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edenfallingJadis in the garden: separation from God is only a punishment if you believe in him.
[ETA: The AO3 crosspost and the ff.net crosspost are now up.]
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Heart's Desire
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"Come in by the gold gates or not at all," the garden's maker had written. And truly, there was no need to turn aside, walk a quarter-circle around the hilltop, and clamber over the wall, but Jadis was the Queen of Charn and she bowed to no one.
She would have the apple on her own terms, as she had earned everything else in her life.
The fruit was sharp and almost painfully sweet, with a metallic tang underneath that expanded to bitter and salt in the aftertaste. The juice was shockingly dark for such a fair-fleshed fruit. Jadis licked the red-brown stain from her hand and laughed.
Pure theatrics: the apple bled. Was that supposed to induce guilt or shame?
The Lion had made this world, she acknowledged, but she had been here at the making; her magic was thus woven deep into its earth and air, inseparable from its very fabric of being. Until this world died, the Lion must adjust his plans to account for her. And even after, she could continue -- if that simpering fool had learned to travel between the planes, surely so could she! And she would learn to cross directly, without the crutch of that horrible, drowning place between the worlds.
A breeze stirred the garden, swirling petals and scent from the tree. Jadis sneezed, and then nearly gagged on the rotting sweetness of the silvery perfume. Stumbling, she turned aside, holding her arms across her face as if to block the very air from attacking her.
The air stilled. The scent dissipated.
Jadis lowered her arms and clenched her free hand, seething. So. The Lion had fashioned a trap for those who defied him and ate the fruit unbidden. But even he could not stop the apple from performing its function; already she could feel new strength coursing through her blood and bones like a river of ice, scouring away her mortality.
She had forever, now. She had new magic to master, a new world to conquer, a new foe to destroy. If the Lion thought that a mere tree would defeat her or that length of days would lead her to despair, he was a fool, as her sister had been.
Jadis ran her tongue across her teeth, savoring the iron tang of immortality, and took another bite.
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Inspired by the 4/27/09![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
15_minute_fic word #108: hungry
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Near the end of The Magician's Nephew Aslan tells Digory and Polly that Jadis "has won her heart's desire; she has unwearying strength and endless days like a goddess. But length of days with an evil heart is only length of misery and already she begins to know it. All get what they want: they do not always like it."
I never believed him. First, people do not always get what they want; anyone who claims otherwise is engaging in sophistry or wishful thinking. Secondly, the sense I got of Jadis in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was emphatically not of a woman mired in despair. Jadis is too practical to give in to despair or wallow in depressive introspection, and I am not at all sure she's even capable of misery; her emotional repertoire seems limited to anger, frustration, fear, hatred, pride, triumph, (self-)satisfaction, and sometimes a pure joy in skill and motion. Possibly also greed or covetousness, but I think even her ambition is more a surety that everything already does belong to her, and she just has to make people acknowledge that truth.
Jadis is evil, no two ways about it. She's selfish, cruel, and probably sociopathic -- other people are not real to her except as tools or obstacles. But length of days with an evil heart is only miserable if you know and care about your relative moral standing. If you don't -- and Jadis doesn't -- then length of days gives you time for everything you find pleasurable, like magic and conquest and fighting.
So with all due respect, I must disagree with Aslan (and therefore, more relevantly, with C. S. Lewis). :-)
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NOTICE! There is an extensive discussion in the comments on the Livejournal version of this post, which happened after I imported my journal to Dreamwidth. I think it is worth checking out.
[ETA: The AO3 crosspost and the ff.net crosspost are now up.]
---------------------------------------------
Heart's Desire
---------------------------------------------
"Come in by the gold gates or not at all," the garden's maker had written. And truly, there was no need to turn aside, walk a quarter-circle around the hilltop, and clamber over the wall, but Jadis was the Queen of Charn and she bowed to no one.
She would have the apple on her own terms, as she had earned everything else in her life.
The fruit was sharp and almost painfully sweet, with a metallic tang underneath that expanded to bitter and salt in the aftertaste. The juice was shockingly dark for such a fair-fleshed fruit. Jadis licked the red-brown stain from her hand and laughed.
Pure theatrics: the apple bled. Was that supposed to induce guilt or shame?
