thinky thoughts
Feb. 26th, 2013 07:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bedlamsbardI was thinking this morning about whether or not it would be possible to do Dust as an original -- not because I want to, mind, but just as kind of a mental experiment. (All honesty, it was because I saw this old post by N.K. Jemisin about her Inheritance Trilogy last night and have been thinking about it ever since.) I'm not talking about scrubbing off the serial numbers, mind, the way it's possible to do with some AU fic. Dust is an AU, yeah, but it isn't a deep space AU or a coffeeshop AU or otherwise a setting!AU (I'm sure there's a technical fannish term for these, but I don't know it off the top of my head). It's a canon divergence AU (I think that's the proper term, yeah?) with some pretty heady tropes and worldbuilding, if I can say so myself. At this point, it probably hangs onto Lewis's canon with very, very tenuous threads, but it is, at its core, a Narnia story. So if I took it out of that Narnian context, could it even still exist as a story? Without all that fannish background, could I tell a story that used the same the same themes and tropes as Dust does, with the same endgame?
My initial response was to say no. I could tell a story that was very similar: you've got a country that has been invaded and occupied, okay; a king and his comrades in exile, fighting a guerrilla war, okay; a mixed human-and-nonhuman early modern/Victorian western European/Mediterranean fantasy society with class issues, okay; ordinary people trying to survive in an occupied country, trying to decide whether it's worth it to fight the good fight or not, okay; even most of the religion stuff could remain. I could tell that story, and it would probably be a fantastic story, and I still might tell that story in an original novel someday (actually, I probably will, because I don't think I'm exploring it to the depth I'd like to in Dust) -- but then we have the Pevensies, and I thought, okay, that's the kicker. There's no way that I'd be able to tell that part of the story as an original.
Because the way I use the Pevensies in Dust is based partially (to a greater or lesser extent, I supposed, based on how you read them) on the canon: four siblings who arrived from another world a millennium and a half before Dust begins, brought to Narnia by a mysterious force (and you can claim that it was Aslan, that it was the Wardrobe itself, that it was Narnia, or the Emperor-Over-the-Sea; it doesn't really matter) to defeat a great evil (or was she?) who were then crowned as kings and queens and ruled for ~fifteen years in what is remembered as a Golden Age, before disappearing under mysterious circumstances. Thirteen hundred years later, they reappear, called back by a magical horn, and save Narnia again: not from dark magic or anything intrinsically evil this time, but from a human threat that, arguably, wouldn't actually lead to anything worse than what Narnia has been living with for the past few hundred years or so. This time, two of the four are told by their (mostly useless) god that they won't be able to return, and the four siblings leave Narnia and return to their ordinary lives. Following this, we have the events of VotDT and SC, which aren't really as important to the mythology of Dust as LWW and PC. (Not to say that they're unimportant, but LWW and PC is really where it's at for me.)
As a result of these extraordinary events, by Dust you have what might be described as cult worship of the Pevensies as the Kings and Queens of Summer: the King of Summer, the Queen of Spring, the King of Evening, and the Queen of Morning, with slightly different aspects among different sects of Narnian religion. (You'll notice that among the Circle faiths -- these are the ones whose members have slogan names, like Perseverance in the Face of Great Despair and Lamentation for the Necessity of Evil in the World, with a couple of variations because even they split -- that the Four have slightly different names. My notes on this have disappeared, so I'll have to go back and reconstruct them, but for example you have the Summerking and the Shadowmaster, rather than the King of Summer and the King of Evening. In the High Reaches they're called things like Bittersteel and Strongbow, but it all comes down to the same thing.) The flip side of this is the use of the White Witch as a kind of devil figure -- I don't know if I'd describe her that strongly, but that's probably how it comes out. The Queen of Winter, the Witch Queen, and so on. (There are also a couple of sects of Narnian religion that don't believe in the Kings and Queens of Summer, though this isn't important for the matter at hand; Elizar Confesor is lapsed Old Narnian, for example, which is why he makes the Lion's Tooth as an apotropaic gesture, rather than the four-point sign. There are class issues here that ended up a little more blurred in Dust than I was originally hoping to make them.)
Anyway, I babbled more than I meant to there, but what you have with the Pevensies are, basically, a set of figures who were heroes of old and have returned several times since, and as a result have been elevated to godhood. I can play with that concept in fic because via canon we, the readers, already know when they've shown up before. It's a bit harder to do in original fiction because it relies on the reader being familiar with either the characters or the concept; for example, Arthurian retellings can do this because the reader will, presumably, already know the stories. The same with other stories based in popular mythology or fairy tales. (I mean, not the godhood concept; I've seen that done in a way that's basically the opposite of what I'm doing in The Almighty Johnsons and I'm sure it's been done elsewhere with the Greek gods, which is actually a genre I tend to stay away from for Reasons.)
