(no subject)

[bedlamsbard]

Okay, ducks, riddle me this: 1940, the Pevensies enter Narnia. Lucy's what, ten? And Peter, five years older, is fifteen. 1941, time two, Peter and Susan are too old at approximately sixteen and fifteen. 1942, time three, Edmund and Lucy are too old at fourteen and thirteen, Eustace is, like, twelve or eleven? 1943, Eustace and Jill are around twelve or thirteen? 1949: Peter's twenty-four, Susan's twenty-three, Edmund's twenty-one, Lucy's nineteen, and Eustace and Jill are seventeen or eighteen and the only ones still in school.

And they're not too old?

Aslan is very active throughout VotDT and SC, after having relatively minimal presence throughout LWW and PC. (Excuse me while I randomly combine bookverse and movieverse. It's a thing. Also ignore how fucked my ages probably are. Again.) And again, ye olde Aslan Conspiracy Theory. He did not bring them through in LWW, he did not bring them through in PC, he did bring them through in VotDT and he definitely did bring them through in SC. And yet in LB, Tirian summons them. Aslan did not bring them through. Tirian does. And -- Narnia?

And there's that whole train crash thing. Whatever. Irrelevant.

OH LEWIS WHAT NOW?

(Yes. I think about these things all the friggin' time.)

Comments

[reni-m.livejournal.com]

Are you going movieverse times or bookverse?
Cause in bookverse Lucy was 8, Edmund was 10, Susan was 12, and Peter was 13 when we first meet them in LWW.
Dunno if the movies tried to preserve that fact (I'm going with no since they are so OLD in PC).

[ceirseach.livejournal.com]

Well, they can't, really, given the time it takes to make the movies. The actors are inevitably going to age more in the intervening time. This also saves us from a) having actors too young to act effectively and b) from seeing KIDS in actual serious battle. Which I personally do not want to see.

... Battles are ugly when children fight?

[burntcopper.livejournal.com]

movieverse ages and then correlate that with the narnian timeline : http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Narnian-timeline

[burntcopper.livejournal.com]

....oh dear god, CS Lewis, your timeline is fucked. I never noticed that. Anyway. LB doesn't exist. No it doesn't. It's your own fault for writing Dust and getting seduced by red-headed boys.

[bedlamsbard.livejournal.com]

Of course LB doesn't exist. Destruction myth! Just like Magician's Nephew is a creation myth!

I blame Lucy in Dust 6 for starting out all existential and then getting distracted by the fact that, hello, bleeding people here.

[muridae-x.livejournal.com]

The timeline makes my head hurt, as does the different ages at which everybody becomes "too old" to return to Narnia. I was much happier before I discovered it existed, when I just figured that C S Lewis couldn't count, and made up my own timeline based on clues like who was still at school when, the fact that Prince Caspian suggests that the war is over (even if that contradicts the implied Blitz of LWW the previous year), and sundry other odds and ends.

It skewed everyone much older (I had Lucy going through a kind of middle school system so that she went to boarding school for the first time at the age of thirteen and Peter's exam he was studying for in Dawn Treader being his Higher School Certificate), and I rather liked it that way.

[lassiterfics.livejournal.com]

uh. age ain't nothin but a number?

is eustace all like "haha we're sort of the same age now maybe, are you going to respect me more" to edmund and edmund is like, "...uh."

CALORMEN FIC DONE AT 8515 WORDS
WILL GIVE IT A READTHROUGH BEFORE SENDING IT OVER
OMG. i am a little excited.

[bedlamsbard.livejournal.com]

aha! i have to put that in before i forget about it, except that i don't have edmund and eustace in proximity for a while, since eustace is going to cair paravel with peter and tirian and edmund is staying at arn abedin. *frowns* or edmund could go too.

YAY. i am very excited!

butbutbut. it's, like, very important throughout the books that physically the kids actually be children when they're in narnia; they're always children, even when it seems that being adults would be, you know, a little more helpful. AND if only a year could pass in england and a thousand years in narnia, then why the hell bring eustace and jill through after four years in england, when they're pretty much physically not kids anymore? why not bring them in a year after SC?

i know. trying to think about this seriously is a brain-breaking thing.

