[Fic] "Endurance" -- Chronicles of Narnia

This is my stab at the obligatory 'problem of Susan' story everyone who writes Narnia fanfiction seems to produce sooner or later. *sigh* Book canon.

(Cross-posted here on ff.net.)

ETA: furies has remixed this story for Remix Redux 9: Once a Queen (The Reality Bites Remix)!

( Endurance )

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You know, writing Narnia fanfiction is odd for me. On the one hand, I want to be at least somewhat faithful to the series' internal mythology, which does involve a lot of Christianity. On the other hand, I'm not Christian and I find some of Lewis's particular theological views abhorrent. On the third hand, I was raised in a largely Christian culture, so Christian allusions and metaphors do come fairly easily to hand. On the fourth hand, I don't oppose all Christian theology. And on the fifth hand, I am an actively religious person myself, and I know I don't like my religion (Unitarian Universalism -- and no, just because the denomination started out Christian doesn't mean all or even most UUs today are Christian -- I myself am a vaguely agnostic semi-pagan secular humanist) being misrepresented, so I don't want to misrepresent Lewis...

So there's this constant internal tension where I look at the story and think, "You know, maybe I should put in a reference here," and then think, "Oh, this other bit over there, that's verging on actual Christian propaganda, and that makes me really twitchy," and I go back and forth and always wonder how the story comes off to Christians and non-Christians alike (and that's not even going into how very many, many ways there are to be religious that have nothing to do with Christianity, and how little they often have to do with each other).

Mneh. It's all a big mess.

[Fic] "Endurance" -- Chronicles of Narnia

This is my stab at the obligatory 'problem of Susan' story everyone who writes Narnia fanfiction seems to produce sooner or later. *sigh* Book canon.

[ETA: The AO3 crosspost and the ff.net crosspost are now up.]

[[ETA2: furies has remixed this story for Remix Redux 9: Once a Queen (The Reality Bites Remix)!]]

( Endurance )

---------------------------------------------

You know, writing Narnia fanfiction is odd for me. On the one hand, I want to be at least somewhat faithful to the series' internal mythology, which does involve a lot of Christianity. On the other hand, I'm not Christian and I find some of Lewis's particular theological views abhorrent. On the third hand, I was raised in a largely Christian culture, so Christian allusions and metaphors do come fairly easily to hand. On the fourth hand, I don't oppose all Christian theology. And on the fifth hand, I am an actively religious person myself, and I know I don't like my religion (Unitarian Universalism -- and no, just because the denomination started out Christian doesn't mean all or even most UUs today are Christian -- I myself am a vaguely agnostic semi-pagan secular humanist) being misrepresented, so I don't want to misrepresent Lewis...

So there's this constant internal tension where I look at the story and think, "You know, maybe I should put in a reference here," and then think, "Oh, this other bit over there, that's verging on actual Christian propaganda, and that makes me really twitchy," and I go back and forth and always wonder how the story comes off to Christians and non-Christians alike (and that's not even going into how very many, many ways there are to be religious that have nothing to do with Christianity, and how little they often have to do with each other).

Mneh. It's all a big mess.

[NOTICE! Just FYI, there is more discussion in the Livejournal version of this post, since people continued to comment over there after I imported my journal and comments to Dreamwidth.]