Just Me

Douglas Gresham, from “I Was Made For Another World || A Documentary on C. S. Lewis”

FYI the site narniaweb has shared contact information for a variety of people involved with Netflix’s Narnia series so that we can make ourselves heard. Now is an ideal time to (gracefully) demand an adaptation which is respectful to the books and their author!! It’s not too late for it to turn around.

Just remember that it’s not about sending hate mail! It’s about expressing our love for the series and our desire to see it done justice. ❤️

The simplest answer is that I am a Christian, C. S. Lewis was a Christian, and Aslan is in the books as the suppositional figure of our God. The Christian God (who is The Father, The Son, and The Holy Spirit, all of whom are referred to as “he”) is not a woman and should not be portrayed as a woman; that’s disrespectful to him and the faith of those who follow him.

If you are not Christian, then you may not understand that, but I hope you can accept how insulting it is to us and our beliefs for this to even be considered. And if you truly cannot grasp that faith is an encompassing thing that matters to the people who follow it (because some people, unfortunately, cannot) then I guess the only other answer is that Meryl Streep is clearly not the right choice to play Aslan: a fatherly, kingly figure. There’s no creative merit to a decision like that; at best they’re being subversive for the sake of being subversive. (But, like I said, at worst they’re being downright offensive to the books, their author, and everything they represent, which is an immediate red flag when adapting a series.)

(I fully believe you were genuine in asking, and so I apologize if my response sounds at all tense towards you. This is just a situation that greatly upsets me, and I hope this helps you understand why.)

I’ve said all along that if Netflix’s Narnia series proves in any way to be disrespectful of C. S. Lewis, his faith, and his vision, that I would stop rooting for it so fast, and that’s true.

Even considering casting a woman to play the role of Aslan!? That’s so disrespectful it’s dipping its toes into heresy.

But, my goodness, that doesn’t stop the whole thing from hurting. It was bad enough to be bombarded by negative voices that never wanted the series to succeed even when all we had was the mere concept of its existence, but now that they have actually gone bad?? Well, now all those voices are going to be I-told-you-sos. Others can celebrate their cynicism while I mourn the hope I had.

Because I still hope for a full, faithful adaptation of all 7 books someday. Except now I know it’s not just around the corner. I’m not a couple years out from seeing The Magician’s Nephew on screen for the very first time. Even if the creative team does a 180° and casts Aslan properly and respectfully, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to trust them again unless the whole team is fired and replaced with people who would never have considered such casting in the first place.

And that hurts. And it’s going to hurt.

Maybe someday I’ll get to see my hopes come to life. But I officially do not trust Narflix or its team to make it happen.

Last night, my dreams concocted an entirely new Jurassic Park movie. And by “entirely new” I mean that it was the original Jurassic Park 4, which was, it seemed, a rare and not-often-talked-about part of the original canon. (In my dream, I had seen it only once before, as it was not included on my DVD set of the first 5 movies.)

Ignoring all the dream logic things that don’t make sense upon waking (such as the fact I was both living the plot and watching the movie, and also that the T-Rex may have spoken once), it was a surprisingly solid movie. It set the scene. There were dinosaur shenanigans. People got eaten. And Dr. Henry Wu even appeared at the end to rescue a T-Rex egg and the plans for the Indominous Rex, therefore sowing the seeds for the next sequel.

Not my favourite Jurassic Park movie, but it was a solidly entertaining JP experience considering it was something my subconscious cooked up while I was sleeping. Would watch again.

Getting the entire Narnia series adapted to screen one day is such an important dream for me, I am begging Greta Gerwig not to shoot it in the foot before it even begins. B E G G I N G .

Standing // Buffy the Vampire Slayer