Content Note: Ableism Narnia Recap: Trumpkin has been sent to the ruins of Cair Paravel in the hopes of collecting any help summoned by Queen Susan's horn.
Prince Caspian, Chapter 8: How They Left The Island
And now we're finally done with the backstory of Prince Caspian and we can come back to the Pevensies who we left behind so many chapters ago. Did you miss them? They missed you.
No, actually I can't swear to that at all. I can't be certain that the Pevensies have ever missed anyone in their entire lives but certainly not us just now because I am surprised to report that Chapter 8 is where everything suddenly turns more than a little sour and all our characters start getting snotty and sore with one another. And I really do not know why that is, but I'm serious: by my estimation, everyone is a right narky jackwagon here except Susan, and she'll make up for it with a complete character derailment into Libby McSnotmouth in the next chapter in order to make a Deep Theological Point. SO STRAP IN FOR A BUMPY RIDE.
And I honestly can't tell you why everyone is so dreadful in this chapter. At first I thought it was just me being in a right dreadful mood; as of writing this, I've only been home a week since the surgery, and I've been fighting the effects of Valium all day long, so I'm more than willing to concede that I'm just not mentally in the best of places right now. But the more I read and re-read this chapter, the more it seems like it's not just me, which brings me back to the why question above. Maybe it's as simple as Lewis being annoyed at having been made to give up his new favorite character in order to have to go settle back into his old protagonists? We'll get there and then you tell me.
"AND SO," SAID TRUMPKIN (FOR, AS YOU have realized, it was he who had been telling all this story to the four children, sitting on the grass in the ruined hall of Cair Paravel) -- "and so I put a crust or two in my pocket, left behind all weapons but my dagger, and took to the woods in the gray of the morning. I'd been plugging away for many hours when there came a sound that I'd never heard the like of in my born days. Eh, I won't forget that. The whole air was full of it, loud as thunder but far longer, cool and sweet as music over water, but strong enough to shake the woods. And I said to myself, ‘If that's not the Horn, call me a rabbit.' [...]
"What time was it?" asked Edmund.
"Between nine and ten of the clock," said Trumpkin.
"Just when we were at the railway station!" said all the children, and looked at one another with shining eyes.
And I don't even know what to say to this. If one of you clever people can explain how Narnia Time and English Time can work out such that the time of day is always the same but with time accelerated such that approximately one year of English time can work out to 1,300 years of Narnia time, then by all means be my guest. Bonus points if you can accommodate in your theory how the Narnia time between Prince Caspian and Voyage of the Dawn Treader is (I think) about three years, and the Narnia time between Voyage of the Dawn Treader and Silver Chair is (I think) about thirty years, despite the English time between each also being (I think) about a year or so. Because Aslan, I guess.
There's another interesting thing here that I'm not sure how much to dwell on, and it's that Caspian blew the horn later than he'd intended. (This will come out later; Miraz's army attacked and the unexpected onslaught prevented Caspian from blowing the horn precisely at sunrise when Cornelius had conjectured the White Magic would be strongest. (Another odd point: referring to "good" magic as "White" magic when the last "White" magician in these parts was undoubtedly evil.)) This is another piece of legend that got glommed onto the story of Susan's horn: at no point did Santa mention that the efficacy of the horn would be heightened at sunrise, rather Cornelius tossed that little tidbit out there as either something he truly believed or in an attempt to justify his keep as the wise old magician of the group.
Either way, the horn apparently worked just fine without any special timing (unless we're meant to believe that a sunrise call would have resulted in some help that was more, er, helpful than the four Pevensie children, but I see no evidence of that), and this is therefore perhaps simply another example of how a religion can evolve, change, and accrue new (and potentially incorrect) bits and pieces over time. I'm not sure, though, if Lewis meant for us to notice that, since that particular observation can be a seriously dual-edged sword in just about any kind of religious discussion. There's a reason there's a bieberbillion versions of Christianity, you know?
"Well, as I was saying, I wondered, but I went on as hard as I could pelt. I kept on all night -- and then, when it was half light this morning, as if I'd no more sense than a Giant, I risked a short cut across open country to cut off a big loop of the river, and was caught. Not by the army, but by a pompous old fool who has charge of a little castle which is Miraz's last stronghold toward the coast. [...]
Anyway, Trumpkin kept on running like the wolves were at his back because it was his duty, dammit, but he took a shortcut in his haste what with being in a super-big hurry in order to save all of Narnia and also additionally having run all morning and being really tired and probably hungry and almost surely dehydrated, and so he made an error in judgment and has now decided the best way to describe that error in judgment is with a racial slur against Giants as opposed to owning up to the mistake in good faith or genuinely excusing it as perfectly understandable under the circumstances.
Because it's important to remember once again that Protagonists make mistakes and have depth and complexity, but Others are one-dimensional and usually in ways that set them apart as dangerously foolish, stupid, lesser beings who just simply aren't as good as God's Chosen
"Great Scott!" said Peter. "So it was the horn -- your own horn, Su -- that dragged us all off that seat on the platform yesterday morning! I can hardly believe it; yet it all fits in."
"I don't know why you shouldn't believe it," said Lucy, "if you believe in magic at all. Aren't there lots of stories about magic forcing people out of one place -- out of one world -- into another? I mean, when a magician in The Arabian Nights calls up a Jinn, it has to come. We had to come, just like that."
And then there's this. Which is... I have to say, a decidedly strange way for Lucy to address her older brother. Tone isn't something that is always very well conveyed in these books, but she seems startlingly aggressive towards what was never a real objection in the first place. "I can hardly believe it; yet it all fits in," is not a statement of the status of one's disbelief, but rather a statement of one's genuine belief. The "I can hardly believe" clause is rhetorical -- the speaker is effectively saying that though their mind rebels against the miraculous situation at hand, yet still the speaker is forced to admit that the miracle under discussion must be what has happened.
So for Lucy to take issue with Peter's phrasing seems very odd. By effectively arguing with him -- "I don't know why you shouldn't believe it, if you believe in magic at all" -- she's basically challenging his manner of agreement with the general assessment at hand. She's accepting that he does believe it, but that his statement of belief is insufficiently enthusiastic. This is kind of rude in my book, but it's also strangely out-of-character for Lucy, who has until now limited the majority of her interactions with Peter as a sort of ingenue looking up in wonder at her older brother. Either this is some form of her aggressively agreeing with him while being oblivious to how she sounds as though she's criticizing him or this is an abandonment of previously established character traits in order to head off reader objections at the pass: THIS IS REALLY ALL TOTALLY REASONABLE IF YOU BELIEVE IN MAGIC, NOW LET'S MOVE ON, WE'VE GOT THINGS TO DO.
At least that's how it reads to me. Neither option feels terribly natural to me, to be honest.
Then there's a lot of talk about how Jinns have no choice in being called up in "The Arabian Nights", which is a theological muddle I don't want to try to sort out, given that the most frequently summoned Jinns in those tales were usually imprisoned in their various containers (lamps, rings, jars, etc.) for crimes against God/Allah and Solomon/Suleiman and Heaven and there is -- in my mind -- a very great deal of difference between summoning a criminal supernatural being against its will in order to command it to exercise one sliver of its magical power as part of an ongoing divine punishment versus summoning an innocent child against its will in order to expect it to fight in a war to the death on behalf of a land they can never truly be a part of. But, no, whatever, these two things are PRECISELY THE SAME.
"Meanwhile," said the Dwarf, "what are we to do? I suppose I'd better go back to King Caspian and tell him no help has come."
"No help?" said Susan. "But it has worked. And here we are."
And I know I keep harping this in, but once again Susan is the first one to vocally volunteer to help Narnia and the first one to step up to do the dirty work of fixing the mess that Aslan has left lying around. I mean, I keep beating this drum, but gorram it, this is important. Susan is a pacifist; she's not volunteering for the sake of blood lust or because this is her idea of a grand holiday. And for all the later nope, not a Friend of Narnia characterization, both in "The Last Battle" and here in "Prince Caspian" as soon as Lewis belatedly realizes that he needs a Pevensie villain to maintain the tension and he can't reuse Edmund since he's supposedly reformed, it's worth remembering that when Narnia issues the call Susan is the one to come running. "It has worked," she says. "Here we are." Ready, willing, and able to help.
This isn't good enough for Trumpkin, because the four Pevensies are only four in number and only children in age. And this is curious to me. I still have no sense from the text as to the scale of this war -- it seems like the Narnian army may be no more than a few dozen in number, in which case a "mere" four new soldiers might make quite a difference indeed. And I still have no sense from the text as to how old Caspian in -- it seems to me that he may be younger in age than Peter is in English years, in which case four "children" shouldn't be such an odd addition to the army since Caspian is supposedly doing just-as-good-if-not-better than all the other soldiers in all the skirmishes.
Still, if Caspian really has waited until the absolutely last minute to call for help, maybe four children at this point simply is inadequate, period. Maybe 300 Spartans and their very own pass of Thermopylae would be insufficient at this point. But the sense here seems to be less that four warriors are far too few so much as that four children are far too young. And that seems odd in light of Caspian's own young age, but maybe Trumpkin is just one of those old fashioned dwarves who thinks battles are ugly when children fight. And why not? We have, after all, already been exposed to a similar viewpoint from Father Christmas, and though Lucy didn't fully agree with him at the time, she deferred to his elder judgment in her characteristically polite way.
"Um -- um -- yes, to be sure. I see that," said the Dwarf, whose pipe seemed to be blocked (at any rate he made himself very busy cleaning it). "But -- well -- I mean -- "
"But don't you yet see who we are?" shouted Lucy. "You are stupid."
Er, but I guess it's never too late in a series to have one of your characters learn the joys of shouting rude insults at another?
The problem -- one of the problems, for there are many -- with deconstructing Narnia is that the characterization is so utterly random at times. You take something like this: I'm fairly certain this is the first time that Lucy has yelled at someone, the first time she's called anyone "stupid", and the first time she's directed obvious ire or anger at anyone outside the family. So... is this character growth? Is this Lucy growing from young, sweet, innocent Lucy who prefers peace and hates fights into an older, harsher, cosmopolitan Lucy lashing out at those in the world who underestimate her based on their prejudice towards her?
Or is this, if not character growth (for I am not at all sure that we see any such growth sustained over the course of the story), an example of Lucy lashing out with Author Knowledge (as opposed to Character Knowledge) at the little person in front of her? This dwarf is lacking the authority of either Aslan or Father Christmas and is therefore standing illegitimately between her and her noble calling. By the rules of this world, does that make him unworthy of even the slightest consideration or kind word? I tend to see Lucy's outburst as more of this latter case, based on how Edmund and Peter will soon pile on, but this makes deconstruction dreadfully difficult because we're left with a very confusing picture of Lucy as a character. Does she have a temper that leads her to name-calling? Is she racist against dwarves? Has she finally been pushed too far, having been summoned into Narnia and then not immediately hailed as long lost Queen Lucy? Is she just being taken over here by the Authorial Voice? I just don't know.
"I suppose you are the four children out of the old stories," said Trumpkin. "And I'm very glad to meet you of course. And it's very interesting, no doubt. But -- no offense?" -- and he hesitated again. [...]
"You mean you think we're no good," said Edmund, getting red in the face.
"Now pray don't be offended," interrupted the Dwarf. "I assure you, my dear little friends -- "
"Little from you is really a bit too much," said Edmund, jumping up.
The thing is, I can understand the children being upset about not being taken seriously. They were kings and queens of Narnia. They had adult bodies and adult skills and it was through their reign and rule that they led Narnia into a golden age of peace and prosperity. Now they've reverted to children's bodies that they are no longer comfortable in and they're being doubted and patronized by the adults around them.
I don't get why this is only now getting to them, mind you, but I do get why it's irritating.
But! And I want to emphasize this because I think it's worth making a point. The answer to all this frustration isn't to get angry at the adult who is gently pointing out that the body you're stuck in isn't well-suited for battle. The answer isn't to start hurling ableist insults about who is and isn't "little" and who is and isn't "stupid". The Pevensies have every right to be angry for a good number of things -- for being dumped out of Narnia and back into their English bodies without so much as a how'd-you-do, for being pulled back into Narnia against their will even after they'd told the puller to stop, for being dropped into the middle of a Narnia civil war without their old bodies or so much as a calling card to prove their identity. Those are all valid things to be angry about.
But none of those things are Trumpkin's fault.
"There's no good losing our tempers," said Peter. "Let's fit him out with fresh armor and fit ourselves out from the treasure chamber, and have a talk after that." [...]
The Dwarf's eyes glistened as he saw the wealth that lay on the shelves (though he had to stand on tiptoes to do so) and he muttered to himself, "It would never do to let Nikabrik see this; never." [...] As they came back up the stairway, jingling in their mail, and already looking and feeling more like Narnians and less like schoolchildren, the two boys were behind, apparently making some plan. [...]
So left in here because it seemed worth noting that not only is Nikabrik a Black Dwarf with Bad Hair and a propensity for evil, he's also greedy and very possibly a thief. Of course he is. Ten dollars says he also juggles kittens on the weekends.
When they came out into the daylight Edmund turned to the Dwarf very politely and said, "I've got something to ask you. Kids like us don't often have the chance of meeting a great warrior like you. Would you have a little fencing match with me? It would be frightfully decent." [...]
"It's a dangerous game," said Trumpkin. "But since you make such a point of it, I'll try a pass or two."