The Lion had made this world, she acknowledged, but she had been here at the making; her magic was thus woven deep into its earth and air, inseparable from its very fabric of being. Until this world died, the Lion must adjust his plans to account for her. And even after, she could continue -- if that simpering fool had learned to travel between the planes, surely so could she! And she would learn to cross directly, without the crutch of that horrible, drowning place between the worlds.
A breeze stirred the garden, swirling petals and scent from the tree. Jadis sneezed, and then nearly gagged on the rotting sweetness of the silvery perfume. Stumbling, she turned aside, holding her arms across her face as if to block the very air from attacking her.
The air stilled. The scent dissipated.
Jadis lowered her arms and clenched her free hand, seething. So. The Lion had fashioned a trap for those who defied him and ate the fruit unbidden. But even he could not stop the apple from performing its function; already she could feel new strength coursing through her blood and bones like a river of ice, scouring away her mortality.
She had forever, now. She had new magic to master, a new world to conquer, a new foe to destroy. If the Lion thought that a mere tree would defeat her or that length of days would lead her to despair, he was a fool, as her sister had been.
Jadis ran her tongue across her teeth, savoring the iron tang of immortality, and took another bite.
---------------------------------------------
Inspired by the 4/27/09
15_minute_fic word #108: hungry---------------------------------------------
Near the end of The Magician's Nephew Aslan tells Digory and Polly that Jadis "has won her heart's desire; she has unwearying strength and endless days like a goddess. But length of days with an evil heart is only length of misery and already she begins to know it. All get what they want: they do not always like it."
I never believed him. First, people do not always get what they want; anyone who claims otherwise is engaging in sophistry or wishful thinking. Secondly, the sense I got of Jadis in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was emphatically not of a woman mired in despair. Jadis is too practical to give in to despair or wallow in depressive introspection, and I am not at all sure she's even capable of misery; her emotional repertoire seems limited to anger, frustration, fear, hatred, pride, triumph, (self-)satisfaction, and sometimes a pure joy in skill and motion. Possibly also greed or covetousness, but I think even her ambition is more a surety that everything already does belong to her, and she just has to make people acknowledge that truth.
Jadis is evil, no two ways about it. She's selfish, cruel, and probably sociopathic -- other people are not real to her except as tools or obstacles. But length of days with an evil heart is only miserable if you know and care about your relative moral standing. If you don't -- and Jadis doesn't -- then length of days gives you time for everything you find pleasurable, like magic and conquest and fighting.
So with all due respect, I must disagree with Aslan (and therefore, more relevantly, with C. S. Lewis). :-)
---------------
NOTICE! There is an extensive discussion in the comments on the Livejournal version of this post, which happened after I imported my journal to Dreamwidth. I think it is worth checking out.
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Re: on theology, ethics, and authorial intent, part 4
Date: 2009-05-12 04:54 am (UTC)Agreed, thematic canon is more important than explicit. All fanfiction messes with explicit canon by its very nature. I'll even allow for dark canon, where a character is inverted in order to explore responses (I wrote a fic once where Peter hates Edmund, based off of his rather stiff and flat character in the LWW book. I was playing with the inversion of a character, but stated it upfront and that I didn't agree with the characterization at all. It was still one of my least liked fics.). I would have a harder time with an inversion of Aslan's character, because I don't see room for an inversion. The flatness of Peter's character allowed me to speculate, but Aslan was more fleshed out and very much shown as a loving, good character.
So I choose to think of Aslan as a deity of love and justice who is completely independent of Jesus and the Trinity... and to either ignore or very heavily handwave most of TLB...I think I can, actually, manage to make most of the events of TLB palatable enough for me to swallow, but I'd have to do a lot of delicate tap-dancing over Lewis's phrasing of certain sentences and mentally embroider the edges of the story with various justifications Lewis does not bother to provide.
I think that's perfectly valid. Though I would be hesitant about something that ignored TLB if it took place during or after. Tweaking it a bit, like you suggest, would be fine, but ignoring it would be unwise, I think, as long as it fits in with the other six books.
it's often easier for me to think in stories than in essays.
Agreed a thousand times! I can't tell you the number of fics I've written either to explain a thought I had, or that ended up unconsciously explaining something that I hadn't thought about before writing it! And I think writing fanfiction helps us understand and think about the source material more than just writing an essay about it, because you have to think closely about the characters, in particular.