Jun. 10th, 2008 10:04 am
Lewis... sigh...
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textualdevianceFinally finished my journey through Narnia.
*shakes head*
*The only adult women who are not inherently evil, dying or already dead are a couple of docile, submissive hausfraus. Little girls are apparently OK until they hit their late teens or so and then they either disappear or turn bad. The adult Susan? Causes chaos in one book with her love life and entirely disappears by the last.
*Turban-wearing, scimitar-wielding, desert-dwelling "Darkies" are apparently not just evil, but worship the devil.
*Atheist, "selfish" dwarves are sentenced to eternal darkness.
*Education, particularly that which is co-ed, focuses on reality and is headed by a woman is inherently bad.
*Logic? We don't need no steenkin logic. We have faith in Aslan!
*Heaven is in the West. Hell is in the East.
*It may be a boy, rather than Eve, tempted by the apple, but it's a grown, beautiful woman doing the tempting. Sex (embodied by women) is EVIL, y'all!
*Absolute rulers with dark faces = tyrants. Absolute rulers with white faces = heroes.
*Boys who get scared and don't want to take up arms are bad, and must be forcibly re-educated.
And then we have that ending. Egad. Some children's book. My kids aren't setting a finger on these until they're old enough to understand the context in which they were written.
It wasn't all bad, really. Some of it was just bizarre rather than creepy. But I think I need to go dive back into Oz to wash my brain out.
I think I've now experienced most of the classic/neo-classic children's fantasies, though: Oz, Middle-Earth, Narnia, Potter, L'Engle, Redwall... Am I missing any? Any recs?
*shakes head*
*The only adult women who are not inherently evil, dying or already dead are a couple of docile, submissive hausfraus. Little girls are apparently OK until they hit their late teens or so and then they either disappear or turn bad. The adult Susan? Causes chaos in one book with her love life and entirely disappears by the last.
*Turban-wearing, scimitar-wielding, desert-dwelling "Darkies" are apparently not just evil, but worship the devil.
*Atheist, "selfish" dwarves are sentenced to eternal darkness.
*Education, particularly that which is co-ed, focuses on reality and is headed by a woman is inherently bad.
*Logic? We don't need no steenkin logic. We have faith in Aslan!
*Heaven is in the West. Hell is in the East.
*It may be a boy, rather than Eve, tempted by the apple, but it's a grown, beautiful woman doing the tempting. Sex (embodied by women) is EVIL, y'all!
*Absolute rulers with dark faces = tyrants. Absolute rulers with white faces = heroes.
*Boys who get scared and don't want to take up arms are bad, and must be forcibly re-educated.
And then we have that ending. Egad. Some children's book. My kids aren't setting a finger on these until they're old enough to understand the context in which they were written.
It wasn't all bad, really. Some of it was just bizarre rather than creepy. But I think I need to go dive back into Oz to wash my brain out.
I think I've now experienced most of the classic/neo-classic children's fantasies, though: Oz, Middle-Earth, Narnia, Potter, L'Engle, Redwall... Am I missing any? Any recs?
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Patricia C. Wrede's Dragons series
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I'm also very fond of Lloyd Alexander's Prydain series (The Book of Three, The Black Cauldron, The Castle of Llyr, Taran Wanderer and The High King), based on Welsh mythology and quite magical!
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The book, NOT the movie.
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