So, it is party time again, folks!

[wiseheart]

Each year this time, we launch my virtual birthday party, which starts on October 1 and ends on October 9 at midnight, sharp. The goals of the party are to post as many comments and collapse as many threads as possible, on as many new pages as we can. It is always great fun, as you can see if you check out the similar entries of the last few years.

This year, I'll also throw the real party at mid-time - and post the recipes of all the food that will be there for you, so that you can all participate if you want to. Virtual food has no calories.

Fandom-related discussions are as welcome as the ones about coffee or chocolate (just to name a few favourites from previous years), and, of course, pictures and recipes of birthday cakes. ;)

So, drop by, tell your story, post your pics or silly poems, ask questions you always wanted to ask and have a good time!

Soledad, in excited expectation




Oh, and by the way, to provide birthday gifts hobbit-style, I've got a revived story and a Kansas 2 update for you.

Enjoy!

Comments

[espresso-addict.livejournal.com]

So, is anyone but me reading the Narnia Fic Exchange? 25 stories, mostly decent with only a few clunkers, a big range of topics and no Susan bashing in sight. I'm not an enormous Narnia fan -- Lewis is a bit heavy handed -- but it's nice occasionally to read fan authors more enlightened views of his universe.

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the suggestion; I'm not a Narnia fan myself, but sometimes it's nice to read a few stories outside my usual interest.

Which of the original books do you like best? And why would there be any Susan bashing?

[espresso-addict.livejournal.com]

The Silver Chair was always my favourite, but my copy seems to have gone walkabout years ago, so I haven't reread it as an adult. I'm very fond of parts of The Dawn Treader too -- the world building, the lack of battles, Reepicheep, Eustace when he isn't being annoying.

The Susan bashing is mainly in the original but there's a fair amount of Problem of Susan fic that assumes she's in the wrong and needs to be fixed (by finding Jesus & living a life of unremitting charity work) before she's ready for NarniaPrimed. I've always thought Lewis was just plain wrong about Susan, at least insofar as the Narnian universe is meant to function as an allegory for Christianity, or even a coherent fantasy universe where Aslan isn't evil. But I don't think Lewis really understood adult women, or at least wasn't interested in writing them.

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

I read the books for the first time as an adult already. Our Master (or should it be Mistress?) of novices in the convent was a huge Narnia fan and recced the books to us - I must say, I wasn't impressed. At all. There is too much preaching, and when you've started your foray into English language and literature with Tolkien, well, Lewis is a poor substitute, IMO.
What I respect in Tolkien greatly, is that although a devout Catholic, he managed to leave religion out of Arda. Mostly, anyway.

I've re-read Narnia a few years ago, and I bought all the films; I must ruefully admit that I prefer the films. No preaching, lots of adventure. My personal favourite is The Dawn Treader, but I like the world-building parts of The Horse and His Boy, too. It was an interesting - because very different - culture, and I laughed myself silly over the constant quoting of the poets.

I must re-read them again, it seems. Personally, I liked Susan most of the Pevensie children; IMO, the younger boy, Edmund or Edward or whatever was his name, was a first grade jerk. I couldn't stand him. And, I'm sorry to say, but Reepicheep annoyed the hell out of me, too.

Wait a minute? Aslan is supposed to be evil? I always thought he was a saviour-like figure, so much that it made my teeth ache. What have I read falsely?

[espresso-addict.livejournal.com]

I read The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe when I was young enough I didn't realise it was Christian allegory (helped by having atheist parents & not studying the Bible at all until I was a teenager), and the rest as soon as my pocket money stretched.

I think Lewis is writing in a tradition of English children's lit that stretches back to the Victorian era, cosy fantasy (and non-fantasy) that's always rooted in the domestic, with a firm narrator's voice that doesn't shrink from directly addressing the reader (E. Nesbit is an obvious early example). It's not a tradition that I'm particularly fond of now, as an adult, but it dominated the older children's fic I read as a kid. It's entirely different from what Tolkien is doing in LotR, which was written for adults and draws on Norse myth rather than Victorian/Edwardian children's fantasy. (The Hobbit is more in the other tradition.)

I never much liked Susan because she's beautiful -- I've always had a problem with beautiful heroines.

Lewis's intention, afaik, is that Aslan is the Narnian incarnation of Jesus, which makes Aslan's rejection of Susan in The Last Battle utterly incomprehensible to me & many others -- hence the minority fanon that Aslan is actually evil.

