#narnia rant

The best (and I use that word gingerly) portrayal of a (pseudo-)atheist in The Chronicles of Narnia is Trumpkin. Now, I loved Trumpkin as a child and I still like him now – he’s a good character, a stand-up guy, and just ornery enough to be great fun. He’s also clearly supposed to be one of the good guys, which is why it’s so mystifying to me in retrospect how he gets absolutely chewed on by the narrative.

Like, Trumpkin’s position at the beginning of Prince Caspian is basically cheerful pessimism – the Horn doesn’t work, Aslan probably doesn’t exist or he’s dead, and we’re probably all screwed – and yet he’s willing to fight anyway, even to go all the way down to the ruins of Cair Paravel, just on the off-chance he’s wrong, instead of sending an over-excitable squirrel who would just get lost. (Which would make him more of a doubtful agnostic than an atheist, but let’s be real: the sort of Christians who create condescending and insulting atheist allegory characters do not care about those distinctions.) Not only that, but Trumpkin is able and willing to admit that he’s wrong when he’s proven to be. He’s pretty gracious about it, too – when Susan beats him at archery, she goes, ‘Oh, no, your shot was as good as mine, there was just a wind’ and he says, ‘No, you beat me fair and square and we both know it, good shooting’.

So the way that he gets slammed, again and again, by the narrative, for doubting, for wondering, for simple ignorance – not wilful ignorance, but ignorance of things he couldn’t possibly know – is unpleasant and disconcerting. Like, the Pevensies have met Aslan. Trumpkin hasn’t. Aslan hasn’t been in Narnia for hundreds of years, the asshole. It is very reasonable for Trumpkin to wonder if he wasn’t just an ordinary, if impressive, talking lion who died. It is perfectly understandable for him to suggest that maybe Aslan’s gone wild and that’s why he hasn’t shown up (and it is, in my opinion, a far more charitable theory than the truth – that he just couldn’t be arsed to step in, or even encourage them). I understand why something like that would be laughable at best to the Pevensies, but the narration spells it out like he’s committed blasphemy. And then, when Aslan finally does show up, he deliberately terrorizes Trumpkin. FOR A JOKE. He growls at him, and grabs him by the shirt with his teeth, and throws him in the air – for… being wrong. And this is supposed to be funny. We’re supposed to think it’s funny.

First of all, it’s not, and Aslan is horrible for doing that (you see what I mean about C.S. Lewis having Aslan do things that he personally thinks are right and then saying, ‘Well, it must be right, because Jesus is doing it’).

But also, now that I’m older, I’ve seen this trope elsewhere. I’ve seen it in arguments. I’ve seen it in TVTropes examples and descriptions for things like Left Behind or Touched By An Angel. I’ve seen it in tone-deaf Christian fiction. I’ve seen it in Chick Tracts. (That should tell you plenty.)

I know all about the arrogant atheist, who is convinced he (usually he) knows everything but is wrongwrongwrong. Not just about Aslan Jesus, but about everything even remotely and tangentially related to religion, like whether children could possibly be the kings and queens how to prioritize your life or whatnot. And said atheist is proved wrong, again and again outshot by Susan and outfought by Edmund, but stubbornly keeps insisting that those things don’t mean he’s wrong about God even though they typically have no relation to religion like how there’s no reason Edmund’s fighting skill, or even the Horn’s magic, since it was a gift from Father Christmas and not Aslan, would necessarily mean Aslan was real/alive/still able to talk or coming, even if all those things were true. And then at the end there’s a miracle, or a direct intervention from God, and the arrogant atheist sees the error of his ways, and begs forgiveness, and believes, and is humbled, and then is magnanimously forgiven and accepted into the fold, and can you maybe understand why this trope makes me angry?????

I’m serious, though, from the time he leaves Aslan’s Howe Trumpkin is not allowed to be right about anything. Even things he would realistically be right about, like what route to take in a country he knows better than the others in this century, he’s made wrong about by a coincidence or bad luck or anything, basically. And this is frequently presented as him being arrogant even when it’s perfectly reasonable. Like, you showed up looking for four powerful rulers and got schoolkids instead? God forbid you express dismay, or suggest the fourteen-year-old in front of you isn’t a match for the king’s highly trained army!

And the fact that being deliberately terrorized by Aslan is supposed to be fitting, is supposed to be a deserved punishment for the heinous crime of doubting Aslan (not denying him, not mocking him, not even being unwilling to plan for the possibility he’ll show up, simply thinking it was possible he wouldn’t and that their plans should reflect that as well), that it’s supposed to be playful, that makes me furious. TRUMPKIN WAS GOOD, HE WAS KIND, HE WAS BRAVE, AND HE DESERVED BETTER. HE ADMITTED IT WHEN HE WAS WRONG AND HE FORGAVE PEOPLE FOR WRONGING HIM AND HIS ONLY CRIME WAS BEING PRAGMATIC AND OUTSPOKEN.

And you know what, Clive?

JESUS WOULD NEVER HAVE DONE THAT TO HIM.

Not the real Jesus. Whether you think real Jesus was a Jewish rabbi or the actual son of God – he wouldn’t have done that. And I mean – as an atheist, I try to stay away from things like ‘Jesus wouldn’t have done X’, just out of respect, but you know what, Clive? You made me do it.

