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bestworstcase · 2 years

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w. what is going on in the rwby fandom

+ ( @discoursed-dracula )

hgjksdfkj to be clear there's no new or active drama happening it's just that every time i see rwby narniaposting it feels like clipping through into an alternate dimension LMAO i should preface this by saying i am an evangelical apostate and i have extremely strong narnia opinions Which I Am Going To Rant About At Excessive Length Now

on winter schnee as an allusion to jadis

while this was actually not the take that provoked last night's grumbling, this fanon is so ubiquitous that i need to talk about it first.

i've been rwby adjacent for all of five minutes so i admittedly do not have full context for how this fanon proliferated in the first place but based on my efforts to reverse engineer it what i've gathered is. this:

and... look.

ok.

to begin--rwby uses character allusions in two distinct ways, which i'll refer to as "intrinsic" and "contextual" for the purposes of this discussion. every character has at least one intrinsic allusion--the... i guess i would say inspiration behind that character. e.g., ruby rose is little red riding hood. these are often based more in aesthetics and symbolism rather than direct parallelism between the character's individual story and that of their allusion, but the only time you get serious dissonance between the character's story and their intrinsic allusion's is when rwby is asking the question, "what if the trauma this fairytale character endured broke them and shaped them into a villain?" - a la cinder fall.

then you get the contextual allusions, which grow out of a character stepping into a narrative role that relates to the intrinsic allusion of another character. e.g., salem acts as cinderella's fairy godmother through her relation to cinder and the role she plays in cinder's character arc. in contrast to intrinsic allusions, contextual allusions do rely on direct narrative parallels; salem is cinder's "fairy godmother" because salem is the powerful magical benefactor who offers cinder a chance to get what she wants.

to be more concise: intrinsic allusions are "salem is rapunzel and the wicked witch of the west", whereas contextual allusions are "salem is cinder's fairy godmother."

so having established that

#1: jadis as winter's intrinsic allusion

the reasoning behind the winter-is-jadis fanon is as follows:

1. shows up in a fancy sleigh airship for her first appearance. 2. proud and hot-tempered 3. dual-wields swords* 4. there's a stone lion fountain in one scene she's in 5. one of her summons is a (beo)wolf 6. she's from atlas, which is cold and persecutes the animal people

*which is a LWW 2005 invention with no basis in the text btw

all of which... is true, but--i can say the same of weiss:

1. shows up with a fancy sleigh luggage cart for her first appearance 2. proud and hot-tempered 3. wields a sword she uses like a wand 4. there's a stone lion fountain in one scene she's in 5. one of her summons is a statue 6. she's from atlas, which is cold and persecutes the animal people

these are aesthetics and vague tangential similarities at most, and the similarities rely on ignoring a huge amount of context in both jadis' story and winter's (and weiss'). it's paper-thin and nonsensical in comparison to, for example, yang's allusion to goldilocks--which i want to highlight here because i think it's probably the loosest intrinsic allusion out of the entire main cast, and yet:

think about how much aesthetic focus is given to yang's blonde hair, and how her hair is used as a symbolic and visual focal point for her semblance. think about how every major milestone in her character arc involves her finding moderation or balance between harmful extremes. hell, think about her two moms—raven, distant and aloof after her self-interest led her to leave yang behind; and summer, super attentive and loving until her devotion to the cause got her killed—both of them at extreme opposite ends of a spectrum, and think about how yang herself struggles to place herself in that same spectrum—how one of her earliest sources of inner turmoil is feeling rootless and disconnected, and how fiercely dedicated she is now even as the pain of it builds up and builds up because she's trying so hard to be strong for everyone else, and how the natural trajectory for her from this point forward is to figure out how to honor the commitments she chooses without burning herself out.

on its face, yang's arc does not particularly resemble goldilocks, but the thematic core of goldilocks is everywhere in yang's arc.

can we say the same about winter schnee and jadis?

jadis was born royalty in a dying world riven by war. she grew up soaked in upheaval and bloodshed. it mades her ruthless and cruel and cynical; she learned the deplorable word and held it under her tongue until the moment of her younger sister's victory in a pointless civil war, and then she uttered it and destroyed every living thing on the planet besides herself.

she enters narnia at the dawn of time, when aslan begins to sing it into existence; he means to create a kindly, peaceful paradise, but jadis flies into a rage and attempts to strike him down, and upon failing flees, and by her very presence at the beginning the world of narnia is irreparably corrupted. she brings anger and spite and cruelty and hate into narnia, and thus the deep magic from the dawn of time is written. jadis in narnia is the cosmic executioner, not merely owed the blood of traitors but required to spill it, lest narnia itself be destroyed.

(put a pin in that thought. we'll come back to the deep magic later.)

aslan's protection keeps her out of narnia for a very long time, but when she returns she curses the land to eternal winter and rules by violent tyranny until she's defeated. she is a temptress and a corruptor; in LWW it is said that many narnians serve her and spy on her behalf out of fear, and she lures edmund onto a dark path / tricks him into betraying his own family.

(put a pin in that thought also.)

anyway,

none of this harbors any symbolic or thematic or narrative resemblance to winter's story. winter is a victim of child abuse who tried to escape by rejecting the legacy of her cruel father and training to become a huntress... and in atlas academy not only is she subjected to the standard fascist conditioning but she also became the personal protege of the headmaster and general of the atlesian military, who personally grooms her to become his loyal second in command. she thoroughly accepts and internalizes the idea that her own thoughts, her own feelings, her own life do not matter and that her sole purpose is to follow orders without question, and her entire character arc up to this point has been about breaking that conditioning, choosing to follow her heart, and throwing off the shackles atlas trapped her in. winter schnee has fallen into darkness when we first meet her, but the arc of her character is one of survival and atonement and recovery.

it is flatly ludicrous to suggest that she has an intrinsic allusion to jadis. even if she were a kind of reverse-cinder—i.e. a character inspired by a villain who asks the question "what if this evil character had chosen a different path?" the comparison to jadis still isn't coherent, because there's no clear line of thematic connection beyond "grew up in fascist authoritarian cultures on post-apocalyptic worlds" which is a statement that can be applied to literally every single atlas-born character lmao.

#2: winter as a contextual allusion to jadis

so... if winter has no intrinsic allusion to jadis, does she ever fill the role of jadis in the story of a different character who has an intrinsic allusion to a narnia character?

and the short answer is: no, because the only rwby characters who could be plausibly, without convolution, be interpreted as having intrinsic allusions to characters from either LWW or TMN are salem and ozma and winter can in no way shape or form be construed as a jadis figure to either of them. obviously.

(remember how i said to put a pin in the jadis-as-a-corruptor thought? this is that pin. keep it pinned for now.)

#3: winter's actual inspiration/intrinsic allusion

she is kai.

the little boy from hans christen andersen's the snow queen.

you know, the one who gets a shard of the mirror that blinds you to everything good in the world stuck in his eye, which leads to him becoming obsessed with precision and perfection and causes him to behave coldly and aggressively towards his family and dear friend gerda? the one who runs away from home to follow the snow queen, who freezes his heart and numbs him to everything he once loved, then spirits him away to her fortress in the frozen north and forces him to play a cruel game of reason to earn a reward while he slowly freezes to death? the one whom everyone believes lost forever except for gerda—who refuses to give up on him and travels the world, finding friendship and aid wherever she goes thanks to her innocence, kindness, and the strength of her love, and who ultimately walks barefoot into the snow queen's fortress and thaws kai's frozen heart with her tears, leading him to weep for everything he forgot, flushing the shard of the wicked mirror from his eyes and freeing him from the snow queen's thrall at last?

that kai?

