mrissa | Meme and Variations

Meme and Variations

Lots of people on the friendslist are now talking about who they wanted to be in a book. I wanted to visit lots of books, but that was different from wanting to be somebody. It was always a bad sign when I wanted to be a fictional character when I was a kid. Not a bad sign for my life. Most of the fictional characters I read when I was small had it much worse than I did, and I knew it. (Major exception: we had an extended game of Swallows-and-Amazons when I was a kid, described in excessive detail here.) So when I wanted to be a fictional character, it was because I would set something right that the author had gotten wrongety wrong wrong wrong.

I wanted to be Will, not in The Dark Is Rising, but in Silver on the Tree, so that I could make them not do the last five pages, so that I, girl-Will, could rise up and start smiting the Old Ones and the Dark alike. The last five pages of that book are so not canonical. The Light are right bastards and, what's worse, typical grownups.

I wanted to be Faith Meredith so I could convince Walter to train for a medic or something and not go proving his stupid bravery for me. I wanted to be Ilse Burnley so I could send Teddy Kent packing away from both me and my best friend Emily of New Moon so that we and Perry could do cool stuff without his clueless spineless (brainless! hopeless!) mommy-obsessed pretentious-artist self, and then maybe Emily would get over her pretentious artist stuff, too. Also maybe Teddy could be unemployed in Greenland. That would have been all right.

I wanted to be Vicky Austin so I could knock sense into Adam Eddington halfway through the book (A Ring of Endless Light) instead of at the very end and give Zachary Gray the boot on day one of The Moon By Night. And apply said boot as many times as necessary until he got the point. I wanted to be Polly O'Keefe so I could knock sense into Renny at all (in A House Like a Lotus).

I wanted to be Aslan so I could stop kicking people out of Narnia. (Also, girl-Aslan. Like many of the people answering this meme, I wanted to replace the most interesting or effective character to replace; unlike many of the people answering this meme, my self-concept has always been firmly gendered, so Aslan would just have to be a girl if I was Aslan.)

I wanted to be Princess Leia so I could thief somebody's lightsaber and take care of business. I wanted to be Princess Buttercup so I could poison Prince Humperdink's tea, take the throne myself, and, after a period of decorous mourning, marry Westley.

Basically, I was fairly convinced that fictional characters in movies and children's books did not kick enough ass, or did not kick ass in the correct directions. I have said before and will say again: when I was a kid, I had a very firm awareness that writers were just people like me, only sadly less competent.

When the characters I read kicked ass, I wanted to invite them out to fix things here. Sir Percy Blakeney, for example, would have been allowed to smuggle me out of Blumfield Elementary in a cart of cabbages whenever he pleased. That would have been quite all right with me.

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so that I could make them not do the last five pages

I'm so glad someone else feels as I do about those pages. Smite smite smite!

mechaieh is also on our side.

I didn't so much want to smite them as just to have them give the humans choices, because otherwise what's the point of being human at all?

They gave wossname a choice, and he gave it back to them, and I was fine with that. Because he was a grown-up.

Some people will think I'm being melodramatic if I say that they didn't give the children choices because they, like many grown-ups, did not believe the children were fully human. But I really think that's what it is.

Err. That is, they gave him a choice because he was a grown-up. Not I'm fine with it because he was a grown-up.

But there's always a sense that they knew in advance how he would choose. I'm not sure they'd have given it to him otherwise.

I think I threw that book across the room at that point, screaming: tools!

mechaieh pointed me to this discussion. I know quite a lot of people who feel the same way you do about those five pages. Personally, the first time I finished Silver on the Tree, I cried tears of rage. Rage.

I just went into immediate denial. Clearly that wasn't the way things had happened; it was a mistake.

unlike many of the people answering this meme, my self-concept has always been firmly gendered, so Aslan would just have to be a girl if I was Aslan.)

Me, too. Although I had (still do) a fondness for girl-disguised-as-boy books, so sometimes I was disguised as a boy when I was in the role of that character, for whatever reason I could maufacture.

This is particularly easy as Aslan: stick a false mane on, and how many people really checked out Aslan's particular bits? Very few people want to get that close to that part of a lion, is what I'm saying.

The last five pages of that book are so not canonical. The Light are right bastards and, what's worse, typical grownups.

This actually didn't bother me so much, mainly because I thought Cooper established that the Light could be (and often was) right bastards way back in TDIR.

It was always in service to beating the Dark before, though. This time it was just "we know best and we're the Light so meeehhhhhhhh."

