#for the record I also know very little about tolkien and........ am inclined to keep it that way

[falderaletcetera]

oh this is interesting! so I have an answer on the "why don't other people feel like this" front, though disclaimer that I was exposed to cs lewis in kind of the opposite way to you: I read the narnia books as a kid and never heard about his views on this stuff until, well, now, though I had him mentally earmarked as someone I didn't care to learn more about.

(for what it's worth, I encountered the harry potter books pretty much the same way, just a few years later - and I do actually handle them quite differently in my thoughts and actions.)

[disclaimer to folks reading: this is a discussion with a friend, so if you engage, keep it chill, please.]

[...this is also more words than planned and disorganised as heck because I drafted this last night and just finished it now. oops.]

so for one thing I think there's a lot to be said for how loud our current landscape of social media and international celebrity allows people to be - jk rowling's had more influence on more parts of the world than cs lewis could have had, in my opinion, though I don't know how much influence cs lewis had on christianity or western christianity specifically.

it also helps that cs lewis is, for most of us, a historical figure, not a living breathing person. it's easier to pretend he's just a product of his time, and it's easier to read his letters and such as a little alien and unfamiliar because they're in an unfamiliar tone with an unfamiliar context. it's less relevant, usually, than celebrities here and now - again, I'm not sure how much he influenced the religious landscape, but… he's not making changes to our lives at the moment.

definitely I'm either biased or just positioned to see this much more clearly, but jkr feels very real and immediate to me. she's not just voicing opinions, she's a big and vocal player in a group that's actively campaigning to make people's lives harder, and succeeding to a significant extent. (I'm a trans person in the uk. that statement might not apply so much elsewhere.) I don't know, admittedly, how writing essays about gender essentialism and the roles of men and women in the church compares to that - they're such different environments, different platforms. a friend of mine's been studying christian theology; I might ask her for an opinion.

it's actually really tricky - I'd have similar reactions to yours to most cs lewis quotes, but for different reasons. I also appreciate and even reblog some of the quotes in question, not because I like the guy but because narnia was a building block of my childhood, and sort of a piece of my cultural background, and it's kind of soothing to return to that with kinder or more complex thoughts about some of it. and unlike with jkr, I don't feel like I'm supporting him by sharing it. (it helps that he's not hanging around telling everyone that seeing support for his children's books makes him feel supported and validated in his beliefs about gender - which jkr explicitly is.)

I think… there's a difference between just being a gender essentialist (and even talking about it and trying to bring other people around to those views) and actually putting your reputation, your money, your time towards a group that's trying to bring about specific (awful) changes, but I don't know nearly enough about cs lewis to know if he did, in fact, do the latter at all.

my problem with jkr, in short, isn't just her beliefs; it's her actions and her platform and her aim to shove trans people so far out of the public sphere that we stop existing. I wouldn't want her at my dinner party for her beliefs anyway, but I wouldn't invite cs lewis either, especially knowing this about him now. so I guess they both fail the dinner party test the same way.

I hope that kind of makes sense? these quotes were interesting to read, even if I kind of want to pick cs lewis up and shake him for suggesting it's wrong to treat men and women as interchangeable machines but it's fine to treat men as interchangeable machines even though a lot of them are also very bad priests.

(it's also interesting to me that he feared everyone being perceived as neuter, whereas modern radical trans spaces talk about the spectrum of masculinity and femininity etc in appearance, in behaviour, in identity, whatever, regardless of the biology they have or started with. essentially, not neuter at all, except for specific people. I assume he saw less masculine men as deficient for it, which is a shame - and he seems to imply that women couldn't be masculine at all, as though women are stuck on a "femininity" scale and men are stuck on a "masculinity" scale, and can only succeed or fail in varying degrees. here I pause for significant and respectful glances in the direction of a) intersex people and b) butch women.)

all that said I do personally have no qualms calling someone sexist for implying wives have to obey their husbands, even if I don't know enough about him to call him A Sexist (tm). and that's as someone who was raised in a church where women weren't preachers, weren't elders, didn't even speak up with a thought or a bible verse or a suggestion of a hymn in the way that men did - something I never questioned at the time. I'd be startled if that weren't the norm in cs lewis' time and place, but mostly because I'd have to sheepishly re-evaluate that part of my life even more.

