, I think.)

Oh yeah: when I finally had Turkish delight in college or thereabouts, my first thought was, I can see why Edmund was so tempted by this, coming from wartime Britain…

LOve this post.

(A Horse and His Boy was always my tippety-top Narnia favorite as a child.) :)
Shamanistic upbringing defintely had something to do with that, Im sure.
(And then somehow or other I ended up in Valdemar...which is a whole other story...yes, sentient otherlife is grand!)

*trying to pretend Im not running over to read Carpetbaggers, [personal profile] cofax7's *

Ah, the hell with it.

*Sprint*

I may or may not have stayed up til 1:30 reading all of Carpetbaggers that had been posted.

I enjoyed THHB a lot when I was a kid. I liked the combination of seeing some more of the wider world and seeing the Pevensies all grown up (actually, going by the official chronology, that has to have been a year or less before they were snatched back to England).

Talking Horses, talking horses-who-aren't horses…I can see connections there. ~_^

I quite liked the film of PC, because it resolves for me a lot of the issues I have with the book.

Some of those issues are structural: dude, virtually the entirety of that novel consists of Trumpkin telling the Pevensies what has already happened. Shuffling around the temporal framework improved it a lot, to my narrative eye. Some of them are philosophical, and those mostly revolve around Susan: I loved the line the filmmakers gave her about how she's happy to be back in Narnia but knows she'll have to go home again, and I approved of the change at the end, when Aslan says she and Peter have learned what Narnia can teach them, and now it's time to take those lessons home. It undercuts one of the central issues in The Problem of Susan, but I vastly prefer it to the book answer, which is "oh well, you're too old now, bye!"

Haven't seen Dawn Treader yet, and I'm a little worried because it is indeed my favorite book (though The Silver Chair has grown on me since childhood), but I'm looking forward to it.

It's been literally years since I've read any of the books, though I'm planning a reread over the break. I hope part of what I found boring about PC was the structural issues.

Yeah, I sort of feel about the Narnia filmmakers the way I felt at times about Peter Jackson, which is that they are able to get a little closer to the heart of the story than even Lewis himself sometimes, and I think the whole "Peter & Susan are too old" thing is definitely one of them.

I am looking forward to TVDT too! When my sister comes back we are going to see it. It has such beautiful images, and such grand adventures.

If I had to pick one absolute favorite book it still might be either TMN or TLWW. Or TVDT. I really like TMN, particularly in retrospect, these last few years.

I think you're the only person I've ever heard tag TMN as a favorite. (In fact, while typing my above comment, I was thinking TMN probably vies with The Horse and His Boy for Most Frequently Ignored Narnia Novel. People rarely list The Last Battle as a favorite, but they sure as hell don't ignore it; it's the Most Frequently Argued About Narnia Novel instead.)

What makes you like that one so much, especially now?

Drat, I thought I'd replied to this comment!

I just found it all really interesting as a kid--Jadis and her backstory, the Wood Between the Worlds and Diggory and Polly wandering around there, Uncle Andrew being so smart and so dumb at the same time (and that great line he has about high and lonely destiny, and C.S. Lewis is laughing at him so hard), and Narnia being created out of bits of our world mixed with its own substance. And when my mother was ill I found myself thinking about the choice Diggory makes at the end, and how it's even harder than I realized as a kid. And yeah, those silver apples, and how lucky he is to get them.

So yeah, it's the book that situates Narnia in this older discourse, and I really do like it a lot.

I just stumbled across this post on my network, so I hope you don't mind if I drop in.

I have mostly adjusted to PC, except for I cannot forgive the writers for Peter's stupid territoriality causing the death of dozens of Narnians. Because if he is to be High King, he has to do it properly, and he has to be better than Caspian, that's the whole point of being High King over all Kings in Narnia. But the writers wedged his head far too firmly up his ass, and it made me Very Unhappy.

Some of that would have worked, because yeah, gotta be shitty to go from being High King to being just That Kid in Maths Class mouthing off. And a movie needs conflict. But Peter had 15 years of learning how to manage people and run an army, and the writers made him forget ALL of it as soon as he got back to England, and not remember it when he returned, either.

Which, everything else they did in the movie mostly made sense to me, as an adaptation, and it's fun to watch. But I felt they served Peter poorly in a way that undercut his position in the canon as High King.

But, all that aside, THANK YOU for the lovely words about Carpetbaggers. You are most kind, and I'm so glad to hear people are reading and enjoying it. It's been a ton of fun to write and think about.

Onward to Chapter V! Oy.

Yeah, in retrospect Peter is very much the adolescent in the middle of the film, though he gets much better quicker, after Edmund and being responsible for the deaths of lots of Narnians remind him what's what. And, you know, I can totally understand forgetting Narnia to an extent in England (I think you'd have to, for your own sanity, after having been an adult and a man and a High King there), but he should have remembered more, quicker, when he came back.

You're welcome! I'm so much looking forward to the rest.

And, you know, I can totally understand forgetting Narnia to an extent in England (I think you'd have to, for your own sanity, after having been an adult and a man and a High King there)

Make the appropriate gender changes to that sentence, and you have the Susan story I want to write someday.

You and... well, damn near every writer in the fandom. It's practically obligatory to write a Problem of Susan story.

Actually, for me it came from a different direction: I thought of it as a companion piece to "The Last Wendy." And there are a couple of other "Marie Brennan picks a fight with classics of children's literature" stories I may write someday.