[...] Round and round the two combatants circled, stroke after stroke they gave, and Susan (who never could learn to like this sort of thing) shouted out, "Oh, do be careful." And then, so quickly that no one (unless they knew, as Peter did) could quite see how it happened, Edmund flashed his sword round with a peculiar twist, the Dwarf's sword flew out of his grip, and Trumpkin was wringing his empty hand as you do after a "sting" from a cricket-bat.
"I see the point," said Trumpkin drily. "You know a trick I never learned."
Edmund and Peter have decided to draw Trumpkin into a series of tests in order to demonstrate the Pevensie's useful skills and in order to show that the children really can be of some help as members of Caspian's army. And I approve of this plan! I'm all about tryouts to demonstrate that there is compatibility of skills and purpose and goals and whatnot.
What I approve less of is the idea that Edmund and Peter seem to have that they are tricking Trumpkin into these tests. Presumably this tack is taken because the boys believe that Trumpkin would never agree to the tests otherwise if he weren't flattered into the tests, but why wouldn't he? Trumpkin is a skeptic, yes, but he's been nothing except exceedingly polite to the children and has acknowledged multiple times that he owes his life to them. Perhaps he might refuse a testing on the grounds that there isn't time for games and he needs to get back to Caspian, but that reason doesn't prevent him from being flattered into a show-match with Edmund so is the implication here supposed to be that Trumpkin is vain and easily manipulated? I just don't see why the children won't be up-front with him, nor why the narrative seems to think this is awfully clever planning on Peter's part.
"That's quite true," put in Peter. "The best swordsman in the world may be disarmed by a trick that's new to him. I think it's only fair to give Trumpkin a chance at something else. Will you have a shooting match with my sister? There are no tricks in archery, you know." [...]
"I think that apple hanging over the wall on the branch there would do," said Susan.
"That'll do nicely, lass," said Trumpkin. "You mean the yellow one near the middle of the arch?"
"No, not that," said Susan. "The red one up above -- over the battlement."
The Dwarf's face fell. "Looks more like a cherry than an apple," he muttered, but he said nothing out loud. [...]
Then Susan went to the top of the steps and strung her bow. She was not enjoying her match half so much as Edmund had enjoyed his; not because she had any doubt about hitting the apple but because Susan was so tender-hearted that she almost hated to beat someone who had been beaten already. [...]
"Oh, well done, Su," shouted the other children.
"It wasn't really any better than yours," said Susan to the Dwarf. "I think there was a tiny breath of wind as you shot."
"No, there wasn't," said Trumpkin. "Don't tell me. I know when I am fairly beaten. [...]
And bless her heart, but Susan is the one Pevensie who isn't enjoying giving dwarf Trumpkin his comeuppance for doubting their royal usefulness. Lucy can shout "stupid" all day long and Edmund can smirk and pretend to be a green boy just looking for a proper swords-lesson and Peter can patronize about swordsmen knowing secret tricks -- which I've no doubt he does know more than Trumpkin, what with Peter living the pampered life of a warrior king and Trumpkin surviving his whole life on his wits and his speed and his secrecy and whatever bit of sharpened raw metal he happened to have at hand -- but it's dear Susan who tries to blame the wind on Trumpkin's loss despite how proud she is of her archery talents.
"And now," said Peter, "if you've really decided to believe in us -- " [...] "It's quite clear what we have to do. We must join King Caspian at once."
"The sooner the better," said Trumpkin. "My being such a fool has already wasted about an hour."
And here we're back to that strange insistence again that marginalized people are horribly, terribly wrong if they don't immediately trust and believe in the white saviors presented to them. Taking an hour to check to see that the Pevensie children will be a help and not a hindrance to the war effort is not a waste of time at all, in my opinion; it was very prudently done and was vital for establishing how the children will be able to help in the coming days (as well as during their dangerous journey back).
Skepticism is not, in my opinion, a bad thing; nor is reserving judgment until more facts and evidence are in, but you'd never know it from the way these books castigate non-believers for failing to believe at the very instance they're asked to reconcile an impossible claim with the only reality they've ever known. It seems unfair, and like a system that is rigged against us from the start.
"Look here," said Edmund, "need we go by the same way that Our Dear Little Friend came?"
"No more of that, your Majesty, if you love me," said the Dwarf.
"Very well," said Edmund. "May I say our D.L.F.?"
"Oh, Edmund," said Susan. "Don't keep on at him like that."
"That's all right, lass -- I mean your Majesty," said Trumpkin with a chuckle. "A jibe won't raise a blister." (And after that they often called him the D.L.F. till they'd almost forgotten what it meant.)
The Pevensies will not be staying on at the end of this book to rule Narnia for a decade or more in the way they did at the end of LWW. Their entire sojourn in Narnia over the course of PC will last maybe, maybe, a week. (I'd have to recount, but I'm almost certain it's no longer than seven days. I think it's closer to four.) So for those four-to-seven days, they will call dwarf Trumpkin -- a person who has spent his entire life having to hide because of his height or be brutally murdered by the genocidal humans who took over his country (probably) before he was even born -- an acronym based around a jibe at his height and which he graciously accepts rather than risk offending the ancient kings and queens on whom the fate of Narnia (and the lives of all dwarves who reside within her) rests.
I don't think I need to explain why this is rotten, bullying, Othering behavior on the part of Edmund. I don't think I need to explain why using this euphemism "till they'd almost forgotten what it meant" over the course of a mere four-to-seven days serves to illustrate just how quickly and easy it is to forget the hurtful meanings behind words whenever you're the privileged one using the hurtful words and not the marginalized one hearing the hurtful words.
"As I was saying," continued Edmund, "we needn't go that way. Why shouldn't we row a little south till we come to Glasswater Creek and row up it? That brings us up behind the Hill of the Stone Table, and we'll be safe while we're at sea. If we start at once, we can be at the head of Glasswater before dark, get a few hours' sleep, and be with Caspian pretty early tomorrow," [...]
"It's like old times," said Lucy. "Do you remember our voyage to Terebinthia -- and Galma -- and Seven Isles -- and the Lone Islands?"
"Yes," said Susan, "and our great ship the Splendor Hyaline, with the swan's head at her prow and the carved swan's wings coming back almost to her waist?"
"And the silken sails, and the great stern lanterns?"
"And the feasts on the poop and the musicians."
"Do you remember when we had the musicians up in the rigging playing flutes so that it sounded like music out of the sky?"
Presently Susan took over Edmund's oar and he came forward to join Lucy. They had passed the island now and stood closer in to the shore -- all wooded and deserted. They would have thought it very pretty if they had not remembered the time when it was open and breezy and full of merry friends.
"Phew! This is pretty grueling work," said Peter.
"Can't I row for a bit?" said Lucy.
"The oars are too big for you," said Peter shortly, not because he was cross but because he had no strength to spare for talking.
I want to feel sorry for the Pevensie children, I really do. I can sink into their shoes so easily. I can imagine being a queen of a far-away fantasy fairy land. I can envision the moonlit sailing parties, the music wafting from the rigging, the exotic food dripping with fats and spices, the dancing, and breezes, the merriment. I want to lie back and close my eyes and feel the privilege wash over me and under me and around me and carry me away into a world where things are simpler and life is whatever I need it to be.
I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I think escapist literature is healthy, valuable, and can even be subversive. I think there's beauty available to be had in Narnia, and I think it's a beauty that shouldn't be taken away or tarnished.
But I think there's also an ugliness underneath it, and I think it's an ugliness that we need to be aware of because it affects how we live and interact in the real world. I think there's a wrongness in double-dealing with people rather than being upfront with them about collaboration and how best to meet each other's needs. I think there's an ugliness in lashing out at people for failing to believe everything you assert the moment you assert it, or for cruely talking down at them when they aren't a member of an authority figure group you choose to follow. I think there's a place for respect and consideration to people who are being polite, and that it is wrong to answer that basic politeness with misdirected aggression.
And I think there's a time and a place for romanticizing about music-filled voyages while still remembering the dangers you put your musicians through by weaving them through the rigging for your own heightened amusement.
What I'm asking for, I think, is a little balance. A little basic politeness. A little less marinating in the privilege that is being a king or queen of Narnia, and a little more recognition of the responsibilities that should come with the job description.
128 comments:
I almost wonder if Lucy's argument about the summons making perfect sense isn't meant to be another of those Christian allegories. "Jesus showing up in my peanut butter makes perfect sense if you believe in Jesus at all" and that sort of thing...
So we spent a good deal of LWW sympathising with designated sinner Edmund even though we weren't supposed to; and now I'm feeling sympathetic towards Trumpkin and Susan, despite the former being a Know Your Place Dwarf and the latter being the designated The Boys and Lipstick Apostate.
Isn't this a fun pattern? I want to give Susan a big hug for actually coming off as a genuinely empathic person.
It's interesting to note that I first read the Chronicles of Narnia in primary school as part of a class reading; the teacher stopped on this chapter, if I remember correctly (it was 15 years ago...) and basically called Lucy out on being weirdly rude.
I think the Pevensies' rudeness can be chalked up to a combination of perceived disrespect from Trumpkin and being exhausted from both sleeping in the ruins of Cair Paravel and the revelation that their once-grand kingdom is now reduced to a crumbling castle and an apple orchard.
The thing is, I can understand the children being upset about not being taken seriously. They were kings and queens of Narnia. They had adult bodies and adult skills and it was through their reign and rule that they led Narnia into a golden age of peace and prosperity. Now they've reverted to children's bodies that they are no longer comfortable in and they're being doubted and patronized by the adults around them.
I don't get why this is only now getting to them, mind you, but I do get why it's irritating.
I think it's getting to them now because of circumstance; back in England, it would certainly be aggravating to be once again treated as a child, but they could likely console themselves by saying "Back in Narnia I wouldn't have to make my bed/go to bed early/eat dinner before dessert - people respected me back in Narnia." But now that they're back in Narnia, they're not being treated with the respect they believe they deserve, and it's really starting to sink in that they can't go back to being kings and queens.
Edmund, Edmund, Edmund. I can kind of understand why you would downplay your skill at first, if you thought that Trumpkin would just dismiss you outright if you asked for a fair trial. It was unnecessary, but I can accept you making what seemed like the more efficient decision. It's when you then harp on it in full bully-mode FOREVER afterwards that I wish to feed you your own crown.
SUSAN YOU MUST NOW BEAR THE RESPONSIBILITY OF BEING THE BEST PEVENSIE.
It's been a year since they were last in Narnia, so I wonder if there's any intent here that Edmund has been back at 'the horrid school' and had a bullying refresher in the intervening time? But Peter was super-judgey last time and is just chuckling from the sidelines this time, so apparently this is approved bullying, for reasons that aren't clear to me. (And that still wouldn't explain Lucy's abusive spouting, either.) Though I would like to believe that the problem is that Peter is distracted by serious issues of interdimensional incursion physics, because:
"Great Scott!" said Peter.
Unexpected new fact of the day: Peter is far more palatable if you imagine him as Doc Brown.
Oh, I knew I'd forgotten something. You beat me to it. Well done, that chap.
"Just when we were at the railway station!" said all the children, and looked at one another with shining eyes.
And I don't even know what to say to this. If one of you clever people can explain how Narnia Time and English Time can work out such that the time of day is always the same but with time accelerated such that approximately one year of English time can work out to 1,300 years of Narnia time, then by all means be my guest.
How about something like this:
Susan makes a crude sundial, "I estimate it's about two in the afternoon now."
Lucy: Which would make it between 24 and twenty five hours ago.
Peter checks his watch, "I have 3 pm now."
Edmund, "So that would be between ten and eleven England time..."
"Just when we were at the railway station!" said all the children, and looked at one another with shining eyes.
-
I shall now read the rest of the post.
It's interesting to note that I first read the Chronicles of Narnia in primary school as part of a class reading; the teacher stopped on this chapter, if I remember correctly (it was 15 years ago...) and basically called Lucy out on being weirdly rude.
Hmm...
It is also interesting that Peter, Edmund and Lucy are all rude to Trumpkin.
But from what you write, it sounds as if Lucy is the only one whom your teacher pointed out as being rude.
Which gets into all sorts of gendered issues around manners and respect.
Lucy is a little girl.
Society expects girls and women to be polite, to have better manners than boys and men. Female people are supposed to be subordinate to, and therefore respectful towards, male people. Younger people are supposed to be respectful towards older people. Gendered expectations about manners and respect trump age-related expectations about manners and respect.
So Lucy, a little girl, has to deal with the strongest expectations of manners and respect. As a female person, she owes good manners and respect to all the male people. As the youngest, she owes good manners and respect to all the others who are older than her. For all the children, because they are Old Narnian Royalty, they are owed manners and respect from other Narnians.
The boys' lack of manners and respect towards Trumpkin gets a pass because they are male. They don't owe him manners and respect in the way that a girl would.
And because of the temporal displacement, Peter and Edmund can, by some standards, be considered older than Trumpkin, and therefore not owing him the respect that the young owe their elders.
So Lucy, little girl, is expected to have good manners and show respect, for reasons of both age and gender. And if she's rude, she'll get called out on it. (She is the youngest of her family, and therefore "young," for story-telling purposes, however one might consider her age from the Narnian perspective.)
Peter and Edmund owe no particular respect to Trumpkin on the basis of gender. And they have a reasonable argument for not owing respect on the basis of age, because, by the Narnian calendar, they are centuries older than Trumpkin.
Susan, older girl/ young woman, is trapped in a lousy position, as usual. She has a reasonable claim to not owe Trumpkin manners and respect on the basis of age, because she has the same claim to age-authority-due-to-temporal-displacement as her brothers have. But she's still female, and expected to give male characters all the deference that Lewis expected women to give to men, in the context of the more conservative and authoritarian culture that Lewis saw as natural.