Being wrong, being mistaken, or being atheist – none of them, separately or all together, merit that kind of treatment, not from anyone, not Aslan or Jesus or God, no one. So yes, I’m furious on Trumpkin’s behalf, but also on my own, because as much as I really believe that C.S. Lewis didn’t realize just how justified he made Trumpkin in a lot of ways – well, actually, no. Because of how clear it is that he didn’t realize that, because it’s clear that Trumpkin was supposed to be ornery and stubborn and arrogant and unjustified in his opinions, it’s also clear what he thinks of mine, what he thinks of me. At best I’m Trumpkin – not just Trumpkin, but what he intended Trumpkin to be: a stubborn, arrogant, unjustified strawman, who must be proven wrong and only then can be redeemed through humiliation.

Well, guess what, Clive? Fuck you.

Okay. Now we move on to the dwarfs. Well, Trumpkin’s a dwarf, but you know who I mean. The dwarfs.

The stubborn, arrogant, unredeemable dwarfs. The dwarfs who are for the dwarfs. The dwarfs who are so stubbornly, blindly convinced of their own superiority that token Good Dwarf Poggin has to sneak away from them to join the heroes. The dwarfs who are for the dwarfs. The dwarfs who stubbornly scorn every clear proof of magic they see as a ridiculous contrivance. The dwarfs who are for the dwarfs. The dwarfs who treat the battle between good and evil as entertainment.

The dwarfs who are for the dwarfs.

The dwarfs who are for no one else but themselves. The dwarfs who murder eighty sentient beings out of spite. The dwarfs who sit blindly in the dark despite the light around them. The dwarfs who would rather spend the rest of their lives cramped and damp and cold and starving than admit to seeing the beauty around them. The dwarfs who see right through the malicious hoax and yet still won’t join forces to end it. The dwarfs who are content to sit around praising themselves for not being taken in instead of taking action. The dwarfs who act however they see fit, with no moral compass whatsoever.

The dwarfs who are so pleased with their intellectual superiority that they can’t see that they’ve been taken in by themselves.

Yes, Clive, you’ve made your point very clear indeed. Very, very clear, to the teenage girl who loved your world, until you threw her out of it. Very, very clear to everyone like her. Very, very clear indeed, to her now, only now it hurts a little less, because she can see that you are, in fact, not even very good at what you do, and while that’s not relevant it is satisfying to know that the person who spent all that rhetoric on crushing her isn’t even a good writer. It hurts less, too, because she’s older now and has the skills necessary to eviscerate you, to decry what you tried to do and announce all the ways that if failed, and it hurts less because she knows now, oh, do I know now, that everything I ever loved that you made, everything good you ever made you made by accident.

(You want me to be nicer? Maybe when my eyes stop hurting from trying not to cry.)

I talked about the dwarfs in The Last Battle already in my disillusionment story, so I’m done with them here. Moving on.

It hurt, obviously, to grow up with those books and that world and then to grow up and realize that I was… that. But if it hurt, to realize that, I cannot begin to imagine what it must be like to be Muslim (or Hindu or even just Middle Eastern or non-white) and go through that same thing. And not just because it’s so much worse, but because the insulting and offensive parallels are much clearer and therefor accessible to much younger children.

My knowledge of Islam is not nearly as extensive as my (patchy) knowledge of Christianity, but what I said before is true: I don’t really need to know a lot about Islam here. All I need to know about Islam to see how offensive these books are is on this list:

1. Muslims don’t worship the devil.

WOW, ISN’T THAT A REALLY SHORT FUCKING LIST!! HOW DID YOU MANAGE TO FUCK UP SO FUCKING MUCH, CLIVE?? HUH?

I mean, the presentation of Tash is… it’s like he couldn’t decide what he wanted to do, so he covered all his bases and offended everybody. Tash is clearly set up, at least in The Last Battle, as Aslan’s opposite, or his nemesis, or both, which makes him, say it with me, SATAN.

But Tash is also the patron God of Calormen, worshipped by Calormenes, which means that Lewis’s pseudo-Arabic/pseudo-Islamic culture worships the fucking devil. Like, the capital city of Calormen is named Tashbaan, okay, this is not something you can wiggle out of, Clive.

And honestly, I could stop there. That’s more than damning enough. But there’s so much more, and I’m going to dig up every single bit of it I can reach, because somebody fucking has to. The thing is, Tash isn’t, say, a serpent (that would be the Lady of the Green Kirtle – how many freaking Satan metaphors are you going to have, Clive? That’s three! Stick to one!), or even some traditional enemy of a lion like a serpent like a… I don’t know, a jackal or something (bonus points for scavenger imagery). Oh, no. He’s a terrifying Babylonian-esque bird-headed thing with extra arms, because it wasn’t enough to mush the entire Middle East into one giant confused stereotype and just pick out the bits you thought were cool, or scary, or anti-Christian, or decadent enough, no, you had to throw in a shout-out to Kali just to get in a dig at Hinduism too.

To make matters worse, worshippers of Tash do give him human sacrifices. COULD YOU SLAM THE STEREOTYPICAL DEVIL WORSHIP EVEN HARDER, CLIVE? HAVE YOU TRIED? I DON’T THINK YOU’VE TRIED!!

(And even then, it’s not consistent. Aravis says she planned her suicide attempt by telling her father she was going to make sacrifices (non-human, presumably) to “Zardeenah, lady of the night and of maidens” who is… a goddess, because this is also paganism? Except for how every other time religion is mentioned, Tash is treated like the sole deity of Calormen. So maybe she’s a saint? But there aren’t saints in that world at all, and there aren’t saints in Islam anyway, I’m pretty sure. [ETA: This was incorrect! Mea culpa. However, Lewis’s fake Tashligion doesn’t really make sense as one which incorporates saints, tbh, so the basic point still stands.] Besides, it’s not consistent with Calormen culture for Tash to have saints. Somehow, the fact that he wasn’t even trying just makes the whole thing more insulting.)