So could I do that in a wholly original story, using a set of characters either as savior figures or as godhead figures? More importantly, could I do it without, basically, writing a whole other novel first to introduce all that background knowledge -- world-jumping optional? Even if I could, could I do it and still keep all the religious themes (the power of belief and you are what you pretend to be being the big two) intact? The religious themes are the big ones, you see. There's a lot of stuff going on thematically in Dust; some of it I put in deliberately near the beginning and some of it has sort of drifted in along the way. But the religious themes have always been some of the most important, and even if I could write an original novel that had most or all of the other themes and tropes in Dust, could I do it in such a way that the religious themes remained intact?
Like I said back at the beginning of this post, my initial thought was, "I could do everything but the Pevensies as an original." And then I thought about it some more. And I thought about the shows I've watched, and the novels I've read, and the fic I'm reading right now, and I thought, "Yeah, I could." Not the savior children who return over and over again from another world; I couldn't build that up in a single novel and have it still make since. But savior heroes who return over and over again? I could do that. I'd do it as a reincarnation story.
(Now, in case the first thing you thought at the beginning of this post was, "Reincarnation, duh," it's not a trope I'm that familiar with simply because it's not a trope that I read very often; it just happens that it's on my mind because of The Almighty Johnsons and the Hobbit reincarnation fic I'm reading right now. I know it shows up in Arthuriana fairly often; my suspicion is that it probably shows up occasionally in novels rooted in Greek mythology too, but those are two genres I don't really read. So it didn't exactly spring immediately to mind.)
So in conclusion: yeah, I could do Dust as an original, if I wanted to. Well -- I could write a novel with a lot of the same set-up and themes as Dust (and I still might do one of these days, because unsurprisingly a lot of themes that I like to play with are in Dust), but it wouldn't be Dust. I mean, it also probably wouldn't be recognized as Narnia fanfic as obviously as, say, The Magicians is, because the world-hopping isn't the major theme to me, but if I was writing it as an original, I suppose I wouldn't want it to be recognizable as Narnia fanfic in a way that I want Dust to be. (And I guess on some level it's debatable if Dust even is recognizable as Narnia fanfic, *shrug*)
So, okay. If I was going to write Dust as an original, this is how the back cover blurb would probably describe it:
To be fair, that sounds pretty much like Dust.
My initial response was to say no. I could tell a story that was very similar: you've got a country that has been invaded and occupied, okay; a king and his comrades in exile, fighting a guerrilla war, okay; a mixed human-and-nonhuman early modern/Victorian western European/Mediterranean fantasy society with class issues, okay; ordinary people trying to survive in an occupied country, trying to decide whether it's worth it to fight the good fight or not, okay; even most of the religion stuff could remain. I could tell that story, and it would probably be a fantastic story, and I still might tell that story in an original novel someday (actually, I probably will, because I don't think I'm exploring it to the depth I'd like to in Dust) -- but then we have the Pevensies, and I thought, okay, that's the kicker. There's no way that I'd be able to tell that part of the story as an original.
Because the way I use the Pevensies in Dust is based partially (to a greater or lesser extent, I supposed, based on how you read them) on the canon: four siblings who arrived from another world a millennium and a half before Dust begins, brought to Narnia by a mysterious force (and you can claim that it was Aslan, that it was the Wardrobe itself, that it was Narnia, or the Emperor-Over-the-Sea; it doesn't really matter) to defeat a great evil (or was she?) who were then crowned as kings and queens and ruled for ~fifteen years in what is remembered as a Golden Age, before disappearing under mysterious circumstances. Thirteen hundred years later, they reappear, called back by a magical horn, and save Narnia again: not from dark magic or anything intrinsically evil this time, but from a human threat that, arguably, wouldn't actually lead to anything worse than what Narnia has been living with for the past few hundred years or so. This time, two of the four are told by their (mostly useless) god that they won't be able to return, and the four siblings leave Narnia and return to their ordinary lives. Following this, we have the events of VotDT and SC, which aren't really as important to the mythology of Dust as LWW and PC. (Not to say that they're unimportant, but LWW and PC is really where it's at for me.)