This conflict puts Susan's character in an impossible situation. If she asserts her authority, skills and power, then she's not properly feminine. If she doesn't assert her authority, skills and power, then she is betraying the nation she has the responsibility to rule and protect.
I am surprised to report that Chapter 8 is where everything suddenly turns more than a little sour and all our characters start getting snotty and sore with one another. And I really do not know why that is, but I'm serious: by my estimation, everyone is a right narky jackwagon here except Susan, and she'll make up for it with a complete character derailment into Libby McSnotmouth in the next chapter in order to make a Deep Theological Point. SO STRAP IN FOR A BUMPY RIDE.
I haven't seen the Avengers movie. Can anyone tell me whether the jerkifying sceptre ends up mysteriously vanishing, possibly into a suspicious spacetime vortex?
(Nobody would notice one more shiny thing in the treasure room, would they?)
said the Dwarf, whose pipe seemed to be blocked (at any rate he made himself very busy cleaning it).
[...]
The Dwarf's eyes glistened as it saw the wealth that lay on the shelves (though it had to stand on tiptoes to do so) and it muttered to itself, "It would never do to let Nikabrik see this; never." They found easily enough a mail shirt for him
Did anyone else trip over the pronoun switch?
*reads equivalent section of Ana's post*
The Dwarf's eyes glistened as he saw the wealth that lay on the shelves (though he had to stand on tiptoes to do so) and he muttered to himself
Huh. I guess not, then.
Lucy heard Edmund say, "No, let me do it. It will be more of a sucks for him if I win, and less of a let-down for us all if I fail."
...wait, what? What's "sucks" supposed to mean here? Maybe it's short for "success"? Is that something mid-twentieth-century people did? Because if so, it's very counter-intuitive, at least to the modern eye.
(Ana, does your version make more sense like it does with the previous quote?)
Then he felt it as well as he could, getting his arms and fingers into very difficult positions as you do when you're trying to scratch a place that is just out of reach.
I never could understand that Shel Silverstein poem about the itchy spot on your back you can't reach. I can reach every spot on my back. (Shoulders are among the easier bits, even.) I'd wondered if maybe I could only do it because of youth, but now Lewis is invoking the supposed common experience in a children's book.
Thank you. And may I say that Lipstick Apostate is totally going to be the name of my rock band.
I like the idea that Narnia time-space is quantum in a way that Earth time-space isn't. (Or maybe they're both quantum, but you can only tell from the outside - when you're living it, the bumps and curves seem perfectly natural.) So relative to each other are random little intersections - except you can't cross from one space to another without some sort of portal. If the portal was over there, you could jump from Susan's coronation to Gordon Ramsay's kitchen; over there, and go from Cair Paravel to the Marinas Trench. But only Deep Magic can create the portals. Because the intersections of timespace are so random, there's no way to know if you'll end up at the same time or not, but there *is*, overall, a greater likelihood of space matching up (Narnia-England, Telmarine-Spain, and Archenland-Nebraska). Similarly, there's a greater likelihood if the time matches up as well, but there's so much time that the matching is likely to be on the smaller scale. So it's not surprising that the nearest portal to the Pevensies from the horn was some distance away from the horn, but in the right ballpark, but at more-or-less the right time. In other words, timey wimey bits.*
It makes sense to me that Trumpkin is not very willing to accept the help of a few outsider kids. It's a war, and a pretty nasty one at that, with casualty rates that are approaching the alarming. They're not dressed right, they don't look right, they appear to have no resources to draw from (except the treasure room, which understandably perks up Trumpkin, because they could certainly use a Swords of Slaying +2). It certainly fits with the idea that Trumpkin sees Caspian as an acceptable figurehead. But the old high kings/queens aren't nearly as good, because they're only figureheads for the Narnians, and not even very good figureheads. "Look, guys, here's the folks who vanished, plunging Narnia into a civil war for succession that left it vulnerable for invasion" is not the greatest selling point to your demoralized army. If the help gets killed, it may permanently break the rebellion - especially Caspian, who is likely to be most vulnerable if the people who he idealizes and who are most like him get killed. The last thing Trumpkin needs is for Caspian to chicken out.
I wonder if he considered trucking back a load of magic swords and knives and bows and leaving the Pevensies there to rot?
* Random side-note: I've been looking for art for my apartment, and stumbled across a full size decal of the Angel of the Waters in Central Park, and my first impulse was to shout "Don't blink!" in the middle of the thrift store. And now I want a Weeping Angel decal to go across from my bathroom mirror, so it just peers over people's shoulders. I may not fully be up to this whole "decorating like an adult" thing.
Maybe it's just because I only read the first book in the series, at a very young age, and retained almost literally nothing from it (I remember enjoying it at the time but never got to the other books) but my emotional investment here, like Twilight, is low, which allows me to adopt a 'broadside guns out' approach to the material at hand. So I am enjoying this series immensely even if i almost never comment on it; generally, you've said most of the things I can think of to be said, and many things I would never have thought of.
It occurs to me, though, that the recent threads about critiquing a work in a larger cultural context versus attacking it versus attacking everyone who likes it as being Bad and Wrong... It seems like walking the line between the first two is difficult, and often impossible, especially with people who like and are willing to defend the source material. Depictions of racism are bad are bad are bad, and if a work has it, that work is Worse than if the work didn't have it. Having flaws doesn't make it Satan, it just proves it was created by People (pointing out every flaw everywhere and every time somebody uses a bad word or does something that's bad or does bad or is bad orgidrrgdrgrgredgerg can get a little wearing on me personally, and probably contributes to the strawman that Feminists Hate Everything or Nothing Is Ever Good Enough etc, etc, because I think it ties into the larger context that for a lot of folks, and myself sometimes, poking at every imperfection is the same as being a Big Meany Hater for not just letting it lie as it is or letting it pass or etc. So maybe it all comes back to Why Are You Making Such A Big Fuss About This, Feminist?)
Or something. I'm trying to put my musings on this into a coherent form and failing, but it might just be that, for a lot of people, there's no way to take apart a series page-by-page and dissect every one of its flaws without, well, looking like you're hating on it. I think. I know that if somebody came up to me and did that about my every flaw I wouldn't be able to look at things objectively or thank them for offering me a chance to improve so much as tell them to go away.
(Reminds me of one time in my Skype chatroom when my fiance's sister told me she was trying, and failing, to figure out any reason that my fiance was with me at all. I never knew I could hold a grudge that way before that. Far as I can tell, she wasn't really meaning to stick a knife right in my gutt, and offered me a whole conversation about Ways I Could Be Better.)
Either this is some form of her aggressively agreeing with him while being oblivious to how she sounds as though she's criticizing him or this is an abandonment of previously established character traits in order to head off reader objections at the pass
I think it's one of those things that can only be explained in the light of the book's religious allegory. 'Believing in magic' is one of the most essential markers of a good person in Lewis's ethics: it's more or less the key to salvation. Consider, for instance, the Calormene who's saved because he insists on seeing 'Tash' only to find it's Aslan: the point is that he believes that Tash is positive and magical, and that belief in magic saves him even though he's of the wrong faith.
So Peter saying he can 'hardly believe it' isn't just a meaningless phrase. He's not saying he doubts that it's actually happened, but he is saying that he's surprised about how it works. Which means he's not in a state of full, instinctual acceptance; he's not in harmony with the magic. Lucy's reaction identifies this as a serious problem of faith: if he were properly versed in 'magic', then he wouldn't be surprised at all. Being surprised at magic is next door to being sceptical of it, and that way lies pre-conversion Eustace and the Dwarves in Heaven.
Lucy is exercising force and authority in her tone because she's taking the role - which she often does - of the person who understands 'magic' the most on an emotional level, which is the level that really meant something to Lewis. For Peter to find it unbelievable that things have happened this way is a sign that emotionally speaking, his values are still on the terrestrial, non-magical, secular level. And that needs to be corrected quickly, because believing in Narnia is the foundation for morality in this world. In effect, she's saying, 'Hey, focus!'
How the magic works is, in Narnia, a theological issue. And to quote The Crucible: 'Theology, sir, is a fortress; no crack in a fortress may be accounted small.'
Is it okay to talk about the mechanics of magic here? Because I'm going to...
If one of you clever people can explain how Narnia Time and English Time can work out such that the time of day is always the same but with time accelerated such that approximately one year of English time can work out to 1,300 years of Narnia time, then by all means be my guest. Bonus points if you can accommodate in your theory how the Narnia time between Prince Caspian and Voyage of the Dawn Treader is (I think) about three years, and the Narnia time between Voyage of the Dawn Treader and Silver Chair is (I think) about thirty years, despite the English time between each also being (I think) about a year or so.
The rate simply isn't consistent - in other words, Time Fcuk. It does seem 'odd' that the time of day would correlate exactly, however. As well as how Trumpkin knows the time in terms of 'hours o' clock' when clocks shouldn't have been invented yet. Then again, neither should sewing machines... (unless they meant a spindle, or something? That's... a machine, and sorta related to sewing). Seriously, you can't schizo tech that hard and then pretend that Earth-logic applies even slightly.
This is another piece of legend that got glommed onto the story of Susan's horn: at no point did Santa mention that the efficacy of the horn would be heightened at sunrise, rather Cornelius tossed that little tidbit out there as either something he truly believed or in an attempt to justify his keep as the wise old magician of the group.
Maybe it's less a property of the horn, and more a property of 'The Horn is White Magic, and *all* White Magic is stronger at sunrise.' Or perhaps in the intervening time, the horn's capabilities were more thoroughly investigated...
there is -- in my mind -- a very great deal of difference between summoning a criminal supernatural being against its will in order to command it to exercise one sliver of its magical power as part of an ongoing divine punishment versus summoning an innocent child against its will in order to expect it to fight in a war to the death on behalf of a land they can never truly be a part of. But, no, whatever, these two things are PRECISELY THE SAME.
Morally, no, they aren't the same thing at all... but in terms of *magical capability* they well could be... I'm having a hard time thinking of a worked example where it would be precisely the same, but summoning is summoning, and theoretically, binding a less powerful being should be *easier*...
I haven't seen the Avengers movie. Can anyone tell me whether the jerkifying sceptre ends up mysteriously vanishing, possibly into a suspicious spacetime vortex?
I seem to recall it getting broken...
I think we've had previous discussions in which it was generally agreed that the only way of making any sense of Narnian time was to assume that they were independent streams that connect at semirandom points, rather than simply flowing at consistent but dissimilar rates. It's worth noting that the professor only refers to Narnia having "its own time", not saying that time should go faster or slower there.
(Though this raises some interesting questions about whether it should be possible to leap back and forth in the Narnia timeline depending on which portal on Earth one takes. Or vice-versa. If it weren't for the overseeing magic, the Pevensies could consider themselves lucky that LWW didn't end with them falling out of the wardrobe three months before they arrived at the house to begin with.)
TW: Ableism and Ableism Terms
Catching up with the thread and haven't read the comments yet, but re-reading the piece, this stood out at me once again:
and then, when it was half light this morning, as if I'd no more sense than a Giant, I risked a short cut
Because lately I've been really struggling to remove the word "blind" from my casual vocabulary. It's such a *useful* word: "blind faith", "blind reckoning", "blind leading the blind". Biut the point of understanding and recognizing ableism is seeing that Blind = Foolish and using it as a shorthand to do so is terribly wrong. Just like Crazy = Evil or Jerk or Asshole or whatever, and the conflation of the two unrelated terms *hurts* good people.
So that's why it stings my chops to say "no more sense than a Giant", because it's conflating a state of being (like blindness) with a foolish set of choices. And due to the Platonic nature of Narnia, it's narratively enforced, so we can't even say Trumpkin is being a jerk so much as just "accurate". (Even though, supposedly, they only just re-learned that Giants are foolish; see last week's post.)
Mine says "sucks", too! I didn't even notice. I don't know what that means in context.
On decorating:
To quote Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics fame, "The whole point of growing up and getting your own place is so that you can decorate it with pure uncut freebased awesome. Let's do this. "
Or xkcd. "We're grown-ups now, and it's our turn to decide what that means." ( http://xkcd.com/150/ )
Basically, I think a Weeping Angel decal sounds fantastic.
The use of 'sucks' seems to be hard to find a clear etymology for, although people have guessed it somehow relates to sucking eggs or similar. The only things that seem generally agreed upon are that it's British (don't know if it's very specifically English), it's young kids' slang, and it's a separate linguistic evolution from the standard modern 'sucks'.
Huh, that's absolutely correct.
I'm not entirely sure on the truth of my memories, of course; I was about seven at the time and even though we spent about six months on those books, I have more memories of my endless bickering with the girl next to me.
It's definitely true what you say regarding the expectations on the four, especially poor Susan who is already relegated to be doomed to an awful position of can do no right.
In the actual context of my teacher and my memories, I'm not entirely sure if she was calling Lucy out for being a little girl, or if she was calling her out for being Lucy. Rather, by this point I imagine we sort of expected Edmund to be a rude jerk sometimes, and even Peter can be rather cruel with her words; but Lucy spent just about all of LWW being the one who responds kindly to the fawn, who mourns the stone statues, who is generally as inoffensive as can be. It could've been a case of the event being so jarring, as it's... Pretty damn OOC for her.
I need a pensieve...
I misread the final word as Pevensie, and have just realised that they're anagrams. Awesome.
Ya boo, sucks to you! - is a phrase that comes to my mind for some reason. I honestly don't know where I've heard it, though.
