Title: Fantasies
Original Text(s) Erased: Fantasies
Erased by: metonomia
Original text by: wingedflight21
Fandom (of original text): Narnia
Fandom (of erasure): N/A

Note: I was super excited to get Winged as my assignment, because not only is she a prolific writer, but she is prolific with beautiful words and original ideas. There was no question for me of working with anything but "Fantasies," which is probably my favorite ever of her stories; I love the concept of Narnia being, truly, nothing more than a series of games the Pevensies played as children, and in doing this erasure what I found coming out of it for me was this terrific sense that it doesn't matter if it's just a story (as, of course, it is for all of us) - the feelings and experiences turn out to be the same either way, and I loved seeking out Susan's journey and experience and it turning out to contain just as much turmoil and beauty and SUSAAAAAAN-ness as it does when we are taking Narnia as a lived experience rather than a made-up story.

Apologies both to Winged and to Z for this being so late!

( the spare room when we stayed was empty )

Today was meant to be Last Battle-day, but I just can't do it, so I'm going to shuffle the order around and do that tomorrow.

Instead, today, have some Susan icons! Only 11, which is really funny because I took a screencap of literally (literally. I am not misusing the word.) every time she was on screen for the first hour and 20 minutes of LWW.  Then...I got tired.  And then of course actually making them took way longer than I thought, and a lot of my caps were blurry/no good...but I'm pretty happy with the ones I've ended up with.

I tried to show a range of Susans, and I think it worked out. More to come, hopefully!

( in which susan wins all the awards )

I missed yesterday (well, I could have done it, but I was tired.) so I'll be doing two days today! It works out pretty easily, actually, because Susan.2 and Susan.3 are HHB and PC, both of which have dramatically less Pevensies than LWW.

( HHB: look, I just love Susan no matter what Lewis tries to say )

Today the Narnia Fic Exchange story written for me was posted, and y'all, it is so perfect that I cannot stand it.

LADIES, and air-balloons, and a camel, and the most perfect and perfectly written adventure ever.

http://narniaexchange.livejournal.com/50295.html#cutid1

NARNIAAAAAAA. Okay, it is probably a really good thing that I slept in between seeing the movie and writing this, and also a good thing that Irish and Hev and Kate were online when I got in and I could hyperventilate to them, because otherwise this would be incomprehensible. Possibly it still will be, at points.

( verdict: weird, but I love it )

Doctor Who, Amy, "That sign said keep out!" "I could have sworn it said 'come see.'"
All her life, Amelia Pond has been told "no"; no, the Raggedy Doctor does not exist; no, her parents will not be coming home; no, she cannot travel the world. Now the Doctor has come to prove her right, to make her dreams and stories come alive, and she doesn't have to listen to anyone anymore. Amy Pond will not be told "no."

Harry Potter, Hermione, memories of war.
It's the oddest things that stick with her, afterwards - the smell of the tent, the number of minutes it took her to stop shaking after Ron was splinched (43 and a half), the taste of Bellatrix's Polyjuice Potion. The smoothness of the basilisk fang in her hand, and the layers of dirt on her clothes. Lavender Brown's expression as she bled out in the Great Hall.

Supernatural, Dean, left behind
"Just us now, buddy," Dad says as they drive off from Stanford, and he hasn't called Dean 'buddy' in years, but Dean understands the need to sink back into something old. There's too much forward movement right now, too much change, and neither John nor his elder son is used to change, especially not when it comes from Sammy. They're the ones driving away, but Dean can't shake the feeling that Sammy has left him behind.

Chronicles of Narnia, Ramandu's Daughter, the rose of battle
She sings the sun up each morning from within the walls of Cair Paravel, and in the spring she sows and in the autumn she harvests, and throughout the years she watches as her husband leads troops past her and brings them home again, brings some of them home again. When she cannot understand the ways of this land she escapes to the beach and the woods and the Centaurs, who show her how to read the skies as mortals do. She watches once-familiar stars dance strange steps, and reads in them cold doom.

( whine whine whine )  
Anyway.  Today I spent the majority of the afternoon scrolling through AO3 finding Narnia fic, so have some recs!

A Small Affair - a short and sweet Cor/Aravis fic.

And After Darkness, Light - I wavered on this one for a bit, because it's sort of that tired old trope of Susan finding peace/redemption through the Church, but it's extremely well-written, and it doesn't follow the usual annoying patterns, and it's really not preachy at all, just lovely and absorbing and with a truly impressive OC making an appearance.  Also towards the end there is a ridiculously disturbing and amazing scene.  So in conclusion, I really recommend this fic :D

King of the Solstice - Father Christmas/Jadis, sort of.  Uh, yeah.

The Lady of the House - Lucy, after LWW.  Because she doesn't always have to faithfully accept tumbling back into a child's body.  Also, go read more of ineptshieldmaid's stuff after this, such as With the Garments of Her Gladness, which is a great piece about those few days at the Telmarine castle after the second Battle of Beruna.  Susan/Caspian in the loveliest of ways (and I can barely believe I'm saying that), with a side of Edmund/Bacchus.

ETA: This beauty, Mandolin Purr, which is Rilian/LotGK and as delightfully creepy as that should be.

And now I'm really going to sleep, really, because I need to be up in...not very many hours, to scour the internet for the new Merlin. :DDDD

I don't know that many people outside California - or even outside the Bay Area - know about the Johannes Mehserle trial.  I honestly don't know tons about it.  