I mean, the parallels are clear. The speech in Calormen in The Horse And His Boy is obviously modelled after the stylistically formal speech in Arabian Nights – while I’m sure Lewis didn’t read the same translation I did, there are enough similarities that it’s definitely not an accident. Even people like Arsheesh, a poor fisherman who’s been poor all his life and almost certainly never had any need for formalities like that (not to mention almost certainly being poorly educated), speaks the same way. Meanwhile, Shasta, who grew up in Calormen, lived there his whole life, thought he was Calormene, and believed himself to be Arsheesh’s son, has no discernable Calormen-isms in his speech with the exception of saying ‘may he live forever’ when he talks about the Tisroc. This makes no sense from an in-universe perspective, but it makes perfect sense if you remember that Shasta is Narnian, which is to say white and Christian, and therefore he simply doesn’t pick up all those oily, unnecessarily formal Muslim brown Calormene ways of speaking, because otherwise the audience might not know that he’s naturally righteous.

*shivers* UGH. I think I need a shower.

And it’s clearly shown that Calormene society is more decadent than Narnian/Arkenland society, and that this is a bad thing. There’s the description of the Tisroc’s palace, the way the marketplace is portrayed (with spices and so on), the litters that all the nobles ride on (blatantly contrasted with the Narnian Lords, who are walking, like decent, civilized, Christian non-decadent people), and particularly the portrayal of Lasaraleen.

Now, I won’t get into too much detail, since Lasaraleen’s treatment comes with a pretty heavy helping of misogyny, and I need to dissect that too, but she’s clearly played up as an example of high-class Calormene life – married (to… someone, who’s never around), surrounded by luxury (exotic luxury – silks and divans and a pet monkey), living a glittering, superficial life at the Tisroc’s court… not like how nobles live in Narnia and Arkenland. They do manly things like hunting, and useful things like governing, and they fight when needed, and they never arrange marriages like in Calormen…

Calormen, where women wear veils. Calormen, where women are forced into marriages. Calormen, where people have dark skin, and are frequently described as looking ‘cruel’, not of expression, but of features. Calormen, where they have slaves. Calormen, with its desert. Calormen, with countless evil, antagonistic, greedy, or downright Satanic people, and exactly two who are pretty decent. Calormen, where institutionalized brutality is shown multiple times to be the general order of business.

Not to mention the disgusting way Rabadash goes after Susan, and the way it’s racialized; overbearing, arrogant brown man wants to possess beautiful pure white woman who swoons in disgust and horror and must be rescued by strong white men… The Tisroc’s cold, pragmatic Lawful Evil outlook feels like a similarly unfortunate trope, but I can’t put my finger on it; I just feel like I’ve seen it before.

And the thing is, you don’t even have to be Muslim to be hurt or offended by this – I’ve pointed out that C.S. Lewis just grabbed bits and pieces from any culture that seemed ‘other’ enough, so he’s casting a pretty wide net at, at the very least, the Middle East, India, Egypt, and anyone who’s Muslim or Hindu – oh, yes, and if you’re one of the latter, you’re not just cruel, decadent savages – you also worship the fucking devil.

I’m going to pause here for a minute and do a comparison, again, with another, much better, famous fantasy author of the same period. Now, Tolkien’s not exactly blameless in his treatment of non-white, non-Christian people, but even leaving aside the Silmarillion (which includes at least two canonically non-white protagonist cultures), the way the subject of the ‘mysterious semi-antagonistic Middle East surrogate culture’ is handled in Lord of the Rings is far more palatable than Chronicles of Narnia. This is because:

-Tolkien didn’t make the non-white cultures monolithic. At the very least we have Rhun, Harad, and Far Harad, not to mention Umbar and Khand, which are in a different direction and have an entirely different culture, probably pseudo-Asia to Rhun etc.’s pseudo-Africa.

-Tolkien borrowed from non-white real life cultures to influence the cultures of his protagonists, not just his antagonists. (Numenor and Gondor, notably)

-Tolkien makes it clear that some if not all of these people who are antagonists have been tricked, forced, or otherwise coerced into serving evil.

-Tolkien didn’t have them worshipping said evil. (In fact, the only culture in Tolkien’s world that ever worshipped his devil analogue was protagonist-aligned, white-coded Numenor.)

-Tolkien used words in his own language or in English for the countries in question and for things like Oliphaunts, instead of making up words that sort of sounded stereotypically Muslim or Arabic, like Lewis did.

-Tolkien doesn’t use those cultures as primary antagonists, or even as primary mooks, and

-We don’t see many details of those cultures, which means that they aren’t bastardized and stereotyped like Calormen was (although they may not have been anyway, we can’t really say how he would have handled that)

Like, there’s still a lot of room for improvement, but the difference to me comes down to two things:

1 - Tolkien was developing a world. Lewis was shoehorning in parallels to ours.

2 - As far as respect, inoffensiveness, etc., goes, whatever his flaws, Tolkien tried. Lewis didn’t bother.

But as much as that sucks –and it sucks, and it’s inexcusable, nothing sets my teeth on edge more than C.S. Lewis’s one attempt at being conciliatory.

You know, the bit in The Last Battle where he says that well-intentioned Muslims actually are just worshipping Jesus but don’t know it, and also conveniently disowns every bad thing done by a Christian in the name of God ever.

Because when Emeth, after meeting Aslan, apologizes for all his time believing in and serving Tash (and doesn’t that just make you cringe, when he’s a pseudo-Muslim talking to actually-canon-at-this-point!Jesus), Aslan literally says that if you serve Tash with a good heart, you’re actually serving him, and you serve Aslan with a bad heart, you’re serving Tash.