You do not use people to save the world and then take it away from them. You. Do. Not. This is worse than the typical Death of the Magic ending, where you save the world and have to go back to being a typical little girl; this time you save the world and have to go back to being a typical little girl and don't even have the memories of kicking ass to serve you well in adulthood.

Harumph.

That's one thing I do like about Jo Rowling: in Harry Potter Book 5 she actually admits the Light (well, the Ministry of Magic) can be right bastards and the people who want to make their own choices do get to kick ass. (Though as

ajhalluk often points out, Dumbledore can be a bit high-handed as well.)

Also, Zachary Gray is a jerk, but Adam Eddington is a superior sod who appears to believe anyone younger than he is by definition inferior and I'd like to see Vicky boot him. (Maybe she could hook up with Simon Renier instead?) THough I suppose Poly would be more likely to do some booting - incidentally, I liked Poly a lot better before she hit adolescence, acquired an extra 'l' and lost all her self-confidence.

I think there's a big difference between admitting that the people who think they're in the right aren't and having people you insist are in the right do horrible, awful, bastardly things.

Yah, I liked Poly better preadolescent, too. But I thought if Vicky had showed proper backbone, it wouldn't have been as much of an issue. Sometimes you have to be firm with guys at that age.

Incidentally, I don't think I'd want to be anyone in either Rowling's or Cooper's worlds, for reasons of age. As I understand it, in either case if you're older than 11 and haven't show any signs of magic, you're SOL for the rest of your life.

I really hope L'Engle gets that book done that she's reportedly been working on, about Meg Murray in middle age, but given her health I don't think the chances are good. Maybe I'll go invest in whatever I don't already have by RA Macavoy, instead.

Meg, hell. We've seen some of Meg. I want my Charles Wallace book, and I want it now.

On the other hand, I don't think you save the world for a reward--even the indirect reward of knowing you saved it. I think the save the world because it's the right thing to do.

I'm not saying I was pleased by the ending, but I still believe it fit with the rest of the story arc.

No, you don't do it for the reward. But when people deprive you of your own hard-won experiences, your own tears and fighting, not because it will help defeat evil but because of rankest paternalism, they're no longer the good guys. The bad guys win at the end of Silver on the Tree. Not all of them, but some of them.

Can I join you in booting Zachary Gray? Tag team booting?

Don't you know that's why butts have two cheeks?

I'm not preferentially left- or right-legged that I know of, so you can pick whichever side you like.

Oh, excellent.

I don't think I know anyone who likes Zachary Gray or even has any sympathy for him. I've been trying to reread An Acceptable Time for months now and just can't because of him.

I actually like that book mostly because of the severe booting he gets. I just cackle whenever he acts like a jerk, because I know what's coming... *g*

Been a long time since I've read the book, so I have vague memories of a booting but cannot recall how severe it is.

Also: Isn't "jerk" Zachary Gray's baseline behavior? Seems to me that he's a jerk 24/7. Such a TWIT.

Yeah, that's part of what makes that book readable. Hee.

(small voice) I felt kind of sorry for Zachary Gray. In fact, I remember wanting to be him, just so I could 1) not flee the hospital, 2) get over my Poor Little Rich Boy complex, 3) dump earnest Vicky and the law school expectations, and 4) spend the rest of the summer sitting around the pool, writing some witty send up of my under/over-privileged upbringing. I'd then do book signings at Encore Books (the only bookstore in my real-life hometown, sadly), play some tennis, do some grueling volunteer work as anonymously as possible (while thinking smugly to myself, take that, Austins, I do more good than you!) and live out my misunderstood days with the reputation of a belled-pheasant-eating cad.

Or maybe I just wanted him to take me to dinner.

I usually started out wanting to be the Aslan, Will or Vicky of the story, but my adolescent chickenheart was too honest to let that little daydream last. I knew that I'd never make it -- doing the right thing all the time can be so hard and unsatisfying. It was much more fun to tweak the character of the jackasses so I could Save the World in tiny, manageable bits while snacking on Turkish Delight and Boeuf Wellington.

(Oh, and hi, I like your journal. I'll shut my contrary mouth now.)

Hi! You don't have to shut your contrary mouth; heaven knows I don't shut mine.

I think getting over his Poor Little Rich Boy complex was fundamentally alien to what I thought of Zachary Gray, and that was part of what made him such an unsatisfying character for me. After A Ring of Endless Light, I no longer believed that he might stop being such a jerk. When he showed up in Polly's books, it was nothing but annoyance to me, because he was more irredeemably self-centered than anyone else was incorruptibly good.

I did a fair bit of that, but more often I just refuse to re-read books that didn't end properly, which may very well be why I don't remember the Susan Cooper books very well.

