Could Narnia ever be banned?

Hermit of Archenland

Hermit of Archenland

Active member
A few months ago it was reported that some of the famous Dr Seuss books are being withdrawn from publication because of 'racist imagery.' Now the Chronicles of Narnia have frequently been accused of promoting racism, sexism, colonialism and goodness knows how many other offences against fashionable ideology. So I wonder if in the future some or all of the books might be withdrawn from publication. Or perhaps just as bad edited to make them more politically correct.
 
I don't know if it will, but stranger things keep happening. It is possible that parts of the Chronicles could be banned at some point. I would hope not, but I know there are folks that would not object to that.
 
There are people who simply WANT to believe they have a grievance, because they take a foul pleasure in feeling resentful. These are the people who pretend to believe that Mister Lewis was "racist," because his Calormenes had darker complexions than the European-descended Narnians and Archenlanders. This accusation might hold a TINY bit of water.... if not for the well-known fact that the EUROPEAN-descended Telmarines were shown as bad BEFORE Mister Lewis invented the Calormenes,
 
I quite agree with you CF. Certainly anyone who has read Lewis's non fiction work from an unbiased viewpoint would find the accusation of racism laughable. The problem is these people are not unbiased and certainly not honest. Their aim is the eradication from Western culture of anything that has a traditional or Christian world view. Which is why I worry Narnia will eventually be targeted by them. I can only hope the Lewis estate would be more resistant to this sort of pressure than other institutions have been.
 
Perhaps, instead of banning Narnia outright, they will try to REDEFINE Mister Lewis' premise., and pretend to be "improving" it.

When the Dawn Treader movie came out, I was dreading a change they might make. You remember how Edmund asks whether Aslan also exists in our world. The answer Aslan gives IN THE BOOK supports His being plainly and simply the actual Jesus Christ, changed only in external appearance. What I was afraid the movie would do was to have Aslan reply to Edmund: "Yes, I am there too; but there, I am known by MANY names. I am Odin, and Kukulcan, and Rama, and Buddha, and Zeus, and Allah, and Krishna, and Yarilo, and Ahura Mazda, and Hanuman...."

We dodged a bullet in the movie. But if stubborn anti-Christians get their hands on copyright control of Lewis' work, they will fall all over themselves in their haste to make the kind of destructive revisions I have imagined.
 
You're probably right, Copperfox. In fact I would argue that already happened to a certain extent in the Walden films. Not as blatantly as in the change you feared but in more subtle ways. In the LWW film, when they meet Father Christmas he tells them it's the hope THEY have brought, rather than the arrival of Aslan, that has weakened the witch's power. In effect they substituted Lewis's orthodox doctrine of redemption by grace with outright Pelagianism. And in PC when Lucy meets Aslan He tells her, in contrast to the book, that WE can never know what would have happened, casting doubt on Aslan's omniscience. And then in Dawn Treader the whole of Lucy's arc seemed very much motivated by modern secular values of self realisation and empowerment, rather than the Christian virtue of humility.

If we ever do get the promised series from Netflix I can't help wondering how much further along the path of revising the Chronicles in line with modernist secular values they will go.
 
Indeed, I have heard a few about the fights behind the scenes in board rooms during the productions of the Walden Narnia films. In particular, the Dawn Treader. As I recall, it nearly didn't have the "another name" part at all. It's been a very long time since I have spoken with anyone at Walden Media who was in the room.

That said, I feel that there are enough anti-censorship people in the world of literature who would refer to that form of editing as a kind of book burning, I don't believe that it would happen. In fact, libraries would hold onto the titles. And there is enough information and there are enough copies, digital and otherwise, that a simple search would reveal the edits.
 
Hermit of Archenland said:
If we ever do get the promised series from Netflix I can't help wondering how much further along the path of revising the Chronicles in line with modernist secular values they will go.
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Please! I can take only so much. If BBC Studios can make such a horror comic out of The Watch, blithely changing characters to be Black or female or whatever else they please for the sake of whatever tin gods we have to appease this decade, I dread to think what Netflix could do with something that isn't as avowedly humanist (and on the whole already "woke") as the works of Sir Terry Pratchett.
 