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

Ah, I understand now. I'd really need to re-read the books. I never liked Aslan, really, he was too stupidly condescending, which means that he doesn't really have that much in common with Jesus.

I must admit that I never realized that Susan was beautiful. That part seems to have slipped my attention somehow.

And while I read The Hobbit as an adult for the first time, too, I loved it instantly. I still can't stomach Lewis's style, though.

[espresso-addict.livejournal.com]

Lewis's understanding of Christianity, as displayed in the Narnia series, is very different from mine, though I liked his Screwtape Letters.

I was surprised rereading Watership Down last year for my Yuletide story how much I disliked the narratorial interjections. I guess as a child I just got used to authors talking down to me. One of the reasons I loved the slightly more modern Earthsea & Diana Wynne Jones, which don't do that, at least not overtly.

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

The Screwtape Letters is hilarious. They were given hand-to-hand in my teenage years, when religious literature wasn't easily awailable over here, and we discussed it endlessly with the Catholic youth group I belonged to. We also howled with laughter each time the topic came up.

When I was in novitiate, we had a meeting with the young people from other orders. One such group turned parts of the book into a performance - it was rather chilling, surprisingly enough.

[espresso-addict.livejournal.com]

They do prove Lewis has a sense of humour, which you wouldn't guess from parts of the Narnia series.

[solanpolarn.livejournal.com]

I first read the Narnia books as a child, too, and I didn't spot the Christian allegory either. This is probably just helping your theory, though, because I also have atheist parents. Finding out they were meant to be Christian allegory diminshed the books for me, though I did still enjoy them when I re-read them all (in English for the first time) in my mid-twenties. I haven't really revisited them since.

Actually, what has inspired me towards re-reading them (but my list of books to read is so long it is not likely to happen any time soon) is reading Neil Gaiman's "The Problem of Susan", where he shows us a grown up, retired Susan. It is not a pleasant tale, and I am not sure I either like or fully understand it, but it does a good job of pointing out how unfair Aslan's rejection of Susan is.

[espresso-addict.livejournal.com]

It's really interesting to hear non-Brits' take on the series; they feel so quintessentially English.

I don't know whether Gaiman invented the term 'the problem of Susan' in that story or was referencing an existing phrase. (Wikipedia seems to think he invented it, but I could swear I'd heard it used years earlier. He certainly popularised it.) Either way, it's a thought-provoking story.

[jenn-calaelen.livejournal.com]

I read them all as a child, and saw the Christian allegory in LWW and Last Battle, but not the others. I grew up in a Quaker family, but without a lot of Christian input (except via Children's Class on Sundays when they often tried to read a bible story to us and get us to draw pictures of - which I ignored as I didn't want to draw things and mostly sat in a corner and read whatever I was reading).
I enjoyed the books, especially Horse and His Boy and Prince Caspian, but stopped reading them around 7/8 deciding that I'd grown out of them, and I don't think I reread them until around when the first film came out. It was very interesting to go back to them and see so much more of the messages and allegories.

[(Anonymous)]

Yep, those two are my favourites, too.

[(Anonymous)]

Yep, those two are my favourites, too.

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

Yep, those two are my favourites, too.

[espresso-addict.livejournal.com]

I stopped reading them too, perhaps a little older than that, but there was a BBC adaptation of several while I was a student (which was generally mediocre but had Tom Baker as Puddleglum), which brought them back to mind.

[jenn-calaelen.livejournal.com]

I've haven't been reading them, but will have to have a look. I don't tend to read a lot of Narnia fic, but it can be fun when it is well done.

[espresso-addict.livejournal.com]

I've found it's often quite repetitive, but this exchange had quite a good spread of characters and settings. There are a few clunkers as ever, but most of the stories were worth a try.

[espresso-addict.livejournal.com]

If you want some starter suggestions the ones I had bookrmarked to reread are:

"...the marks of that which once hath been" -- lady of the green kirtle & star's daughter

That We May Hear the Whispers Of The Gods -- Calormene theology

Five Things that Never Happened to Eustace Clarence Scrubb

To hold back the night -- long TLB AU

Bitter Work -- AU set immediate after the end of TLtW&tW

Endless Roads to Travel, Endless Lives to Live -- Polly five things