LIKE.

absolutely, i get people not picking up on where winter's arc was going back in vol3 but... by the end of vol8 winter-as-kai is so blatant that it's half a step down from cinder "literally actually cinderella" fall.

jacques schnee is winter's mirror shard. his abuse fractures her relationships with her siblings and drives her away from her family, as well as laying the psychological groundwork that makes winter so particularly vulnerable to fascist conditioning. in 7.8 we see how viscerally winter was damaged by the trauma of her childhood--she can't even handle being in the same room as jacques without an emotional outburst. given that winter's emotional repression and habit of hiding it behind a strict, prideful facade is a trait that both her sibling share, it's likely that it stems from her childhood and was merely exacerbated by her training in atlas; and it's not a stretch to extrapolate that winter, as the eldest sibling, had the greatest weight of expectations put on her shoulders before she disowned herself--planting the seed for her preoccupation with being perfect rather than merely good.

ironwood is her snow queen. he's much kinder to her than her own father, but he also took a vulnerable, hurting young woman and sculpted her into a perfect soldier, a weapon, a tool--the perfect, obedient vessel for the powers of the winter maiden. ironwood demands absolute loyalty from winter, and she gives it to him, and in exchange he promises to entrust her with power, with information, and with a destiny; this is the impossible game of reason, trapping winter and crushing the life out of her as it dangles reprieve just reach. she's not literally freezing to death, but she is drowning her conscience and choices in the conviction that she doesn't matter.

and, lastly, penny is her gerda. her closest friend. penny is relentless in asserting that winter matters, that her feelings matter, that her heart speaks true, that her life has value and meaning beyond what ironwood tells her to do. penny and ironwood spend vol7-8 in a pitched battle for winter’s soul, and penny wins, because winter is her friend, and both of them are absolute ride or die for each other, and no matter how hard she tries winter can't stop herself from caring. (winter couldn't sacrifice her life to take the maiden powers as ironwood wanted her to; but to protect penny, winter threw herself into a fight against cinder fall with her aura already broken without a second of hesitation. she loves penny so much.) penny wakes winter up and thaws her heart and sets her free.

i could write. literally so much about penny's and winter's arcs and how closely intertwined they are narratively and thematically and emotionally but for the sake of staying on topic i will restrain myself and close out this section with these observations, because rwby does love its symbols:

1. in the original tale, gerda arrives at the snow queen's castle alone, helpless, without even her boots or mittens to protect her from the intense cold; likewise penny, when she uses her dying moments to bequeath the maiden powers to winter and say goodbye, is barefoot and defenseless, having been stripped of the physical durability of her original body. and also, you know, impaled.

2. kai's own tears, inspired by gerda's help and his own sudden realization of everything he lost, are what flushes the shard of the mirror from his eyes and restores him to wholeness; similarly winter cries after weiss falls to her apparent death, and it's these tears—this open, vulnerable expression of emotion from a character whose defining trait has hitherto been intense emotional repression—that mark the end of this chapter of her arc and the beginning of the next, wherein she will need to learn to live without silencing her own heart.

3. the snow queen gives kai a sort of game to play, using little pieces of ice, with which she tasks him to form the word 'eternity.' if he wins, she promises him that he will be his own master, and that she will "make [him] a present of the entire world." he tries and tries but is never able to arrange the pieces right; yet when she leaves to spread winter across the world, and gerda comes to thaw his heart and his eyes are washed clean of the mirror shard, he cries out joyously, embracing her, asking where she came from and how they came to this place ("How huge and empty it is here!" hm.); and as they laugh and dance with excitement for the reunion, the pieces of ice move of their own accord into the precise word the snow queen had asked for. kai is set free--and is due to receive the present the snow queen promised him. and, while penny and winter's reunion in the white void is far from joyous, winter is confused at first to find herself and penny there, and they do embrace, and then—well:

IRONWOOD: So. The destiny I chose for you has arrived. WINTER: You chose nothing. This was a gift.

the maiden powers are the reward that ironwood promised to winter for playing his 'game', but when they come to her they do not do it under his auspices, or by his choice, or because he gave them to her; nor does she earn them as he demanded. they are given to her, freely and easily and with love, by penny--just as the game in the original tale was 'won' not through kai's effort or in accordance with the snow queen's will but simply as a natural expression of his love for the friend who came to rescue him.

winter is kai.

on narnia flavor penny resurrection theory aka, the "atlas arc as an LWW au" reading

oh boy. oh, boy, this one is a doozy.

in...brief, among the penny's-coming-back-again crowd there's a specific strain of argument / theorizing that hinges upon reading vol7-8 as an extended allusion to the lion, the witch, and the wardrobe, most often with ironwood playing the role of jadis and penny filling in as either edmund or aslan or both (?!) and also sometimes winter is edmund.

the general thrust of the argument here is this. ironwood is jadis—the cruel, domineering tyrant—and when penny defies him to stand with rwby and jnor in defense of mantle she becomes edmund, the traitor whose life must be sacrificed to appease the deep magic. under this line of reasoning the virus watts infects her with under ironwood's auspices is thus construed as parallel to jadis' demand that aslan honor her rightful claim to edmund's blood, vaguely making the implication that rwby+jnor are acting out aslan's role as penny/edmund's savior; meanwhile under the penny-as-aslan interpretation, ironwood is jadis, winter is edmund, penny is aslan, and penny's death at cinder's hands is construed as a parallel to aslan's willing sacrifice in edmund's stead. a great deal of emphasis is put on the line "narnia will perish in fire and water" and atlas... flooding and burning as it falls, in order to lend a shred of legitimacy to the reading, and i have also seen someone make the claim that the table in ironwood's office represents narnia's stone table and when he smashes it that's parallel to the sundering of the stone table by the deeper magic from before the dawn of time, and on one truly memorable occasion someone trying to argue that the silver apples and the maiden powers are equivalent.

all of this is, to put it gently, Completely Fucking Bananas.

remember when i said to put a pin in the discussion of the deep magic from the dawn of time? IT'S TIME FOR THAT NOW. LET'S TALK ABOUT THE DEEP MAGIC.

as i mentioned before, aslan intends for narnia to be a kindly paradise, but jadis' presence during the act of creation irreparably corrupts it; she gets incorporated into the deep magic at the dawn of time—the fundamental magical laws governing narnia's existence—as an avatar of cosmic retribution. she is the emperor's hangman.

