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rthstewart) wrote2018-10-03 09:45 pm
Chronicles of Narnia to be produced by Netflix
The streaming service is adapting the beloved fantasy franchise into new films based on the seven fantasy novels that launched in 1950 with C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The Chronicles of Narnia is the tale of four British children during World War II who escape into an alternate magical world.
“It is wonderful to know that folks from all over are looking forward to seeing more of Narnia, and that the advances in production and distribution technology have made it possible for us to make Narnian adventures come to life all over the world,” said Douglas Gresham, stepson of C.S. Lewis, in a statement released by Netflix. “Netflix seems to be the very best medium with which to achieve this aim, and I am looking forward to working with them towards this goal.”
It’s not yet clear how many pieces of content will be produced and what form they will take. Producer Mark Gordon describes “multiple productions” and “both stellar feature-length and episodic programming.” Gordon added, “Narnia is one of those rare properties that spans multiple generations and geographies.” ....
So of course we've been yacking about it all day on Twitter. Thoughts? Fancasts? Given Gresham's involvement, I'm assuming this is likely for younger audiences, family themed, and probably more Christian themed -- I guess Netflix does have a production line for that sort of content.
You know what I want to see -- True Beasts, adults in children's bodies, humor, politics, espionage, multiculturalism, and wild dryad tree sex. I think Bible Study is the more likely outcome but who knows? Someone on Tumblr pointed out that this likely means an influx to Tumblr fandom and AO3 of purity police, though maybe they'll stick to where most of them still remain on Narnia fansites and fanfic.net? And it will probably skew young, too. And even in fandoms that are definitely (cartoons, etc) adults still have room to play in the sandbox. And new original content and visuals does spur creativity.
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I have absolutely ZERO confidence that Netflix will be able to do ANY of that.
And, oh God, the last thing we need is more purity police ...
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Netflix... oh Netflix. It could go so badly. I have a tiny bit of hope, mostly because of The Good Place and Jessica Jones, but neither was entirely their creation, and then they went and did Insatiable and oh, wow. They're like lighting a wick that could be a candle or a firecracker.
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I started this journey in 2009 as a committed Christian who saw in the Chronicles the potential for a rich, joyous tapestry and important themes (which I identified as Christian but of course not exclusively so) of compassion, mercy, being slow to judgment, and a recognition of the importance of doing good in service to others. One reason some of my work is so very long (other than I just don't care about word counts) was that it was important to me to preserve Aslan as benevolent if a bit clueless and a stronger parallel for Jesus than I currently hold (For all my advanced age, I was very naive). I expected to find that goodness and hope in the fandom and in many places I did and I continue to marvel at the enduring friendships I've formed through fic.
In other parts of the fandom, I found a cesspool of hate, bigotry, homophobia, racism, purity culture, misogyny, sexism, anti-science, and a trail of broken women. And I saw many talented writers leave altogether bc they couldn't stand the hypocrisy of writing work popular with the Christian fen when they knew they would be despised had the readers known the writers were queer. I ended up leaving my own church during the process bc I couldn't stand any association with a male hierarchy and organized religion.
I don't get that very much anymore. I stopped posting and my immorality was so well known in those circles they just avoided me altogether as a near occasion of sin. Though about 2 months ago, I did a reader who hadn't gotten the memo who told me I was doing God wrong which especially pissed me off as it involved an OC a WOC on the spectrum whose grief was apparently not appropriately reverential to Aslan, or something. I still get nasty occasionally from a reader especially angered by Flee From Memory who told me to stop writing -- which I did for several years.
Ultimately my work was grounded in hope. And I lost it, in large part due to my experience with a segment of this fandom that I saw as becoming ascendant and confidently powerful in their hatred and intolerance. (based on this experience the 2016 election was no surprise for me -- I'd seen the rising deplorables for years in my reviews). It's been a long struggle to find that hope again.
But even if Netflix goes in a direction I really don't like, this is ultimately what fandom and transformative works are for -- to reclaim the narrative, to tell our stories using someone else's framework, and to build communities around them. New blood is good! New content is good!
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Their God is supposedly all things, so how can any way of doing Him be wrong?
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My wishlist is like yours, especially the adults-in-kid-bodies part. If there's no wild dryad sex I will boycott :P What I really want is to recapture the feeling of Georgia as Lucy walking into the snow for the first time, but I think loyalty to the first cast is going to make anything that follows reall very hard to love because nostalgia.
The likely fandom overload is part of why I feel weary just thinking about it. I think your friend is right, the purity police will be a quiet constant we'll hav to deal with and uuuuuuu do not want. But I really want to see good Narnia fic. The stuff I've bookmarked, there's very little of it I like enough to keep the bookmarks of . Partly that's because I was younger and less picky when I had my last Narnia kick but it would be really nice to get some new enthusiasm round here. (Maybe even more of, hmmm, Harold and Morgan? Susan going shooting with Peggy? Is there any hope of this? ;)
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The "Young Indiana Jones Chronicles" show was my absolute favorite as a child. That show did a really interesting thing where they didn't stick to one time period. Some episodes had a ~19 year-old Indy, and some had a ~10 year-old Indy. It was vaguely consecutive within the two time periods, but obviously the adventures and supporting cast were different. That was so interesting and might work here, making more of a tapestry show that blips back and forth between different books and casts. That way, you get to do Pevensie stuff, but also other things, too.
I say this as someone who, obviously, loves every single word of the books, and have a lifelong devotion to this canon. But I'm growing tired of slavish adaptations that manage to wildly miss the mark. I remember watching the first season or so of BBC Musketeers and feeling that, even though the plot had NOTHING to do with the book plot, the spirit of it was the most similar to the book than any of the many adaptations I've seen. And the TV show of The Magicians similarly plays fast and loose with book canon, and is a delightful thing of its own (though I actually hate those books, so that's a slightly different case; the show writers clearly hate them in the same way I do, and have fixed every single criticism I had of them).
These are all pipe dreams of course. What we'll actually get is a disappointing by-the-book boring adaptation of the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe.
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I am honestly not sure why I haven't run into the same kind of attacks you have, though perhaps it's because either I'm just not as widely appealing a writer or because that particular breed of asshole can somehow sense that "you are Doing Christianity Wrong, you horrible sinner!" is not a tactic that has any impact whatsoever on me -- because I've never been trying to do Christianity in any form in the first place. *hands* Or maybe it's just that I don't write Pevensie-centric romance? I wonder if that's the deciding factor...
Eh. Fandom is always weird, because people are weird. I think building a community of people who are open-minded and accepting and just not interacting with the purity police and their culture of censorship is probably the policy best calculated to keep the rest of us happy and healthy and inspired to write. :)
(And if they must start by adapting LWW yet again (*sigh*) maybe I'll finally get to see a dramatization of Edmund fighting his way through three ogres to smash Jadis's wand. I do wish the previous adaptations had kept that detail...)
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GIVE ME MORE NARNIA! I loved the Disney versions, I loved the old BBC versions, I love fanfic all shapes and sizes and themes (everything you described and more).
What I won't tolerate is people trying to police others how they can enjoy their fandom. *eyeroll*
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In the current abhorrent climate, I am disinterested in seeing how it goes. I believe I will end up letting them get on with it, and then see what everyone else (for values where "everyone else" equals you, Rth, and those who love your writing the way I do) is saying before I decide to watch or not.