So it’s okay, because Emeth has been serving Aslan his whole life, he just didn’t know it!

If that isn’t the most cloyingly patronizing, paternalistic thing you’ve ever heard I don’t know what to say to you.

I mean, let’s dissect it.

-good Muslims (and Hindus, and Jews, and Zoroastrians, and Buddhists, and pagans, ad nauseum) are just misguided! But their good acts are still inspired by Jesus. (*gag*)

-no non-Christian religion could ever inspire good works, or worthy acts, or admirable feelings! No, it doesn’t count, because it’s actually God doing it – our God, the right one (*gag again*)

-conversely, Christianity isn’t answerable for any of the bad things that might be done because of it! The Crusades? That was the Devil, it wasn’t for God. The Westboro Baptist Church? It’s the Devil, they don’t serve the real God. Someone bombed an abortion clinic and killed a bunch of people, while yelling things about Jesus? Jesus had nothing to do with it, it was the Devil’s work. This one is especially infuriating because people say this kind of thing in real life all the time, usually as an excuse to not take responsibility for their rhetoric. Real Christians don’t do that, blah blah. It’s some sort of hybrid No True Scotsman thing.

-and it makes things really convenient for Lewis, doesn’t it, since all the good Calormenes will have been serving Aslan unknowingly, and so they’ll get to go heaven Aslan’s country, and there won’t be any hard questions about good people being locked out. (I do know that not all Christian traditions, and not all individuals within those traditions, hold that you have to believe in God to get into heaven if you’re already a good person – but I am already at negative slack with this guy, and that’s about what I’m willing to cut him.)

-IT’S SO PATRONIZING AND PATERNALISTIC AND DISRESPECTFUL!!!

It’s probably possible to write a good Christian allegorical fantasy, although I don’t know that I’d enjoy it. It’s definitely possible to write a good Christian-themed fantasy, or Christian-influenced fantasy, or just a plain old Christian fantasy, and I probably would enjoy it. (I’ve certainly enjoyed Christian fiction, even sometimes when it was objectively rather badly written.) The Chronicles of Narnia, even purely from a writing perspective, is not any of those.

I think part of the problem is that C.S. Lewis is recycling parts of his beliefs wholesale into the story without critically examining them. And while no one is obligated to turn the Literary Criticism Lens on their religion (… that would probably be weird, actually), when you’re turning it into literature, it has to make sense as literature and not just as allegory.

(And to be honest? I kind of resent C.S. Lewis for putting me in a position where it’s difficult to criticize his writing without also seeming to be criticizing his religion. I mean, in fairness that probably wasn’t a deliberate attempt to fend off criticism, but I don’t really feel like being fair. For the record, all vitriol and ‘this doesn’t make sense’ is directed straight at Narnia and not at Christianity, etc., etc.)

It’s not my problem, or, really, my business, how one particular person/group explains or understands something about their religion that doesn’t make sense to me. I might have opinions on how much sense something does or doesn’t make, but I keep it to myself unless they’re interested in a friendly debate or an atheist’s perspective, and criticizing someone’s religion, unless it is actively oppressing you, is really shitty.

Books are different. (No points for the smartass who says, ‘The Bible’s a book!’) Novels demand justification for things. They demand consistent logic. They demand that the author look critically at the plot and the rules of the universe. And if they don’t have these things, then they can and probably should be torn the hell apart.

Actual scenario: I am eight. I’m fairly familiar with the Chronicles of Narnia, not yet particularly invested in my atheism (because I’m eight), and, oh yes, have no idea about any of the allegory. I like the books, but I always get annoyed during The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe because ‘but if Aslan knew about the Deeper Magic, then he wasn’t really a willing victim being killed in a traitor’s stead, so he shouldn’t have come back, because it doesn’t count if he knew so the Deeper Magic shouldn’t have worked!’

Well, now I know that Aslan is Jesus, but you know what? All that is still true. All of that still bothers me. All of that still yanks me out of the story for the entire climax of the book, which sucks, by the way, because that part is kind of awesome. When it’s removed from the context of Christianity, Jesus’s sacrifice and resurrection loses a certain amount of justification, and C.S. Lewis’s half-assed attempt at re-justifying it is just that – half-assed. Besides, Christianity can get away with stuff like that, because

-there’s a certain amount of mysticism in religion that makes perfect sense there but immediately becomes handwaving if used in fiction outside the context of an in-universe religion

-Christianity contradicts itself a lot. Some people find a way to reconcile this, some people ignore the parts they don’t like, some people decide that it’s a mystery of God, and some people can’t reconcile it and don’t believe. This is fine in a religion. It does not work in a novel because it is not the reader’s job to reconcile contradictions, but the author’s; it is not the reader’s job to throw out half the novel so they can make sense of it, but the author’s to make sense of it for them; a ‘mystery of God’ in a novel translates to the author pulling a deus ex machina; and if the readers walk away from a novel because they can’t believe it, you have failed as an author.

-Partly due to the above and partly due to people being people, there are a lot of different versions of Christianity, differing about things like who can get married; whether God has a representative on Earth; who’s getting into Heaven; what language the Bible should be in, which translation thereof is correct, and what books should be in it… This doesn’t work for a novel. There is (generally speaking) only one version of it, and anyway, if you have to rewrite it for every different group who might read it, that is a huge failure as an author. If a work is only accessible to people with the exact same religious background (or any background) as its author, that is an epic fail.

The most direct allegory, and the one I’m going to tackle head-on, is clearly when Aslan (Jesus) sacrifices himself for Edmund (humanity) and then is humiliated and killed by Jadis (Pontius Pilate I guess) and resurrected by dint of the Deeper Magics and possibly the Emperor over the Sea (God).