(the emperor-beyond-the-sea, for those of you who don't walk around with a box of narnia lore in your head, is a mythological figure referenced time and again throughout the chronicles of narnia; he is aslan's father and the ruler of all words, and he wrote both the deep magic from the dawn of time and the deeper magic from before the dawn of time. his authority is absolute; both jadis and aslan are stated outright to be beholden to his magic and law.)

all of this is symbolically reflected in jadis' theft of the silver apples in TMN; the apples offer healing and protection, but they are only meant to be given, never taken. jadis violates that rule, and in so doing she secures her immortality but dooms herself to a cold, joyless, spiteful eternity. by her presence she corrupts narnia; by her choices she corrupts the magic of the silver apples, and thus she becomes the everlasting flaw in the paradise.

now, getting into the exact specifics of what the deep magic says:

“Tell you?” said the Witch, her voice growing suddenly shriller. “Tell you what is written on that very Table of Stone which stands beside us? Tell you what is written in letters deep as a spear is long on the fire-stones on the Secret Hill? Tell you what is engraved on the scepter of the Emperor-beyond-the-Sea? You at least know the Magic which the Emperor put into Narnia at the very beginning. You know that every traitor belongs to me as my lawful prey and that for every treachery I have a right to a kill.” [...] “Fool,” said the Witch with a savage smile that was almost a snarl, “do you really think your master can rob me of my rights by mere force? He knows the Deep Magic better than that. He knows that unless I have blood as the Law says all Narnia will be overturned and perish in fire and water.” “It is very true,” said Aslan, “I do not deny it.”

moreover we know, because both aslan and jadis confirm as much, that the bar for who qualifies as a "traitor" according to the deep magic is breathtakingly low: edmund, a nine-year-old boy, stumbles into narnia alone and gets lost; he is soon found by an adult who treats him kindly, offers him food and shelter from the cold, and presents herself (not inaccurately) as the queen of this strange magical country. upon learning that he has siblings she asks him to bring them to her home so that she can meet them as well, and then she sends him on his way.

the food jadis gives to edmund is magical. it fills him with a desperate, overpowering compulsion to do whatever it takes to get another taste.

the next time edmund comes to narnia, this time with all three of his siblings, driven half by that magical compulsion and half by the simple fact that he trusts the word of the adult authority who treated him kindly over the word of the younger sister whom his older siblings openly prefer, he slips away at the first opportunity to tell jadis where the other three are.

and for that—just that—the deep magic from the dawn of time mandated that he was a traitor whose life was forfeit. a nine-year-old boy. because the point is not that edmund is a traitor; the point is that edmund is a victim of cruelty and evil far, far greater and deeper than any individual person. remember that the chronicles of narnia are a christian allegory and draw heavily upon c.s. lewis' faith; edmund is innocent eve tricked by the serpent in the garden, he is the original sin that humanity can never wipe clean, he is an innocent victim condemned by his own victimhood.

no person with an ounce of compassion would call edmund a traitor. when the other pevensies discover that edmund has gone to the witch's house, they immediately want to go rescue him, because he's their brother and he's only a kid. even in the heat of the moment when his betrayal is discovered, they don't blame him, they're terrified for him. none of the narnians in aslan's army raise a whisper of protest about rescuing him from the witch. when he's saved, he tries to apologize, and his siblings all say that no, it's alright, and the narration notes that "then everyone wanted very hard to say something which would make it quite clear that they were all friends with him again"--because of course none of them feel any ill-will towards him. it wasn't edmund's fault.

even jadis herself only refers to edmund as a "traitor" in the context of the deep magic's law; when she's making her preparations to execute him, she calls him not a traitor but a victim.

but to the deep magic, that doesn't matter. the deep magic is not human; the deep magic is a cruel corruption of the kindness that should have been, and it says that lost little nine-year-old boys who trusted the wrong adult through no fault of their own deserve to die, and aslan saves edmund because the deep magic is WRONG.

i feel this, and the fact that—however much she relishes the cruelty and bloodshed—jadis no more has a choice in fulfilling the role imposed on her by the deep magic than aslan does, are two extremely important dimensions of the deep magic that get lost in the atlas-arc-as-lww-au reading. jadis does not simply feel entitled to kill edmund the way that ironwood feels entitled to infect penny with a virus or demand absolute obedience from his officers; jadis quite literally IS entitled to kill edmund, and were she forced to renounce her claim narnia itself would be violently destroyed...

...except there's a loophole. jadis is cosmically entitled to take one life every time an act of treachery is committed in narnia... but it need not be the life of the traitor. a willing sacrifice will also suffice.

and if that willing sacrifice is blameless—if they have never committed an act of treachery in accordance with the law of the deep magic, not even something as small as edmund's—and jadis accepts their sacrifice nonetheless and kills them in the traitor's stead... then an even older, even grander cosmic law will be invoked: the deeper magic from before the dawn of time. the deep magic written upon the stone table and inscribed on the emperor's scepter will be undone—the stone table will crack—and death itself will work backwards. thus: aslan, a willing victim who has committed no treachery, is ritually killed on the stone table, the deep magic is overturned, jadis' immortality is stripped away, and aslan is restored to life.

which is to say, what "death works backwards" MEANS in the narnian context is not "aslan comes back to life," but rather "the original corruption of life and death in narnia is undone and natural order restored; jadis' tainted immortality is taken from her, purified, and given to aslan, her victim."

narnia, imperfectly created, remains flawed, but jadis is cast out of her role as the cosmic executioner and the threats of fire and flood, the injustices of the deep magic, put to a permanent end.

(and since i've gone on about the deep magic for this long: while aslan states that jadis knew nothing of the deeper magic, i maintain there's real textual grounds for an alternate reading of LWW wherein jadis and aslan both know precisely what they're doing. her immortality is stated to be a miserable curse, she did not have a meaningful choice in becoming the cosmic executioner to begin with, she does an awful lot of dawdling / fretting about ritual propriety / not just killing edmund when she has the chance. moreover we do not hear her discussion with aslan when they come to the agreement about his sacrifice, and all we know for sure is they speak "earnestly" with each other in private for an exceptionally long time. there is absolutely room here for a reading of jadis as someone who has been going through the motions of her cosmically-mandated role for quite some time without taking any true joy in it, and who sees aslan's trick for what it is and willingly, with genuine relief, helps him carry it out so that she can finally die.)

WITH ALL THIS BEING SAID. BACK TO THE SUBJECT OF RWBY:

as i mentioned, i feel that the way the deep magic is treated / discussed by the atlas-is-a-LWW-au contingent is... er, reductive to the point of not really making sense anymore. narnia takes a... very vague and mystical approach to magic yes but there is nevertheless a lot of specificity on the mechanics of how aslan's sacrifice undid the deep magic by invoking the deeper magic, and i truly think that if the only takeaway from LWW is "aslan (good) dies to save edmund (condemned) from jadis (evil), therefore Mystical Mumbo Jumbo brings aslan back to life and Good Wins," then a) you should probably give, at the least, LWW and TMN a closer read and b) you are not really in a position to be using LWW as lens for analysis of a different text due to the junk in, junk out principle.

the crux of it is this: ironwood makes a bad jadis, winter makes an even worse edmund, and penny fundamentally cannot be aslan. penny can be edmund, but she is an edmund without an aslan; thus she dies, and thus the deep magic goes unbroken.

and, it is emotionally important to me that everyone who read this far understands this: there is only one reading of atlas-as-narnia in which it makes sense for atlas to perish in fire and water. i will circle back to this point in a moment after discussing the previous points.

ironwood is a bad jadis

ironwood is not a divinely-ordained executioner. ironwood is, in fact, cosmically insignificant. the gods do not know or care that he exists. he and jadis share many personality traits—that comes with the territory of being violent autocrats—but he is a mere garden variety dictator. his feeling of entitlement to total control over penny is just that: a feeling, backed by nothing but his own ego.

a jadis without her divine appointment, without her cosmic right to kill, is not jadis at all. she's only a tyrant. she's only human.