Based on Lucy's almost non-existant knowledge of the War of the Roses (in that she compares a nation under a supposedly tyrannical rule to a massive, decades spanning civil war. . .), I wouldn't be surprised to find that she had glossed over certain parts of the Arabian Nights, and thus her mental association is Jinn=Summoned, more like a Final Fantasy character.
Billy Bunter?
I think it's interesting that the demonstration of the Pevensies' abilities comes down to physical combat - sword-fighting and archery. Useful enough, but surely Kings and Queens would have more to offer than mere personal prowess in battle. When Trumpkin doubts them, on the basis of being children, they might have responded by pointing out that despite being back in the bodies of children, they still had skills and experience of royal leadership. They should know how to plan grand strategies, organize supply lines, carry out diplomacy between different Narnian factions, and all the other aspects of governance that don't involve being on the front line with a sword. Surely that kind of thing is in much shorter supply in Caspian-era Narnia, given that the non-humans have been isolated and on the run for centuries, and Caspian himself is learning on the fly.
(The third part of the demonstration - Lucy healing Trumpkin's wound - doesn't really count for me either. It shows that the cordial is valuable but it doesn't show that she and the other children are!)
The text points out that Edmund would have lost his fight, if it had taken place when he had only just arrived back in Narnia - but since he's been breathing Narnian air, "his arms and fingers remembered their own skill". Susan too defeats Trumpkin even though "he was a famous bowman among his own people". (Another example of the trope where the "civilized" outsider lives among "uncivilized" people, and becomes better at local skills than the locals themselves.) It's a pity that the children don't seem to be at all disadvantaged by being back in their youthful bodies. It would be more interesting to me if they didn't magically regain their combat abilities, and had to prove themselves through wisdom rather than physical strength.
I think that in Lewis's shorthand, all the virtues of kingship are not only correlated, but also summed up by physical combat as the "pure essence" of kingliness. This may explain the thinking behind the Miraz duel. The best fighter is definitively also the best at ruling; if we accept as axiomatic "my strength is as the strength of ten, because my heart is pure", then my strength in battle shows everyone that my heart is indeed pure. It's the same kind of thing where people who look healthy and wholesome must automatically be trustworthy in morals and judgement. Narnia does seem to have a few examples of: you are wrong to doubt my plan; my plan must be the right course of action because I am a moral person; you can tell I'm good by looking at my non-spooky eyes.
"It will be more of a sucks for him if I win, and less of a let-down for us all if I fail."
...wait, what? What's "sucks" supposed to mean here? Maybe it's short for "success"?
No. Success wouldn't make sense in that context. In my head, I'm connecting it with the word sucker. Don't know how etymologically sound that is. Must go look it up.
TRiG.
I can find it as a verb:
Slang . to be repellent or disgusting: Poverty sucks.
Source: Dictionary.com Unabridged. Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2012.
I'm pretty sure that's the meaning intended. It'll be a sucks for him => "It will be a victory for us", with strong implications of humiliation and embarrassment for Trumpkin.
Compare, from the same source:
eat crow, Informal . to be forced to admit to having made a mistake, as by retracting an emphatic statement; suffer humiliation: His prediction was completely wrong, and he had to eat crow.
TRiG.
British, yes. I once read an Americanized version of the books which had the word "shock" there instead.
They should know how to plan grand strategies, organize supply lines, carry out diplomacy between different Narnian factions, and all the other aspects of governance that don't involve being on the front line with a sword.
I am now SO SAD this wasn't invoked in text. Aslan basically does all of this, of what little gets done at all.
It's the same kind of thing where people who look healthy and wholesome must automatically be trustworthy in morals and judgement.
Obligatory Star Wars derail: this is why I find the bizarre* insistence that the Dark Side makes you look unwholesome so disconcerting. Really, SW writers? You want to write a world where prejudice and bias that favors pretty people is a GOOD thing? You want to try to explain why anyone would trust a Sith after the first glance.
* Bizarre because I never connected it with the movies. The Emperor was ugly, yes, but he's ONE GUY*. I distinctly remember playing KOTOR with my then-husband and him noting "hey, does my character look... off somehow?" And then us finding out that Dark Side makes you look unwholesome. And being just STUNNED.
** One of these days I want to catalog -- if someone hasn't already -- the symptoms of Sequelitis. One is a contraction of the world, where suddenly people are related to each other more than they were implied to be from the beginning -- see, The Little Mermaid canon where Triton and Ursula are retconed as siblings, or SW where now C3PO was built by Anakin Skywalker for not bloody reason and R2D2 has been chums with Obi-Wan Kenobi since the beginning.
Two, is a normalization of random elements, so that Ugly Emperor becomes a world-building rule for all Sith, and perfectly reasonable desert-robes-disguise becomes a Jedi uniform which makes zero sense if you were, you know trying to hide out incognito.
Both elements seem designed to remind the watcher/reader of the earlier (usually better work) but at great cost (in my opinion) to the world-building as a whole.
E. WAUGH Brideshead Revisited II. v. 287 It's great sucks to Bridey
I wish I could locate it, but there's a statue head of an unknown Roman whose skin appears to be melting off. He looks Palpatineish. It's from a time when flaws were in. They indicated you were worldly and wise. Also the age shown on your face was a symbol of the time you'd put in service to the Republic.
Anyway, Palpatine would fit right in when that was the ideal you aspired to. During Greek democracy or Augustine empire not so much.
I'm sad to say that SW:TOR does the evil makes you ugly thing. As you go up (down?) in Dark Side levels, you gain glowing eyes and get rather...undead...looking. At least going up in Light Side levels does nothing. (Though people on the forums have wanted it to, with ideas from glowing - which I admit would be hilarious on my all-Light-Side Agent - to having good glowing eyes to having any scars on your character erased. To the last I say HELL NO.)
I must admit that the Dark Side corruption does make it really obvious which NPC Sith are evil. Though the fact that they're ordering one to do evil things or going on about spreading fear and hatred (as if it's a good thing!) would give it away just as clearly.
But the fact that the vast majority of my characters have either scars or facial tattoos (my Jedi are the only exceptions) might be just slightly a reaction to good = pretty. (Okay, fine, my characters are all pretty anyway. *sigh* I'm deeply shallow.)
Now you say it, it definitely rings a bell, despite my lack of proper familiarity with the Bunter oeuvre. So it's either part of a geekish osmosis like half the things I know, or I've seen a preview, parody or pastiche at some point.
"Yah boo sucks to you."
It might have come up in other contexts ("Sucks to you!") is a phrase I have used myself, in the dim and distant past, but if you're at all a Rowan Atkinson or Hugh Laurie or Stephen Fry fan, you may remember it from BlackAdder Goes Forth:
Melchett: "Damn and blast your goggly eyes! Will you stop interrupting, George! Now, this is excellent!" [shakes Blackadder's hand] Congratulations man! It's totally inspiring, makes you want to jump over the top and yell 'Yah-boo sucks to you, Fritsie'."
Meh. I make pretty MMO characters too. If I'm going to be staring at them for 500 hours, I might as well like what I see. At least with LOTRO, I have 2 Elves, 2 Humans, and 1 Hobbit and they're all Pretty In Their Own Way. I love my little chubby hobbit. (I wish the humans had a breast size that wasn't GARGANTUAN, but that may just be my opinion. The elves seem to have ranges, but the humans are YOWZAA imho.)
For Morrowind, I have a Dark Elf character with decked out mods that gave her curly black hair and white eyes and a giant facial tattoo with a rose.
For some reason, I simply can't play MMOs as a cis-male character, though I don't mind in single-player games like Dragon Age. I'm still furious there's not a cis-female dwarf body type in LOTRO -- they all telegraph as cis-male to me.
I don't play cis-male characters in MMOs much because it's so hard to make an attractive cis-male character in most MMOs. (Deeeeeeply shallow.) I had the most cis-male characters in City of Heroes and Champions because I could make a variety of attractive guys. I've only got one cis-male character in SW:TOR because - even though there are other decent faces, hair styles, etc - I cannot seem to assemble another attractive man out of them. I don't know why. I've got a whole assortment of attractive women, across three of the four body types (chubby, amazonish, and "average").
(Following your lead and avoiding making cis- the default did make me realize I've never really considered the gender of MMO characters beyond which body I chose for them. Thank you for that interesting thought.)
(I'm still learning, too. Adding "cis-" to everything happened right before I hit post, and even then I worried that I might not be using the terminology right.)
The Emperor was ugly, yes, but he's ONE GUY\
One guy who looked just fine until he had some sort of force-lightning-related mishap fighting off an assassination attempt, no less.
Which leads into one of my pet peeves about SWTOR - the way so many of the classes seem to be based off one particular character from the movies, right down to details that should have been specific to that individual. The bounty hunter and smuggler classes are the most obvious example of this - they practically scream "Look! You can be just like Boba Fett/Han Solo!" - but the Jedi and Sith classes get in on the act too. The ur-example of a Sith warrior presented in the promo art is strikingly reminiscent of an unmasked Darth Vader, the combination of double-bladed lightsabers for Sith Assassins and the dark-side Zabrak* race makes Darth Maul, and the Imperial Agent seems likely to have been inspired by Grand Admiral Thrawn from the expanded Universe.
*This may have been mentioned on this blog before, but I'll say it again. It's facepalmingly FAIL that empire-aligned Zabrak have the menacing Darth Maul black-and-red skin, while republic-aligned Zabrak have a human-looking tan-and-brown color scheme going on.
it's so hard to make an attractive cis-male character in most MMOs.
Aion says hi. :D
For all the male-gaziness of the female armor, it is VERY easy to make attractive characters in a variety of different styles. It's also reasonably doable to make a plausible transman, and maybe even a transwoman - I haven't tried it, but with the amount of options you get for both face and body it's got to be possible.
Also, I got good results in SWTOR using the asian-ish faces on Chiss males, but you and I probably have different tastes there.
I like the black-and-red Zabrak look better, precisely because it is less human looking. I wish the Republic-aligned Zabrak were black-and-red, too - both to avoid FAIL and because it just looks neater. But I really like my good, if intimidating, amazon Zabrak Sith Warrior. She looks so physically capable! And seems nothing at all like Darth Vader (not the least because she's running around with her helmet hidden and wearing an outfit that looks like she stripped off her shirt to beat the crap out of you. But also because she's very much Light Side.)
(Though my brain gets an out of cheese error with regard to Imperial Agent = Grand Admiral Thrawn. O_o Not that I really remember Thrawn, though I did read the Zahn books. From what people say, though, Thrawn sounds more like a chessmaster type than James Bond. Though the creators made the claim that the class is based on Moff Tarkin and the hero of the Splinter Cell games. Which also gets an out of cheese error. Having played the class, it's James Bond (or maybe Jason Bourne) in outer space.)
Oh, yes, Aion was lovely when it came to character creation. The outfits were facepalmy, but now that it's free to play, I'll probably fire up my account again one of these days.
And, yes, the asian-ish faces are good looking in SW:TOR. Not sure what my hangup there is.
I must admit that the Dark Side corruption does make it really obvious which NPC Sith are evil. Though the fact that they're ordering one to do evil things or going on about spreading fear and hatred (as if it's a good thing!) would give it away just as clearly.
"'I'm super trustworthy,' said Darth Nefarious." *click*
See, I sort of get why big evil villains think spreading fear is a good thing. At the very least, you can trace it back to Machiavelli's The Prince- fear and love are exclusive, so it's better to be feared than to be loved. I disagree! But I can perceive that there is a logic there when it comes to being a cold pragmatic ruler.
... But a lot of these villains seem to spread fear and hatred for the point of spreading fear and hatred. That's just silly.
No, this time I've got nothing. Everyone is being very oddly and unpleasantly, except for poor Susan, and I can see no reason for it either.
Did anyone else trip over the pronoun switch?
I did! So much that I went back and forth through the chapter, checking; no, Trumpkin is referred to as "he" everywhere else, so what's with this? He's an "it" when he's being a representative of his species, with an inordinate attachment to metalwork and money?
Although, I believe I recall hearing the Dwarfs calling Caspian an "it" when they find him unconscious in the forest. But it's weirder when your supposedly impartial narrator says it.
our great ship the Splendor Hyaline
Which I always thought was an odd name, but I never bothered to look it up before. Turns out that "hyaline" means "glassy and translucent" -- maybe it was a glass-bottomed boat? Or merely, a boat as splendid as a diamond? The Free Dictionary quotes Sacheverell Sitwell for an example: the morning is as clear as diamond or as hyaline.
(Love-in-a-mist and Bovril. Are there more Sitwells than one? Oh yes, there are Sacheverell.)
And I think there's a time and a place for romanticizing about music-filled voyages while still remembering the dangers you put your musicians through by weaving them through the rigging for your own heightened amusement. ... A little less marinating in the privilege that is being a king or queen of Narnia, and a little more recognition of the responsibilities that should come with the job description.
I can't argue with that. And no doubt the whole "up in the rigging" thing would have been very unpleasant for the musicians if they weren't also sailors. So I hope they were; I hope they were the kind of sailors who thought that "skylarking" in the rigging was the best of amusements.
But that's Lewis and music again. When he says it sounded like music out of the sky he really means it.
On a much more earthly plane, my husband saw one of those "Tall Ships" events recently. And sure enough, there were the sailors, on sailing ships from all over the world, in ranks out on the yards, singing. He said it was very impressive (and the sailors all seemed to have a safety harness, just in case).
To be fair to Sith (for certain values of fair), Sith think that fear and hatred are good things.* They believe strength comes from fear and hate. When Darth Jadus told my Agent that he planned to spread fear and hatred through the Empire, it's because he wants the Empire to be strong. My Agent, of course was busy thinking WTF!? since he's not a Sith and doesn't think that way. (Granted the whole fear and hate thing may have played into my Agent living up to good is dumb** and getting force lightninged by Jadus shortly thereafter.)