This is dumb for several reasons.

1. Jadis was already The Serpent in the not!Garden of Eden in The Magician’s Nephew. It seems sloppy to give her two utterly unrelated parts like that, especially when everything else is so painfully on the nose. (Yes, TMN was written after TLTWTW, but I didn’t make C.S. Lewis write a prequel. It’s sloppy in either direction.)

2. C.S. Lewis seems to be trying so hard to get the surface details right (sacrifice, humiliation, resurrection, JESUS) that the actual messages are… scrambled. Here is where I have to lean on my tentative theology, so please jump in and correct me if I’m wrong, but… Jesus died for all humans. All humanity. For our sins. Aslan died for one preteen boy who fucked up. Like… ???? Isn’t that kind of… not it, really? (Also, since Edmund is from our world… and Jesus died for everyone’s sins … doesn’t that mean that Aslan has already died for Edmund? I mean, it doesn’t necessarily invalidate the second sacrifice the way the poor execution of the Deep Magics does but it’s just bizarre when you think about it.)

3. Why does Jadis get traitors? Why is she even written into the Deep Magic? She’s not from Narnia, and she’s not a magical spirit being of the world like Aslan – she’s a sorceress-queen from freaking Charn who stumbled into the world when it was starting. Why would she be written into the Deep Magic? It’s clearly her and not just evil beings in general, because the Deep Magic is never mentioned again in the next five books which fall chronologically after this, nor in The Magician’s Nephew which comes before but was written later and which, oh yes, is directly concerned with the creation of the world which is when the Deep(er) Magic(s) were set. And Aslan doesn’t talk about them like he set them himself, which means it’s incredibly likely they were made by the Emperor Over the Sea… you know, God. So why would God put in a Jadis-gets-the-traitors clause on the world? Is she supposed to be Satan? Because she’s kind of Satan-esque in a lot of ways, but dammit, Clive, make up your mind, is she the Serpent or Satan or Pilate? Not to mention that all the direct religious figures, like Aslan and his father, aren’t tethered to or of one particular world, and Jadis is, so it doesn’t make sense for her to be Satan or the Serpent (yes, I know they’re sometimes considered to be one and the same) since she’s just a sorceress-queen from Charn with a corporeal body and human(ish) parents and a sister. And the final nail in the coffin of Jadis-as-Satan – C.S. Lewis wrote a literal Satan into later books. Tash makes a direct freaking appearance in the last book, damn it!

4. Why is Aslan so terribly depressed on the walk up to Jadis’s camp with Lucy and Susan when he knows he’s not going to stay dead? It’s not even a show he’s putting on for them; they can tell he’s depressed way before they actually meet him. Like, he hasn’t been personally betrayed (like Jesus was), he knows he’s coming back, and Edmund has mostly learned his lesson by this point, so what is there to be sad about? Does he know they’re going to shave his mane? Well, it doesn’t really matter, because he also knows it’s going to grow back when he comes back to life.

5. Why does his sacrifice count when he knew he’d be resurrected???? It shouldn’t freaking count. It has to be a ‘willing victim’ being killed ‘in the traitor’s stead’. Aslan was never a victim willing to be killed instead of Edmund, because he knew he wasn’t going to really die.

6. No one who doesn’t know he’s coming back (aka everyone) calls Aslan out on the fact that leaving them and dying for Edmund? Is actually a really shitty thing to do. Yeah, he gets resurrected – but nobody knows that’s going to happen. As far as they know, literally their only hope just went and got himself killed, and how are the Sons and Daughters of Adam and Eve going to get to Cair Paravel to fulfil the prophecy without Aslan to protect them from Jadis. She can just swoop in and kill everyone now, which means, wait for it, Edmund will die anyway. Yes, it would be terrible to just sit around and wait for Jadis to murder a ten-year-old boy (or however old he was. Ten-twelvish.). But the call Aslan made was only acceptable because he got brought back. No one else knew that would happen, so they should have been angry. But not one person points that out. No one mentions that they’ll all get slaughtered (which they almost do, until he shows up with Lucy and Susan and all the unpetrifieds for back-up). No one suggests he’s being selfish, or short-sighted. I mean, yes, these people basically worship Aslan, but it’s not like no one ever criticizes him. The freaking plot of The Last Battle is based on Narnians criticizing Aslan, even if they’re wrong. URG. Lewis has a seriously bad case of protagonist-centered morality. Or, well, let’s be honest, Jesus-centered morality. The only problem is that Aslan isn’t real-life Jesus – he’s Jesus as interpreted by C.S. Lewis, which means that he is subject to criticism in a way that Jesus usually shouldn’t be, both in- and out- of universe.

So there’s that.

Ultimately, it weakens the story, instead of making it more powerful, which is probably the ultimate failure of a theme, let alone an entire allegory.

And here’s the thing – it’s an easy fix from a story perspective, if not an allegorical one.

Weaker option, still better than canon: Aslan doesn’t know about the Deeper Magic, so the Emperor tells him when he’s sending him back. Keeps the allegory (and the problem of ‘sending your only hope to die is a bad call’), but doesn’t break the entire logic of the universe.

Better option: Peter sacrifices himself for his brother, Aslan lets him (because he knows about the Deeper Magic), at cost to his own reputation/the army’s faith in him. When Peter returns to life, Aslan takes him (and maybe Susan and Lucy if they stuck around) to wake the statues and rescue the army. (Or, alter the Deeper Magic just slightly and have Edmund sacrifice himself in atonement.)