winter is a terrible edmund

at no point in LWW is edmund truly the witch's servant. he is a child. he is a child whose behavior has become rather beastly, said to be because he's fallen in with a nasty crowd in school and probably amplified by his older siblings' palpable dislike for him (they don't like him because he's taken to bullying lucy; but edmund is nine, and not quite capable of putting those pieces together yet). but he's still just a scared little boy. he gets lost. he trusts an adult whose intentions are evil. he gets drugged with magical candy that erodes his free will, and does what the adult he trusted told him to do. then she holds him hostage and abuses him whilst making no secret of the fact that she's going to ritually murder him the moment she gets to the stone table. he is NINE YEARS OLD.

winter though? winter is ironwood's second-in-command. she has been serving faultlessly at his side for years. he hand-picked her to be the recipient of the maiden powers, and she is one of the only people he ever trusted beyond a shadow of a doubt. she knows from the moment he orders the dust embargo and closure of atlesian borders that he's on the wrong path ("no—you have sacrificed everyone else. you closed the borders! you squeezed mantle until it broke!")... but it takes months for the protestations of her conscience to grow loud enough, with penny's unflagging encouragement, for winter to reject him. she stands by him without flinching until the eleventh hour.

if ironwood is jadis? winter is the witch's dwarf.

penny cannot be aslan

for two reasons:

first, and most important, is that aslan could invoke the deeper magic by trading his life for edmund's only because he had never committed an act of treachery—not even the slightest, most insignificant one. remember how harsh and exacting and unfair the deep magic is; remember that it condemns an innocent nine-year-old child to death.

and penny? penny who wants so badly to do the right thing? penny, who is innocence and kindness and love personified; penny, who was built to be a cog in a fascist military dictatorship but cared so fiercely about people that she never once hesitated to align herself with the people against the dictatorship; penny, who defies her father's plea to save herself and spare him the worry, who disobeys her general's orders, who by her very existence in vol7-8 is spitting in the faces of the gods who declared that the dead should not return to life—penny is a traitor a hundred times over, because it is not possible to be a good person in atlas without becoming a traitor.

and that means that penny cannot invoke the deeper magic.

(i submit that there are only two—possibly three—characters in vol7-8 who haven't committed a treacherous act by the standards of narnian deep magic: robyn, and (hilariously) tyrian. the entire plot of LWW proves that principled resistance to a leader one has never agreed to serve does not qualify as 'treachery', otherwise jadis would be claiming rights to the lives of...everyone in aslan's army, and of course tyrian's loyalty to salem is absolute. the "possibly" is maria, because i am not sure whether or not "betrayal of one's own principles" counts as treachery, and in vol6 maria makes it clear that she feels her decision to retire and go into hiding after losing her eyes was a dereliction of her duty as a huntress.)

secondly, penny does not die in winter's stead as a willing sacrifice. throughout vol8, penny does show a general inclination to die for her friends, and there is no doubt in my mind that were her position reversed with winter's in 7.13, penny would have acted exactly as winter did—throwing herself into the line of fire to protect winter from cinder—but, penny does not sacrifice herself in 8.14, and when she dies she has no idea that winter is even fighting anyone, let alone that winter is in trouble and dire need of help. (remember that as far as any of the kids in the portal knows, ironwood is safely locked in a holding cell.) what actually happens is cinder murders penny, and penny, with no intentions other than to deny cinder the powers of the winter maiden, uses her dying moment to bequeath them to winter instead. that this action saves winter's life is a lucky coincidence.

penny might be edmund, but there's no aslan to save her

penny is certainly a traitor, and like edmund she is a traitor through no real fault of her own. under the law of narnian deep magic she would, like him, be an innocent victim of an unfair system—which tracks rather neatly with penny's actual place in atlas, that being a good person caught in the jaws of the atlesian machine. she's victimized by deeply corrupt and unfair legal and social forces utterly beyond her control, and the harder she fights to extricate herself from them the harder they clamp down around her...

...culminating in penny being infected with a virus under the auspices of an adult authority figure she once trusted, which robs her of her ability to think rationally about anything but obeying the command it installed into her code. which, yes, we can read as directly analogous to edmund's magically-induced addiction to turkish delight.

and penny does not have an aslan. she has no perfect, willing sacrifice to rescue her from the cruel injustice of the deep magic or the cruel injustice of the atlesian fascist regime; oh, her friends try, but they fail. they find a loophole and keep her alive for all of fifteen minutes before the death she evaded came due.

if atlas is narnia, if ironwood is jadis, if the deep magic is in force, then penny polendina dies because that is what happens to edmund pevensie in a world where aslan does not come to narnia.

"...and perish in fire and water."

which of course, atlas does. we see the flames and we see the flood--but that is the price of the deep magic being defied. that is what happens to narnia if jadis is prevented from spilling the blood she is owed, and as discussed if atlas is narnia and ironwood is jadis, that makes penny the only real choice for edmund—she is a traitor and it is she whom ironwood seeks to control, which is the closest analogue for jadis asserting her right to edmund's life.

and penny, of course, dies. ironwood, in accordance with the deep magic, gets what he is due. her friends try to save her, but they fail—and, importantly, LWW gives us a precedent to argue that merely trying to save one of the witch's victim's is alright as long as she is not following the proper ritual protocols, i.e. she's not slaughtering them on the stone table and perhaps has not formally stated her claim; because jadis does eventually go "fuck it" and decides to just slit edmund's throat in the woods, and she is sharpening her knife in order to do so when aslan's army arrives to rescue him, without any consequence besides jadis strolling into their camp the following day to demand that aslan return him and allow her to carry out her execution. from this we can conclude that jadis is entitled to take the lives of traitors, and she is allowed to do so without any rite or ritual, but that anyone capable of standing their ground against her without getting turned to stone is allowed to, in effect, demand that she observe the proper ceremonies and prevent her from taking her kill until she has done so. thus: it is not a problem for penny's friends to act in ways that delay penny's execution as long as ironwood isn't adhering the proper procedures involved in executing her—which in narnia would mean ritually sacrificing her over the stone table, and which in atlas would mean acting through the established legal channels to take her offline, which we know are a thing because doing that was a possibility raised after penny was framed for the attack on robyn's election night rally. i think it is safe to say that allowing one of salem's servants to remotely install a virus with a self-destruct clause into penny is not the proper procedure, here.

the point being: as the traitor, penny's life is forfeit. there is no aslan to save her. ironwood makes his claim on her life. she dies.

the deep magic is satisfied.

atlas, narnia, should therefore not perish in fire and water. it should by all rights go on as it always has, in its corruption and its injustice, until its jadis claims the next traitor and there's another chance for aslan to escape his exile at last.

as for the version of the atlas-as-narnia reading where winter is edmund and penny is her aslan? well... taking that at face value, the result should be that ironwood dies, penny is revived, and atlas is liberated from its oppressive regime. the dire consequences for defying the deep magic cannot be suffered if the deep magic itself has been overwritten; or LWW would have ended, uh... differently.

the only way for the flood and the fire we see when atlas crashes into the ground to make sense in the context of reading atlas as narnia and the destruction as consequent of the deep magic being flouted is if ironwood is jadis, winter is edmund, and penny is an aslan who fails, whether because she 1. cannot invoke the deeper magic, being a traitor herself and not a willing sacrifice, and/or 2. did not secure ironwood's acceptance prior to saving winter through the action of her own death. a significant point is made in LWW of the witch formally renouncing her claim on edmund's life and consenting to take aslan's in his place. aslan is not the only one who must agree to die for edmund; the witch must also agree to the trade—because, after all, it is her claim, and her right to edmund's life, that is being bargained for.