*Okay, not all Sith think that way. It's all in how they interpret the (not inherently evil) Sith Code.
** As in the quote from Spaceballs. Plot Armor is the only reason my Agent survived that little chat.
Or, to quote George MacDonald, who was a major influence on Lewis: "You see this Fairy Land is full of oddities and all sorts of incredibly ridiculous things, which a man is compelled to meet and treat as real existences, although all the time he feels foolish for doing so."
He may feel foolish, but he'll be worse off in the end if he doesn't treat the unbelievable matters of Fairy as real and important. Notice, though that he speaks more of actions than of beliefs. The characters of Phantastes are validated by their deeds, not their faith or their feelings.
And the character speaking here is "a very parfit gentil knight," a paragon of courtesy. I don't recall anyone in Phantastes being as rude as these Pevensies are rude here.
One is a contraction of the world, where suddenly people are related to each other more than they were implied to be from the beginning
Two, is a normalization of random elements, so that Ugly Emperor becomes a world-building rule for all Sith,
This is exactly a genetic bottleneck, in population dynamics. The first quote is more or less its definition, the second is its effect.
I think this relationship is more than purely coincidental.
I don't remember the Sith Code (there's need for that pensieve again), but I'm assuming here you mean something akin to "Struggle makes us strong"?
According to Wookieepedia:
Peace is a lie, there is only passion.
Through passion, I gain strength.
Through strength, I gain power.
Through power, I gain victory.
Through victory, my chains are broken.
The Force shall free me.
Which doesn't sound inherently evil, and yet, somehow becomes terrible in the typical Sith interpretation of it. I mean, it does lean toward might makes right, but I'm not sure quite how it ends up being "let's heap pain, fear, and suffering on people, pit our apprentices against one another, and generally be as evil as possible mwahahahaha" but it does.
And I think there's a time and a place for romanticizing about music-filled voyages while still remembering the dangers you put your musicians through by weaving them through the rigging for your own heightened amusement. ... A little less marinating in the privilege that is being a king or queen of Narnia, and a little more recognition of the responsibilities that should come with the job description.
I can't argue with that. And no doubt the whole "up in the rigging" thing would have been very unpleasant for the musicians if they weren't also sailors. So I hope they were; I hope they were the kind of sailors who thought that "skylarking" in the rigging was the best of amusements.
What makes it weird to me is that it's written specifically as if they ordered the musicians up to the rigging, not caring what they thought of this. I mean, it would have been easy enough to talk about a troupe of acrobat-musicians who did it themselves, and how awesome that was; as it is, it just makes it sound like they view the musicians as bits of scenery to be placed wherever, and not having any opinion of their own.
Mind you, that's a misinterpretation of Machiavelli, who didn't seem to view fear and love as exclusive at all - it's best to be both, but if that's not possible, fear is more reliable than love as a way to remain in power. And hatred is right out, since that'll give people the motivation to fight through their fear to bring you down.
Of course, Sith would seem to see the latter as a good thing, since they've inspired their target to become stronger.
You're right, it's not inherently evil. It's time to BREAK IT DOWN.
Peace is a lie, there is only passion.
This could be read as the idea that the natural state of life is conflict; animals eat plants, animals eat other animals- i.e. to thrive or live, one entity must destroy another. For the Sith, this might manifest in a very pragmatic teaching method that to survive, one must be strong, and the weak die- survival of the fittest, in any sense. Passion could be... Well it's probably speaking of emotion, vibrance- lots of life. Peace is quiet and doesn't involve conflict, it's antithetical to life.
To live, you must have passion.
Through passion, I gain strength.
Life is best with passion, and passion means you want to live, and the desire gives you a stronger will. Anyone without strength clearly doesn't live enough, so maybe if they're afraid they'll gain that passion- fear is a passion, of sorts.
Through strength, I gain power.
This seems pretty obvious. Through that strength of will you gain the ability to impose your will on the world- power. If you don't have power, you're simply not strong enough. The weak do not have power or strength, and thus are lorded over the weak. The weak are told, "If you want to not suffer, be like the strong", and thus everyone is encouraged to yearn to be strong.
Through power, I gain victory.
Victory over what? Victory is to conquer, so in that aspect, through power I gain control, I 'win'. If all of life is in conflict, then everything wants to win- and the only way to win is power, not (say) friendship.
Through victory, my chains are broken.
Chains being... See, it'd be really subversive if this was circular. Through victory, my chains are broken- the chains placed upon me by the strong, who broke the chains placed on them by the strong before them.
However, a more likely interpretation is that this is freedom of ambition- through victory I'm free to do as I please without fetters.
Together, this interpretation seems to suggest that the Sith spread fear, pain and suffering because conflict is the best way to produce strong people. Even though those strong people will eventually rise and overthrow the current strong people, the Sith may very well not consider this to be a bad thing, as it's only natural for the strongest to rule- one could assume that over time, the general 'mean strength' of society would increase.
It's a very independent philosophy- be the best, or you'll be eaten. Be strong, or you'll be oppressed. Peaceful motives are a waste; the only true motive is power. Everyone is forced into focusing on the absolute pinnacle; that so many are crushed in the wheels is meaningless.
Or it's a justification for the modern batch of Sith being sadistic jerks.
Mind you, that's a misinterpretation of Machiavelli
Yeah, you're totally right. I went and simplified it a little too much.
The thing about Star Wars is that you can't just have a character who's a chef. No, he has to come from the PLANET OF CHEFS whose entire culture is based around cordon bleu cuisine. And he has a fourth-wall-breaking name like Mizon Plasse. And he's not just any old chef but he's the BEST CHEF IN THE GALAXY, which again isn't because of his extensive training but because he's FORCE-SENSITIVE and uses the Force to make perfect souffles. He has to have some interaction with the original story, so let's say he's the guy who did the catering when Darth Vader turned up on Cloud City that one time. He made bantha piccata because the only animals we know in Star Wars are banthas and womp-rats, and who's going to serve womp-rat to Vader? Great, we've managed to flesh out some trivial detail from the original trilogy, so the only thing left is to completely miss the point of some vital scene. Like maybe our chef was part of some elaborate plot to slow down Vader during his fight with Luke by overfeasting him. Perfect!
I know, it kind of depends on how you interpret that "We had..."
"We ordered it", as in, "We had the decorators paint the hall purple."
Or "It happened when we were there," as in, "We had bigger snowstorms when I was young."
Maybe I've just been reading too much Patrick O'Brien.
At least it was flutes, and not tubas or French horns or something.
Fascinating! Can you elaborate? Because this is a thing that seriously bugs me and I'd love to hear more about it if you have the time. :)
No, I completely agree that the Sith code doesn't NEED to be evil. IIRC, I like it better than the Jedi one.
Back in me SW fan'ficcing days, I wrote about Gray Jedi and since I knew little that was canonical about them, we never had a set code for them, BUT I think they'd have favored the Sithy one.
(How are you doing today? Worried about you and fire. :()
And he has a fourth-wall-breaking name like Mizon Plasse.
*dies laughing*
(But without regrets!)
I did! So much that I went back and forth through the chapter, checking; no, Trumpkin is referred to as "he" everywhere else, so what's with this? He's an "it" when he's being a representative of his species, with an inordinate attachment to metalwork and money?
Hmm. I thought I saw another bit. I'll go look.
Ah, here it is.
Everyone could see from the way the Dwarf took its position and handled the bow that it knew what it was about.
What version are ya'll using? It's not in my e-book version. o.O
Hang on.
Same page:
They tossed up for first shot (greatly to the interest of Trumpkin, who had never seen a coin tossed before)
He familiar with the concept of wealth in the throne room, I believe there's SOME mention of Narnian coins, and the Telmarines probably have some rudimentary currency too. So does this mean that he does know what coins are but that Narnians aren't used to flinging them up in the air for probability? I suppose that would make sense if the coins weren't likely to be evenly weighted, but... it just reads oddly.
I can't believe I've been missing out on a discussion of the Sith Code! Sith Code derails are, like, the best derails.
I unabashedly prefer the Sith Code to the second and third Jedi Codes (although the Ancient Jedi Code is pretty good). The problem is all down to interpretation - the Sith that we see always conclude that the best way to follow the Code is to make life hell for everyone and then only their favourites will survive, but the Sith might also want to notice that they keep on losing, a lot, and conclude that maybe their plan for supremacy has a glitch or two. If you want maximum strength on your side, you don't just kill the weak - you help them break their chains. In the Sith Code, strength and power and victory are all just tools and stepping stones: the prize is freedom, the freedom to be and to do what you want.
The orphanage-demolishing Sith have a problem in that they are constantly destroying potential strength. They've been told that the only kind of strength that is worthwhile is one that can be expressed in the world as it exists in this precise moment without any outside interference. Which is a bit like saying "Sure, industrialisation would be an amazing advance for society, but all the coal is all the way over there, so this empty factory and pile of iron ore are obviously just in my way."
The thing that I find most interesting about the Sith Code is that it assumes a hostile environment: it isn't addressed 'to the chained', it just says: you are chained - this is how you get out.
In a way, it strikes me as a kind of activism gone wrong, in that it's interpreted to promote exceptionalism instead of revolution. The regular interpretation of the Sith Code in a sexist society would basically be all about celebrating the women who managed to rise above the disadvantages, and encouraging them to tell the more-obviously-oppressed women that they just weren't trying hard enough. A less 'received wisdom' interpretation, I think, would allow for the Code to be interpreted as more like 'F*ck the Patriarchy, I have a lightsabre' and encourage those who had the strength (the privileged, including the most privileged among the oppressed) to scramble their way to the top and then keep going and reshape the world as they see fit. That's freedom - transformation rather than status quo.
Passion could be... Well it's probably speaking of emotion, vibrance- lots of life. Peace is quiet and doesn't involve conflict, it's antithetical to life.
To live, you must have passion.
By comparison, the Jedi code is:
There is no emotion, there is peace.
There is no ignorance, there is knowledge.
There is no passion, there is serenity.
There is no chaos, there is harmony.
There is no death, there is the Force.
So they're sufficiently interested in suppressing their emotions to say so twice in five lines, which seems to me to be a hint that this is the part apprentices tend to have the most trouble with. Becoming a Jedi apparently means becoming a Vulcan, only more so - Vulcans at least are allowed to feel emotions, just not to express them or allow them to influence their actions, and Vulcans are free to marry and have children, which Jedi aren't.
There is no chaos, there is harmony. also comes off as a bit anti-life - nobody wants to live in a state of total chaos, of course, but total harmony with no chaos whatsoever is the province of stifling dystopias. You need a balance between the two for life to thrive.
Overall, it's a decent code to follow if you genuinely want to detach yourself from this world and achieve enlightenment, but otherwise... not so much.
The one you quote there is the best-known, but canonically the second Jedi Code, which I think rather made a mess out of the original:
Emotion, yet peace.
Ignorance, yet knowledge.
Passion, yet serenity.
Chaos, yet harmony.
Death, yet the Force.
I'm not sure who came up with what when, in the real world, so this might be a retcon, but it's one I'm happy to take. It essentially characterises the code we know as wilfully ignorant and in denial, whereas the original is more about the simultaneous existence of contradictions and balance. It doesn't reject emotion, it just says that emotion isn't all there is. It doesn't fear passion, but doesn't recommend letting it run rampant. It recognises death, but insists that death is not the last or only thing that matters. Good stuff.
It's interesting to note that the phrase "Light Side" does not show up once in the original trilogy once. It's just referred to as the Force, and the Dark Side seems more like an aberration or corruption, rather than the somewhat Manichean light/dark dichotomy prominent in the prequels and EU.
That makes a lot of sense. I'm going by what I've seen in SWTOR, where they're apparently using the second code - an early Sith quest I did during my free trial week involved manipulating an imprisoned Jedi who was reciting the Jedi code to keep himself calm, and since my Sith had recently recited the Sith code for an unrelated quest I thought the contrast between "Peace is a lie, there is only passion" and "There is no passion, there is serenity" was a nice touch.
That is interesting, and something for which I've always thought Lucas does not get credit (since it means his writing has at least always been pretty consistent about the way the Force functions). It perhaps does not reflect super-well on the fans that reacted badly to the introduction of the same notion in the books, which resulted in a rapid shift back to 'No, it's totally Light vs Dark for reals' in Jedi philosophy.
What version are ya'll using? It's not in my e-book version. o.O
I don't know about Amaryllis, but Mom told me when she gave it to me she got this one in a used bookstore. (She gave me a whole talk about graciously accepting unwanted presents from people who don't really know what they're doing, and all the while she was my Secret Santa.)
I looked up "Prince Caspian" on Amazon and scrolled until I found a picture of this cover, and it says it's the 1986 version.
What version are ya'll using? It's not in my e-book version. o.O
Google Books shows that different editions have different versions of the phrase.
A Scholastic-published version uses the "it" version of the phrase, whereas a Collier Books version uses the "he" form.
I can't find much else in the way of distinguishing features, and I think that both versions were targeted at schoolkids in the 1986-1987 timeframe. I wonder what Lewis's original manuscript used?
Fascinating! Can you elaborate? Because this is a thing that seriously bugs me and I'd love to hear more about it if you have the time. :)
Disclaimer: I am not a biologist, but I do remember my first-year-bio class that talked about this.
