(no subject)

[bedlamsbard]

The biggest problem I have with Dust is that there's such a huge gap between my characterization and themes in Part I and my characterization and themes in Part II, because my view of the characters changed completely. Also I got a chance to calm down, which is nice; I was really really bitter when I was writing most of Dust I. Which shows, sometimes. Looking at a discarded Peter scene from Dust I:

Peter puts his head back against the bars and watches the castle approach. Caspian would probably have a fit if he knew that the castle he designed and laid the foundations for was being occupied by enemies of Narnia, by the conquerors of Narnia; it’s as if the Telmarines had decided to take up residence in Cair Paravel. Or not even the Telmarines, rather; the Telmarines had just been vultures come to pick the bones of the country neighboring Natare and Belgarion had decimated during the Dying Times a thousand years earlier, in those years of chaos after Peter and his siblings had vanished – been stolen from – Narnia. That was when the walls of Cair Paravel had been struck down, when the halls of his castle had run red with Narnian blood and the Shifting Market below the castle had burned, two hundred ships sinking down into the harbor that the Telmarines had called Graveyard Bay for their corpses. Tumnus and the Beavers had died in those last days of Cair Paravel; so had Oreius and Osumare Seaworth, Peter’s bodyguards Kaikura and Sidonie, his friends and his lovers and his people, all those who he’d sworn to protect, sworn his sacred honor to protect with his life’s blood – all gone, murdered, because he’d been sent back to a country that seemed stranger and more alien to him than the most distant nation he’d journeyed to from Narnia. While he’d been reading Thucydides and playing cricket, his country had burned, and the next time he’d been in Narnia barely her bones remained for him to try and resurrect, a brutal memento mori that seemed to him more cruel than anything else. But Caspian – for all his faults, Caspian had been starting to fall in love with Narnia as well; Peter would never have left her to him if he’d thought Caspian would follow his ancestors’ example and strike out at the very people who’d saved his life and won him his throne. The Telmarines, when they first entered Narnia under the rule of a lord named Villaruel, would never have survived without the help of the native Narnians. They’d only forced them away when Villaruel died in the night decades leader, leaving the Telmarines to follow an army captain named Caspian. Caspian I, Caspian the Conqueror, they called him three hundred years later; the Narnians had called him Caspian the Butcher.

And the first king was a lucky soldier, Peter thinks, idle for a moment, and wishes for his sword. He has studied politics and war his entire life, and he was never given the chance to bequeath mathematics and philosophy on a son. He fought his last war in Narnia so that Caspian might have that chance. It’s not that decision that brought ruin on Narnia; such things as this happen, and always have. But this could have been prevented. That’s the horror of it. It could have been so easily prevented, if Tirian and his father had simply thought –

What’s past is past; he can do nothing for it. It’s the present and the future that must concern him now; if he looks back, he’ll be lost.

And yet this is Narnia, and there’s not a damn thing in Narnia that isn’t steeped in his own history. Not the ground beneath his feet, not the stones on which Caspian’s castle stands, not even the broad expanse of the Great River, which bringest back the memory of the past to him as if he was standing on its banks in the fullest flush of summer, head turned back to the sun and his country humming in content around him. He can’t not look back: he doesn’t dare look forward, because if there’s anything he’s learned in the past decade it’s that Aslan’s left nothing for him in Narnia except for the crises that will never cease, because history is a cyclic poem and even those that know what the past has wrought are doomed to repeat it. Peter’s been here before; he’ll be here again. That’s certain. There are few enough things that are.

I wince, y'all.

Oh, but this later bit is pretty. Not sure if I'll be able to reuse it, but it's pretty. So not going to put that up here, just in case I do decide to reuse it.

Comments

[juliekarasik]

Yes, it's bitter, but I don't think that invalidates it. Your Peter's closer to his inner wrath than his other siblings (though Susan comes close). And I like the wistful-ness of wishing he could have bequeathed something better to a son.

[bedlamsbard]

My head!Peter got a whole lot calmer in the past year or so. *sighs*

That bit's a reference to a quote from someone -- John Adams, maybe. My Peter, always quick with literary references. I think there might be two more in the last paragraph, but I don't know the source.

[autumnia]

I liked this, bitter or not. It's part of the Peter I've come to love in your universe. I think what I like about it is that it shows Peter very much human, with plenty of emotion and thought -- he's not a cardboard character nor is he perfect, but has flaws just like the rest of us.

[bedlamsbard]

I think one of the reasons I cut this chapter was because it was too melancholy. (This bit is pretty typical. I mean, there was some plot stuff too -- it's a scene we never saw in Dust, where Peter's taken to the castle after he was arrested in Dust 10 or 11, one of the two. It was originally the introduction of Prince Bahadur!)

[lady_songsmith]

I can see why you feel this is too bitter, but it works with your Peter. He's got a right to a certain amount of pain and bitterness, with his history and with Narnia crying in his head to compound his own feelings. Bitterness can be a defense against pain; anger is a good deal more useful to a soldier than sorrow. If he's softened in the intervening time - for you, that is - perhaps there's an in-universe explanation in that he's making progress? A lot of Peter's bitterness over Narnia seems to stem from his helplessness -- he'd do anything to keep her safe and he keeps getting ripped away from her and coming back to find her worse off -- so having something to do, and making strides to better Narnia would relieve a lot of that for him, I'd think.

[bedlamsbard]

I guess the concern there is, as a writer, that I'll be unable to channel that level of bitter the next time I do a Peter POV and still have it be in character, as it's been a pretty long time since I was wrote this -- almost two years, I believe. And my attitude towards the canon has changed a lot.

[lady_songsmith]

Well, but my thought being that he needn't be as bitter in the now as when he first saw the wreckage of Narnia, if he's in the middle of his grand plan to fix it all. It's perfectly all right to have the character adapt as long as there's some reasoning behind it.

[bedlamsbard]

That's true...