so: in this scenario, penny tries to be aslan, but she does it wrong, and because she saves winter, atlas falls and burns and drowns. the deep magic remains, and death will not work backwards. which makes all the emphasis on the "perish in fire and water" bit among the contingent that likes this reading feel awfully bleak.

but all of this being said,

quite apart from the narnia parallels themselves being as convoluted as they are, i think reading the atlas arc as an extended allusion to or metaphor for narnia also just... undermines the actual strength and themes of the atlas arc in a big way?

the reason the atlas arc and LWW do have some passing superficial similarities is because both of them are stories about children fighting cruel tyrants, which is about as bog standard as you can get with fantasy fiction where the protagonists are children.

but at the end of the day LWW is a quirky christian allegory that literalizes a lot of the more esoteric aspects of christian myth and ends up being largely a story about a god doing what he can to heal his beloved world from the corruption that twisted it into a harsh dystopia at the beginning of time, while the children caught up in the crossfires heal their familial bonds and try to survive.

whereas the atlas arc takes the ideological war between fear and hope that has always underpinned rwby's core conflict and turns it up to eleven. the child soldiers tasked with fighting this war are beginning to crack, all of them staring down their own crises of faith and identity and courage. the leaders and institutions who were once held up as paragons and protectors of hope reveal themselves to be tarnished and rotten inside with fear, until in the end they crash and burn in both the figurative and literal sense. ozpin atones for his past failures, all borne of his fears, and commits himself to trust, and honesty, and in doing so learns to genuinely embody the hope for mankind that he has always strived to represent. an act of hope exposes the ideological cracks in salem's inner circle and inspires not just one but two of her most valuable servants to turn against her. salem herself, the embodiment of fear as much as ozpin tries to be the embodiment of hope, steps onto the battlefield herself for the first time and walks away with two relics and an utterly destroyed kingdom to show for it. we learn precisely what it is that cinder is so terrified of, for her to be as desperate for power as she is. again and again the heroes find things to hope for, and they're slapped back down again, and again, and again, until the arc ends with atlas and mantle obliterated, their whole populations stranded in the desert in the middle of a storm and under attack from all sides by the grimm, penny dead, all of rwby plus jaune stranded in the void and presumed dead, pietro and maria stranded on a derelict, drifting satellite, robyn, qrow, and the surviving ace-ops watching in horror as atlas falls, and salem and cinder flying away from the smoking wreckage, triumphant. fear is ascendant.

(and yet: the atlas arc is also loudly, furiously, unrelentingly optimistic about human nature and the human capacity for goodness. even as the darkness rises, even as the city falls, even as fear emerges from this battle victorious—the narrative celebrates hope. the heroes try and fail and try and fail and try and fail and try, and people come together and fight for each other and pick themselves up and keep trying; ruby does not lose her faith, and ren finds his balance again, and nora articulates a pain so deep she hardly knew it was there and receives a surge of support and love from all her friends, and weiss reaches out to the family she thought she had to leave behind and finds them reaching out for her in turn, and winter turns at last to embrace the conscience that has been screaming at her since beacon fell, and ozpin transcends the failures of his past and proves himself worthy of trust, and emerald finally escapes the nightmare she's been trapped in for who knows how long, and qrow inches into newfound confidence, and the happy huntresses make a difference. their hope, their efforts matter—the risks they take matter—even though they lose the battle, in the end. because people are good and hope is worth the risk and i just have a lot of feelings about the atlas arc okay—)

just... LWW and the atlas arc are different stories with very different things to say about the nature of humanity and the nature of the world and i just don't think they make very good lenses through which to examine each other.

...though with that being said, i do have one more point to make.

on salem as jadis (& ozma as her aslan)

this one is not a refutation but rather a reading of my own; a, "if we're doing narnia comparisons this is the one that makes sense to me" sort of coda to the whole discussion. namely: i submit that salem's character can be read as an explicitly tragic deconstruction of jadis.

(& to be extra clear: can be read as, not intentionally alludes to, everything i'm about to say is analysis of salem using jadis as a lens and i'm not trying to argue anything about authorial intentions in the way that i argued winter-as-kai.)

anyway,

jadis is born to the royal line of charn. she's a formidable sorceress in a world of profoundly powerful magic. yet she is also trapped—everyone on charn is trapped—with nowhere to flee from a planet that is being slowly roasted alive by its own dying sun. she grows up surrounded by war and death and anguish and hate, knowing nothing but violence and power. she finds the deplorable word, and she clings to it until her entire world crashes down around her ears.

and then she is alone. the last living thing in all of charn, untouched by time, waiting for the destruction of her world.

until she meets two children, diggory and polly, transported by charn by magic, who show her a glimpse of escape, of possibility, of worlds beyond her own. she leaps at the opportunity to meet them, and she finds, on earth, an entirely different humanity. smaller, to her eyes, diminished and weak and uncivilized. she is less than impressed; she intends to conquer them, but she fails, and she is cast into the dawn of time before narnia begins. she witnesses the creation of narnia by aslan and flies into a rage, hating everything he represents. she cements her immortality and damns herself in the same breath by eating one of the silver apples, and by aslan's power she is cast deep into the wilderness to live among monsters and beasts for as long as he can keep her at bay.

when his protections decay—as they must decay, in time—jadis storms into narnia with a vengeance, conquers it, rules it by fear; she elevates the creatures of darkness and fear who were shunned by aslan's chosen people. and, by mandate of the emperor-beyond-the-sea—the highest power in all the worlds—she is an executioner of traitors. the flaw in the paradise, the root of all evil in narnia, the corruptor and divider and temptress luring innocents into darkness. a destructive force whose corruption leaves deep, irreparable scars in narnia even after her death at aslan's hands.

(who ever heard of a witch that really died?)

on the other hand we have salem, locked in her tower; salem, who grows up knowing nothing but imprisonment and an all-consuming ache for freedom. ozma comes to rescue her, and the two of them fight their way free. she gets a taste of liberation, a taste of joy—and then it's senselessly and suddenly ripped away from her.

unlike jadis, none of salem's pain is self-inflicted, not in the beginning. she does not choose her immortality, and she doesn't speak the word that wipes out all of humankind. unlike jadis, she can't even sleep through her isolation after the extinction of humanity; she's forced to wander, undying and lonely and grieving and so, so angry, on a broken planet abandoned by its creators and left to rot. her prison is a mass grave, and she cannot escape it even in death.

until humanity evolves anew, but even then she is still isolated. different, in such a tangible way, from these new humans who lack her magic, her culture, her history, her knowledge of the gods, her context; these people who cannot understand who or what she is, who hate her and fear her (and how could they not? she looks like the grimm). diminished and weak and riven by conflict. for ozma's sake, she tries to unite them in the only way she can fathom—by conquest—and he rejects her in the end, so thoroughly that he devotes the rest of his own eternal existence to keeping her at bay and serving the will of the gods who did this to her in the first place.

he forges civilizations anew and dedicates himself to a hopeless quest to redeem humanity in the eyes of the gods while salem rots in her isolation, surrounded by monsters and biding her time until his beloved institutions begin to crumble—and then she strikes, and strikes hard, to crush them out of existence. she’s the divider, the corruptor, the would-be conquerer, and—just as jadis rules by fear and twists the narnians to her side by terrorizing them into submission—salem preys upon people’s most vulnerable weaknesses and deepest-seated flaws to bend them to her will.

