InsaneJournal

Last Battle as tragedy


Yes, the Narnians were acting stupid. That’s the point. You didn’t think we were supposed to take their actions as proof that they were smart did you? Aslan is angry because they didn’t –almost none of them- have enough faith in him to realize that they’d been conned by a frigging ape.

Can you imagine how insulting that would be to you if you were the God King of somewhere in the persona of a lion and you went away for a little while and came back to discover you’d been replaced by a drunken ape? And your people not only didn’t recognize you but mistook a donkey in a badly sewn costume for you. And your people are killing your people because a drunken ape said a donkey in a badly sewn costume told him it was for the best? They’ve arrested their own king and sacrificed him to an evil sub-god.

Why?

Because most of the people were stupid enough to think somehow that you’d want this, and they are egged on by four people who thought this up because what they really want is to conquer Narnia with a foreign power and they figured it didn’t matter because you don’t really exist.

You have literally died for these people and none of it mattered. You thought you could let them make their own choices because they should have evolved to that point but it turns out they’re just two year olds who got their hands on knives and matches because you were under the apparently mistaken impression you could leave them alone for two minutes.

My response would definitely be “WTF you guys? What is WRONG WITH YOU? Why are you so STUPID? You didn’t have enough faith in me to trust that I was coming back? I cannot turn my back on you for five minutes! This is why you can’t have nice things! Every. Single. Effing Time. I go away, you turn on me you’d almost think I didn’t personally create you or something. You’d almost think that this entire world has forgotten that it wouldn’t actually exist without me.

For it is written in the words of Claire Huxtable, ‘I brought you into this world, and I can take you out of it’. RAWWWR. If you’re this stupid, I must have made a mistake in creating you at all and EVERYTHING I EVER DID FOR YOU WAS ENTIRELY POINTLESS!”

*throws thoroughly justifiable temper tantrum to prove that yes, I will take my toys and go home because you know what? They were My Damn Toys to Begin With.*

The one thing I asked you to do is never forget that you are mine. Do you not understand that because you forgot this, and because you forgot who I am, period, that you have destroyed yourselves in a way that I cannot fix this time?”

Unlike his Our World counterpart, Aslan didn’t really ask much of his followers, and of the things he specifically said Do Not Under Any Circumstances Do, they managed to do all of them.

The whole theme there is that people who don’t understand or educate themselves about their own religion are easily conned. Forget your gods and you’ll forget yourself, and when you forget yourself, you will cease to exist.

If we look back at Narnian history it was all leading up to this in tons of tangled and subtle ways. Although it's interesting that unlike real Christian mythology, the Narnian Apocalypse seems to have been a mistake, that came out of a bug in the original programming *not* the inevitable goal of an Ineffable Plan (C.S Lews, not so much a PMDist, apparently). This is pretty typical of Christian mythology, where there's been a longstanding argument over just how much of the bad stuff was *supposed* to happen and how much was just cruel fate. It's one of the reasons for the widespread and traditional loathing of Judas.

Of course it's a tragedy. Even some of the characters remark on how confused and upset they are by what's happening. Jill is horrified by Eustace's casual lack of concern for the people they're leaving behind, and Lucy bursts into tears as Peter is closing The Door and demands to know why the others aren't showing enough sadness at the destruction of their world.

A certain sub sect of Christians do believe that it's nothing to be unhappy about, while at the same time, they fear it just like any sane person should. They think they want it, but deep down they don't, but even deeper down, they kind of do but even deeper down, they really don't.

But to understand this any more requires more knowledge of Christian apocalyptic tradition, which is itself a strange, convoluted, heavy subject with many interesting controversies and creepiness and politics and OMG ANGST. It’s an entirely separate genre within Christian fiction, and Christian mythology and Christian theology, based on a series of Jewish apocalyptic myths that may possibly have been written by someone on some very heavy drugs.

On the other hand, not knowing that could make things actually less traumatic, if you think it's just a confusing, frustratingly told story instead of a belief that millions of people in the world actually hold. Because the first time *I* read TLB, it totally freaked me out for years. Not because of the Susan thing, or most of the other complaints people usually have, that stuff sailed right passed me because I was too busy freaking out about the Anti Christ. See, many of the people in my religious community actually did (and do) believe that TLB is an allegory about something that is actually going to happen. Most Christians do, but not as literally and not to the level that these people did (and they were mild compared to the evangelicals in other parts of the country)-they believed not only that it would literally happen but that it was about to happen. It was going to happen by the time I was an adult. *I* read TLB and saw not just their world ending, but ours, I've already covered this in a previous post, though.

Then, on top of that you layer the fears of someone born at the turn of the previous century, witnessing the Industrial Revolution, fighting in WWI, living through the Blitz, (and everything else in WW2- even if it didn’t personally affect your life, imagine how it felt to be alive for the Holocaust and Hiroshima), the slow, painful loss of the British Empire, a world changing so fast he can’t keep up and everyone he cares about abandoning him or dying, except his brother who needed to be taken care of. It's difficult to be positive in the face of all of that.

We also can’t discount the part where he allegedly didn’t want to continue the series anymore and didn’t want anyone to force him to or for anyone to be able to continue it without him, so he took steps to make sure that couldn’t happen.

I would love to have seen the Pevensies come back and kick some ass. In fact, I’d actually forgotten that’s not what happens. For some reason, I’d remembered it as they do come back and fight and *rock*, and one of them has a secret weapon that they end up having to use…but I must have gotten this mixed up with some Incredibly AWESOME FANFIC (because I remember reading the Edmund portion of “Into the West” and thinking during the part where he acquires the weapon, that the author of the fic was alluding to something that happens in TLB).

But it doesn't happen that way and as annoying as that it, I think I can understand why.