361 – Cup
By admin on May 3rd, 2016

I LOVE CUP

So I was thinking of all those gritty reimaginings of Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz, and I thought: You know what I’ve never seen a gritty reimagining of? NARNIA. That’s mostly cuz, unlike Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz, Narnia isn’t in the public domain and, since Disney owns it, it will NEVER be in the public domain. But still, too bad, huh? Cuz it’s kind of a natural for that sort of thing. What a great video game THAT would be! C.S. Lewis wasn’t exactly imaginative with his critters (They’re all just basically either talking animals or half-animal hybrids swiped directly from Greco-Roman mythology), but you could find enough potential enemies to populate a corrupted Narnia: dufflepods and marshwiggles and earthmen and poisonous plant dryads and, of course, gotta have wolves. And the bosses! You could have some good ones, like Rabadash with his donkey head, Shift the giant ape, some big ol’ satyrs. Yeah, that’s the ticket. Most likely the plot would have something to do with Aslan going insane and becoming a tyrannical God, because that way you could shoehorn in some totally edgy HIS DARK MATERIALS type commentary on the oppressive authoritarian nature of religion or something. Or probably a better thing to do would be to have Aslan merge with Tash to create Tashlan a la in The Last Battle. That way you have your cake and eat it too: You have all your edgy religious commentary of a corrupted Aslan with the ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card of saying that it’s alllll Tash’s fault when fundies and Narnia fans get butt-hurt about it. Perfect!

You’d probably also play as Susan, the only non-dead Pevensie sibling SPOILER, trying to rescue her hypnotized, Tashlan-worpshipping brothers and sister from the fiend’s clutches. I guess? Susan seems the natural choice there, even though she’s really the most boring character in all the books. Cuz we all know that Lucy is the fearless little badass, Edmund is the redeemed asshole who has an actual character arc, Peter is the one who bosses people around and says NOW LOOK HERE and LET ME TELL YOU SOMETHING a lot, but Susan… she’s pretty much the Daphne Blake of the siblings, just there to fill out a gender quota. But still, I bet if you continued her story past the books it would get pretty interesting, seeing as she’s just had to deal with the deals of ALL HER SIBLINGS and HER PARENTS too. Wait a second, that’s right, I forgot about that… In The Last Battle, the Pevensie parents are in Narnia too? Cuz they also died? What the hell? How does that work? They were never there before. Did they believe in Narnia? Cuz, like, didn’t Aslan have some requirements for dead people coming to Narnia, right? He kind of implied that Susan wasn’t welcome anymore cuz she didn’t believe, right? I mean, I know she also wasn’t dead yet but whatever, it’s sort of heavily implied that she WON’T get to come when she dies if she doesn’t believe. So why are the Pevensie parents there? Did they totally buy their kids crazy stories?