(like aslan, ozma is an impermanent, inconsistent fixture in remnant's history; whenever he dies, he takes a long time to come back—but he does return, sooner or later, to pick up the pieces of the things that broke in his absence and to uplift new guardians to carry the torch he's trying so desperately to keep lit. he is wise and melancholy and mysterious and imperfect and loved in spite of it all.)

the fundamental difference between jadis and salem is that salem's story is constructed as a tragedy and an indictment of divine power; she suffers, and then she finds a tiny spark of hope in the darkness and clings to it with all her might, and when it's snuffed out again she moves heaven and earth in a desperate, doomed quest to get it back. every time she tried to escape her fate she was cast into it deeper, until she hit the bottom and decided to wrap herself in the darkness and revel in it instead; the gods found a grieving young woman and tortured her across millennia until she broke, and all of remnant is shouldering the consequences.

lastly,

...for the precious few who make it to the end of this post, congratulations! because it is 8.2 thousand words long.

#rwby #WHEW BOY #i'm. pretty sure this is the longest post i've ever written #by a ... large ... margin

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ginervacade · 2 years

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Peter and Lucy Pevensie

I LOVE that Peter and Lucy hold hands. It’s the cutest thing. He’ll always be there to protect her and he’ll do everything in his power to make sure of that. So he keeps her close. She reaches for him instinctively when she’s afraid, when she’s sad, when she’s happy. If she’s about to do something reckless she’ll grab his hand first. If you watch the LWW movie the scene in the end where they find the lamp post and go back to England, as she runs away, even though they’re adults, she still sticks a hand out behind her for him to take and follow her. And he does. He’s a little confused but he takes her hand and follows. And he always will. Because he’s her protector her entire life. And they both know it. And it’s beautiful.

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staliaqueen · 2 years

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Do your family and peers make fun of you for liking Narnia? Because it’s a “younger” interest? Because mine do a lot and I hate it. (I’m also 17)

No, they don't. I watched all the movies with my mom and we often discuss it and I show her all my gifsets. My friends aren't really into it but they don't judge me at all.

I'm so sorry they're doing that. It fucking sucks. If something makes you happy it doesn't matter at all if kids were the intended audience, why would they even care? It's so pointless.

Maybe you could try telling them how dark the series can be? Cause holy shit it gets dark when you think about it. They're stories about kids fighting in wars. There is so much death. Like that scene in LWW where Peter kills the wolf. That's Aslan forcing a 13 year old to kill. And the entire siege sequence in PC. That Minotaur holding up the gates and getting crushed, the rest of the troops being locked inside, doomed to their death.

Also, like, the books are definitely meant for kids, but the movies are clearly family movies, meant to be enjoyed by all ages.

The most sensible advise to give is probably just to tell them how you feel. I mean, I don't know anything about your situation, but most people's intention behind actions like these aren't cruel. If you could just tell them that you hate it, that might help. Try doing it in a way where you're not accusing them of anything though. It's just a human instinct to get defensive when people do that, no matter how valid they are. It happens to the best of us. Something like, "Hey, I know you're just joking around, but it really hurts my feelings when you say stuff like that. I'd really appreciate it if you stopped." will probably work.

Best of luck!

#ranger-august #narnia #mal answers

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skandarismyturkishdelight · 4 years

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I Missed You (Pt. 4) - Edmund Pevensie x Reader

Characters: Reader, Edmund, Lucy, Peter and Susan Pevensie, and Caspian

Setting: Narnia, The Golden Age/LWW and Prince Caspian.

Warnings: None

Summary/Blurb: (Requested by @creseselia ) Edmund and (Y/N) have had a great friendship since Edmund had become King of Narnia. The problem is, they haven’t confessed their feelings for one another. But when Edmund disappears when going after the White Stag, what happens to her?

taglist: @ohheyitsjake7 @cherrii-xo @glupijelen @thellamaisinthehouse @majalissa @kit-kat-is-me-lol @ironsdragon @gingertorch @letylopes @heyohheyitsgabi @eds-gryff @whatisthepointofusernames @beckaroodle @suruhcha @thebadassbitchqueen @mindofthescattered @foreverfangirling123 @pahoehoejaemin @animequeen1600

(some accounts that asked to be tagged unfortunately didn’t work, so sorry if you didn’t get notified!)

Reader’s P.O.V:

The sun’s rays cut through the thin trees, and as you strolled through the ferns overlapping the forest floors with Caspian ahead, a rustling sound behind you made your ears perk up.

You turned in time to see Trufflehunter just ducking behind a bush. You couldn’t help but grin and shake your head.

“I can hear you,” Caspian‘s exasperated voice calls out.

A moment passes before Nikabrik and Trufflehunter poked themselves out of from behind a pair of trees. You chuckled to yourself as you continued to walk, catching up to Caspian. Standing by his side, you noticed how tall he was, and how his hand was almost always on the hilt of his sword: his guard never resting for a moment.

“I just think we should wait for the kings and queens,” Trufflehunter called out. Caspian have him a long look before continuing to walk.

Even the mention of the kings and queens made your stomach dip in anticipation. The echoes of their voices heightened in your mind, their faces more vivid in colour, and Edmund’s smile; the brightest smile she had ever seen.

They aren’t dead, a voice from within you whispered excitedly, They aren’t dead.

“Fine, go then!” Trufflehunter basically shouted. “See if the others will be as understanding.”

Nikabrik’s amused faced drew your eyes to him. “Or maybe I’ll come with you. I want to see you explain things to the minotaurs.”

Caspian stopped in his tracks, and you paused too, watching his expression.

He looked dazed, and a glimpse of what looked like excitement shone in his eyes. “Minotaurs... they’re real?”

You laughed and Caspian turned to look at you with his dark eyes. A grin graced your face as you continued your march towards the end of the forest. “Of course they are.”

Trufflehunter grunted. “And very bad tempered.”

“Yeah, not to mention big,” the dwarf added.

“Huge.”

You rolled your eyes, a smile still dancing on your face as you turned around to look at the three who were catching up slowly.

Caspian didn’t waste a chance in asking more questions. “What about centaurs? Do they still exist?”

Trufflehunter began walking towards you. “Well, the centaurs will probably fight on your side. But there’s no telling what the others will do.”

“What about Aslan?”

You stop in your tracks, heart sinking slightly as you looked at the young prince.

Nikabrik and Trufflehunter also paused and peered at each other. They seemed just as unsettled as you.

You hadn’t heard Aslan’s name in so long. It was hard to know he wasn’t here now, or if he would come ever again.

Nikabrik turned to Caspian suspiciously. “How do you know so much about us?”

“Stories,” Caspian responded.

The badger added with surprise, “Wait a minute...your father told you stories about Narnia?”

Caspian frowned. “No, my professor...”

You saw his face changed as his voice trailed off, almost hardened by the truth hidden behind his eyes.

“Listen, I am sorry,” he continued. “These are not the kinds of questions you should be asking.”

Caspian begins to walk towards you again. You wish you could comfort the stranger but you were just as clueless as he, probably even more so. You were just desperate to find something you were familiar with again.

Behind you, something sniffed loudly, and you spun around to see Trufflehunter’s snout in the air.

Nikabrik picked up on his unease immediately. “What is it?”

“Human,” he answered confidently.

