Oh, my best beloveds.
Last night I went on a regular tear (on Mastodon and Twitter) about a certain article I couldn’t find. It was about Susan Pevensie making her own kingdom. I had it confused with Sarah Gailey’s most excellent Women of Harry Potter series, which I read at about the same time.
Lo and behold, this morning a very kind person on Mastodon knew what I was talking about, remembered it, and dug it up. So, without further ado, here’s the link–and it also has a companion piece about Susan at school. (The writer is also a fanficcer and novelist, if you’d like more.)
Sometimes we forget, dealing with the dregs, just how magical the internet is. My faith in humanity is quite restored this morning.
I probably needed it, because I spent last night reading Hurlothrumbo’s The Merry-Thought, all four in the series. Tudor England was a trip, yo. Then this morning I read a little Kwaidan, because I woke up from dreams of ladders and disasters, turned over, had another dream about thieves in my garage, and woke up in a cold sweat. Reading’s generally what I do to calm myself after terrible dreams, especially if my tossing and turning hasn’t disturbed the dogs, but maybe Japanese ghost tales filtered through a Greek-Irish lens was not the best choice, because I feel a little sideways.
But finding those two articles on Susan again made it all worth it. CS Lewis was a misogynistic turd. A very talented one, and you can see the ur-characters he was trying to repress peeking through the bars of his smallness-of-mind and religious poisoning… but still, his hatred of adult women, like Tolkien’s, is very telling. (Even if I do love Puddleglum and Reepicheep and Tumnus and and and…)
In any case, I’m glad for modernity, and for the ability to type into a glowing box, and for literacy, and for the vast treasure-trove of books on Gutenberg.org, and so on, so forth. Often I overlook the good things about the internet because the bad things–trolls, thieves, bots, nastiness–are so very, well, bad. It’s nice to be reminded of the good as well.
I suppose the dreams were a signal that my internal creative pressure has reached the requisite pitch, since physical misery bled off a lot of energy earlier in the week. It’s back to the whetstone to sharpen some words.
Even if a lion tries to keep you out of heaven, there are kingdoms to make here. And, after all, is it really heaven if a misogynist lion can keep you out?