Narnia Annoyances

rosybloom.RemoveThis@verizon.net wrote:

> 1. Why do the Narnians need us to constantly pull their asses out of
> the fire? Why can't they do it? Why kids? Why can't older people come
> to Narnia? Why kids from our world in particular? Why doesn't Aslan
> ever help them? Does Narnia exist just to test the character of a group
> of children? Why is Aslan so interested in just these kids? How many
> other earthlings have been to Narnia? Lewis never clearly set down just
> what the relation was between that world and ours.
>
> 2. I find troubling the notion that these children lived full lives as
> adults then were transformed back into children. Did they retain all
> their adult memories in childish minds? Do they remember adult sexual
> experiences?
>
> 3. Anyone find it disturbing that while the talking animals are
> untouchable, nobody sees anything wrong in eating the dumb ones? All
> animals are equal, some animals are more equal than others.
>
> 4. Narnia was destroyed, how did the underground dwellers and sea
> people get out?

What about the sentient trees? I read no evidence that they made it into
the Stable!

> 5. Aslan is constantly driving the children to self-flagellation over
> such minor wrongs. Digory purely by accident lets the witch in. Lucy
> follows her brothers and sister instead of following Aslan into the
> woods alone, and later spys on her friends. Jill shows off how brave
> she is, then fails to recognize the city.

Jill let herself forget Aslan's instructions!
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atsarisborn.DeleteThis@hotmail.com wrote:

> 1. Aslan is interested in THESE kids because they're the ones who get
> into Narnia somehow, two of them the day it was created. He's also
> interested in Shasta and Aravis.
>
> 3. Four-legs good, two-legs bad.
>
> 6. No, Susan married rather well (corporate lawyer), inherited all the
> family property (Professor Kirk's old house turned into a Council
> Estate, brought in a pretty penny), and brought her own children up to
> be very active in sports and things that distracted them from excessive
> fantasy. She is currently M.P. for Lower Barsetshire (Tory).

Is she a strong advocate of railway safety (having lost her entire
family
in a railway accident)?
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mike_in_the_west wrote:

> > the romantic element is suitably restricted
>
> I'm sure Lewis, as a philologist, would be amused at how the meaning of
> a phrase can change in a few decades
>
> Ch. 9 of The Silver Chair (talking about Jill):
>
> "she made love to everyone"

That sentence threw me for a loop!
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Poor Jill. In her next adventure, the King of Narnia gets so angry at
her actions that he says "if she were a boy, she would be whipped."
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Maybe, or she has married aa engineere and reminds him to design wagons
safer...
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There is an old celtic idea that a ruler is married to the land rather
than to any person. The very earth of Narnia is considered living and
magical (did the citizens of Narnia not spring from the earth?), so
perhaps the rulers of Narnia were expected to have only a bond to the
land rather than get married.

Mabon Dane
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Lawrence Watt-Evans <lwe DeleteThis @sff.net> wrote in
news:8gl4521hd0ucdj9h3ft2hmusar5d1if78k@news.rcn.com:

> Except that it's established in _The Horse and His Boy_ that Queen
> Susan was expected to marry, and her failure to find a suitable mate
> was considered unfortunate.

Which is one of the reasons that Susan is, to me, a more sympathetic
character that usually portrayed.

She grew up in Narnia, entering the wardrobe in her early teens and leaving
it in her late 20s. She was a full adult in Narnia, co-ruler over an
entire country and mature enough to be considering marriage. The Pevensies
appear to have chosen to live out their lives in Narnia, with no intention
of going back to war-torn Britain.

Then, without warning, she was ejected from Narnia with nary a shred of
physical evidence that she was really there, thrust back in the body of a
teenaged girl and relegated from queen to displaced war refugee.

Personally, I would consider that treating the entire thing as a figment of
the imagination was probably the best way to retain her sanity.

Her slowness to embrace Narnia and Aslan in _Prince Caspian_ could easily
be described as unwillingness to open herself up again to a magical world
which she fears being (and which will be) cruelly ripped from her once
more. Her desire to "race on to the silliest time of one's life as quick
as she can and then stop there as long as she can" as Polly puts it in _The
Last Battle_ can be characterized as a deep longing to regain the feeling
of being a queen in Narnia that she can no longer have.

Of all of the Pevensies, her reaction strikes me as the most realistic,
that of a human who has visited Fairyland and then told they can never go
there again.

--
Brian Gibbons.
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Mabon Dane wrote:

> There is an old celtic idea that a ruler is married to the land rather
> than to any person. The very earth of Narnia is considered living and
> magical (did the citizens of Narnia not spring from the earth?), so
> perhaps the rulers of Narnia were expected to have only a bond to the
> land rather than get married.

But the very first King of Narnia was married!
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Add to that she was ordered by Aslan himself to "search him in our
world", not in Narnia anymore. Others still hanged on Narnia. She
decided to leave lit behind as unreachable... the logical thing to. As
Pullmann said :
"Susan, like Cinderella, is undergoing a transition from one phase of
her life to another. Lewis didn't approve of that. He didn't like
women in general, or sexuality at all, at least at the stage in his
life when he wrote the Narnia books. He was frightened and appalled at
the notion of wanting to grow up. Susan, who did want to grow up, and
who might have been the most interesting character in the whole cycle
if she'd been allowed to, is a Cinderella in a story where the Ugly
Sisters win. "
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It is NOT possible. AIMB the Narnian Estate already denied at least
THREE authors (Karol Lindskoog, Michel Faber and another) to publish
such stories. Before 2033(earliest) it's only possible as fanfic or as
manipulated story. (Like Neil Gaiman's "The problem of Susan").
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SS13 wrote:

> It is NOT possible. AIMB the Narnian Estate already denied at least
> THREE authors (Karol Lindskoog, Michel Faber and another) to publish
> such stories. Before 2033(earliest) it's only possible as fanfic or as
> manipulated story. (Like Neil Gaiman's "The problem of Susan").

What's the address for the Narnian Estate?
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> Let's play around with an idea: Lewis wrote The Lion et al and never
> got around to write another. Upon his death, someone goes and writes
> Caspian and Dawn Treader. We are talking the EXACT same books that
> Lewis actually wrote.

Two different people can't write the same books. Your hypothesis is
invalid right from the start.

In occasions it's possible that even the original author himself is
unable
or unwilling to write *good* sequels to a story he's written.
Mark Twain, I hear, wrote sequels to Huckleberry Finn that were utterly
dissimilar in tone and inferior in quality to the first two books in
the
series (those being Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn itself).

And Tolkien started writing a sequel to Lord of the Rings, set in the
Gondor of early 4th Age, but rejected the idea after one chapter or
so saying that it would be an inconsequential
conspiracy-mystery-thriller
type of story, not worth writing. (Mind you, I'm not sure I agree.
Though
it'd be different in note, and lesser in gravity of events described
than
LOTR, I don't think it'd be uninteresting to fans of his work.)

But one way or another, one could argue that the original author is
the only one that does have the right to change the mood and style
of his written universe as he/she sees fit.

Can someone explain to me in what way is a sequel by someone
other than the original author anything other than a piece of
fanfiction?
I value fanfiction, but for itself -- I don't presume to consider it a
proper
sequel.

Aris Katsaris
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> Wouldn't his heirs have the authority to sanction such stories?

Legally, yes. Artistically? The way I see it, no.

-Aris Katsaris
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