And to me properly has always included not killing off major characters, no matter what. I don't care if the story 'needs it,' the story is wrong. WRONG. Well, actually, the story can kill them off in the first book, but I flat out refuse to reread the Westermark books because the main characters are killed off in the last book. The last one! They made it that far, you're not allowed to kill them. Likewise, Phillip Pullman's first series, I loved the first book, and I hated the second and never read any more because he killed the wrong person.

This is probably why I object so strenously to the end of Pitch Black as gratuitous killing.

I can think of at least one book I've already written that you shouldn't read, and at least one more in outline-and-notes-and-a-few-scenes format that you shouldn't, then.

Are the Westermark books different from the Westmark books? Because I know the main characters are alive at the end of The Beggar Queen. I just checked.

Hmm. It's probably me messing up the title. And I don't know, maybe they weren't the main characters, but more people died in that series than I thought was proper, and the wrong people too. Though I may have been influenced by the fact that I read it while still in middle school, and I may actually allow deaths of important characters now, I just haven't gone and reread the books that bothered me the first time through. And I'm not really in favor of it, mostly because I like books to have happy endings. I mean, I know bad stuff happens, but it can happen after the book ends, damnit.

It was a book about revolutionary war. I would have thought it highly improper if there hadn't been so much blood. None of it was pointless, in my view. If it had happened after the book ended, it would have been an entirely different book, either set in a different time period or trying to pretty up something that's fundamentally ugly.

But I was a gory little political animal at 8.

I wanted to be the bad guy, wosshisname, in the Memory of Earth stuff, because he was the only person in the whole silly thing who made any sense. Well, maybe half the time he made sense. I wanted to straighten him out. And to punch all of the "good" guys.

I didn't fight too hard against the ending at first, or the "you were adults, whoops, now back to being kids!" thing in Narnia), but it did start to aggravate me seriously later on. I simply retconned it to human brains not accepting that much erasing, and eventually everybody remembered things. In bits and pieces and dreams first, perhaps, but eventually it all came back.

I wanted to be *with* Will, so badly. I invented all sorts of mythical women I could be that he would hang out with.

Also, I still feel sorry for Susan - I mean, there she is at the end of The Last Battle, with her parents, brothers and sister, and old family friends all dead, and she's left alone just for being so weak as to buy in to the ideas of the world she's living in.

And this is *after* she's shown that in a more supportive environment she has the potential to grow up into a gracious and secure person.

(And come to think of it, if you read the books as parables, which I rarely do, this is probably CSL's commentary on those of us who are so obstinate as to still be Jewish post-Jesus. Sigh.)

Have you read

papersky's poem about Susan? It knocked me flat, but now I can't find it. I think I've got a printout of it folded into The Last Battle, but I'd rather link if I could.

I don't think she's meant to be Jewish at all. I think she's meant to be a worldly sexually adult female. I don't think the lipsticks, stockings, and invitations are accidental -- nor is Lucy's particular scorn for them -- and I don't find any way to tie those things particularly to Judaism. Non-Christian faiths get off fairly well in The Last Battle with the good Caloremene -- that if you call upon the Good and do things pleasing to the Good, the Good will not care if you called it something else, even if you called it Evil -- but adult female sexuality doesn't get very good press anywhere in the series. So I think it's about Susan growing up to be an actual woman by the standards of her time, instead of a pedestalled queen.

Didn't someone (Neil Gaiman?) write a story about Susan as an old lady, where she's a professor now or something? It was really strange.

Yes, Aslan kicking people otu of Narnia was v. annoying. And I have a whole post in my head about those books in which that aspect is a major part.

I was disappointedwhen Poly lost her virginity to Renny because it seemed all wrong for her. Your first time should not happen because you went through a crisis, and I thought Poly had developed enough as a character to know that. There was no build up to it at all, as she and Renny weren't much more than friends. It just happened, and nothing really even came of it. Maybe we were supposed to take away the thought that the experience helped her to know to fend off Zachary in Greece, but I thought it was a disappointing way to develop her as a character.

I disagree. I don't think one's first time should happen because of a crisis, but many emotionally developed teenagers are still teenagers and still prone to suboptimal decisions in moments of crisis. (Hell, adults are prone to suboptimal decisions in moments of crisis.) And I also disagree that there wasn't much buildup or that nothing came of it. The relationship was extremely fraught with tension, especially on Polly's side, and her reaction to that entire day reverberated through the rest of the book. It wasn't that it helped her fend off Zachary. It was that it more subtly affected every line of her dealing with Zachary.

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Meme and Variations

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Poly

Re: Poly