[lyamainu.livejournal.com]

Also with the age thing - Eustace and Jill never had the decades in Narnia, ruling a country. So even though they're much older physically, they're really much, much younger.

[dikela.livejournal.com]

Why do you think that it is calendar age that is so important?
IMHO it is the inner maturity of every person that makes them too old or not old enough.

Bardy, you called Aslan the worst God figure, but he did more for his land than our human Gods. You wouldn't expect Jesus Christ to appear now, for example. In fact he didn't return after the crucifixion.
But we know that Aslan came to Narnia in person at least twice (LWW and PC); in LWW the beaver says that Aslan doesn't appear often, but it means that he does appear.
I wouldn't want him to become a puppet-master.

The train crash thing.
Again, IMHO, it was an accident, Aslan didn't kill them. But he did use it to send Jill and Eustace to Narnia.

[bedlamsbard.livejournal.com]

Because throughout the books Lewis makes a point of always bringing children through -- physically children. If it's inner maturity, then the Pevensies wouldn't have been allowed to return during PC, because at that point they've been adults for the better part of two decades; they just happen to be in children's bodies now. He's continually bringing children through even when it would be more useful to have adults, or at least experienced fighters (LB being the prime example here, because hey, that went badly. VotDT probably would have been fine without any outside intervention, and it didn't matter who it was wandering around the North in SC. But in LB...that's where you needed someone with experience). And as far as LB goes, Lewis has made a point, earlier, or bringing them through once a year or so -- a year in English time, however long in Narnian time. But there are four or five years between SC and LB in England.

None of our gods have destroyed the world after getting ticked off that someone else stole their toys. *shrug* Maybe I'm too much of a humanist, or maybe it's the fact that I'm not Christian (and have no Christian background, for that matter)).

[dikela.livejournal.com]

Well, neither am I Christian and my family is atheist. I read Lewis's Narnia Chronicles as interesting stories, and even when I learned about Christian symbolism it didn't change.

Lewis makes a point of always bringing children through -- physically children.

But these are children's books and it is children who have to learn their lesson.

If it's inner maturity, then the Pevensies wouldn't have been allowed to return during PC, because at that point they've been adults for the better part of two decades; they just happen to be in children's bodies now.

But were they really mature in the beginning of PC? In book and in film I didn't really feel it. It seemed as if their bodies influenced their behaviour. Peter and Susan at the end have learned to accept the inevitable.

None of our gods have destroyed the world after getting ticked off that someone else stole their toys.

But was it Aslan who destroyed Narnia? Remember, in LWW Jadis says, that unless she gets the traitor's blood "Narnia would perish in blood and water". Shift, the Ape was the Traitor and, though Tirian threw him into the stable, I wouldn't say that he was punished, just killed in the battle. And it was Tash who got him.
So, since the requirements were not met, Narnia had perished. And Aslan took those he could into his country.

Bardy, do you still consider TMN and LB myths? As I wrote somewhere earlier there is a live witness to TMN -- Digory Kirk. As a child he sees the creation of Narnia and, btw, it(Narnia) dies when he does.

[bedlamsbard.livejournal.com]

Well, Aslan killed Jadis back in LWW, so. *sheepish grin*

Yeah, I still consider MN and LB creation and destruction myths, partially because in my 'verse, there's a whole world outside Narnia, and it doesn't make sense for any one deity to have that kind of power. (If and when the Stardust/Narnia crossover ever gets written, we shall see this, because one of the main points in that is that Aslan isn't the god, he's a god, and the other gods are pissed.) And I'm aware that Digory Kirke and Polly Plummer are live witnesses, and yet --

Well, there're several reasons I write movieverse.

[dikela.livejournal.com]

Personally, I never thought Aslan to be THE god. If Lewis equals him with Jesus Christ then THE God is Jehovah -- the Emperor Beyond the Sea.

And yes, I know how it is when you KNOW something, but your knowledge is just standing quietly to the side.
So, go on writing movieverse and I shall READ your stories.