As a result of these extraordinary events, by Dust you have what might be described as cult worship of the Pevensies as the Kings and Queens of Summer: the King of Summer, the Queen of Spring, the King of Evening, and the Queen of Morning, with slightly different aspects among different sects of Narnian religion. (You'll notice that among the Circle faiths -- these are the ones whose members have slogan names, like Perseverance in the Face of Great Despair and Lamentation for the Necessity of Evil in the World, with a couple of variations because even they split -- that the Four have slightly different names. My notes on this have disappeared, so I'll have to go back and reconstruct them, but for example you have the Summerking and the Shadowmaster, rather than the King of Summer and the King of Evening. In the High Reaches they're called things like Bittersteel and Strongbow, but it all comes down to the same thing.) The flip side of this is the use of the White Witch as a kind of devil figure -- I don't know if I'd describe her that strongly, but that's probably how it comes out. The Queen of Winter, the Witch Queen, and so on. (There are also a couple of sects of Narnian religion that don't believe in the Kings and Queens of Summer, though this isn't important for the matter at hand; Elizar Confesor is lapsed Old Narnian, for example, which is why he makes the Lion's Tooth as an apotropaic gesture, rather than the four-point sign. There are class issues here that ended up a little more blurred in Dust than I was originally hoping to make them.)
Anyway, I babbled more than I meant to there, but what you have with the Pevensies are, basically, a set of figures who were heroes of old and have returned several times since, and as a result have been elevated to godhood. I can play with that concept in fic because via canon we, the readers, already know when they've shown up before. It's a bit harder to do in original fiction because it relies on the reader being familiar with either the characters or the concept; for example, Arthurian retellings can do this because the reader will, presumably, already know the stories. The same with other stories based in popular mythology or fairy tales. (I mean, not the godhood concept; I've seen that done in a way that's basically the opposite of what I'm doing in The Almighty Johnsons and I'm sure it's been done elsewhere with the Greek gods, which is actually a genre I tend to stay away from for Reasons.)
So could I do that in a wholly original story, using a set of characters either as savior figures or as godhead figures? More importantly, could I do it without, basically, writing a whole other novel first to introduce all that background knowledge -- world-jumping optional? Even if I could, could I do it and still keep all the religious themes (the power of belief and you are what you pretend to be being the big two) intact? The religious themes are the big ones, you see. There's a lot of stuff going on thematically in Dust; some of it I put in deliberately near the beginning and some of it has sort of drifted in along the way. But the religious themes have always been some of the most important, and even if I could write an original novel that had most or all of the other themes and tropes in Dust, could I do it in such a way that the religious themes remained intact?
Like I said back at the beginning of this post, my initial thought was, "I could do everything but the Pevensies as an original." And then I thought about it some more. And I thought about the shows I've watched, and the novels I've read, and the fic I'm reading right now, and I thought, "Yeah, I could." Not the savior children who return over and over again from another world; I couldn't build that up in a single novel and have it still make since. But savior heroes who return over and over again? I could do that. I'd do it as a reincarnation story.
(Now, in case the first thing you thought at the beginning of this post was, "Reincarnation, duh," it's not a trope I'm that familiar with simply because it's not a trope that I read very often; it just happens that it's on my mind because of The Almighty Johnsons and the Hobbit reincarnation fic I'm reading right now. I know it shows up in Arthuriana fairly often; my suspicion is that it probably shows up occasionally in novels rooted in Greek mythology too, but those are two genres I don't really read. So it didn't exactly spring immediately to mind.)
So in conclusion: yeah, I could do Dust as an original, if I wanted to. Well -- I could write a novel with a lot of the same set-up and themes as Dust (and I still might do one of these days, because unsurprisingly a lot of themes that I like to play with are in Dust), but it wouldn't be Dust. I mean, it also probably wouldn't be recognized as Narnia fanfic as obviously as, say, The Magicians is, because the world-hopping isn't the major theme to me, but if I was writing it as an original, I suppose I wouldn't want it to be recognizable as Narnia fanfic in a way that I want Dust to be. (And I guess on some level it's debatable if Dust even is recognizable as Narnia fanfic, *shrug*)
So, okay. If I was going to write Dust as an original, this is how the back cover blurb would probably describe it:
It has been [x] years since [Country] fell to the armies of [Empire]. For all but the deposed [monarch], hiding in the thick woodlands of the [periphery] with his few remaining followers, life goes on much as it did before. The human nobility run their estates and play their games, the gangsters of the cities seek to make a profit at the expense of their new masters, and the non-human peoples seek merely to survive and, if possible, to prosper. Only a handful of [natives] still fight for freedom -- and some of them are willing to do the impossible in order to with their battle. No matter what the cost to [Country]. Even if it involves calling the gods down to earth.
To be fair, that sounds pretty much like Dust.