(it just wouldn't surprise me if he perceived more of a pushback against his views than there actually was - I feel like "this is going to be very unpopular" is the sort of thing people say when they're annoyed that there's any pushback at all and are blowing it a little out of proportion. but I don't know enough about the culture and the time to say, and perhaps this is uncharitable of me.)

…I started this meaning to point out what, for me, are the differences, but actually I'm sort of agreeing with you as well. jkr's work is on its own level in my head - I don't know how to engage with that stuff without inadvertently supporting hate groups based and active in my own dang country, so as a sort of minor protest I tend not to mention or reference it at all. cs lewis I think can't be on that same level, even if there's worse I don't know about - but I'll be less likely to think positively of his quotes and such in the future, so, sympathies and solidarity on that.

so I've seen a lot of posts about how people don't like seeing harry potter related content due to aversion to JK Rowling's awful and transphobic views, and I totally get that (seeing HP stuff kinda makes me cringe too)

but I low-key have a similar reaction to seeing Narnia or other CS Lewis related content, especially CS Lewis quotes, and i wonder if/why other people don't feel the same way about that?

Maybe this is just my first exposure to CS Lewis was in reading some of his essays for a class in high school (it was a class on JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis and over the course of the term i came to adore Tolkien, but did not feel the same way about Lewis, even though they were besties)

imho, CS Lewis was easily as much of a gender essentialist as JKR, even relative to his time (at least according to my memory from high school, which admittedly was a long time ago)

TW: gender essentialism, transphobia, cs lewis negativity

CS Lewis was a deeply, unapologetically Christian man, and I think his gender-essentialist views were most apparent in his essay "Priestesses in the Church?" (1948) in which he responded to an essay by Lady Marjorie Nunburnholme arguing for ordaining women into the priesthood.

Lewis wrote,

The innovators are really implying that sex is something superficial, irrelevant to the spiritual life. To say that men and women are equally eligible for a certain profession is to say that for the purposes of that profession their sex is irrelevant. We are, within that context, treating both as neuters. As the State grows more like a hive or an ant-hill it needs an increasing number of workers who can be treated as neuters. This may be inevitable for our secular life. But in our Christian life we must return to reality. There we are not homogeneous units, but different and complementary organs of a mystical body. Lady Nunburnholme has claimed that the equality of men and women is a Christian principle. I do not remember the text in scripture [...]; but that is not here my point. The point is that unless "equal" means "interchangeable", equality makes nothing for the priesthood of women. And the kind of equality which implies that the equals are interchangeable (like counters or identical machines) is, among humans, a legal fiction[...] But in church we turn our back on fictions. One of the ends for which sex was created was to symbolize to us the hidden things of G-d. One of the functions of human marriage is to express the nature of the union between Christ and the Church. We have no authority to take the living and semitive figures which G-d has painted on the canvas of our nature and shift them about as if they were mere geometrical figures. [...] It is painful, being a man, to have to assert the privilege, or the burden, which Christianity lays upon my own sex. I am crushingly aware how inadequate most of us are, in our actual and historical individualities, to fill the place prepared for us. But it is an old saying in the army that you salute the uniform not the wearer. Only one wearing the masculine uniform can [...] represent the Lord to the Church: for we are all, corporately and individually, feminine to Him. We men may often make very bad priests. That is because we are insufficiently masculine. It is no cure to call in those who are not masculine at all. A given man may make a very bad husband; you cannot mend matters by trying to reverse the roles. [...]

(emphasis mine, as well as some paragraph breaks, and minor spelling things)

The central point of this essay is to say that Lewis believes that sex is not something superficial, it is something essential about who were are. It is essential to the way G-d made us,

He says with some lament that roles in secular society are increasing treating people as "neuter", but insists that in our spiritual lives we can't do that.