Hermit,
Thank you for starting this unfortunately relevant topic of racism and banning.
And yet Caspian X of the Telmarines becomes the rightful king of True Narnia, and one of the heroines of Horse and His Boy was Calormene...
 
Benisse said:
Hermit,
Thank you for starting this unfortunately relevant topic of racism and banning.
And yet Caspian X of the Telmarines becomes the rightful king of True Narnia, and one of the heroines of Horse and His Boy was Calormene...
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And that Calormene becomes queen of Archenland and the mother of its greatest king, who was therefor of mixed race. Doesn't exactly sound like the work of a racist, does it?
 
One reason why haters might ban the Chronicles is the fact that Mister Lewis, who actually fought in a real war, DID NOT subscribe to what is now an ironclad show-business dogma: the claim that every human female above the age of eleven is an unbeatable warrior-goddess who can defeat any grown man with her eyes closed.
 
Well, Jill Pole was close to becoming that sort of action hero.

To be fair, Princess Leia could shoot a gun in 1977 with the best of them.

I personally think it's about time that there are female heroes. We are still getting loads of male heroes all the time as well. I just think the industry is correcting for bad behaviors in the past.

Would they ban Narnia for it? They kind of already do. I think it is a shame that they do, because the books where not only written in a different Era, they were also SET in a different Era, and we shouldn't rewrite history unless we find history to be different than reported.
 
About time?

Edgar Rice Burroughs depicted warrior women a CENTURY ago. "Buck Rogers," the first science fiction comic strip, featured a female soldier who was a crack fighter pilot; around the same time, E.R. Eddison portrayed Lady Mevrian in "The Worm Ouroboros" as a swordswoman. In the movie-serial era, there was a serial called "Zorro's Black Whip," in which a daughter of the original Zorro takes up the mantle. Another serial heroine, Nyoka the Jungle Girl, fought hand to hand against male villains. Conan the Barbarian hung out with more than one female warrior. A piratical feature film titled "The Spanish Main" included the historical female pirate Anne Bonney. Maureen O'Hara once played a daughter of one of the Musketeers. Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, comes in there as a female Tarzan. The historical sharpshooter Annie Oakley had her own Fifties TV series. You already know about Eowyn. I'm barely getting started, barely into the age of television.

Emma Peel was a major TV tough-lady. So was Honey West. Agent 99 in "Get Smart" was always, always, better at everything than Maxwell Smart. Anne Sheridan played a lady gunslinger in the humorous Western series "Pistols and Petticoats." Melodie Patterson took a similar part in "F Troop." Wonder Woman. The Girl from UNCLE. Batgirl. Charlie's Angels. Men being at the mercy of magical females in "Bewitched" and "I Dream of Jeannie." Lily Munster dominating Herman in "The Munsters." Female fighters in "Star Trek Next Generation" and every Star Trek show that followed it. Likewise both versions of Battlestar Galactica. Animated series "Inspector Gadget," the Inspector is absolutely useless, and his brilliant niece accomplishes everything.

Leela in "Doctor Who." "G.I. Jane." "Atomic Blonde." "Kill Bill." "The Hunger Games." "Alita, Battle Angel." "Divergent." In "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," Chow Yun-Fat's character was the only male in the film who WASN'T outclassed by every woman he encountered. And then there's "Home Improvement," in which Tim Allen's character was absolutely required to be ALWAYS wrong, not just often, always, while his wife was invariably right.

In print fiction, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser got outsmarted by female thieves. Tomoe Gozen defeated every male samurai she faced. Anne McCaffrey's heroines outshone the guys. This barely scratches the surface in the book business. When I peruse the fantasy shelves in bookstores anymore, I'm almost astonished if I see a book cover featuring a MALE warrior. We could fill a long thread just with all the ways Eric Flint has made women superior to men in his sci-fi novels. I happen to have read more Christian romance fiction than you might expect, and men in those female-written books often are dimwits compared to the women.

Trinity in "The Matrix." Dominant women on TV in "Babylon Five," "Alien Nation," "Queen of Swords," "Witchblade," "Farscape," "Lexx," "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," the "Stargate" programs, the "NCIS" programs, "The X-Files," "Firefly," "Bones," and Queen Latifah's revision of "The Equalizer." Disney's movie "Moana" depicting EVERY male as always wrong, and every female as always right.