Nikabrik nodded towards Caspian. “Him?”

“No...” Trufflehunter stopped suddenly and stared to the clearing from which they entered. “Them!”

Your hand immediately unsheathes your sword at the sound of foreign and rough voices. Soldiers. Armour shining in the sunlight, they looked taut and merciless in the way the moved across the clearing. Even worse when they lifted crossbows into your direction.

“There they are!” A thick-accented voice called out.

You saw a man position his crossbow towards you. A heavy stone seemed to fall into your stomach as your heartbeat grew louder and louder in your ears.

Trufflehunter shouted something, and knowing you didn’t have to wonder about what he said, you dashed ahead of the rest

The whizz of the arrows flying past and sticking into nearby trees, sometimes bouncing off them, was almost as loud as her heart.

Run, run, run.

Anxiety was trampling in your chest, leaving you gasping for air. Your mind was racing with the thought of going back home. Anywhere with the sea, or high cliffs, anything that reminded you of the glory of Cair Paravel. Anything that reminded you of the Pevensies. And Edmund.

Edmund.

A cry fell from far behind, and you turned to see Nikabrik and Caspian pause in their haste to escape...Trufflehunter nowhere to be seen.

“Trufflehunter!” You cried out, panic rising in you as you ducked out of the way of a flying arrow.

Caspian stood still before running back towards the overlapping fern bushes. Nikabrik waddled quickly towards to where you were gesturing you to run.

“He’s fine! Go!”

The shake in his voice made you hesitate, still looking towards the Prince kneeled on the floor who was quickly tucking something in his pocket. You watch as the soldiers take aim.

Then one screamed and fell. Then another, and another...

Caspian had thrown the badger over his shoulder and you caught a glimpse of an arrow poking out from his back leg. Your heart sank as the long-haired prince caught up, placing a twitching Trufflehunter gently in your hands.

Caspian nodded to both you and Nikabrik. “Get him out of here.”

You stood bewildered, clutching Trufflehunter as fur and blood tangled between your fingers. “You can’t fight them! Caspian!”

But it was no use. Caspian drew his sword, moving towards the dead men in a smooth motion. You saw another soldier fall heavily, and another grunting in madness, taking out a sword to cut through the grass.

“Where are you?!” The armoured man howled, and no sooner had he fallen down; lying unmoving like the rest of his men.

The ferns were bristling violently, creeping around the guards before switching directions, and moved towards Caspian.

You cried out a warning, yet the small thing that leaped out of the forest floor and knocked Caspian to the earth.

Biting your lip in apprehension, you found yourself cursing and placing Trufflehunter gently onto the thick leaves of a nearby bush.

“What are you-“ Nikabrik protested, moving violently towards you, but you cut him off quickly.

“He needs help!”

The way you had darted across the bushes to reach Caspian reminded you briefly of the distant times where you and Lucy would try to catch each other in the woods surrounding Cair Paravel’s grounds.

In those memories, the forests were less daunting, and the sun wasn’t so harsh. The wind would catch at the trees’ delicate leaves and pull them to fall onto your hair. Now, there was none of that.

You slowed as you got closer to Caspian, sword at the ready like Edmund had taught you almost a lifetime ago. But this wasn’t an ordinary target, you noticed quickly.

It was a mouse; quite a large mouse with a tail that was swishing around the air proudly. The creature was perched on Caspian’s chest, pointing what you thought was meant to be a sword, but only looked like one of Sudan’s large sewing needles. Its voice say comfortably ok its throat as the mouse began demanding Caspian.

“Pick it up!” The mouse shouted in an alarming manner. “I will not fight an unarmed man.”

Caspian seemed to struggle with his answer. “Which is why I will live longer if I choose not to cross blades with you, noble mouse.”

You tilted your head curiously as the mouse swished his blade. “I said I wouldn’t fight you. I didn’t say I’d let you live!”

“Wait!” You said, stepping closer to the scene as you sheathed your sword. “There’s no need for that, he isn’t a soldier!”

The mouse peered at you with beady eyes. “He’s a Telmarine! You’ll catch me snipping off my own tail before I passed a chance to kill-“

“Reepicheep, stay your blade!”

The mouse turned as you did, seeing the badger leaning on the dwarf tiredly. “Trufflehunter? I trust you have a good reason for this untimely interruption!”

Nikabrik looked almost amused. “He doesn’t. Go ahead.”

The badger took a moment to capture his breath. “Reepicheep, he’s the one that blew the horn!”

The words sent a great shiver down your spine, the mention of the horn again breathed far more hope into you that the Kings and Queens were still out there, somewhere. You would see them again, and everything will be alright.

Reepicheep stared down Caspian in surprise. “What?”

A deep voice emerged from a corner of the forest. “Then let him bring it forward.”

Four large centaurs came walking gracefully over the hill, the greatness in size always stole your breath.

“This is the reason we have gathered,” the voice continued, coming from a dark haired centaur.

You gave them a hopeful look before peering down at Caspian again. He looked at you, amazement flooded in his expression.

A small smile played on your lips, your mind wandering to the hope of tomorrow. The hope of seeing the Pevensies again.

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narniaconfession · 5 years

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It's hard to believe that exactly 15 years ago was started a shooting of the film LWW! From june to december they were filming this magical movie. This movie is one of my favs, and it bring so much joy to my life. I still love to rewatch it, and also extra materials of how the film was making and behind the scenes. They all were so cute together, like a real siblings. Time flies....

#narnia #narnia confession #peter pevensie #susan pevensie #edmund pevensie #lucy pevensie #narnia fandom #georgie henley #william moseley #anna popplewell

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awfullybigwardrobe44 · 5 years

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Little Prince Caspian (movie) things

Here is my stream of consciousness from rewatching Prince Caspian. IDK if anyone will take the time to read through this lol but here it issss

-Queen Prunarismia, upon delivering and being handed her newborn baby, immediately checks with eagerness (and anxiety?) to see if it’s a boy.

-Susan sits by herself at school. She prefers to be left alone.

-the look of fear on Lucy’s face, and disappointment in Susan ‘s, when Peter is fighting.

-Peter’s desperate look at them when he sees them and realizes they must be disappointed.

-“Act your age” -Security guard to Peter

-it’s weird for me because Ed and Lu changed so much between movies. Ed’s voice obviously got deeper, but Lucy’s did too. She seems SO much older.

-Lucy falling in the water on the beach was probably Georgie falling in real life let’s be honest

-the Cair ruins are SO PRETTY.

-Pevensies running barefoot through the castle ruins

-OK BUT MIRAZ’S BABY IS REALLY CUTE

-I loooooove the Spanish accents.

-“Abducted....... by NARNIANS.”

-the Telmarines calling Narnians “fairy tales” ohhhhhh the irony

-Ok but? Peter does this thing with his head when he’s looking at his statue in the treasure room? He almost shakes his head? As if to say “I can’t believe that was me” or “why am I not like that now”???

-Ed turning away to laugh when Peter includes “The Magnificent”

-Ed’s smile when Peter tells the DLF that Ed will fight him

-the little embroideries on Caspian’s night shirt :)

-parallel between Badger believing Caspian is going to save them and Beaver believing the Pevensies were going to save them

-Pevensies in the history textbooks

-Abcient professor, having studied the Pevensies his whole life, suddenly has an arrow from QUEEN SUSAN in his OFFICE??? (Miraz stabs it in his book)

-his smile. The look in his eyes. The HOPE. The TRIUMPH. The SMIRK.

