Forget Susan And Lucy (don’t) But Please Don’t Tell Me Lewis Didn’t Like Female Characters When

Reading The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe with my son on Easter Tuesday and he was so shocked and confused and bereft when Aslan died. Then we had to stop for a very gloomy lunch before we could read the next chapter, and it hit me that he was getting a better understanding than anything we could have taught him about what the disciples went through on Easter Saturday. I mean, we had just been talking about it three days earlier, but of course when you know there's a happy ending coming, you don't really feel it. And Aslan was finally here, after all this hope and expectation, and he was meant to make everything all right again 😭 He'd even already made the connection to Jesus when the witch's gang were kicking and hitting and jeering at Aslan, but he never in his wildest dreams thought he would become alive again! The joy and wonder and absolute glee he felt in the next chapter — he figured it out just before it happened because he cottoned onto the homage — preached the whole thing more eloquently than I could ever have hoped. And oof, if I didn't feel it all with him, too, as if for the first time ❤️ Well played, Mr Lewis, well played.

Also yesterday I caught him saying "I say!" so a positive experience all round 😃

It's a cliché to say that Tolkien's experiences in WWI affected all aspects of his writing, how he wrote about friendship and grief, how he wrote about desolate blasted landscapes. But I wish someone who knows more about Tolkien's military career could help me understand how Tolkien related to retreats. His description of Faramir keeping his people together on the retreat from Osgiliath is one of the best-written sequences in the trilogy, and hardly anyone remembers it. It's about a desperate retreat, and a leader whose presence, whose strength manages to keep it from turning into a rout. There's something very vivid in the descriptions: don't break formation, don't start running or they'll pick you off one by one, keep together, keep moving, hold all of that fear at bay. Tolkien describes that retreat as genuinely heroic, a superhuman act of will, one that exhausts Faramir almost to death, and Denethor still does not accept it as heroic because it's a retreat. It saved men but it lost territory, therefore in his eyes it's a failure.

Tolkien has strong opinions about heroic retreats, in the Silmarillion he sometimes gives the retreat-through-the-dangerous-wilderness plotline to female characters (Emeldir, Idril), he always writes them with respect. Sometimes, getting out of there and keeping most of your people alive is a great act of valour. I feel like he must have had a personal experience about what it means to retreat, and what it means to hold a retreat together, and what it means to get no thanks for it.

Febuwhump Day 19: Death Wish (Captain America)

“So why did you decide to crash the plane into the ice? Wasn’t there another option?”

The breath froze in Steve’s lungs. He blinked at the interviewer, who was leaning over his desk with concerned eyebrows and a wicked glint in his eyes.

That question hadn’t been on the approved list.

They’d promised they would stick to the list. It was the only reason Steve had agreed to a live interview, his first since being thawed out, his first since coming into this new world where he was a piece of history, not a person.

And now they asked him this, on live TV.

Steve cleared his throat, clasped and unclasped his hands between his khaki-clad knees. “I’m not sure I understand the question,” he said quietly, hoping that would be enough to re-route the interviewer back to the list.

The interviewer didn’t take the hint. Instead, he unfolded a piece of paper, tapping it with one manicured finger. “Your decision to ground the plane has been studied by experts since the records were declassified,” he said, flashing perfect teeth in a predatory grin. “They estimate there were at least six other ways out of the situation without taking it down. So why was that the route you took? Was it a death wish?”

Steve’s throat closed. For a moment, he could only see the glaring white of the ice through the windshield, hear the static of the radio, the shriek of the wind…

He kept his jaw set, measuring each breath until his vision cleared and he could see the room again. The studio audience waited in breathless anticipation; the interviewer had arranged his face into an expression of polite concern. Somewhere behind him, Steve could hear the furiously whispered argument as SHIELD’s PR rep urged the television crew to go to a commercial break.

“Your experts are misinformed. There was no other option,” Steve said quietly, once he was sure he could keep his voice steady. Then he got to his feet, moving quickly enough that nobody expected the movement until he was shaking the surprised interviewer’s immaculately-manicured hand, squeezing hard enough that the bones creaked under his fingers. “Thank you for having me today,” he said loudly, speaking over the interviewer’s gasp of pain.

The exits were blocked—there was no easy way off the stage. That didn’t bother Steve. He locked eyes with the first kid in the audience he saw, and pulled a pen out of his pocket as he stepped over the camera cables and into the studio audience, leaving the stammering interviewer, cradling his hand, alone on the stage.

Within seconds he was safely surrounded by a delighted crowd seeking autographs. The audience door was a few yards away, and beyond that was freedom.

This interview was over.

But even as Steve smiled and worked his way towards the door, signing hats and hands and t-shirts as he went, the only thing he could hear was the whistle of the wind through the desolate cockpit, and the tremble in Peggy’s voice as she bravely talked him through those last few minutes.

No, there had been no death wish. In that final moment, Steve had wanted to live more than he ever had before.

It had made his choice all the harder.

And now, stranded in this new world, where people analyzed his decisions, dissected and pulled him apart like some grotesque thought experiment, he found himself more isolated even than he had been on that doomed plane.

Because then, at least, he’d had someone who cared.

————

Written for @febuwhump

Battle of the Gingers Finals

Ms. Frizzle (The Magic School Bus) vs Anne Shirley (Anne of Green Gables)

Mod comment: I've been getting quite a bit of Anne content on my dashboard because of this tournament. Apparently they're making an anime that is coming out soon?

Hobbits with spring flowers!

Diana Wynne Jones wins big once again for understanding that the funniest way to write an isekai/portal fantasy is from the point of view of the people living in the fantasy world who look at the character who got isekai’d from our world and are like ‘WHAT is that guy’s deal???’

Howl/Howell stumbling back into his moving castle drunk after a night with his rugby bros is like the second funniest scene in that book, closely followed by poor Sophie getting reverse isekai’d and taking a day trip to Wales and suffering the terrible ordeal of a ride in a car.

I feel like I need to share my favourite Jet Lag outake, that, afaik, was only uploaded on Scotty's twitter. It's so fucking funny. Adam looks like he's having an actual brain aneurism while Ben is just like 😕 I don't like it

The first verse of What Child is This but over a painting of the Pieta

The difference between Howl and Gen is that Gen won't try and weasel his way out of the things he really really doesn't want to do.

I haven’t platonicposted in a while