(Hijack, sorry):
So, wait. Judas pleads with the Lord not to take away the sea, because it’s his one day of respite from the tortures of hell. Then the Lord takes away the sea and puts it in heaven–presumably where Judas can’t get to–anyways? How fair is that?
Well, if Judas can be spirited all the way from Hell to the sea on Earth for his day of respite, why not to the sea where God has put it? Good catch, admittedly, but since Kipling has God giving the sea back to everyone else, I’m sure He could give it back to Judas as well. He was allowed to enter his plea, after all - which wouldn’t have been all that easy in the ordinary way, you may think.
It’s important to note that Susan is the only one out of all the travelers to Narnia who chooses to grow up. Sure, she may have been interested in lipstick and nylons, but she’s the only one likely to have become a parent herself. Her siblings, Eustace and Jill, Polly and Diggory, had all lingered on in the innocence of their childhood, in a sense. We see the Pevensy parents made it into heaven without having had any experiences in Narnia to help them get there; Susan I’m sure, too… she’ll just have to worry about her kids getting in.
And, really, the true prat in the Last Battle is Lucy. While she’s sneering at her sister liking lipstick and nylons… her sister, alive, is dealing with the fact that her entire family and all their friends just died. Lovely.
But IIRC the Pevensies et al. don’t know until the very end of The Last Battle that they have died, when they get the chance to speak to Aslan and express confusion that they are back in Narnia but had previously been told they wouldn’t be coming back. So Lucy is being a bit of a prat talking about how SUsan is acting, but she doesn’t actually know what Susan is dealing with back in the real world.
Of course I may be wrong in my recollection; it has been several years since I’ve read the books.
No, you’re exactly right. Only on the very last page does Aslan reveal that they have just died and will not be going back - and, for the benefit of those who may not know this, the problem with Susan is not that she likes lipstick and nylons, but that she has no time for anything else.
On the other characters’ say-so (and since they knew her face to face, this is not hearsay, it’s testimony) Susan’s only idea of “growing up” was to become a party girl inappropriately early, and she was determined to remain one as long as possible. “Grow up? I wish she would grow up!”.
Yes, but it’s the testimony of people who are annoyed that she doesn’t want to talk about Narnia any more, so it’s hardly unbiased.
And it still wouldn’t have hurt for the Pevensies &tc. to pause for an “Oh, poor Susan!” moment in their happiness. (mind you, I suspect their attitude toward her was one of exasperation rather than contempt, not that it necessarily reads that way)
A friend of mine thinks that the books portray Susan as being condemned to Hell in the end. I haven’t read them in ages, and frankly all the Christian allegory went over my head at the time anyway. (What can I say, I was raised pagan.) Was she thinking of some other book maybe?
Susan is not condemned to anything in the book. She is last mentioned in Chapter 12 as alluded to above, and I just refreshed my memory:
Peter says stiffly that she is no longer a Friend of Narnia
Eustace says that when you try to get her to talk about Narnia, she acts as if it was only ever a childish game
Jill says that she always was a sight too keen on being grown up
Polly retorts that she wishes Susan would grow up, and that her whole aim in life has been to rush on to the silliest part of it and then stay there as long as possible.
(So anyone dissing Lucy or Edmund over this part of the story should be made aware that in fact neither contributed to this discussion at all.)
One response to some of the above criticism is that Lewis was plainly of the opinion - as he expressed in The Great Divorce - that in fact the saved cannot be made miserable by the plight of those who refused salvation, and that it was perfectly right that this should be so, “or you’ll make a Dog in the Manger the tyrant of the universe”. Eventually those who insist that no-one else is to be perfectly happy unless they get what they want on their own terms will find that they have been deprived of the power to use Pity as a weapon.
I know Movie Adaptation threads here on the dope turn into giant Fanwanks but this one has reached a new height. Just…wow.
I saw the movie yesterday, little late to the game I know, and I dug it. I realize that they changed some things about the book in a major way, but they did it very effectively IMO, unlike the LotR idiocy with Aragorn and the cliff. Trumping up the conflict between Peter and Caspian was useful for the drama of the movie and attack of the Castle was the crux of that storyline. Lets face it, the drawn out siege of Aslan’s How that the book portrayed would have been awfully tedious in action movie form and probably would have produced some nonsensical battle sequences. Plus it served to unite the Telmarines against the Narnians which was important to their motivation to march out to war. I like the fact that they at least made that addition part of the story instead of just a tacked-on action/dramatic sequence.
It’s been a long time since I read the books, but in the book, doesn’t Edmund later admit to Lucy that he also saw Aslan across the gorge, and was afraid to speak up? If I’m remembering that right, that is a very important point that was left out of the movie.
The attack on the castle was a bizarre addition that seemed to me to be added just to generate conflict between Peter and PC.
The sense I remember getting from the books is that Peter is well meaning but sometimes kind of a dick without realizing it. In the movies he is just coming across as a dick.
Can anyone explain to me why I am so attracted to Susan? She just seems smoking hot to me and I don’t know why. Objectively I don’t think she’s that attractive of a person, but she makes me feel kinda funny, like when we used to climb the rope in gym class 
. Anybody else feel the same?
I never climbed the rope and I agree with you. She’s very secretly-naughty hot, moreso in her uniform.
She had Angelina Jolie’s lips cloned and grafted in a secret underground facility.
I’m pretty sure that was Susan, not Edmund.
That makes this even more interesting (in a coincidental, amusing way):
From Wikipedia’s page on Lewis:
From Wikipedia’s page on Anna Popplewell (the actress who plays Susan):
Um … yes.
None of them except Lucy saw Aslan at first, but Susan later admitted that she really believed Lucy from the beginning, but was so tired and frustrated and sick of the woods that she wouldn’t say it. I think this fits in with what happens to her later (the no longer being a friend of Narnia bit); deep down she may believe but she lets herself get caught up in the moment and tries to take the easy way out (grousing and being disagreeable in the woods, focusing on material things later in life - only then, there was no physical Aslan to appear and set her straight).
Reepicheep is one of my favorite characters in literature and I was glad to see him represented as well as he was.
I like how they did Reepicheep too. 
The rest of the movie I am too PO’ed to talk about.