Not AU exactly -- AW through a blurry, malfunctioning telescope

[rthstewart]

In the following, we now cover 15-16 years, and this goes places I did not intend, and we end up not in AU exactly, but maybe. It's not what I'd intended. The first part is re-hash of the commentfic and I blame lady_songsmith for the prompt that took us to the Amazon and then anastigmatfic for where we’ve ended up, however improbably. The very end is new.

Comments

[anonymous]

Sorry to interrupt a discussion that has gotten far deeper than what I had so far considered with this piece, BUT...

Does it make sense to be mad at the High King?

Of course! He is not Aslan (and even Aslan accepts his subjects' anger... thinking of Morgan and a candlestick here), and he can be blind, stubborn, misguided, and frustrating like any other person. People are so often frustrated with anyone who is holier-than-thou (which Peter, I believe, is definitively NOT) -as well as with anyone so firmly convinced of their point of view that they have blinders on with regards to anything else. Perhaps it's almost easier to be frustrated with Peter, because he normally is so right, that any flaw to be noticed rubs raw, out of proportion to its actual size.

I see Peter in some ways as a contradiction. He is so open-minded on some things (anti-colonial king!?), and on others he just can't step out of his own boots and consider other paths. We've seen that going back to his struggles between Richard and Digory, his calling versus his schooling. He sees one path forward and will not deviate from it, because he knows it is right--he can't quite consider that there might be other sorts of right, equally valid but different. One might say that he learned this in Narnia, so why did he forget? I don't think he's forgotten, but I think we underestimate how difficult it is to see the way forward to applying that lesson to Spare Oom situations. Lucy is much better at that; I think she doesn't separate the worlds so much as her siblings do. It doesn't have to be one or the other for her; Narnia and Spare Oom coexist in the present, in her heart. She hears the voices, while for Edmund and Susan Narnia must be relegated to past (relevent or not). And Peter's still struggling to figure out when Narnia is applicable, and when it must be set aside. He's very black and white--spying during the war was regrettable but necessary, but now it's done. Finis. He's always had a trouble with gray areas--both a strength and a weakness. A good friend of mine is quite similar. I love her, I admire her, and she frustrates the hell out of me sometimes. All of which is the long way around to saying--is it ok to be mad at the High King? Of course! Someone who's always right in everything is not only a bit of a bore, but alien enough that he would be hard to love. And that is just about opposite to the essence of Peter.

~Syrena

[rthstewart]

Thank you so much, for this post and the one you just made. I've been swimming in doubts of the highly negative variety-tear-it-all-down-go-to-ground-like-I-did-in-1996 and I really, really appreciate this. I hope that you'll eventually consider, amidst your many other obligations, setting up some sort of anon account, whether on LJ, as a fake email, or an ff.net account and we can take it off line sometimes. If you wish, of course. For now, again, thank you. I wallow about and then I see something like this and realize that folks really have read a whole lot and are really trying to pull things together and it's very humbling. Thanks again.