rthstewart:

msbarrows:

jillbearup:

Turns out people really like me waffling about Narnia on Twitter.

So here’s a more hopeful spin on Susan Pevensie. (From the author’s pen to your eyeballs.)

Storify link.

I fell into reading Narnia fanfiction on AO3 a year or two back over the whole ‘Problem of Susan’ issue, since it was interesting to see what takes people had taken with her future. Ones that particularly stood out to me:

Life After Narnia, series by Transposable_Element – from identifying the bodies and organizing the funerals to working through her grief and moving on in her life in the years immediately afterwards. Pack tissues in bulk. (see tweet above about “It’d be a hella depressing story to start out with”, because yes).

Once A King Or Queen Of Narnia, Always A King Or Queen, series by dirgewithoutmusic (aka @ink-splotch here on Tumblr) – a collection of Tumblr fics/essays/meta all exploring potential paths Susan’s life could have taken afterwards. May also require tissues at some points.

Also, while it’s not about Susan’s life after the Last Battle, I would highly recommend rthstewart’s “Queen Susan in Tashbaan”, part two of a lengthy series looking at what the Pevensies (plus Professor Kirke, Polly Plummer, and eventually Eustace Scrubb and Jill Pole) are up to in between the various books. This part covers what Susan is doing over in America during her parent’s visit there (though it doesn’t start in on her (sometimes highly allegorized) point of view until chapter 4 or so, since it’s covering the viewpoints of all participants). Honestly I recommend the entire series very highly, I like to refer to it as ‘over 1 million words of Narnia fanfic I didn’t know I needed until I read it”. Really delves into the whole question of what it was like for the Kings and Queens, reduced back to comparatively powerless childhood after already growing to mature adulthood, and being cut off bit by bit from Narnia.

tl;dr  Susan was doing what Aslan commanded all along.  She just
disagreed with the others on what that was.  Susan just caught a later
train.

The Problem of Susan is its own trope at this point with every Narnia writer and many others taking a crack at it.  She’s a wonderful vehicle for xovers – I’ve seen terrific Avengers, Dr Who, Harry Potter, Stargate, Torchwood, and many many others.

But wow the Narnia evangelical Bible Study fen have some horrific
approaches to this.  One of the worst, by a VERY popular author was that
Susan became, in England, a worshiper of Tash – essentially the
devil.  Ugh no.  Oh and then there’s the one that since Susan is
obsessed with beauty, she’s blinded. Charming.  

I of course have many views on this as I’m still writing that million
words of fanfic in large part to explain Susan’s supposed apostasy
(which I reject utterly). I’VE BEEN THINKING ABOUT THIS FOR ALMOST A DECADE!  ARGGGH  I LOVE SUSAN, OK? HOW CAN YOU HAVE HEAVEN WITHOUT THE BIG SISTER?

I think Jill, Eustace, and Polly’s “lipstick
and nylons” TLB nonsense can be handled very easily.  They don’t
understand.  Peter’s “not a friend” from TLB is much crueler and oddly personal  and peculiarly is something Lucy and Edmund do not join in and in fact they change the subject.  It’s really weird (never mind that at that point, they don’t know they are dead).  Explaining this thru fanfic is HARD if you’re trying to both salvage Susan and manage Peter as something other than an unmitigated ass .

I think Susan was doing what she had
been commanded to do and I think her split with Peter was over numerous things – his views that what she was doing were not appropriate in some ways for an Always A Queen of Narnia and ultimately over the use of the Rings.  Aslan told Polly and Digory not to use them and Peter wouldn’t let it go – he couldn’t let the events of the Telmarine conquest happen again.  Susan OTOH had faith they would be called when Aslan wanted them there.  This was something I developed in another story, Food For Thought.