-that shot. The one looking up into the sky from the water. With the sun and the boat. And the music.

-I love how Lucy and Susan’s hair get frizzy when they’re on the water in the boat. Like? Same. Yet they still look like angels

-Lucy just wants to talk to the friendly Bear!!!

-Peter brandishing his sword and hugging Lucy with the other arm

-the way the Narnian theme turns minor as it shows the steep cliff drop off

-Lucy’s smile when she sees Aslan.

-Lucy trying not to cry after seeing Aslan and Edmund looking all compassionate

-the little lights in the trees during the council meeting in the woods with Caspian

-I REALLY LOVE CASPIAN’S ACCENT WHY DIDNT THEY KEEP IT

-How did no one see the Pevensies hidden behind the log? Susan’s red arrows stick out like a sore thumb

-Parallel between trebuchets at Beruna and the leftover ones at Cair that Ed notices

-The gorge is so prettyyyyyy

-Susan and Lucy’s late night girl-talk about Aslan. I love it. Susan deferring to Lucy as the expert on Aslan...

-The way Lucy’s little head whips around when she hear’s Aslan’s growl

-I have always loved the parallel between Lucy’s expression in LWW when she sees the Dryad and when she sees one in PC- same expression of wonder

-The way the whole dream scene happens in semi-slow motion- exactly like a dream

-”Dear one.”

-”Certainly Lu. Whatever you like.” -direct book quote

-One of the fauns looks like Martin Freeman and it’s throwing me off

-Why did they feel they needed to make Peter angry and prideful... the looks he and Caspian exchange... why can’t my smols just play nice

-Caspian and Peter walking ahead and talking strategy

-Lucy walking with Reep

-BABY CENTAUR alskd;jf;klsjdkl cute

-in that famous scene where the Pevensies walk forward and Caspian stays behind during the centaur salute- Peter and Susan step forward first, then Edmund and Lucy

-UMMMMM?????? I think Susan is crying when they see the Stone Table in the How????????? Feels?????

-When they see the Stone Table I love that it’s Susan and Lucy in the center, staring at it just as they did so many years ago when Aslan rose again...

-Caspian’s look of dejection when he realizes that Peter is High King and he has to call the shots (I still hate that he and Peter’s relationship is like that but good acting on Ben’s part)

-When Peter asks Glenstorm for help, Glenstorm shares a look with Caspian.

-Edmund getting dropped at the castle first... because he has a torch!

-Parallel between Pevensies flying in by gryffin and WWII bombers...

-the muted trumpet/bugle theme for Reep and his mice!

-Susan taking Caspian’s side against Peter when Caspian wants to go find his professor <3

-when the guard accidentally turns the torch on and it shines in his face. Same, dude. Same.

-Edmund canonically calls Peter “Pete.”

-Oh. my. goodness. “Exactly WHO are you doing this for, Peter?” when in the first movie, it was “For Narnia, and for Aslan.” Really shows the error he’s made. He really has given up hope on Aslan. (Again, not saying that I like this change to his character AT ALL but this was a cool way to show it if they HAD to go in that direction...)

-THEN he says “For Narnia.” (but not for Aslan...)

-The Minotaur holding up the gate :’(

-The smile in Edmund’s eyes before he falls backward onto the gryffin

-Peter crying as he see’s what he’s done with the Narnians getting trapped and Susan crying too I can’t

-Lucy. Sitting on the stone table, all alone. While the others are fighting. Holding her healing cordial, wishing she could be there helping. And the significance of her being “near” Aslan when she’s lonely and sad waiting for the others to get back.

-When the Telmarine lords are pledging their troops to Miraz as he’s getting crowned one of them says “Etinsmoor” which sounds a lot like the castle from Hamlet I think??? lol.

-Miraz’s sick cape flip as he walks up to the throne

-parallel between the Stone Table music from LWW and the summoning of the witch music in PC

-ok the Hag is seriously creepy

-The witch’s ice and the witch herself appear in the big archway where Aslan appeared in LWW. Nice parallel. Like she’s coming between them and Aslan...

-You can see Caspian’s breath when the ice appears

-Lucy using her dagger and being ruthless

-The witch telling Peter he “can’t do this alone” YEAH BUD YOU CAN’T WHICH IS WHY YOU NEED ASLAN NOT HER???

-Edmund breaking the ice. Yeaaaaaah buddy character development

-The shot of the Aslan statue in the background

-Susan’s look of disappointment at Peter and Caspian

-After all this time I think Caspian is still wearing his nightshirt....

-Is... Is Peter looking up at the Aslan statue with tears in his eyes?

-Parallel between Lucy’s “Susan! you’d better come quickly!” and Edmund’s “Pete... you’d better come quickly.”

-UMM Miraz is riding a WHITE HORSE and the horse’s HELMET HAS A UNICORN HORN UMM IS HE TRYING TO BE PETER

-I’m sorry but Edmund walking towards the Telmarine camp carrying a plant as a peace offering

-Susan is NOT impressed with Caspian’s behavior. Giving him the cold shoulder.

-Susan. Facing the Telmarines. Alone. The director said they had horsemen ride at Anna full-force and she never flinched.

-Susan’s little smile as she swings up onto the horse with Caspian.... (I’m not a hardcore Suspian shipper but awww)

-Edmund resetting Peter’s arm

-Caspian. with tears in his eyes as he chooses not to kill.

-Miraz dies with Susan’s arrow stuck in him- like the arrow he took to the Professor’s office earlier- “superstitions”

-This time during battle it’s the Telmarines dropping rocks and not the Narnians like in LWW

-I can’t ever watch Susan pull an arrow out of her quiver without thinking of that blooper lol

-Edmund with a crossbow yeeeeaaahhh

-Peter says “Lucy” and Susan reads his lips from that far off and shakes her head

-and THEN when the trees come in, Peter’s cry is FINALLY “For Aslan!”

-Lucy pulls out her dagger and then makes this EXPRESSION like COME AT ME Y’ALL

-Aslan and Lucy just look at each other

-the symbolism between the Telmarines trying to control the Narnians or deny their existence and their building the bridge across the river- and then Aslan unleashes the RIVER DUDE and Narnia fights back

-Meeting Aslan, Susan looks afraid to meet his eyes

-The little bit of a growl/sternness in Aslan’s voice when he’s talking to Reep who is being a touch prideful

-When Reep is giving all the reasons he needs a tail, Lucy looks to Aslan and smiles and Aslan looks to Lucy and smiles. All these looks really show that thing the book says that “Lucy understands some of his moods” or something- she knows him best

-”Where is this dear little friend you’ve told me so much about”- Did Lucy tell Aslan about him on the way to Beruna?

-Lucy still has waves in her hair in the parade scene and I’ve always wondered why but maybe it’s still from her braids from the beginning of her movie?

-Fireworks at the castle again- for a very different reason

-The look between Aslan and Susan.

-I think you can hear Aslan say “world” to Susan and Peter- like “your world”?

-Susan’s shy little smile as she looks back to her family after KISSING CASPIAN

-maybe i’m just imagining it but I’ve always thought that Aslan was mouthing “bye” to Lucy at the very end when she looks back to him

-I LOVE that they show the transition from Narnia to the platform from Lucy’s perspective.

#narnia #the chronicles of narnia #cs lewis #prince caspian #narnia rewatch

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