It is not necessary for women to be written as warriors AS OFTEN as men are, since waging war isn't the number-one thing women were created for. Indeed, women have often claimed to be morally better than men precisely because men WERE the warriors. Having "loads of" male heroes is not wrong, because God did create men to bear the main responsibility of defending against deadly threats. But female fighters have not been unheard of at any point in my seven decades of life. And it is usually overlooked that the "loads of" male fighters in literature and entertainment AREN'T making it their deliberate business to humiliate women in particular.

Whereas many of today's powerful female characters exist for the explicit purpose of humiliating men, as in "Birds of Prey" and "Ghostbusters 2016."
 
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Yeah, I know about most of those. I probably wasn't too clear in my response, but I am perfectly fine with the number of them that they are making now. While women weren't created to wage war, I honestly don't have a problem with women getting more content that features them as heroes. I think of the single moms and other women throughout history that have had to be that defender, out of necessity.

I understand that there have been a lot in the past.

I haven't watched Birds of Prey (the movie or the old TV show), because of the amount of F-bombs dropped in the opening of the movie. I had to turn it off. But I have seen Ghostbusters: Answer the Call. (The official title of the movie, that has been embraced by the GB fandom.) The only major misstep in that movie was in it's treatment of men, when in the original two films featuring men in the lead, the women were also smart. Dana and Janine, both, were intelligent and both had an edge and didn't just put up with bad behavior from the guys. But, Ghostbusters: Answer the Call seemed to go out of its way to make almost every male character a buffoon of some sort in the film. It was almost as if, while writing, they described every male as "unintelligent." I did find the movie to be funny, regardless, and the cameos of the original actors, they were all the men that were used with respect, so the movie wasn't 100% an attack. In fact, the attack on men part was the one thing Paul Feig regretted about what he had done when making the movie. I think the problem there was actually, for the most part, the fault of fans attacking him on social media as soon as he was hired to make the movie. And then when he revealed he was thinking about an all female team, they immediately roasted him. All of that was before a script had been written or an actress had been cast. It had to be a nightmare, so I think he might have lashed out a bit too hard, in reality and in the movie. And he thinks so too, and is remorseful of that fact. It doesn't change the outcome, the movie still has those characters, and the part where they are reading comments that are sexist is still in the movie, rather than ignoring the morons who were prejudging a movie that hadn't even been written yet.

That said, I love Stargate. 😆 That show had strong men and women. That's what Ghostbusters Answer the Call should have been like.
 
Hard-line girl-powerists will choose to believe that I'm saying I want ALL female characters to be helpless and weak. They all really know that this isn't what I mean, but they'll pretend to believe it is what I mean, because the sense of grievance is an addiction. I speak from direct in-person experience of encountering this exact behavior.

I have never in my life wanted all female characters to be helpless. What girl-powerists don't want to admit is that, as I've proven, there ALREADY ARE plenty of strong female characters, and HAVE been since before I was born. They want to be able, every time the latest invincible kung-fu princess is presented, to say dramatically, "FINALLY, for the VERY FIRST time ever, we're getting a LITTLE bit of justice, as the VERY FIRST female character who can fight her own battles is introduced!" That's how Brie Larson talked, in a magazine interview about her Captain Mary-Sue-vel character: she explicitly claimed that it was an INNOVATION for a female hero to be the mightiest one in the story.

We're supposed to believe that Larson didn't know about Jean Grey the Phoenix in X-Men movies, or about River Tam in "Firefly," or about literally hundreds of super-Amazons in print fiction. This is exactly what Mister Lewis was describing when he wrote about people "rushing about with fire extinguishers when there is a flood, and crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gunwale under."
 
Yeah, Brie Larson cast Captain Marvel in a bad light. I have a lot of Captain Marvel comics, by the way. Both male and female versions. I had been a fan since her particular character was Ms. Marvel and a member of The Avengers, which I read from the Heroes Reborn event 25 years ago.

And I have a LOT of the comics they've released of her as Captain Marvel. They have since created a new Ms. Marvel, which is also coming to Disney+ as a show, so I don't expect Captain Marvel to be either Rick Jones or his father again anytime soon. That's alright with me, though.

And it appeared that Brie Larson forgot about Wonder Woman the summer before, or that Carol Danvers had become Captain Marvel in the comics back in 2012.