Anyway, on to the more general themes – here are some Aslan problems:

-he’s a Gary Stu. It makes me really uncomfortable, calling Lion Jesus a Gary Stu, but this doesn’t apply to real Jesus, I swear. Aslan is always right. I don’t mean because he’s Narnia Jesus, or because he’s usually factually right or usually morally right, but that disagreeing with him is always bad, even if you’ve got a good reason. Like I pointed out, no one calls him out on (what should seem to them) the utter illogic and selfishness of trading himself for Edmund. Not believing Lucy (not even Aslan, but Lucy) when she said she saw him for one second and just ~knows~ that means they should go down a dangerous cliff where there are no signs of a path instead of a route that appears to be much safer is wrong in this universe. Susan convincing herself she didn’t see Aslan because she didn’t want to die falling off a cliff is presented as a horrible sin instead of a momentary error in judgement. I mean, the scene where Edmund supports Lucy because he didn’t believe her and then lied about seeing Narnia in TLTWTW and learned from it and wants to make up for it is heartwarming, it really is, but it doesn’t justify all that… mediocre weak milk of a moralistic subplot. It is universally condemnable to disagree with Aslan, even if you obey him anyway, or even if it looks like he wants you to walk off a cliff. People are condemned by the narrative for being annoyed with Aslan, even if they have cause. At best, the narrative treats them condescendingly, like Trumpkin. At worst, they get shit on like Susan did. And that’s if they’re protagonists. The villains who criticize him are evil, greedy, utterly unlikeable, and always have an agenda to do so. Look at Shift and Ginger. No one ever criticizes him for real reasons. No one ever criticizes him for utterly delusional reasons that they nevertheless believe. They only ever do it as a complete lie to manipulate people. When they do make a valid point (like Shift saying he’s been gone for hundreds of years and why would he vanish like that if he cares about them) it’s clearly completely an accident on C.S. Lewis’s part.

-his symbolism is way too on-the-nose. In The Voyage of The Dawn Treader, he shows up as an albatross. Really? An albatross? Also, I really hated that poem, so you are not winning points with me, Clive. And then, at the end, they meet him as a lamb, before he turns back into his true self as a lion. The lamb turned into the lion. Groan. Aside from the fact that that’s actually basically the plot of Breaking Dawn… *ba dum tish* Anyway, as a kid I just thought both those things were weird (and I couldn’t figure out what the albatross was supposed to mean, let alone be), but as an adult? It’s like one of my dad’s bad jokes, except the point is Christian symbolism instead of humour. I don’t… what am I supposed to do with that, C.S. Lewis?

-Aslan expects way too much of children. I’ll get into this later because it’s probably more C.S. Lewis’s fault than Aslan’s, but oh my God. There’s a very effective and very moving quote from Criminal Minds that I’ve debated about putting in – I wasn’t sure it would be appropriate, but it's been going around in my head ever since I started writing this rant.“Your God expects way too much of thirteen-year-old boys.” The delivery is… everything I wish I could slam in Lewis’s face. Because it's true of him as well. (I also like that quote because it differentiates between the God of a specific religion and that God as interpreted by an individual, which is what I am trying to do here. He's not exactly making it easy for me, Jesus.) 

-a lot of it boils down to this: C.S. Lewis wrote a Jesus Expy into his books, but he was not Jesus himself, nor did he have Jesus as a consultant on his books, and therefore his Jesus Expy behaves not in ways that Actual Potential Real Life Jesus would have, nor ways that Actual Christianity Jesus would have, nor even in ways that are universally moral, but in ways the C.S. Lewis perceives to be moral or saintly, and this is a problem, because those actions are portrayed as the actions of Actual Christianity Jesus, and as universally moral, and, pardon my language, THEY ARE FUCKING NOT. See, Aslan expects way too much of children, Aslan disappears for hundreds of years because it’s plot convenient, Aslan lets imperfect humans fumble around without helping them and then shows up and judges them for failing.

