(no subject)

So tomorrow I'm flying home.

And, while, my room is a mess and my laundry is going through the dryer a second time (HATE YOU TULANE DRYERS), obviously I decided to watch the video scrapbook one of my friends put together for her senior project.

This will be...weird. And yeah, I know that every high school graduate ever goes through it, but it'll still be weird.

*muses*

peta thoughts

In the interest of procrastinating cleaning, folding laundry, and packing, I am reading genderflip meta -- specifically, on girl!Daniel Jackson from SG-1 and how his/her upbringing would have been influenced based on the time s/he grew up.

Obviously, as the chick who's written 50K+ of Peta Pevensie, this gets me thinking.

The thinking would be working somewhat better if I knew something more about how a teenage girl in 1930s England (before being evacuated) would have been raised. Especially as the oldest of four siblings.

I can extrapolate that Edmund, as the only boy, might have had more responsibility; I can also extrapolate that Peta was a hell of a lot more aggressive than Peter, and that she was also less willing to fit into your basic nice English schoolgirl niche, and that therefore she may have been a little bit (or a lot) of a tomboy before Narnia. She was probably a lot more isolated than Peter and she was probably a troublemaker, and she wasn't as close to her siblings even after Narnia. But getting into Narnia was probably even more of a lock into a key situation than for Peter: for the first time ever, she fit. (She also had a much toughter time being taken seriously in Narnia, so she has a lot of issues that are tied up in her gender, and also the fact that her siblings are very literally her second-in-commands; she says to Caspian that, "I very seldom trust my siblings with Narnia," which is something Peter would never say.)

But, in other words, I'm wondering just how screwed up Peta would have been before Narnia, as a fourteen, fifteen year old tomboy in WWII London, and why and how she would have become the kickass warrior, general, and High Queen that she is in Be Like Water. (And oh, lordy, but does she ever have issues in Water. I didn't actually figure this out until I was picking at the scene that immediately follows the last scene I wrote in NaNo, the one where Peta and Lucy scream at each other about Narnia and Aslan and responsibility. And she had issues before Narnia, she had issues during Narnia, and she had issues post-Narnia.)

Also, I know that this post won't make much sense until Be Like Water is actually completed and posted (I have dreams about this. Someday, oh, someday). But, well. *flaps hands*

Anyway, this came out of one of the last things I wrote in Water, where Peta and Caspian are talking and he asks her what she was like before Narnia.

He hesitates before he actually says it, but says it anyway. “What were you like? Before Narnia.”

She winces, then raises a hand to her face, pinching the bridge of her nose between two fingers. After a moment she lets her hand fall back down to her lap and turns to look him in the eye. “I was a fuck-up,” she says.

“I’m sure you weren’t –” Caspian begins, automatically.

“No, I was a fuck-up,” Peta says. “I was a bad sister, I was a bad daughter, I wasn’t much fun to be around – I think there was a pool going on whether I’d get myself killed, arrested, or knocked up first. There probably still is, actually. The only thing that changed when I got back was that I actually had a clue how to fight, and that I could take on boys older than me and win. That doesn’t do much for a girl’s reputation back in England.” She grins a little, humorless. “Unless you happen to be one of the boys.”

ETA: Though to be fair, I don't know how much of this comes from writing juvenile delinquent!Peter with lassiterfics.

because a country, like the soul, survives its conflagerations

I mean to quote this an age and a half ago, when I was still actually studying it, but I forgot. And I remember now because about three-fourths of my luggage consists of books, and this is one of them, and I marked (most of) the spots I wanted to quote.

These are from Claire Messud's novel The Last Life, which I read for my TIDES class, Reading and Writing Women. (And I actually get to meet Claire Messud; she's the Zale Writer for 2009.)

( When I was a little girl... )

I think it is perhaps not hard to see why I flailed and flailed hard, because, uh, theme. Theme theme theme, and Narnia and Cair Paravel and how memory is softly golden and blurred around the edges and in the end, just a memory; it cannot be touched. But there's something, god damn it, there's something there -- but it's gone now.

ANYWAY. The book isn't really my thing, but there are some absolutely gorgeous lines in it (the majority of which I just quoted), and it hits a lot of my Narnia kinks pretty hard. Algeria isn't Narnia and Algiers isn't Cair Paravel, but damn if it doesn't read a lot like it, you know?

has the internet perished? are y'all safe and sound? or am i just losing it?

LJ is quiet and it is freaking me out.

*twitches* Is everyone in transit today? Am I just not interesting? Is this a sign from the gods that I should be writing instead of faffing around on the Internet? (I have a grand total of ZERO words for Dust 8. I also have a suspicion that it may be a Jill POV, and involve food disputes, because hi, Dust 7 had drugs, crime, and prostitutes; Dust 8 should go back to more prosaic matters like FOOD. I have also not started my Yuletide; I thought I had two more days than I, uh, actually do. OH BEDLAM. Also, the fandom? Is not one I have written in before, and, well, this should be interesting. *sigh* Be Like Water: in progress. Voices: SHOOT ME OH MY GOD. "Must Be Tuesday": needs to be typed up and some context added so it's not put Peter and Edmund killing things and bitching about...everything. The banter here is kind of off the walls.)

Also, I am reading three different pieces of meta at once, and it's kind of killing my brain.

...screw the meta, I'm going back to watching all the Narnia battle scenes ever. (At this point in time, specifically LWW.) At least for the moment. OH LITTLE PETER AND EDMUND. SO YOUNG. SO INNOCENT. Man, they're jaded by the time they hit PC.

(On a sidenote, some of the meta I was reading was about always/already genderfuck. So. *flaps hands*)