It was a shame seeing comments from her that weren't the smartest thing to add to the conversation. They caused loads of backlash for what was otherwise another decent entry to the MCU. I noticed that the sequel, which will also follow from the Ms. Marvel series on Disney+, is called The Marvels. That's going to be interesting to see how it shakes out. It's also going to have Monica Rambeau from WandaVision (which is the character I am most interested in seeing in this film). The Marvels will likely be touted as a girl power Marvel team, but as long as they each have something cool to do, it's fine with me.

I hope that they take a page out of the Mandalorian, where there was a scene that could have been viewed as a very girl power moment, but it literally just so happened that the characters were together when they were, and was so organically in the story and came about so smoothly, that you just watched this group being awesome. It wasn't until after it happened that I noticed. This, in stark contrast to the scene in Endgame where all of the Marvel women somehow found each other in the chaos of war, and there happened to be no men around them. I got what they were trying to do, it didn't impact my enjoyment of the movie, but it didn't feel genuine. The Mandalorian moment felt earned.
 
I agree with you about Monica Rambeau. She seems like a character who is less packaged in a predictable box than many other Marvel characters.

Speaking of comicbook characters, I hope you're finding time to read my "Spacebullies" novel. The further I go in it, the more ways I'm finding to bring diverse combinations of characters together. Like, on one "parallel Earth," two male Marvel characters marry two female DC characters.
 
Looking it up, LWW has been banned. In 1990, according to http://celebratingbannedbooks.weebly.com/ , it was banned "for depicting graphic violence, mysticism, and gore." and in 2005, the group Americans for the Separation of Church and State declared it as unconstitutional, at least for school reading, due to its use of Aslan as a possible allegory to Jesus.

As for sexism, Lucy was portrayed as a fighter in a war. Surprising even Shasta. However, the Narnians simply stated that the queen will do as the queen wants to do and nobody gave it a second thought. Aravis was absolutely not shown as a pushover. Her main thing was her independence and how often she fought with Shasta/Cor. However, in truth, the Narnia books were not centered around the battles. In fact, when they happened, Lewis would have scenes elsewhere and only talk a little about parts of the battles, so there was no possibility for anyone to be shown to be a hero on the page.

MrBob
 
Both Tolkien and Lewis had personally been IN real battles. Although they were well aware that fighting can be both morally justified and pragmatically necessary, neither of them would ever consider it entertaining. Just imagine Lewis or Tolkien being presented with a modern first-person-shooter game; do you suppose either of them would be bursting with eagerness to mow down virtual enemies?

Those anti-Narnia fanatics knew themselves to be lying when they pretended to believe that reading the Chronicles would be equivalent to forced religious indoctrination. The exact same people (I know this from personal interaction with public schools) have no objection at all to making school kids read books about witchcraft, even though what we call witchcraft is itself rooted in what used to be many people's routinely-accepted RELIGION. And in modern times, many public schools now require students to learn extensively about Islam, but their faculties would furiously deny that this was forcing any child to CONVERT to Islam.
 
CF, when I was in school the RE syllabus focused almost entirely on Christianity. Other religions were covered in one lesson, in a very disparaging way. Now the pendulum was swung too far in the other direction. Other religions, Islam especially, are romanticised while Christianity is implicitly criticised with very biased and one sided accounts of events such as the Crusades and the Inquisition. The inclusion of witchcraft or 'Wicca' in religious instruction is rather absurd, as it's a syncretic neopaganism that was invented in the mid 20th century, based on the now thoroughly discredited theory of Margaret Murray that medieval witchcraft was a survival of ancient paganism driven underground by the church. Wicca is a mishmash of different and incompatible forms of paganism, that bears little resemblance to the beliefs of any culture in ancient times.

As regards the question of female warriors, I was really annoyed by the 'girl power' version of Susan we saw in the PC film. This was completely contrary to her characterisation in the books. In fact I think this was a large part of Susan's problem; her timidity and lack of courage. Of course Lewis has gotten a fair bit of stick for this. It's been claimed he only approved of 'tomboys' like Lucy, Jill and Aravis, and disapproved of feminine girls like Susan. But in my view Lewis had no issues with femininity itself, just with a corrupted and distorted stereotype of femininity that equates it with weakness and superficiality.
 
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