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edenfallingThe master list of all NFE 2013 fics is up!
I wrote Into Something Rich and Strange: "The siren is a creature of reflections, born of lightning on the winter sea," the mer-woman said, her tail fins twitching in signs Susan had no skill to read. "Cold and light feed its power and no being born of the sea can gainsay its command, though we who are female can at the least resist its lure. You are a Daughter of Eve, born of dreams and flesh. Your power comes from the warmth of blood and the darkness of the beating heart; the siren has no strength against that magic. You must close your eyes and dream the enemy into the final dark." 4,375 words, written forsnacky!
(The fic is also available via the handy-dandy AO3 crosspost, wherein I fixed a single typo that drove me nuts the moment I noticed it in the LJ post, argh.)
...
So, thoughts.
As you can see, this story has nothing whatsoever to do with stars, which was the world-building issue I complained about at length midway through my flailing attempts to corral some kind of useable narrative incident. I started out with the notion of writing about the Sea Girl whom Lucy sees near the end of VDT. That led me to wonder about the nature of the Last Sea, which led me to the conclusion that Lewis fails astronomy forever, and also the Narnian world cannot actually be flat no matter what Caspian believes, or the English characters would have noticed and remarked upon the lack of a horizon in both prior books and all through the early sections of VDT. I think, in the end, it's sort of a section of a globe -- like if you took a giant knife and hacked off a quarter to a third of Earth, stuck magical mountains around the edges, and messed with physics to keep gravity acting as if the rest of the planet exists. But this is a tangent, so back to my writing woes.
Wondering about stars made me curious about Ramandu's daughter, specifically why she is never textually identified as a star in her own right, and also why we never hear anything about her mother. We don't even know if her mother was a star, or a human, or -- most interesting possibility! -- something utterly metaphorical. We also don't know how Ramandu got to his island in the first place, particularly since it's in the uttermost east but he only talks about setting one last time, which would necessarily have been in the uttermost west. He probably had to be carried there... but by what or by whom?
I started thinking maybe Ramandu's daughter was born of the reflection of her father's light on the sea as he fell. Which I still think is an awesome idea and I want to do something with it someday, but the only practical result so far is that I took that same general idea and changed both the light source and the state and location of the ocean -- from a star to lightning, and from the warm, sweet waters of the Last Sea to the icebound coast of Narnia during the Long Winter -- and created a siren.
Some of my musings on Lewis's oceanic geography fail also made it into the story in the brief mentions of Terebinthian pearl fishers and the wind-weavers from Seven Isles, but those are more placeholders than proper world-building. Again, I want to go back and explore those ideas someday, but here they are just background color and something to play up Susan's sense of duty.
Susan is the main character because Snacky asked for stories about her during the Golden Age, and also because the narrative arc ended up being about doubt, reluctance, and the weight of war and duty, which are themes I find easier to address via Susan than via Lucy, particularly since this story is set very early in the Pevensies' reign and Susan is the one who, being older, had a better understanding of the war in England and how in many ways Narnia is NOT an escape, but just another battlefield. Also I think I was experimenting with reasons Susan might not want to reminisce about Narnia later on -- that it was always a burden to her as much as a joy. (Her actions in HHB are interesting when read in that light, just FYI.)
The mer-woman is nameless mostly because I couldn't think of a name that sounded right, but then I realized that the siren was also nameless and I guess it sort of became a "mysterious ocean is mysterious!" mini-theme. I hope she comes across as a person rather than a complete plot device, though. *sigh*
The siren, by the way, is not just nameless; it is also genderless, at least in terms of the narrative. I was very careful never to call it 'she.' It may come across as superficially feminine, but it only uses a female, motherly voice on Susan because that's the tactic to which Susan was most vulnerable. For someone else, it might have sounded like a father, a child, a lover, or even a beloved pet. The reason its song doesn't work so well on women isn't because of a shared sex or gender, but because of Christian mythology (which is an integral part of Lewis's world-building, dammit, no matter how much it makes me want to scream some days, and which also means that his version of England is just as much a fantasy as Narnia, as if the wardrobe itself didn't give that away; all gods are equally real and unreal, whatever their source!) wherein Adam was created from earth and air (mud and the breath of god, I guess), but Eve was created from something that was already living -- out of flesh and blood and bone. The Talking Beasts of Narnia were born directly from the earth and Aslan's song, and the Beings presumably had similar origins -- IIRC, they just kind of appear out from between a bunch of trees, assuming they're not actually trees or water or whatever. So, like Adam, they are built from raw elements rather than from life itself. The siren can work with that.
Female members of other species have a partial protection via symbolic connection with human women and thus with Eve, but not enough to fight the siren head-on. That falls to a human woman or girl... which of course is tricky, since a siren tends to live in and under the water. :-/
Lastly, this story is canon for the bulk of my other Narnia fic -- what I have been calling the Lost Chronicles sequence, for lack of a better name. Expect Queen Elwen of Archenland to get name-checked in "The Courting Dance" sooner or later. :-)
I wrote Into Something Rich and Strange: "The siren is a creature of reflections, born of lightning on the winter sea," the mer-woman said, her tail fins twitching in signs Susan had no skill to read. "Cold and light feed its power and no being born of the sea can gainsay its command, though we who are female can at the least resist its lure. You are a Daughter of Eve, born of dreams and flesh. Your power comes from the warmth of blood and the darkness of the beating heart; the siren has no strength against that magic. You must close your eyes and dream the enemy into the final dark." 4,375 words, written for
snacky!(The fic is also available via the handy-dandy AO3 crosspost, wherein I fixed a single typo that drove me nuts the moment I noticed it in the LJ post, argh.)