-Actually, let’s talk about that. More specifically, how about let’s talk about Prince Caspian, The Silver Chair, and The Last Battle. Aslan is gone, here. In Caspian and The Last Battle, he’s been gone a long time. Yes, he probably does need time off from time to time, and, yes, iirc he does mention having other worlds that need his attention. But non-stop for hundreds of years? This gets uncomfortable again, because it’s something I would never say about Actual Christianity Jesus, or about any god(s), whether I thought so or not, because it’s really rude. But this is C.S. Lewis’s fault. Maybe Actual Christianity Jesus/God has been absent from the world for a while (bar minor stuff like talking to the Pope or sending people visions, etc., depending on your denomination, etc.) because he does have other worlds that need his attention, or maybe he doesn’t exist and that’s why, or maybe God’s just mysterious, or maybe *dozens of other possibilities which I don’t really know about because I’ve never been a practicing Christian*. But that’s fine, because that’s a religion. Clive, this is a book. You have to explain why your all-powerful character vanished and let his world go all to shit and then blamed, not whoever wrecked it, but the people trying to fix it because they didn’t do a good enough job. Like, why, exactly, did he just bugger off when the Telmarines moved in and subjugated all his people? It’s not even enough to say that it has to be a human triumphing because World Reasons (that bit doesn’t make sense and is uncomfortably reminiscent of British Colonization – ‘Narnia was never right unless a Son of Adam was king’ over all the sentient animals and the semi-humanoid beings and really? – but at least it’s established as a Rule of the World that Narnia’s part of.) But that still doesn’t sell, because 1.) Caspian, and 2.) when the Pevensies get back to Narnia, instead of helping them (or just going to the Howe and helping Caspian’s army, since Caspian’s like twelve and can’t run a campaign), he puts them through ridiculous tests of their faith (which is ridiculous, since Aslan-as-Aslan has never required faith; he’s tangible and active in the world and they’ve met him before, so why is faith so important) (Answer: it’s important to him because C.S. Lewis didn’t think about how the changes he made would impact that kind of thing, he just pasted on yey some Lion on top of Jesus and thought that was good enough) – tests which, honestly, in retrospect seem more like tests of their unthinking obedience to him, which is frankly a little frightening. Every single one of those kids would drop everything and follow Aslan and obey him if he just revealed himself and he knows that because they did it before. If he can muster up the whatever to appear to Lucy for ten seconds and turn up to talk to her and wake up the trees a day or two later with no difficulty, then there’s no reason he can’t just appear to them all, or better yet, just show up corporeally and help them out. In The Silver Chair, he sends Eustance and Jill to save Rilian instead of… doing it himself? Helping them? Going with them? Anything that would be remotely helpful? And when they fuck up – because they are kids with no context for the needlessly cryptic clues he gave them – he appears to Jill in dreams to scare her into doing better instead of, I don’t know, giving her some help? Like, clearly he’s not too busy to show up and be hard on her, so I don’t see how he’s too busy to show up personally, or just tell her something helpful in the dream (like ‘Green Kirtle bad’ maybe, that’s three words). The story wouldn’t have suffered if he’d been a little more specific in his instructions; they still could have had trouble in most of the same places. Besides, if he was so okay with them getting help from Caspian, why didn’t he blow them, oh, I don’t know, onto the deck of Caspian’s ship, where Caspian could see and recognize Eustace. I mean, I love Puddleglum, and all, but I would be fine with drastic revisions to the plot of that book as long as we still got a cheesy scene with Trumpkin mishearing everything through his ear-trumpet. But the sad thing is that the book doesn’t even need a total rehaul – all it needs is someone to say, somewhere, that the Lady of the Green Kirtle cast some sort of spell, or something, to keep Aslan from actually intervening himself. It’s implied Jadis did – it didn’t last forever, he's too powerful, but LoGK could have made it last long enough that Caspian would have died before seeing his son again, and Aslan didn’t want that. One freaking line somewhere, Clive! Then there’s The Last Battle, where Aslan literally can’t be arsed to do anything until literally everyone is dead. This is where the Christian imagery just becomes blatantly stated Christianity and switches from allegory to… parable? Moral story? I don’t know, whatever. But you still have to justify Aslan’s actions within the context of the book, and honestly in The Last Battle he’s just a negligent douchebag. Like, ever since I was a kid, I always felt like it was less that the world of Narnia faded because it was its time and that’s why Aslan was absent, and more that Narnia faded before its time, because Aslan was absent. I mean, we don’t even hear about it having a red sun. Old worlds have big red suns, younger worlds have smaller yellow suns, just-born worlds have very small, very powerful yellow suns, this is CANON from The Magician’s Nephew. (And that doesn’t even touch on why, say, Aslan needed to scare Bree and Hwin to death to get them to the hermit instead of just appearing personally to King Lune in THaHB or something.)

-Actually, let’s do some math about Narnia’s age. Generously we’ve got, say, a thousand years between TMN and TLTWTW; The Horse And His Boy takes place during TLTWTW; then probably about five hundred years is long enough for Cair Paravel to fall into ruin, but with other kings and queens (maybe?) before that, Prince Caspian is probably roughly another thousand years later, then maybe seventy-five before TSC, and then it’s like, what? Four or five hundred years before Tirian’s time in TLB? So a grand total of… it rounds up to 2600 years. Our world is way older than that. Our world is way older than that even according to creationists. It’s bullshit that Narnia was dying naturally. It wasn’t old, it wasn’t messed up anyway outside of the country of Narnia – Calormen, as I recall, was doing just fine, and we hadn’t heard anything bad going on in the Lone Islands. Archenland maybe, I can’t remember. (It is my least favourite book.) Besides, I am sure there are more countries in the world, we just didn’t see them. Like whatever Telmar is now, for instance. The real-world equivalent would be God throwing a shitfit when the Romans invaded Britain and blowing up the whole world. Or, to borrow from a much better devoutly Christian fantasy author, if when the kingship of Arnor failed Iluvatar had just drowned the whole entire world just like Numenor, but this time 1.) with no actual benefit (he only drowned Numenor as a side-effect of making Valinor unaccessible) 2.) with much less provocation, and 3.) THE WHOLE DAMN WORLD. Like. Seriously.

-lastly, this might be a minor personal thing, but when I found out that Aslan was Jesus? The one thing that really disappointed me was that all the mystery and excitement goes out of the Emperor Over the Sea. When I was a kid he was Aslan’s mysterious, exciting father – but what was he? Emperor, not king, that’s exotic, it implies a lot of power… and colonialism, for that matter. Is he human, Aslan’s father, or humanoid, rather? Is he a Lion who’s Emperor? Does he have a physical form at all? What kind of mysterious, enigmatic politics happen Over the Sea, and where is Over the Sea, and is it a physical or metaphysical place or both somehow? What kind of parent is he to Aslan – does Aslan even have a mother? What’s his relationship to his father – was he born/created fully aware, and what effect did that have on their dynamics? When I found out Aslan was Jesus, I was like ‘Meh, that’s weird, whatever.’ A few months later, when I thought to apply this fact to the Emperor, my literal reaction was this: *exasperated tone of disgust* “Oh, he’s God? That’s boring. DAMN it.” (I was about thirteen at the time, for reference.)

Now to talk about using fiction as a vehicle for other things. I’m going to give Lewis a break and chew up Ayn Rand for a while instead.