A genetic/population bottleneck happens in a species when for some reason a large, diverse population is winnowed down to a few individuals. Since the genetic diversity of a small group is much less than that of a large group, once the population begins to re-establish itself the population as a whole -- even if it reaches comparable numbers -- has irrevocably lost genetic diversity since all family trees go back (in a few generations) to the original small group. (The low genetic variability of humans suggests that we as a species underwent a genetic bottleneck in the not-too-distant past.)
Imagine that an oddly selective comet, for example, hit the Earth. Through a freak accident involving quantum mechanics and a Mars bar, everything was fine... except that every Canis was killed off save for purebread Chihuahua. Even if packs of Chihuahua were left to roam free in the wilderness for thousands of years, the population of wild dogs would recover orders of magnitude more quickly than the appearance of anything wolf-like.
Extending this as a literary metaphor, the intersection of a population bottleneck and sequelitis happens when an author tries to create new characters using previous ones as a model. Chewbacca was the original Wookiee, so he became the archetype for the entire Wookiee species. But as far as A New Hope established in-text, the Wookiee could have been a species populated by scholars and galaxy-renown creators of edible fashion, and Chewbacca merely a particularly hirsute individual with an unfortunate speech impediment.
I think the only way out of this as a creator is to go a bit overboard when creating more-of-a-type. Creating Chewbaccas-but-with will create an entire species of Chewbacca, but it's so tempting to do so because we intuitively underestimate just how different people are from one another.
To be really pseudoscientific, I think creative instincts work on a log-scale. Once something is already massively different, we lose precision on subsequent difference, and then it's all too easy to create a species of clones. What would a transgendered Wookiee be like?
I think there's also some intersection with privilege here, since we can neatly substitute "human" in science fiction with "privileged group." The un-privileged character is representative of the entire group, so of course s/he has to act as an archetype. We see the lack of difference across disparate works more frequently than extra-instantiation in sequelitis, but I think the net effect is similar.
My mind, it is blown. This is wonderful, I cannot thank you enough. I am going to go ruminate on this. But I wanted to say that this:
I think there's also some intersection with privilege here, since we can neatly substitute "human" in science fiction with "privileged group." The un-privileged character is representative of the entire group, so of course s/he has to act as an archetype.
reminded me of this:
CONTENT NOTE: MASS EFFECT SPOILERS
http://ferretbrain.com/articles/article-853#comment_9012
Secondly, and more skeevily, "humanity" in these kinds of texts almost always winds up being represented by somebody like default Shepherd - a white heterosexual American man (and worse, the other alien races that have so much *less* potential than humanity are often analogues for other cultures or - in the case of the Asari - other sexes).
If you play ME3 with Default Shep, then the entire story boils down to: "And every fifty thousand years, the Reapers arose and devoured everything, until finally the galaxy managed to produce a straight white dude."
One assumes that the ambassador from Minoritania effect comes into play in sequelitis.
If you have multiple wookies in the original showing diversity, then you don't get stuck with single archetype wookies in the sequels.
we can neatly substitute "human" in science fiction with "privileged group."
Which then creates problems for science fiction works where humans *aren't* the privileged group, because so many readers expect them to be. In Mass Effect 1, humans are most definitely marginalized relative to the species that rule the galaxy, but there were quite a few players who saw the alien-distrusting white human sidekick and assumed she should go in the same "racist" category as a white American who distrusts black people - when in fact she's more like a black American who distrusts white people because she's seen family suffer the effects of racism.
Wandering in after work and dinner
Re: The Sith Code and The Jedi Code
Rather like Will, I always thought the Sith Code sounded like the mantra (or plan) of an oppressed people, which had somehow gone horribly off the rails once said people fought their way out of oppression. I've no idea if that's an intended impression or not, of course.
And, of course, whether it comes off as evil/might makes right/disturbingly independent depends a lot on what gets filled into the blanks. Especially with regard to what it is one's gaining victory over - one's oppressors, one's circumstances, everyone else in the galaxy, the road blocks in one's path, ??? What is the freedom being gained? Freedom to do anything to anyone? Or was it originally freedom from oppression or outright slavery? Freedom as in free will? I mean, there's plenty of room for a Sith to interpret the code towards good and be a force against oppression and oppressors everywhere. (Pretty much the opposite of the standard Sith interpretation.)
I prefer the original Jedi Code, both because it seems more attached to reality and because it doesn't give me the creepy vibe the popular Second version gives me. I mean, the Second version is fine - if you're an order of monks. Where it goes into creepy territory for me is that a) Jedi are more than just an order of monks, they're an order of peacekeepers - peacekeepers trained to not understand (or reject - not sure which is worse) the basic motivations of most people and b) Jedi actively seek out and train all Force sensitive people they can get their hands on (at their worst, they are nearly as bad as the Sith when it comes to this: testing people at birth and taking them away from their parents so they can't form attachments). The original Jedi Code seems fine for an order of peacekeepers (though I still think Jedi shouldn't go around forcibly recruiting people - which they seem to do even in times when they're not stealing people's babies.)
It just crossed my mind that the Noble Savage Life Debt is averted, in all possible places, Conan. Namely the second movie. I was expecting Zula*, the badass woman fighter who gets saved by Conan from a mob and who consequently swears her service to him (sigh) to kick it in a climatic battle saving his life. But it doesn't happen! She was basically hanging a "valiant sacrifice" sign on her neck with that line and she survived the movie! I was elated.
Now granted it might be because they sort of used that plot already in the first movie, with Val. But still. (Now, the sequel is pretty meh otherwise. Better than Red Sonja but I've scraped dogshit off my shoe that's better than Red Sonja.)
* Had to check from wikipedia. Can't remember any names from the second movie.
Imagine that an oddly selective comet, for example, hit the Earth. Through a freak accident involving quantum mechanics and a Mars bar, everything was fine... except that every Canis was killed off save for purebread Chihuahua. Even if packs of Chihuahua were left to roam free in the wilderness for thousands of years, the population of wild dogs would recover numerically orders of magnitude more quickly than the appearance of anything wolf-like.
If that documentary I saw* is anything to go on, dogs might actually go extinct if you had nothing to rely on but the purest of the purebreds; they're practically inbred to death right now anyway.
This isn't strictly relevant to anything, but hey, it's an interesting factoid. And maybe relevant if anyone is thinking of buying a dog.
*http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPmKIgMoUPc. Content warning: it's all about, and depicts, animal suffering. And there's some surgery.
Well, as dog breeds are genetically almost identical and it's only the things that regulate the expression of the genes that vary by breed, there's no such thing as genetically purebred chihuahua. If the poor things got to breed freely they'd probably develope into something more viable. (An experiment in breeding domestic foxes that selected only by the parents' amiability to humans quickly got such un-foxy characteristics as floppy ears and spotty fur.)
And yes, the poor things are more inbred than European royalty in 17th century. Comes from the whole selected breeding by appearances. There was a web page showing photographs of different breeds a 100 years ago. Dachshunds actually had legs back then.
My understanding is that for a lot of types of dog (though probably not chihuahua) there are two types of purebreed. There's the show type that's bred to compete in dog shows, and the field type that's bred to do whatever the dog was originally intended to do. Both leave you with a much smaller genepool than not sticking with purebreeds, but the field dogs are probably less screwed up since their breeding takes into account that they will be expected to do jobs where being crosseyed with brittle bones and whatnot would be a serious detriment.
That said, that's half remembered from what someone told me in person without citation.
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I understand how important genetic diversity can be to surviving adversity, but it's also the case that an empty niche can be filled up pretty fast. Once you have a large population I'm not really convinced that a lack of genetic diversity means doom for all involved. Sure, a potato famine might come by, but barring something that seems specifically targeted at that one group and is able to be universally applied, it's unlikely something will kill off the whole population just because there are so many, and over (lots of) time mutation will create a degree of diversity. That's how all diversity arose in the first place after all.
Of course my attempt to ask for details about why it's accepted wisdom that you can't repopulate a species with just two individuals but apparently you can* with an effective population** of seven or less, resulted in an epic and acrimonious derail over at typepad. (I don't remember whether it was Slacktivist or the Slacktiverse at the time.) So I could be missing something.
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* That's the hope anyway, wikipedia says they could be down-listed from endangered to threatened by 2019.
** Effective population is what you get when you take into account that making babies does not magically introduce new genetics (besides the very slow work of mutation.) So Noah's ark would have had a human population of eight (assuming monogamy) but an effective human population of five because there's no reason to count Noah's three sons. All of their genetics were already counted when we counted Noah and his wife.
Seven? Really? I... find that difficult to accept. *
Not that that makes it wrong. Argument from Ignorance and all that.
* Since I'm not accepting it at face value, I assume that makes me dreadfully sinful in Narnian terms. LOL. Bring it on, Aslan! ;)
Well, they're not nearly out of the woods yet. For one thing, they're island ducks so they were never in the woods, for another the population is still under 1,000* and I think there's only two colonies.
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* 500-680 mature individuals according to BirdLife International.
My understanding is that for a lot of types of dog (though probably not chihuahua) there are two types of purebreed. There's the show type that's bred to compete in dog shows, and the field type that's bred to do whatever the dog was originally intended to do. Both leave you with a much smaller genepool than not sticking with purebreeds, but the field dogs are probably less screwed up since their breeding takes into account that they will be expected to do jobs where being crosseyed with brittle bones and whatnot would be a serious detriment.
Yes, that makes sense. You see German Shepherds doing all sorts of work, for instance - police dogs, guide dogs - and they look pretty robust. The Crufts ones, though, are just pathetic: they've been bred for such an extreme slope to the back that they can barely walk properly; they just slither along like frogs.
I don't know if there's something similar going on with cats. I have to admit that I'm a moggy-fancier, and that a lot of the pedigree breeds look so baby-faced and doll-eyed that they rather freak me out, but since Crufts seems to be a bigger event, and as cats seem harder to breed past a certain basic shape and size, maybe they're not so messed up.
Since I'm not accepting it at face value, I assume that makes me dreadfully sinful in Narnian terms.
It only just occurred to me that we've actually seen this pattern before under slightly different circumstances - Lucy is here filling the role previously occupied by the professor in LWW, when he chastised Peter and Susan for not instantly believing Lucy had transported herself through a magic portal to a temporally-displaced alternate world. Then and now, people are being told off for getting stuck on the (extremely implausible) logistics of the situation rather than credulously moving on to the next task at hand.
I can very nearly see a resonant argument in there ('Don't get hung up on the magic; focus on your sister/your oppressed people') but it's a bit of a Space Whale Aesop, as the trope goes - the 'lesson' is either inapplicable to real life ('If you ever get transported by magic to a fantastical realm that desperately needs your help, don't waste time asking how it works') or it's outright dangerous ('Instantly believe everything a trustworthy person tells you because to do otherwise would be a betrayal of your bonds').
f course my attempt to ask for details about why it's accepted wisdom that you can't repopulate a species with just two individuals but apparently you can* with an effective population** of seven or less, resulted in an epic and acrimonious derail over at typepad.
Two thoughts -
1) I wonder if the belief that "7 or less" can be enough individuals to repopulate a species is tied to belief in a literal Noah's ark story?
2) The link you give says the all-time low for the population was 7 adults and 5 juveniles. Shouldn't that be a population of 12, or is there a meaning of "effective population" that I'm not finding in that link?
Shouldn't that be a population of 12, or is there a meaning of "effective population" that I'm not finding in that link?
It was in Chris's footnote:
Effective population is what you get when you take into account that making babies does not magically introduce new genetics (besides the very slow work of mutation.) So Noah's ark would have had a human population of eight (assuming monogamy) but an effective human population of five because there's no reason to count Noah's three sons. All of their genetics were already counted when we counted Noah and his wife.
The juveniles were presumably the children of the adults.
One of the thoroughly-undeveloped sci fi ideas stuffed away in my head is set in a distant future where there are thriving interstellar civilisations that are currently making good use of the incredibly advanced technologies recovered from their own 'mysterious precursors', who apparently came from 'Earth' and vanished abruptly a millennium or two ago. The story would begin when a group of (cartographers? archaeologists? phlebotinum prospectors?) discover yet more Earthling ruins, including unprecedented labs of (cryogenically preserved? genetically-speed-fabricated?) Earthlings. One would pop out before the futurepeople could shut it down again, and she would be all "Sweet, our plan totally worked! Wait, it's been how long since humanity disappeared? Oh @#$%, we were supposed to re-emerge like five centuries ago! THERE IS NO TIME, COME WITH ME IF YOU WANT TO SAVE ALL OF THE THINGS." And thus our party of protagonists would gain their Last-Of-Her-Kind Token Human member.
All of which is just to say that I decided if I was going to have a character intentionally be a Representative Human, simple probability dictated she should probably be a South Asian woman.
(Though, to nitpick on the ME3 article quoted, I don't think there's any rule that Default ManShep has to be straight, at least in part 3.)
The juveniles were presumably the children of the adults.
Ah, okay. I guess I just didn't make that assumption ... Maybe because I'm used to the falcons here in Columbus - the adults have a pretty high mortality/death rate. So do the fledglings. But we have had occasions when mom or dad died just about the time the young'uns were fledging, and a new adult/mate moved into the territory while the young were still "juveniles". So there's one parent with common genetics, plus an unrelated adult.
The information on them is spread around in various places. Where it says that the effective population was 7 or lower, which I presume means that the young ones were descended from the adults, is actually on the page about minimum viable population where it notes that minimum viable population does not take into account human intervention. I think.
It would be better to have the info all in one place.
My version of that idea was somewhat different.
Most interstellar civilizations are making use of incredibly advanced technology liberated from an advanced race that they once banded together to defeat because it threatened to take over everything.