...
So, thoughts.
As you can see, this story has nothing whatsoever to do with stars, which was the world-building issue I complained about at length midway through my flailing attempts to corral some kind of useable narrative incident. I started out with the notion of writing about the Sea Girl whom Lucy sees near the end of VDT. That led me to wonder about the nature of the Last Sea, which led me to the conclusion that Lewis fails astronomy forever, and also the Narnian world cannot actually be flat no matter what Caspian believes, or the English characters would have noticed and remarked upon the lack of a horizon in both prior books and all through the early sections of VDT. I think, in the end, it's sort of a section of a globe -- like if you took a giant knife and hacked off a quarter to a third of Earth, stuck magical mountains around the edges, and messed with physics to keep gravity acting as if the rest of the planet exists. But this is a tangent, so back to my writing woes.
Wondering about stars made me curious about Ramandu's daughter, specifically why she is never textually identified as a star in her own right, and also why we never hear anything about her mother. We don't even know if her mother was a star, or a human, or -- most interesting possibility! -- something utterly metaphorical. We also don't know how Ramandu got to his island in the first place, particularly since it's in the uttermost east but he only talks about setting one last time, which would necessarily have been in the uttermost west. He probably had to be carried there... but by what or by whom?
I started thinking maybe Ramandu's daughter was born of the reflection of her father's light on the sea as he fell. Which I still think is an awesome idea and I want to do something with it someday, but the only practical result so far is that I took that same general idea and changed both the light source and the state and location of the ocean -- from a star to lightning, and from the warm, sweet waters of the Last Sea to the icebound coast of Narnia during the Long Winter -- and created a siren.
Some of my musings on Lewis's oceanic geography fail also made it into the story in the brief mentions of Terebinthian pearl fishers and the wind-weavers from Seven Isles, but those are more placeholders than proper world-building. Again, I want to go back and explore those ideas someday, but here they are just background color and something to play up Susan's sense of duty.
Susan is the main character because Snacky asked for stories about her during the Golden Age, and also because the narrative arc ended up being about doubt, reluctance, and the weight of war and duty, which are themes I find easier to address via Susan than via Lucy, particularly since this story is set very early in the Pevensies' reign and Susan is the one who, being older, had a better understanding of the war in England and how in many ways Narnia is NOT an escape, but just another battlefield. Also I think I was experimenting with reasons Susan might not want to reminisce about Narnia later on -- that it was always a burden to her as much as a joy. (Her actions in HHB are interesting when read in that light, just FYI.)
The mer-woman is nameless mostly because I couldn't think of a name that sounded right, but then I realized that the siren was also nameless and I guess it sort of became a "mysterious ocean is mysterious!" mini-theme. I hope she comes across as a person rather than a complete plot device, though. *sigh*
The siren, by the way, is not just nameless; it is also genderless, at least in terms of the narrative. I was very careful never to call it 'she.' It may come across as superficially feminine, but it only uses a female, motherly voice on Susan because that's the tactic to which Susan was most vulnerable. For someone else, it might have sounded like a father, a child, a lover, or even a beloved pet. The reason its song doesn't work so well on women isn't because of a shared sex or gender, but because of Christian mythology (which is an integral part of Lewis's world-building, dammit, no matter how much it makes me want to scream some days, and which also means that his version of England is just as much a fantasy as Narnia, as if the wardrobe itself didn't give that away; all gods are equally real and unreal, whatever their source!) wherein Adam was created from earth and air (mud and the breath of god, I guess), but Eve was created from something that was already living -- out of flesh and blood and bone. The Talking Beasts of Narnia were born directly from the earth and Aslan's song, and the Beings presumably had similar origins -- IIRC, they just kind of appear out from between a bunch of trees, assuming they're not actually trees or water or whatever. So, like Adam, they are built from raw elements rather than from life itself. The siren can work with that.
Female members of other species have a partial protection via symbolic connection with human women and thus with Eve, but not enough to fight the siren head-on. That falls to a human woman or girl... which of course is tricky, since a siren tends to live in and under the water. :-/
Lastly, this story is canon for the bulk of my other Narnia fic -- what I have been calling the Lost Chronicles sequence, for lack of a better name. Expect Queen Elwen of Archenland to get name-checked in "The Courting Dance" sooner or later. :-)
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Date: 2013-10-03 04:35 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-10-03 07:24 pm (UTC)Well, sirens are traditionally always female and I didn't do anything really explicit to counter that -- the lack of gendered pronouns is not nearly as noticeable as, say, a bunch of male voices in the singing. (Hmm. Come to think of it, perhaps I should go edit the AO3 post to say something about the siren's vocal range when its singing to itself... *ponders*) And it does imitate Mrs. Pevensie, so again, there are a bunch of female markers that don't have many explicit textual counter-examples -- the only one I can think of offhand is that some of the frantic phantom faces and hands the siren manifests at the end are male (Susan's father and brothers), but that comes off as an illusion the siren is casting rather than anything the siren is in and of itself. Of course, its 'normal' voice is equally illusory, but since Susan doesn't realize that, it's not clear in the text.
I was not initially sure just how Susan was supposed to defeat the siren, since I was writing very close to the deadline and more or less made it up as I went along. But since I'd already established the siren as a creature of light, I figured it was only as tangible as it wanted to be and had to be fought with magic and metaphor, and the obvious counter to light is darkness. (Well, that or a cage of mirrors, but in this particular case I don't think reflections would be much help, and also wouldn't be something that only Susan could do.) I also like inversions in general, and making binary systems non-absolute, so fighting light with darkness is a solution that plays heavily to my own interests. *wry*