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[Narnia Content Note: Racism, Violence]
Narnia Recap: Shasta has run away from the Narnians.
Obligatory note about racism, intent, and Lewis is here.
The Horse and His Boy, Chapter 6: Shasta Among the Tombs
Haha, did you think we were going to see Aravis any time soon? I DID TOO, but we were wrong. It would seem that Lewis has a really hard time being crowbarred out from the white male point of view character he's imprinted on.
Okay, I will freely admit I am starting out snarky here. It is a valid writing choice to follow Shasta's path out all the way to the "dead-end" and then backtrack to take up Aravis' path. It's not a writing path I would use here, and it reminds me personally too much of video game mechanics where split-the-party mechanics end with everyone hanging out in a big waiting room, but it's a valid choice. However, I went to sleep last night thinking "well, at least I get to write about Aravis in the morning" and that isn't panning out, so y'all get snark.
SHASTA RAN LIGHTLY ALONG THE ROOF on tiptoes. It felt hot to his bare feet. He was only a few seconds scrambling up the wall at the far end and when he got to the corner he found himself looking down into a narrow, smelly street, and there was a rubbish heap against the outside of the wall just as Corin had told him. Before jumping down he took a rapid glance round him to get his bearings. Apparently he had now come over the crown of the island-hill on which Tashbaan is built. Everything sloped away before him, flat roofs below flat roofs, down to the towers and battlements of the city’s Northern wall. Beyond that was the river and beyond the river a short slope covered with gardens. But beyond that again there was something he had never seen the like of—a great yellowish-gray thing, flat as a calm sea, and stretching for miles. On the far side of it were huge blue things, lumpy but with jagged edges, and some of them with white tops. “The desert! the mountains!” thought Shasta.
I said waaaaay back in a previous chapter that there are glimpses and pieces where I feel Shasta was channeling an earlier ideal of a City Street Rat. I don't know if there was an earlier draft (seems unlikely) or if Lewis got the idea from 1,001 Nights (along with much of the rest of the aesthetic) or if it's only there for me, but there's these glimpses of a Shasta that isn't our Shasta. He's good at stealing, and good at not being caught. Now he's running over roofs like a pro despite never before having left the ground.
He's also getting his bearing pretty quickly, given that this place really ought to feel impossibly big to him. I mean, he's lived his entire life among rural villages of maybe a few hundred people but now he's capable of taking in at a glance where he is and how to get to the meeting-point they've already agreed upon. I'm impressed, and I don't know whether to chalk this up to spotty characterization (Shasta is what the narrative needs him to be), racist characterization (Shasta is the best because he's white), or my pet theory that this is a glimpse of an older, earlier, more competent and morally-gray Shasta who was a proper "city pauper" in contrast to Corin's princeliness.
Shut Up!
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[Xanth Content Note: Rape, Misogyny, Self-Harm]
Castle Roogna, Part 8
When we last left Xanth (er, over a year ago, sorry), the Harpy Faction (air-creatures of all descriptions) and Goblin Faction (ground-creatures) were closing in on Castle Roogna. They are not, to be clear, particularly concerned with the humans in Castle Roogna; instead, they are closing on the site through the magic of Murphy's curse, which is sort of a play on "Murphy's Law" except not really.
Dor asks King Roogna what weapons they have left, and it all has a very quaint D&D slash McGyver slash Chopped feel to it, because you have to use everything in the basket to pull out a win. They have a Pied-Piper flute that makes people follow it, a two-inch ring that anything which passes through disappears forever, and a Major Forget spell. Vadne enlarges the ring to a thin hoop despite it being outside the normal limits of her "neo" (i.e., not-up-to-sorceress level) talent because fuck any kind of consistency when it comes to Vadne.
Chapter 11 starts with the words "Zombies ahoy!" because a centaur lookout has noticed that the Zombie Master has shown up with his horde to help. The problem is that there's a huge army between the castle and the zombie horde and they were really hoping to have the Zombie Master INSIDE the castle so that he can set up his laboratory and start zombifying people. I don't really understand this, because I thought I remembered his talent to be essentially touch-based and immediate, so why he can't just carve his way through the goblin army, zombifying things as they go, is unclear. The book just sort of asserts that the goblin army is a Problem, but I mean, it's the Problem that the zombie horde was brought here to solve.
Shut Up!
I plan to revive my Xanth deconstruction soonish, but I wanted to share this. It was a good affirming thing for me to realize.
Shut Up!
[Narnia Content Note: Racism, Violence]
Narnia Recap: Shasta has been taken in by the Narnians so that we can observe their conversation from the character's POV.
Obligatory note about racism, intent, and Lewis is here.
The Horse and His Boy, Chapter 5: Prince Corin
Welcome back to Chapter 5! When we last left Shasta, he was idling in the corner while the Narnians planned their escape. That's fine. I explained why I'm theoretically okay with this as a rhetorical device. But now the author is faced with a rather big problem, namely: since the Narnians are going to where Shasta wants to go, and since their way seems a lot more fun and less dangerous, why can't he go with them?
Shut Up!