Only together were they able to stop the menace and wipe the threat from the galaxy and only just barely. The technology they're using comes entirely from the non-classified parts of the defeated precursor's technology because the rest is designed to destroy itself rather than be reverse engineered by another race.
Without the common threat the alliance of all surviving races crumbled into infighting and decay.
Then comes another threat, not as terrible as the defeated precursors, but much worse than can currently be fought off by the interstellar empires weakened by thousands of years of internal war.
So an adventuring party gets an idea, they'll resurrect the deadliest thing the universe has ever known to use it as a weapon against the new threat.
They go deep into forbidden areas, they search for forgotten technology, and finally they get their ultimate weapon: (an exact copy of) some human college kid who volunteered for the "We'll do a brain scan and take a DNA sample and maybe someday this can lead to immortality but don't count on it soon," experiment because it paid a few bucks.
First human being in thousands of years awakes to, "You race does nothing but destroy everything in its path, you are a force of ultimate destruction. Go over there. Do what you naturally do, but do it to them." *pause* "Seriously. Go. Destroy! Do what comes natural." *pause* "What are you waiting for?" *pause* "Fine, what do you need from us?" *pause* "Would you like a pair of pliers?"
The only reason said human has any chance is the ability to use certain things only humans can use, such as the standard repository for all knowledge (SRfaK), which would basically end up being the hero, or at least savior, of the story (the interface would have a personality), the human being the conduit through which it worked. Well, there would be a degree of teamwork between human and SRfaK.
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And, I think, this all came from the idea of someone saying, "Why do you think we all speak your language? Your race conquered all of us."
Everyone always searches for the ancient artifact that can be used to stop this present evil, no one thinks about how the artifact feels about being dug up after all this time and told, "Kill. Kill! KILL!"
There's a man working in my department, on some birds in the Seychalles. They managed to get a population of several thousand back from only 26.
Fear Of Human Conquerors was definitely a thread in my story as well, though not the impetus - just a factor causing a lot of tense nerves and suspicion around this lone human being loose in the galaxy. "Are we sure this is a good idea? This is the same species that set off nuclear fission in their own atmosphere, on purpose. Half of their religions involved killing their gods! They achieved spaceflight by strapping people to towers full of combustive liquids! When the Drokon Armada tried to invade their system, they disassembled their only moon to build a subductive funnel station that hurled all the enemy drones into their sun! And then they spent ten years putting the moon back together again because they said the tidal-preservation gravity satellite wasn't pretty enough! THESE ARE NOT STABLE PEOPLE."
For some reason the like button isn't working for me. I liked this post. I have nothing to add beyond that fact.
I think Lucy's comparison was meant as more of a "it's just as confusing to try and learn about and keep all this straight" rather than a "these two situations are similar in their particulars," but that's just my read on it.
I agree that the darkside physical appearance thing can be incredibly problematic, but I'm conflicted, because I've also heard it explained in a way that made a lot of sense to me in (what seemed to my privileged perspective to be) a more value-neutral way. Basically, that someone who used the lightside, and was in harmony with the force, let the energy move through them (like Iroh's lightning redirection in Avatar: The Last Airbender) without impeding its flow. A darksider hoards that power, interrupting its natural progress -- while they can build up incredible reserves of energy that lightsiders cannot match, this is a process which is directly physically harmful, like a continuous exposure to high energy radiation. As the body is not meant to be a reservoir for such power, but rather a channel, creating a blockage in order to keep hold of the power causes direct physical harm. I'm having trouble finding a direct and useful correlation right now, but it seems to me that there are enough potential parallels (like what damming a river does to the local ecosystem) that it makes sense.
Of course, that doesn't make the depiction less problematic, given that this explanation is not, as far as I know, directly confirmed or discussed within the canon, and that it still plays into a trend of depicting physical beauty as virtue and deformity as vice,. So even if it's a sensible explanation, that doesn't make it OKAY in the larger sense. I just thought that the explanation might be relevant/interesting/possibly mitigating.
Well, for practitioners of the Dark Side, who can draw power from negative emotion, it's like saying "go provide me with a bunch of potential power ups!"
Eh. It's not hard at all to come up with reasonable-sounding explanations for lots of problematic things. Take the aforementioned Zabrak, who have a scary-looking ethnic group that's aligned with the evil side, and a more human-looking ethnic group that's aligned with the good side - it's wholly reasonable to say that they had a civil divide that ended with each side picking a different path, and given a factional split there's a 50-50 chance of the more human-looking side going with the "good" faction anyway.
Just because it's possible to invent a reasonable-sounding explanation for why the pretty people are good and the ugly people are bad doesn't excuse the author(s) from having decided to put that stuff in.
OMG, this made me laugh so hard. Yes. Yes, pliers would be a good starting place.
They draw power from their own psyche, same as any other Force-user, so creating emotions in other people isn't all that useful except insofar as maybe it's easier to be really angry when you're surrounded by lots of other angry people. The only thing that can actually increase the Force presence in an area is quantities of life - it's been pointing out multiple times in-universe that this is essentially the Jedi's greatest advantage, since their methods lead to flourishing life more often than Sith methods do.
The Force-flow/Force-hoarding thing doesn't really make sense, since there is no logistic difference in the way Jedi and Sith use the Force - Sith metaphorically hoard power, in that they take control and don't like to share, but not literally. Also, the two top-canon examples we have of scarred Sith (the Emperor and Vader) are both shown to be completely fine until they are scarred by unrelated accidents ('Force lightning' and convection from lava). It's an interesting explanation, but it doesn't match any of the rest of the worldbuilding.
There is no "magic number" that means you definitely can or cannot re-establish a breeding population. It just gets more and more likely to fail the fewer you have.
Mice are routinely inbred for research purposes. Twenty generations of brother/sister mating will get you mice that are essentially completely identical to each other, which is useful in a wide variety of ways. They tend to be fairly healthy overall as bad genes get weeded out in the process, but being so homogenous they are prone to disastrous epidemics because if one mouse is susceptible, they all are. But they are not necessarily deformed or anything resembling the usual stereotype of "inbred".
However, when you set out to do this, you will fail half the time even with careful mousekeeping, because some generation or other will hit the genetic jackpot on lethals and they'll all die. In the wild you would fail more often, because a generation that's sick but not fatally sick would probably still die.
Real wild populations of various critters have been established by single pregnant females or breeding pairs. But it probably fails a large number of times--the odds depend on details of the organism's genetics and life history--for every time it succeeds.
So if we are confronted with a tiny number of some organism, in my opinion we should try to help them out, no matter how tiny the number. But we should strive never to get to that situation, because the lower the number, the higher the chance of extinction.
I once visited Wolf Haven and saw the last seven buffalo wolves. They thought the species couldn't be saved, so they sterilized them. It broke my heart, and I have never gone back.
I once visited Wolf Haven and saw the last seven buffalo wolves. They thought the species couldn't be saved, so they sterilized them. It broke my heart, and I have never gone back.
That is massively stupid and deeply heartwrenching.
-
Real wild populations of various critters have been established by single pregnant females or breeding pairs.
That's the other thing that gets me about the, "You cant establish/repopulate a species with only [whatever]," isn't that how some island populations are created? One or two things shows up and then, boom, newly established species. (And no one notices the many other times that doesn't happen because what are the odds you find the remains of the bird family that didn't survive?)
They draw power from their own psyche, same as any other Force-user, so creating emotions in other people isn't all that useful except insofar as maybe it's easier to be really angry when you're surrounded by lots of other angry people.
Huh. If this is canon, that does some really fascinating things to how this Dark Side stuff works. A lot of EU stuff seems to treat it like one might an evil empath - ah, the smell of suffering in the morning, it gives me so much power. In reality, a Sith - assuming Sith use the Dark Side - should strive to be wildly passionate personally to give themselves the most power. Standard Sith behavior should result in your enemies being stronger in the Dark Side, not in you being stronger in the Dark Side. Or, worse, if lots of life is needed for Force presence, since Sith are generally found surrounded by barrenness and death. (Though I suddenly find myself wondering if the real reason for the existence of Death Stars was so that Vader and the Emperor could go into battle surrounded by as many people as possible.)
Also, the two top-canon examples we have of scarred Sith (the Emperor and Vader) are both shown to be completely fine until they are scarred by unrelated accidents ('Force lightning' and convection from lava).
Actually, it gets quite odd if you look at those incidents (They don't really qualify as "accidents"). The Emperor is the only person in movie canon (and any part of the EU I've encountered) who is scarred by Force lightning. Luke didn't seem to suffer any lasting harm and certainly didn't end up looking half melted. (I am told that in some EU book, he did suffer harm that required a dunk in a Bacta tank to remedy, but I don't know how canon that can be considered, since movies trump EU and in the movie he seems to be fine.) And Anakin/Vader lost his fight to Obi Wan through... um... inconsistencies in how lightsaber battles work. (He did, as far as I can tell, exactly the same type of move that allowed Obi Want to beat Darth Maul.)
Using the Dark Side warps reality in ways that negatively effect you?
I once visited Wolf Haven and saw the last seven buffalo wolves. They thought the species couldn't be saved, so they sterilized them. It broke my heart, and I have never gone back.
What? On what... in what... how... I don't even...
LOGIC, THEY HAVE NONE!
Will, I'm just going to have to agree to disagree with you on this one, because up until the scarred-Sith point, I saw far more worldbuilding explanations that I feel support my explanation of how it works than yours.
And as for those two examples of scarred Sith -- Lucas showed us the circumstances under which they were scarred a good decade after the physical corruption explanation was firmly established in EU, at least.
And as for those two examples of scarred Sith -- Lucas showed us the circumstances under which they were scarred a good decade after the physical corruption explanation was firmly established in EU, at least.
The question becomes: was Lucas trying to disprove the EU idea that Dark Side use caused physical corruption, or was this his odd way of supporting it? EU things he signs off on (so to speak) continue to include the idea that Dark Side use causes physical corruption, so he's clearly not sent out any kind of memo saying "knock it off with that." On the other hand, he did depict actual injuries as leading to Vader's disfigurement and... *throws up hands in confusion over Palpatine melting himself with Force lightning* I've no bloody clue what we're supposed to make of that.
Dear Mr. Lucas, please to be having more consistency.
About the use of the pronoun "it" -- Mr Tumnus is called "it" by the narration multiple times in the chapter where he's introduced in LWW. I seem to recall it goes back and forth: whenever the narration calls him "Mr Tumnus" he's a "he", but whenever it calls him "the Faun" he's an "it".
even with careful mousekeeping
Is mousekeeping actually a word? I need more excuses to use that.
I once visited Wolf Haven and saw the last seven buffalo wolves. They thought the species couldn't be saved, so they sterilized them. It broke my heart, and I have never gone back.
I know pretty much nothing about Wolf Haven, although I once heard it only sterilized males. But it's worth noting that buffalo/great plains wolves (C. lupus nubilus) are not usually considered extinct. One can argue forever about whether the current nubilus population is the same as the historical wolves labeled "buffalo wolves," but it's probably as close as we're going to get. Most of the older & smaller wolf subspecies have been merged anyway, given what we now know about the massive interbreeding going on between them; modern wolves are way less genetically diverse, but most of that diversity loss doesn't break down easily into some subspecies vanishing while others survived.
Which is just a long-winded way of saying: the people at Wolf Haven may say that they have the "last seven buffalo wolves," but I'm not sure anyone else agrees. And any attempts to reconstruct a more "authentic" buffalo wolf would probably not depend on those seven individuals, but on the much larger nubilus populations in the Great Lakes area and eastern Canada.
Again, though, that's not an attempt to defend or attack Wolf Haven overall.
Becoming a Jedi apparently means becoming a Vulcan, only more so - Vulcans at least are allowed to feel emotions, just not to express them or allow them to influence their actions
This is an interesting comparison. If I remember correctly, Vulcans suppress their emotions because they feel them more intensely than humans, which can be super-destructive.
Possibly the Jedi realise that a highly emotional Jedi could be really dangerous- I wonder if this ties into the idea of power corrupting.
Okay! I've found my university library's (University of Waterloo, Ontario) copy of Prince Caspian; it's a 1951 edition marked with pencil as if it was used as a schoolbook.
For the pronoun usage, both he and it are used for Trumpkin. The first usage is "though it had to stand on tiptoes to do so," but the second phrase in question reads as "handled the bow that he knew what he was about."
Since Trumpkin is referred to as "he" throughout the majority of this chapter, I suspect that "it had to stand" was a typo. I've attached images of both passages to this message; my apologies for the poor focus from my phone's camera.
It's interesting to note that the phrase "Light Side" does not show up once in the original trilogy once.
Luke does say in RotJ that he wants to confront Vader and "turn him back to the good side." (I think.) The way he said this made me think he realized, halfway through the sentence, that he didn't know any way to make it sound right.
I've found my university library's (University of Waterloo, Ontario)
Hang on, did you just say you live in the same county (well, region) as me?
(And no, I'm not getting more specific about where I live than "somewhere in Waterloo Region".)
And I really don't think Trumpkin is being gentle. Rather, he's being incredibly patronizing. First he declares that the children who just saved his life--the children who were just summoned by the Horn That Maybe Brings Help--cannot possibly be helpful, because, haha, look at them, they're just children! Then he drops the "we're all awfully fond of children" line, and finally calls them his "dear little friends," which is not how I'd refer to any child above the age of eight if I didn't want them boiling with rage. I don't think it's particularly ableist for them to turn that insult back on him. Everyone in this conversation is "little" in one way or another, and Trumpkin's the only one devaluing someone else based on their littleness.
