Susan Pevensie goes up to the counter, but the barista won’t let her order any coffee because she is wearing lipstick.
oh my god
Actually, it’s more like Susan Pevensie won’t go up to the counter because she’s stopped believing coffee is good or wanting anything to do with it, despite all the efforts of her family and friends to remind her coffee is delicious. Besides, the cup would smear her lipstick, and she’s on her way to a party.
Strangely enough, however, people keep insisting that the only reason Susan doesn’t have coffee is because the barista is mean and judgmental and her family and friends don’t love her enough. Apparently it’s their job to hold her down and pour hot coffee down her throat? Or something?
hmm, it has been a long while since I read The Chronicles of Narnia, but I always thought the way “people keep insisting that the only reason Susan doesn’t have coffee is because the barista is mean and judgmental and her family and friends don’t love her enough” is not really about what people think the characters in the book should have done but about how C. S. Lewis chose to treat Susan.
It could have been any character who stopped believing in Narnia, but he chose to make it Susan and he chose to make it because she preferred traditionally feminine things and he chose to have her siblings resent her for this. And a lot of people have had an emotional reaction to that, so there have been a lot of posts about how this can be seen as misogynistic and upsetting. It’s certainly what I remember most from the last book. If I reread it then I certainly may come to a different interpretation, or find other details that make it seem less so, but I think the thing people are fixated on is that the way Susan was cut out was done in a way that it overshadows whatever other reasons there may have been.
Add this to the fact that I believe the new version of Narnia was supposed to represent heaven or something? and it kinda looks like Susan was kept out of heaven bc she… liked makeup. or whatever.
but then again, i haven’t read it in a while and don’t plan to.
So I went and found the passage where they talk about Susan not getting to come back to Narnia in the end and I’m so mad. “No longer a friend of Narnia” when Narnia turned its back on her twice, made her a queen and an adult and a heroine and then sent her home to be a child again because that’s “just the way things had to be”. She ruled as High Queen of Narnia, with all the diplomacy and bureaucracy and management that entails and if Jill thinks that she went home and only cared about fashion and parties than she clearly doesn’t know what she’s talking about.
Or she was enjoying the childhood she didn’t get to have because an all-powerful lion decided to place the responsibility of a country on the shoulders of children. She spent her formative years up until her first adulthood, plus some of that adulthood, under all the stresses of leadership and duty. Maybe she wanted to enjoy it this time around.
“Wasted all her school time wanting to be the age she is now” Are you kidding me? What adult wants to be shoved back into childhood, with no choice in the matter, and have to go back to listening to their parents and doing schoolwork (that is either pointless or that they already know) and having very little independence? She used to be able to ride from the mountains to the sea if she wanted to and now she has to ask permission to visit the next town over. Of course she wanted to be an adult again. And what the hell was she wasting, when she spent her school time wanting to be an adult? School was wasting Susan’s time, not the other way around.
“Silliest time of one’s life”? And I suppose, Polly, that you were silly at that age? Tell me, is it Susan you disapprove of, or do you just have some self-loathing going on of who you were at that age? Was Susan silly at that age when she ruled Narnia? Were the “parties” at Cair Paravel silly? Why do you think that she couldn’t do something just as worthwhile at a party in England as she could at a ball in Narnia and why don’t you understand how socializing plays into political maneuvering?
eirenical17 