imagine being éowyn in the lord of the rings trilogy. your uncle the king is being mind controlled by an evil wizard until said evil wizard’s cooler version shows up and frees him. he is accompanied by an elf, a dwarf, and the hottest guy you’ve ever met. the hot guy also happens to be 87 years old and maybe still not over his immortal elf girlfriend but he respects and listens to you so you’re shooting your shot. your geriatric hotguy situationship turns you down the night before the biggest battle ever then goes ghost hunting in the mountains. you decide to go to battle because you’ll either help save your people or die in a really cool and honorable way. you then kill middle earth satan’s number one henchman with the power of loophole and being a woman (you are also helped in doing this by a 4 foot tall stoner). then you get to marry faramir. 10/10 no notes my girl went through it all
HEY that’s MY emotional support morally ambiguous misunderstood full of trauma touch starved yearning for love drenched in blood responsible for numerous atrocities comfort character who is TRYING & u will TREAT them with RESPECT
“If Nature has made you for a giver, your hands are born open, and so is your heart; and though there may be times when your hands are empty, your heart is always full, and you can give things out of that - warm things, kind things, sweet things - help and comfort and laughter - and sometimes gay, kind laughter is the best help of all.”
narnia has actually way too many completely devastating concepts in it that are not explored At All
We talk a lot about how in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the Pevensie children live full adult lives as kings and queens of narnia before stumbling out of the wardrobe by accident and being children again after like 15+ years. But I’ve never seen the same level of analysis devoted to how in Prince Caspian they return to Narnia and discover that over 1,000 years have passed in Narnia since their last visit.
Imagine undergoing the grief of losing an entire life you lived in another world, being forced back into the body of a child and to grow up all over again without the ability to even talk about what happened in the decades you lost. Every person you knew and loved, vanished, leaving no indication they were ever real and no guide for how to move on.
But returning to that world where you were a King or Queen and discovering that centuries have passed without you and that the people you lost are not only dead, but mostly aren’t even remembered? That’s almost worse.
That series is really something for “worldbuilding threads picked up and never touched again” too like
in the silver chair it’s confirmed that deep underneath the earth in narnia there’s a molten, fiery abyss world called Bism that is apparently populated and also apparently gemstones are living creatures that live there, and what we understand as diamonds, emeralds, rubies etc. are just the discarded husks of once living creatures
Jadis is actually not originally from Narnia, but accidentally gets sent there at its creation (making her one of the oldest beings in narnia) and she annihilated all life in her world of origin. she also very much does go to literal actual London and terrorize people. she is like 7 feet tall and can tear iron with her bare hands like it’s taffy.
Jadis makes it “Always winter and never Christmas”…what the FUCK is her beef with Father Christmas. I know it’s supposed to be like a metaphor or some shit but I’m imagining what exactly the fuck must have happened between them for jadis to specifically want to prevent him from coming to narnia to the extent that her powerful seasonal-change-stopping magic also includes a “fuck that guy in particular” clause.
like think about it, Jesus is not a thing in narnia, he’s just aslan. and aslan did not get born. ergo, the origin of such a concept as Christmas is the entity Father Christmas. Christmas is not a religious holiday to Narnians it has no symbolic meaning it is just specifically the time of year when Father Christmas fucks around across the landscape giving children gifts, such as very deadly real weapons. There’s no reason for him to do this. It’s just what he does. And Jadis fucking hates it.
another thing from the magicians nephew that is never brought up again is that Polly and Digory don’t go directly to Narnia, they end up in this intermediate place between the worlds that’s like a forest full of pools leading to other worlds, potentially infinite other worlds, and they end up in Narnia pretty much at random.
I think it’s also confirmed that Archenlanders were originally from Earth, and are the descendants of a small group of people who traveled to Narnia by accident and got stuck. One wonders why Aslan didn’t whisk them back out. Or why being too old wasn’t a problem for them.
I think this is early installment weirdness but there are Roman gods in narnia. ?????
stars are sentient???
narnia is flat. this is not actually an unresolved thread but I don’t think it’s common knowledge even though in one of the books they literally sail to the edge of the world. caspian specifically thinks it’s super cool that the earth is round
I LOVE the whole concept of Bism. Like Lewis really just said oh yeah there’s a whole world under Narnia where people live and jewels are alive too actually you wear dead ones in your jewellery and then no one ever spoke about it again, not even the fandom
No wonder this series infuriated Tolkien so much. Lewis just threw paint at a wall and jokingly asked the man who’d spent a decade on a single painting if he liked it.