Fiction is wonderful and powerful and one of its many uses and values is to shine a light on various issues or truths. It’s risky using I book I confess I haven’t actually read but oh well: look at the cultural impact of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Or, hey, try Jaws – which the author regrets, because it had a devastating real-life impact on the world’s (largely non-threatening) shark population. (Did you know you’re more likely to be killed by a vending machine falling on you than a shark? And you’re more likely to die in a lawn-mower accident than a terrorist attack.) People have used fiction to great effect in good causes (and bad ones), and, usually, I have no issue with this… as long as I agree with them. :) Like, I’d really love to stab the author of Melanie’s Marvelous Measles in the eye with a fork. Although that’s more in the Rand/Lewis category tbh.

But the story – the story is important. If the story gets short shrift because of the message that is a crime. Fiction can be a powerful tool, yes, but it should never be reduced to only that. Storytime: when I was fourteen, my family went to St. Lucia with friends who had a timeshare there. While we were there, my friend Alex lent me one of her books she thought I’d like. It was Anthem, by Ayn Rand. I read it. I loved it. And then I got to the end. (Spoilers!)

The main character, Equality, finds an empty house full of books (God knows how they’re not completely rotted when the world’s been a heavily-regulated Communist dystopia for hundreds of years.) and discovers the word I (since the world’s so communist that they don’t have singular pronouns anymore) and also some Greek mythology. This completely changes his entire personality and voice (the book’s in the first person), something which falling in forbidden love, becoming disillusioned with his culture, recreating the entire concept of marriage with his lover/wife, and running away from the only society he’s ever known as an enemy of the state failed to do. He pontificates for most of the last three pages about how the word I has changed his life and how he thinks about things and how evil Communism is, names himself ~~Prometheus~~ and gives his wife a similarly symbolic name I can’t remember (dude, maybe she wants to choose her own?) and swears that their future children will know the power of the one true pronoun, I.

I’d never been more jarred in my life. I don’t think I have been since. It was very unpleasant. And it made me angry. Not just because Rand thought I was too stupid to get the point that Communism = bad. Not just because she didn’t care enough to make the final rant even consistent with the tone of the rest of the book. Not because the symbolism of Prometheus is terrible (again with the on-the-nose symbolism; Equality actually reinvents the lightbulb during the story and tries to give it to Mankind). No, I was angry primarily because Ayn Rand lied to me. She said, here, come read this dystopian story I wrote. It has plot and characters and worldbuilding because it’s a novel. And I did. I got invested in her characters and a cared about her plot and I paid attention to her worldbuilding. And then three pages from the end she said, “Actually… you’re here for a lecture.” And gave it. Through the unwilling mouth of one of those characters I’d gotten attached to.

That experience, along with the value I’ve always placed on art in general and fiction in particular, gave me a life-long loathing of the particular fiction-coming-second-to-the-message type of author tract, and a wariness of author tracts in general. Not only does it almost always compromise the quality of the work (if you want to hear about this from someone more organized and less shouty than me, read any of Limyaael’s Rants where she talks about message fantasy and why it sucks), but it’s always seemed to me to also be disrespectful to the art form. And I know that sounds super pretentious, but I can’t articulate it any better than that. Use fiction to tell a story, to build a world, to have fun, to work out your issues, to correct something you think was badly done, to illustrate a point, even – but if you want to lecture people, write a goddamn essay.

But the thing is, as much as I hate Ayn Rand (for any number of reasons), she’s two points up on C.S. Lewis.

1.) She was honest about what she was doing. When she decided to stop the story and tell everyone what to think, she stopped the story and told everyone what to think. From what I understand of her other books (I haven’t read them because I’m not that much of a masochist), even when the whole book is an author tract, it’s made abundantly clear that it’s a lecture disguised as a novel. Not to mention the fact that she makes it even clearer by stopping the story anyway in order to tell everyone what to think. (It’s not who is John Galt, it’s when will John Galt shut up?) This makes for uneven, hack-y writing, but no one’s getting conned, except into laying down money for an Objectivism Rant when they thought they were getting a novel.

2.) AYN RAND WROTE FOR ADULTS

Here’s the thing – it is shitty and dishonest to disguise propaganda as literature. It is appalling to disguise propaganda as literature and direct it towards young children who don’t have the experience or analytical skill to know what you’re doing or to make up their own minds. EVEN AYN RAND DIDN’T DO THAT.

Hell, forget Ayn Rand. Even Jack Chick didn’t do that. I mean, he has tracts for kids, which is appalling, but like Rand, he always makes it abundantly clear that you’re getting thinly veiled ideology, not a real story.

Lewis hides it. He sneaks it in under the radar, with parallels and shout-outs that kids probably won’t catch and certainly won’t understand, gets them invested in six and a half books worth of adventures and magical creatures and fantasy, and then at the end of the seventh literally confirms that Aslan is 100% Real World Jesus – and if kids have parents who are disinterested or areligious or don’t follow their kids’ reading habits or just don’t see the harm – whether because they’re Christian or because, like mine, they think the books are harmless because why wouldn’t you, you’re meant to think that – they just buy the whole thing.

And I mean, if you’re Christian and the books were meaningful to you, that’s great, especially if you knew what you were getting from the start. But I was lied to. Even ignoring the painful and offensive depictions of atheism and pseudo-Islam and the plot holes... even before I spotted any of that, I still felt lied to. C.S. Lewis promised me a magical lighthearted fantasy romp and then he took that back, and it's not irrelevant that those books hurt me as I grew up because of the hidden things. I can’t even imagine how much worse it would have been if I was, say, Muslim instead of an atheist.

Maybe I can’t really articulate why the dishonesty of it bothers me so much, why it tips it over the line from poorly-thought-out allegory into actual propaganda, but…