(Unfortunately, Narnia being under copyright still means my Susan story may have to stay in the realm of fanfiction.)

I've been thinking of taking on Barrie after I get finished bitchslapping Lewis. *g* He's actually a much more worthy target.

Unfortunately, Narnia being under copyright still means my Susan story may have to stay in the realm of fanfiction

Well, I dunno -- Gaiman got away with it.

But he's said in interviews that he made some choices in writing the story specifically designed to keep it distant enough not to be a problem, which probably explains why "The Problem of Susan" involves the two women talking about Susan the way they do -- treating it as a story they've both read, rather than having the old woman be Susan. My story wouldn't have that distancing, and while I wholeheartedly believe that it should count as a transformative work, I don't have the money or will to defend that in court if I got sued.

(Heck, even with "The Last Wendy" I erred on the side of caution by donating my payment to the Great Ormond Street Hospital, which holds a kind-of-sort-of copyright on Peter Pan in perpetuity -- the situation there is tangled, though by the information I found I'm in the clear. I did get one extremely wrong-headed rejection for the story, though, from somebody who apparently believes Disney owns the copyright on the original story.)

That would be interesting! I have my own potential answer (and I've seen some really great ones, including a particularly chilling crossover with His Dark Materials)--I feel like the way you answer the Problem of Susan is sort of like a Rorschach test, or the same sort of thing wherein your dissertation says a lot about you.

My own idea was shaped by the fact that I had just been running a Changeling game, and had realized during the course of it that I did something far crueler than I meant to in the story. By Changeling mechanics, humans can only see chimerical (faerie) things if they're enchanted, and after the enchantment wears off, they forget a great deal of what they saw and did. I needed the human who was helping the player-characters to actually be useful, so I gave him a gift that allowed him to remember it all clearly -- but didn't think until much later what it meant that they kept enchanting him, and that it kept wearing off. He essentially was dropped repeatedly into Oz, where everything went full technicolor, and then got booted back into black-and-white Kansas again, to pine for what he had lost and wonder if he was crazy for thinking he'd seen it.

And that was what was in my head when I re-read the Narnia books before seeing the PC movie. No wonder my brain went straight to interpreting Susan's adult behavior as a defense mechanism, after Narnia abandoned her the second time.

But I felt they served Peter poorly in a way that undercut his position in the canon as High King.

This is exactly my problem with the movie. Prince Caspian is my favorite of the books, and one of the things I've always liked best about it is the incongruity of the Pevensies as competent, experienced leaders in adolescent bodies. They're constantly being underestimated and then freaking people out by turning out to be more than they seem; even Miraz's troops eventually recognize that Peter is more kingly than their own king. I felt that the movie really sabotaged Peter's dignity and authority by portraying him as an angry, arrogant kid with something to prove.

There was a lot about the movie that I liked, but Peter's attitude and rivalry with Caspian really ruined it for me. (I also think Caspian was cast too old, which probably contributed to the problem.)

On a more positive note, Carpetbaggers is definitely on my to-read list. :)

I too thought they were pushing the edge of Caspian's possible age in the casting, but they probably couldn't have gone any younger for TVDT purposes. And I feel like, if they hadn't had to do that, they might have toned down the Peter vs. Caspian rivalry in the script too.

I haven't re-read the Narnia books in over a decade, but I kinda want to now. Only I'm doing a complete re-read of Discworld right now...bugger. I didn't get that far into the PC movie because Peter just annoyed me that much, but your post makes me want to make another go of it. I do remember adoring TVDT when I was a kid and I really rather want to go see that.

And this comment was rather pointless, but I made it anyways.

The PC movie is definitely stirring by the end, even with Peter being an ass right through the middle section. And the Narnia books are quite short! I'm thinking I can knock them all out in a day or two (after Christmas, that is).

I remember them being longer than the boxset sitting on my bookshelf says they can be. Clearly it's been much longer than I thought since I've read them.

Perhaps I will give PC another try.

Thanks for the rec; that sounds like great winter break reading!

If you like Narnian world-building,

bedlamsbard is another author I highly recommend. Her Warsverse stories are largely about the Pevensies' reign and contain a wealth of historical and cultural detail.

Oo, I'll have to check that out!

she doesn't believe in God, but she still believes in Aslan

Wow, that resonated really hard with me. When I finally twigged that Aslan = Jesus, I'd already spent a good five years or so believing in Aslan, and my response was less annoyance at the allegorical obviousness or at being tricked than it was just "...No he's not."

I adore the Prince Caspian movie, probably because I had no particular attachment to the book, and not only did they make me like the story, but they made a genuinely good and enjoyable film in the process.

I'm actually quite anxious about Dawn Treader, because I know they made a lot of structural and narrative changes, and while I can see why they did given the episodic nature of the book, Dawn Treader is my favorite. It's already perfect as is! I am afraid I will be bitter at the movie. :(

I'm probably not going to reread the book before I see the movie this weekend, to facilitate not being outraged at any changes they made. Though I remember being singularly unimpressed with the BBC TVDT as a critical 12-year-old, so there's nowhere to go but up, really.

Yeah, I think I felt some of that "No he's not" too. Particularly since it'd been like 10 years since I'd first read the books at that point. I don't know, I know many people like the books for their vaunted Christianity, but I kind of feel that that makes everything just a potential allegory, which I do find annoying.

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Prince Caspian. And a fic rec.

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