But the bare facts are - last year on New Year's Eve, BART officer Mehserle shot and killed unarmed passenger Oscar Grant.  I do not know what caused him to do so, what the defense is, or any of the extenuating circumstances - actually, I just looked it up, and Mehserle says he accidentally fired his service weapon instead of his taser.  I do know that Mehserle is white, and Grant is black, and that Oakland is in utter uproar.  Tonight Mehserle was convicted of involuntary manslaughter - Oscar Grant's family wanted second-degree murder (and 'wanted' is a horrid word.  They want to not have to go through this.  They want for their son to not be dead.) - so he's going to jail for awhile.  

Riot police are out, stores are being broken into, and people are raging mad.

I...don't know what the point of this post is.  Mostly I'm just really really sad.  I know nothing near enough to offer judgement.  An innocent man is dead and a lot of people are deeply sad and deeply angry.  I'm mostly just praying that things will not escalate to a point where more people die.

Also I'm sad over feminism fail.  And not even feminism, because genderfail is a subject of humanity, not just feminists.  I'm sad that there is so much death and hurt and anger hanging over life, and that it has such an easy way of sucking us all into obsessing over it and arguing over it and thus extending the reach of the badness.

And now I'm going to go finish watching the LWW commentary because those kids are adorable and hilarious and happy.

Saw Toy Story 3 again today, and I think I've pinpointed a tiny part of why it makes me cry like it does (I'm talking throat-constricting, tears rolling down face, trying not to sniffle too loudly bawling, here) - it makes me feel guilty for growing up.  Not in a bad way - it's obviously all about how kids grow up but the love for toys and imagination goes on, and gets passed down, and our toys and our childhood games are always with us no matter what, but still...I think what it's making me feel is that by losing that utter glee in making up stories and not just using my toys and dolls to act them out but truly believing that said toys were alive, were really playing with me, were really there (I blame A Little Princess, which had me convinced for years that my dolls and stuffed animals came alive in my absence, and that imagination made things real.) - and you know, it's not really guilt as much as just sadness.  I'm sad that I grew out of those days when a friend and I, or a brother and I, or just I by myself could spend hours entranced by the way my imagination could make inanimate objects come to such vivid life.  I don't regret it, obviously, that I've grown up; it would be mostly bad if I didn't develop out of that child's mindset. But it is a bit sad.  And so so so perfect.  I cannot fathom how they've made such a beautiful and perfect world out of toys and childish jokes and then carried it forward with us as we've grown up.   It's beautiful, and the people in charge of it are totally amazing.

Toy Story 3, I'm going to venture to say, is really about loss of innocence, and how it is not really lost but is simply buried under the cares of growing up, and we can always find it if we just look back fondly and give it a bit of a chance and dig out those old pictures and those old toys and share them with new young minds.


Also, unrelated but connected - having now seen the Narnia trailer on the big screen three times, I am very certain of one thing - that IS Peter on the beach with the young 'uns and Aslan and Reep in the shot in front of the wave-waterfall, just before the epic-walking shots of the Pevensies.  So Peter and Susan are there in Aslan's Country at the end.  I am baffled.

ETA: I'm a liar.  The blond was making me think Peter, and the fact that in the foreground he looks taller than Ed, but it's actually Eustace there. Facepalm.  But  there are four shadows, so Caspian?  And Reep is there.  It's all so weeeeird.

Sorry, I refuse to call her 'Liliandil.'  She's never really needed a name, in my head.  Which is probably bad on one level - it shouldn't be okay for yet another Narnian queen (I'm thinking of Lune's wife, here) to be nameless, pop out a kid, and then die.  But...it never really mattered, to me.  I've fluctuated over the years between just accepting her mindlessly as I did everything in the Narnia books when I first read them, then kind of hating her because she edged out Lucy, then really coming to like her and the possibilities for character building she represents.  And through it all, she's never needed a name.  And I think that's mostly because it's how she was written originally - she has always, always been defined by her connection to the various male characters of her father, her husband, and her son.  Also, it was always so romantic that it was never bothersome for her to be unnamed - she's a star's daughter, and therefore has an air of mystery to her, and so it's always been fine to me that she not have a name.  So despite my growing annoyance that she's so sidelined, I don't like the name Liliandil for her - it's pretty, certainly, and I've come to wonder if maybe it's not linked to the sea of lilies or something, and Douglas Gresham picked it so I have to respect that to a certain extent, him being the one who would be most likely to know something extra about Narnian nomenclature etc. But, the thing is - that name maybe fits the glowy ghost-thing that we saw in the trailer, but it doesn't at all fit my vision of Ramandu's daughter.  

And I think this is maybe why the whole defined-by-the-men-around-her thing has never bothered me - because in my head, she is the most beautiful, gracious, wonderful queen, and so while I do wish she could have a name and could do a bit more than be palfrey-lady and wife and mother, she IS just a filler.  She doesn't really have a personality; she's your typical Romance trope - otherworldly, beautiful, kind, helps our hero on his quest, and his ultimate marriage to her completes the story, signals the success of his adventure.  She's the girl on the palfrey, riding out to give the knight advice, to help him gain entrance to the otherworld, to bless him on his journey.  If he can live up to his chivalric ideals of honor (which Caspian ultimately does when he successfully reaches the end of the world, having found all the lords and completed his quest, and then also listens to his lord - Aslan - and returns to his duty as king), then he gets the girl.

So, while in fic I would LOVE to see her developed more, given a name, given an actual personality, a backstory (good lord, the poor girl, growing up on that island with just her dad!), etc...I prefer filler-queen Ramandu's daughter of the book to this glowworm Liliandil.

I'm talking myself out of hating her.  I'm really worried that this movie is going to re-spark fandom hatred of her, because that's just not cool.  I'm very much expecting though that this will be one part of the movie that I'll need to just block out and fill in with book-canon.