*nods* What they're angry about--Trumpkin condescending to them--is entirely Trumpkin's choice, Trumpkin's fault. There are lots of other things they could be angry about that aren't Trumpkin's fault...But those things are not why they're yelling at Trumpkin.
From the flip side of microbiology, this is exactly why regulatory agencies are pretty leery of creating, say, antibiotic resistant bacteria or shiga-toxin producing microbes in the lab. If one gets free, it could be Bad News. But then microbes are a lot better at the whole one organism --> population explosion thing by necessity. It's just scary from our perspective, dealing with disease-causing organisms.
He doesn't pull the "dear little friends" out until *after* Lucy has shouted at him and called him stupid. And Edmund has shouted at him, too, and gotten all red in the face. I read it as placating, not patronizing, but YMMV.
(As for knowing how to deal with children, if THESE children are so immature they can't handle a badly turned phrase in a moment of placation by someone who may well be unused to dealing with children, then they shouldn't be kings or warriors, period. And blaming Trumpkin for how they choose to react to his words bothers me as it seems like putting the blame on the wrong party. We are all responsible for our behavior and shouting and getting red in the face because someone hasn't kowtowed to Your Highness is not cool, in my opinion. Again, YMMV. But it seems contradictory to give the Pevensies a pass for being children but then expect Trumpkin to treat them as kings and warriors and not children.)
He hasn't denied that the children are the children of legend (in fact, he admits it readily) -- he's simply said (prior to Lucy and Edmund shouting) that "no help has come". If the Narnian army is in bad enough straits, that may be true no matter how good the 4 kids are. See above, re Sparta.
Indeed, the only reason the Narnians win is because Aslan shows up with an army composed of the Entire Forest and a couple of Greek gods. Not because of anything the Pevensies do. Yes, Peter fights Miraz hand-to-hand, but the Telmarines weren't going to honor the results.
So, essentially, Trumpkin is right in his assessment that the war is lost if the only help they have is these four kids. I don't... see what's so wrong about gently pointing that out. :/
Skepticism is not, in my opinion, a bad thing; nor is reserving judgment until more facts and evidence are in, but you'd never know it from the way these books castigate non-believers for failing to believe at the very instance they're asked to reconcile an impossible claim with the only reality they've ever known. It seems unfair, and like a system that is rigged against us from the start.
It is unfair and my issues with church basically stem from this. I still don't understand why Lewis was so unfair to Edmund in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe when he was just a young, vulnerable kid. I brought up my faith issues with someone a week or so ago and they suggested I read the Narnia books. (I really liked Till We Have Faces up until the end, where I felt that Lewis had cheated me and it turned really preachy.)
~Lily~
Oh my stars and garters, really? Someone said that for realsy?
Narnia would most definitely *not* be a good thing for me to read in light of "faith issues". Honestly, everything in Narnia that is meant as a Deep Religious Point and not just Happy Fantasy Adventures pushes me further from Lewis' (apparent) version of Christianity rather than closer, because there seems to be a very strong contempt in the series for making decisions based on facts rather than gut instinct. (Especially in the coming chapters.) And that's just... not for me. I'm a fact-y person, not a gut-y person.
TW: Religious Violence, Rape, Domestic Violence
And I cannot-willnot-shallnot worship "wild lion" Aslan who mauls young women with his claws because they had the audacity to unashamedly do whatever they had to do to escape a life of rape and domestic violence. Everyone on earth is welcome to their own opinions on The Horse and His Boy but I, personally, consider that scene to be a major, horrible, incredible, massive turn-off to anything Aslan supposedly represents.
Content note: Religion
I never got as far as The Horse and His Boy. My mother told me the Narnia books were allegory and I never could read them as fantasy books again.
I'd be more inclined toward Christianity if someone said, "This pagan guy in Israel met Jesus at [date], Jesus did something for him and there is written, primary source evidence to back it up." It'd just comfort me to know God was not the complete jackass the Old Testament says he is. (Whatever you do, don't read Judges 19. It turned my stomach, for reasons I won't mention since I don't want to trigger anyone. It just...ew.)
~Lily~
Yeah. It's admittedly really hard to try to make a consistent statement out of Lucas's hash of Campbellian archetypes. Especially if one is trying to incorporate the EU into it. (Which is also terribly inconsistent in many ways, *quality* not insignificantly among those ways. Seven years ago I would have said the EU was consistently higher in quality and cosnsitency than the prequels, but those last seven years... oy vey.)
I don't blame the recent EU authors when it comes to consistency; they were suddenly tasked with reconciling the prequels with past EU works that Lucas decided to ignore. There's no way that they could succeed, so I don't blame them if they give up.
It'd help if Lucas started out by being consistent with himself. The prequels threw in so many inconsistencies (also lots of unfortunate implications and horrible story telling) that there's not really a coherent movie canon to compare the EU stuff to. Half the time, it's not possible to say "well, in the movies, X" because it's more like "in the movies, X or maybe Y, or possibly Q."
Whether Force lightning melts people is a really good example of this. When Palpatine lightninged Luke, by movie canon, it did no lasting harm (though it obviously was very painful and would eventually have killed him), when Palpatine lightninged himself, he got all...melty. Possible explanations include: lightning melts dark siders, lightning only melts people when deflected back on the caster, using lightning melts you, lightning melts people over the age of 40, lightning causes looks-preservation spells to fail (that is, Palpatine already looked melty, he was just hiding it), Palpatine's act of trying to lightning Mace made him ding Dark V and he got melty looking because of that. Okay, the last one is just silliness, but the problem remains.
(I must note that, so far as I know, Palpatine is the only person ever melted by Force lightning, so who the frak knows.)
Of course, one can still try to discuss various people's interpretations of Lucas's incoherent canon. Which brings us back to "evil makes you ugly has really unfortunate implications."
TW: Religious Violence, Rape, Domestic Violence
And I cannot-willnot-shallnot worship "wild lion" Aslan who mauls young women with his claws because they had the audacity to unashamedly do whatever they had to do to escape a life of rape and domestic violence.
Yeah, that gets a huge no from me, too. What the frak was she supposed to do, almighty Aslan? Submit? Only save herself if she didn't risk anyone doing it? Those are great messages, you furry asshat.
>What the frak was [Aravis] supposed to do, almighty Aslan?
She's supposed to feel bad about what she was forced to put her maid through, instead of gleefully declaring that the maid deserved it, in my reading.
Not that this justifies Aslan's choice of action. But in a world where he's almighty, nothing justifies any of Aslan's choices of action. As Anton said just above, -he's an ass- theodicy.
Probably not, but it seems like Aslan cares about the results, as well as the presence of the Pevensies in general.
I don't think Trumpkin could have predicted that.
doesn't seem to be what Trumpkin believes. He fully accepts that four great heroes could help the war effort significantly. Indeed, as soon as the kids prove that they can actually fight and heal and whatnot, he completely changes his mind about their usefulness.
This turns out not to be the case. He doesn't change his mind until Lucy reveals she can do the impossible. (At least, I think Lewis wants us to believe the wound healed more quickly than science would allow.) Once he realizes they have magic, he figures he shouldn't trust his assumptions about what they can or can't do against an army. And this sort of makes sense, especially if we declare that he doesn't quite believe the Horn brought them. Remember that Cair Paravel is the last of the three places where Cornelius thinks help might arrive. And he mentions this place in part because he believes (falsely, as far as I can tell) that if Aslan came he would come over the sea. Of the three possible sites for help to arrive, the local wizard associates the Lantern Waste most strongly with the Pevensies. Strange children showing up elsewhere seem like weak evidence for magic.
Before the miraculous healing, it looks like Trumpkin believes anyone who goes to Aslan's How will die. That has to include him because of duty. It doesn't have to include children, no matter how legendary they are.
Ana, I love #6. Come to think of it, most of Aslan's problems could be solved this way. He could use some assertiveness training to learn that there are more options than passively doing nothing most of the time and then occasionally aggressively lashing out with maulings and the like.
Somewhat related Onion article: http://www.theonion.com/articles/god-diagnosed-with-bipolar-disorder,348/
So now we're back to the philosophy that if you don't spank the shit out of children, then they'll probably be spoiled and all wrong.
Did we ever leave it? I kind of thought it stayed in the room from the introduction of Eustace onward.
(Also, evils of vegetarianism, non-smoking, being teetotal, and--in the Silver Chair--co-ed schools with women in charge.)
Before the miraculous healing, it looks like Trumpkin believes anyone who goes to Aslan's How will die. That has to include him because of duty. It doesn't have to include children, no matter how legendary they are.
I didn't include the healing in full in the OP because I try not to quote the whole chapter, but that's a great point that I hadn't thought of. o.O
I don't think Trumpkin could have predicted that.
Agreed. What the Pevensies actually got used for (or, in the girls' case, not used for) isn't something anyone could have predicted, unless they had a window into Aslan's crazy brain.
He doesn't change his mind until Lucy reveals she can do the impossible. (At least, I think Lewis wants us to believe the wound healed more quickly than science would allow.) Once he realizes they have magic, he figures he shouldn't trust his assumptions about what they can or can't do against an army.
Actually, I think Trumpkin's already changed his mind after Susan's performance, which is the point where he admits himself fairly beaten and rebukes himself for doubting that Lucy could be a great doctor as well. He's certainly happier to change his mind after Lucy works her magic, but that's mostly because she actually does him a favor instead of just handing him another embarrassing defeat.
Personally, I don't think that Trumpkin ever believes the Pevensies have magic beyond Lucy's healing skills. He never asks if they have any superhuman powers when it comes to traveling back to the How or defending against Miraz's sentries, let alone fighting the main army. He's the strongest disbeliever in Lucy's visions of Aslan, and when Peter fights Miraz he thinks it's just a matter of who's "handier with his sword."
Of course, he also never says a word about Lucy's healing skills when Caspian or Peter gets wounded, so evidently Trumpkin's only allowed to only be wily and pragmatic when it doesn't raise uncomfortable questions about Aslan's decision-making.
Before the miraculous healing, it looks like Trumpkin believes anyone who goes to Aslan's How will die. That has to include him because of duty. It doesn't have to include children, no matter how legendary they are.
Yes, he certainly doesn't want to put them in harm's way if they can't contribute anything to the war effort.
It would have been the work of nothing -- except it would have required basic compassion for Immigrant Brown Girls -- to have all this in the form of a *conversation* instead of a brutal mauling.
I think it's also a matter of Aslan's character changing over the series. He gets much harsher with mortals--directly harsher, I mean, not just engineering completely unnecessary battles and stuff--as time goes on. In Dawn Treader, he scares Lucy out of temptation (the first time he's been aggressive with her at all), and he agonizingly flays Eustace alive in order to de-dragon him and teach him not to be greedy. In the Silver Chair he terrifies Jill with tales of the people he's killed, while forcing her to approach him anyway by inflicting intolerable and terminal thirst on her. As a kid, that was the first time I thought he'd really gone off the rails. And in the Last Battle he, well, kills everybody. And possible allows the devil to take sinners' souls, for the first time in the series. And cuts Susan loose.
So by the time he gets to Aravis, Aslan's championing twelve different kinds of prejudice and is apparently set on being an even more violent father-god than he was in the first couple of books.
I agree, and it's one of the reasons why I feel the series really had (for me) to be analyzed in written/published order rather than world-chronology order.
(Also, evils of vegetarianism, non-smoking, being teetotal, and--in the Silver Chair--co-ed schools with women in charge.)
Of course, presumably more traditional schools are also shown as being warping. Lewis just couldn't be pleased when it came to schools.
Re: 'The Dark Side makes you ugly' - the odd thing about this being adopted as confirmed fact by later writers is that I'm pretty sure the Emperor's appearance in Return of the Jedi was originally intended as a parallel to Yoda's appearance. They're both inhumanly aged and frail looking, their physical weakness a contrast to their immense spiritual/magical power. They're both Wise Old Masters, just following different philosophies, and their appearance reflects that.
As for Vader - well, Return of the Jedi makes the comparison between his cyborg limbs and Luke's hand - I kinda always saw him as the logical extension of Yoda's "Wars not make one great" philosophy. If you charge off into battle all the time like Vader, or like Luke in Cloud City, it diminishes you.
Unfortunately, the Star Wars EU seems to be bizarrely literal-minded at times, and seems to have instead concluded that "All Sith Lords are either aged-looking or cyborgs. Or both."
Of course, presumably more traditional schools are also shown as being warping. Lewis just couldn't be pleased when it came to schools.
Yeah.
There's an old piece by Andrew Rilstone that goes into that a bit more, and like most all of his writing on Lewis is well worth reading:
http://www.rilstone.talktalk.net/eustace.htm
Those are all valid things to be angry about.
But none of those things are Trumpkin's fault. Because teenagers never misdirect their anger to the person closest to hand, so it would be wrong to show them acting that way?
IDK if Lewis is trying in this chapter to show the Pevensies struggling at throwing off a years 'childishness' and recovering their Narnian, adult(ish) personalities, but it's at least a plausible reading of why they act so inconsistently (and suggests that, as with many monarchs, their adult personae were deeply unpleasant and self centred).
But thats probably being too generous to CSL
Dear me, look at the last line of that essay: ‘The Narnia books appeal to the heart rather than the head and do not repay close textual analysis and literal interpretation.’. We're in trouble then!
Because teenagers never misdirect their anger to the person closest to hand, so it would be wrong to show them acting that way?
I find this framing deeply problematic. We apparently have a disagreement about whether Trumpkin condescending to them is actually happening, but there is no ambiguity in the story about the fact that that's what they're indicating they're upset about.
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