[snacky]

Huh. I actually didn't think that Tirian summoned Jill and Eustace, exactly. He saw them all in a dream, but Jill and Eustace were killed in the train crash and that's how they ended up in Narnia. I'm probably wrong, but that's how it read to me. :) Now that I'm thinking about it, I don't know if that's what happened - would they have been killed in England and then killed again in Narnia? Maybe Aslan pulled them off the train just as the crash started, so the rest were killed and Jill and Eustace were sent to Narnia to be with Tirian.

And I don't think that the actual ages mattered - it was the fact that Aslan had never told Jill and Eustace that they were too old and couldn't come back, which made them try with the rings.

[katakokk.livejournal.com]

*confused* IT MAKES MY HEAD HURT!

[mentalhygiene.livejournal.com]

I always thought Lucy was much younger than 10 in LWW. Maybe 7 or 8. That was always my impression. *shrug* But a lot of my impression is from the BBC movies, where they all look much younger than in the Disney movies.

[bedlamsbard.livejournal.com]

I'm trying to estimate based on what they actually say in the books. She's out of school by 1949 in LB and she's about to start boarding school in PC, so she has to be around ten or eleven in LWW. Maybe 9. There's also an argument based on the British school system for making her as old as 13 in LWW, though I wouldn't go that far. And you can estimate the others off that. (I just fudge around ages until I can get Peter to the point where he can fight in WWII, but that's me. *shrug*)

[mentalhygiene.livejournal.com]

She could be younger than that, she could feasibly be at boarding school at 9 or 10. But, again, I haven't read the books in a very long time, (although I have copies of them with me at the moment, since I'm at home).

I think what's important about bringing children through is faith. I think that what Lewis was after is the idea that children have a much more malleable sense of faith. Lucy can be called to, in LWW, because she has nothing that colors her faith with the impossible. And her faith is impressionable - the more impression you get as a child, then, the more you're affected as you get older. (I think Aslan says something like 'by knowing me a little in this world, you can know me better in yours'. Again, long time.)

I would agree that your reading of Aslan and the books in general is probably somewhat different than a typical readers because you don't have a Christian background (did you ever do the Bible as literature in an English class, out of curiousity?) of any kind, but it's an interesting viewpoint.

[bedlamsbard.livejournal.com]

Nine or ten is probably most likely for LWW.

The only time I have ever read the bible is two books out of it on my reading list from my dad about five or six years ago. One of them was Genesis, and the other one is the book where Jesus smites a fig tree because it has the audacity to not have any figs on it.

...look, the bible clearly never made much of an impression on me aside from the fig tree bit. *cough* Greco-Roman mythology and a little bit of Norse mythology is my biggest religious influence, which is really weird from the kid who has relative who are actual Buddhist priests.

[mentalhygiene.livejournal.com]

I haven't read the smiting of a fig tree but the concept makes me giggle. There's a lot of stuff in western literature in general that is based on concepts in the Bible, saints, stuff like that.

So you're reading it from a different religious standpoint which, as noted, colors how you see the book vs. how someone like me (raised by atheists) vs. a full-time Christian would read it.

I don't comment on this stuff usually mostly because I dislike the Disney movies and because it's been about ten years since I read the books.

[lazaefair.livejournal.com]

Hi, LJ stalker looking around for Narnia fic. Don't mind me.

I think the concept of "too old" for Narnia isn't so much chronological age as some indefinable psychological criteria that combines their mental ages from England and Narnia.

Perhaps it also has to do with the rate at which they're maturing. Narnia has a way of growing somebody up really fast, which is why Edmund and Lucy were banned at a younger age: they started in Narnia younger, so they tripped the maturity threshold younger. Whereas Eustace and Jill started in Narnia at fairly high immaturity levels despite their older starting ages, so they reached the maturity threshold at older ages.

Then they all died. The end.

As to Lewis always bringing children through: they're children's novels. Lewis isn't the first or last to have children going off and having fantastical adventures that would be solved much more realistically by adults (but with less whimsy and humor, and more joy-killing cynicism). Children like to read and make up for themselves stories about fantastical adventures.