Prince Caspian. And a fic rec.

[starlady]

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. 

Comments

[cofax7]

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.

[starlady]

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.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

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.

[cofax7]

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

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

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.)

[cofax7]

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.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

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.)

[starlady]

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.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

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.

[juniperphoenix]

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. :)

[starlady]

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.