Holy shit there is a lot about Narnia I don’t know.
Writer’s block? Why not try peppering panpsychism into your atheist-turned-christian young adult literature and never addressing it again?
So many fics, so little time.
Fun fact about the woods between worlds thing and what the inspiration behind it was:
This is an illustration of it from the book.
And THIS is a forest full of shell craters from WW1. Which C.S Lewis fought in as a teenager.
I always assumed the Father Christmas thing was triggered by Frank, the random London Cabbie, and his wife Helen who because the first king and queen of Narnia - them bringing earth lore into a world powered by belief in Aslan and the High King Beyond the Sea made Santa manifest and all the talking animals were like “….I don’t know enough about humans to contradict this, so let’s just go with it”.
also the whole garden of Eden surrogate with magical healing apples is just… there? And it’s okay if you take the apples with good intentions? But not if you steal them with bad intentions?
love the library. there’s no risk. you can take out a book and go “wow this sucks” and just give it back. and when you do that you’re still making the library’s Number Go Up so you’ll be able to roll the dice on even more books. all for the low low price of free/you already paid for it with your tax money so you might as well use it
PSA: Writing a book can take a looooong time. If you’ve been working on your project for a year, two years, five years… you’re not doing anything wrong. If you’ve written three drafts and thrown them all away, if you can only write a hundred words a day, if you put your book down for six months and pick it up again only to be baffled by what you’ve written… Congratulations. You’re not inefficient or slow. You’re just a writer. Welcome to the writing life.
Wish I could show this post to my Masters Degree self.
Edit because apparently this needs to be said: the point of a book cover is to tell you what you’re about to read and whether or not you want to read it. Following trends in cover design doesn’t mean the book is bad or had a bad cover designer. It’s visual communication. I’ve read and enjoyed about half the books featured here.
“She said, ‘Well when I was nine years old Star Trek came on,’ and she said, ‘I looked at it and I went screaming through the house, “Come here, mum, everybody, come quick, come quick, there’s a black lady on television and she ain’t no maid!”’ And she said, ‘I knew right then and there I could be anything I wanted to be, and I want to be on Star Trek.’ ” — WHOOPI GOLDBERG
Nichelle Nichols on meeting Martin Luther King jr. — "I said "I’m going to leave Star Trek because (I was going to say ‘because I have an offer to star in) …I never got that far” He (MARTIN LUTHER KING) said "You cannot - you cannot. For the first time on television we will be seen as we should be seen every day – as intelligent, quality, beautiful people who can sing, dance, but who can also go into space, who can be lawyers, who can be teachers, who can be professors - who ARE on this day, and yet you don’t see it on television – until now…” (—science-officer-spock)
I miss when library books used to have little paper pockets inside with a list of all the people who borrowed it and when… I hate that this is now exclusive knowledge of librarians. I do care that a miss Mariana borrowed this book in 1985 and then Dario in 1997. They’re my brothers and sisters
but really, there’s a million reasons why it’s an issue for users and staff of the public library to have immediate access to a record of who has borrowed a specific item and when.
and that’s not even about keeping the information “privileged” to the library staff, these days they don’t even keep a digital record of an item’s history of borrowers; once you return a book, there isn’t a list of everyone thats ever taken that book out that your name gets added to (though they probably take a tally of how many times it is checked out for circulation statistics).
i think the card system is a remnant of a culture that could only exist in the world before the internet as it exists today, where this identifying kind of information wasn’t always readily at your fingertips, even for those at the “information professional” level.
don’t get me wrong here, i do understand the nostalgia factor to it as being part of a different time, but i think it’s always important to understand why this kind of system has its flaws and has been (at least in north america) taken out of practice
bear in mind that US public libraries spent most of the past twenty years fighting off lawsuits that they were prohibited from disclosing to the public because when 9/11 happened the federal government wanted a list of every person who read certain books and the librarians had a really bad feeling about where that kind of policy would end up going, for some reason.
not keeping the records in the first place is a way for the libraries to protect themselves when they stand up for your privacy.
eagerly awaiting the reveal of what political science 101 concept is she going to stop the plot to teach middle schoolers about. we got bread and circuses we got the extended work on thomas hobbes my money is on haymitch starting this book as an objectivist and having to unlearn that in the face of true struggle
REAL
oh it is definitely not im genuine. i am fully aware that the series is on the younger end of YA and so ms. collins meets the audience where they’re at. love and admire her clear commitment to using her books to teach middle schoolers introductory political theory i think that’s something that should really really be accessible to kids.