(I should note that CS Lewis strongly believed that it was bad that society was starting to treat women as interchangeable with men, even in secular life. This is evident from his essays and even in his fiction:

For example, in That Hideous Strength, one of the main female characters starts out desperately unhappy in a broken marriage where she keeps trying to take a leadership role and her passive husband lets her, and she finds her happiness by learning to embrace her femininity and be a humble, loving, and obedient wife. It is strongly implied by the narrative that this is the only way a woman can be happy.)

Lewis was not merely a product of his time on this issue; that is apparent from the fact that Lady Nunburnholme clearly thought differently above, but also very clear in the essay "Mere Christianity" (1952), in which Lewis claims that most other people are doing Christianity wrong:

All the same, the New Testament, without going into details, gives us a pretty clear hint of what a fully Christian society would be like. Perhaps it gives us more than we can take. It tells us that there are to be no passengers or parasites: if man does not work, he ought not to eat. [...] On the other hand, it is always insisting on obedience-obedience (and outward marks of respect) from all of us to properly appointed magistrates, from children to parents, and (I am afraid this is going to be very unpopular) from wives to husbands...]

(emphasis and paragraph break mine)

note the "I am afraid this is going to be very unpopular". He was not just expressing popular views of his time in his insistence that wives should obey their husbands, just by virtue of their gender (or at least, he didn't think he was); instead, he seemed to think this is a very unpopular view that he has taken the burden of defending

.

To be clear, I am not saying that I think CS Lewis was sexist or hated women or anything. Based on the essays that I read by him and, of course, the Chronicles of Narnia and his other novels, I did get the vibe that CS Lewis had a deep respect for the worth and value of women, especially women who embraced their (in his opinion) G-d given role in marriage and in society as a whole.

He just believed that gender (meaning assigned sex at birth afaik) was an essential part of a person and should determine their role in society, which did not vibe with my high-school self at all, still does not really vibe with me, and, in my understanding, is also people's problem with JKR.

As a side-note, I don't recall him saying anything about trans people in particular, but I believe that he would have been opposed to medical transitioning: he did make clear in several essays that he was very opposed to all forms of contraception, because he believed that man's attempt to control nature like that was abhorrent and an absolute act of violence, and I can't see him not feeling the same way about medical transition.

(I suspect Tolkien (a devout Catholic who was also very big on man not trying to control nature) would have agreed with Lewis on contraception, but his essays and letters were generally more forgiving and less ardent and less direct. I remember feeling like they were more nuanced, but also made it harder to pin down what his views were exactly. (Except on Nazis. Tolkien was very anti-Nazi and did not mince words about that.))

[herenortherenearnorfar]

Thanks @aipilosse for the tag! My AO3 account (this one at least) is a bit less curated than most. I’ve been using it since the age of 16 and have gone through the requisite teenage interests and then some so some of these answer will be a blast from the past.

How many works do you have on AO3? 

75

What’s your total AO3 word count?

Just over 500k

How many fandoms have you written for and what a they?

According to the drop down menu, 27! A lot of them are overlaps but I’ve still covered a lot of ground over the years. Niche YA, children’s movies, non-niche bestselling YA, Star Wars, anime. A few things I’m still interested in, a few I’m not. Sometimes I get a little embarrassed that there’s a paper trail of all my old fascinations but it is nice to have an archeological record of the last few years.

What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

For It Shines Bright and Never Changes, a 90k Kubo and the Two Strings AU from 2016-2018. My longest and most popular story. I’m actually proud of the planning that went into it.

Aftermath of an Announcement, a frankly kind of shoddily written Steven Universe fic that I remember writing at midnight on the couch outside my bedroom in England. Inexplicably recommended on TvTropes, which might explain the ridiculously disproportionate attention it got?

Regina, a decent little SvTFoE story that got some very good abandoned artwork. Thoroughly disproven bu the rest of the show, I think? I never finished watching it.

The Most Valuable Resource. Probably what my Silm friends know me from! Sauron and baby Celebrimbor in Angband at the very beginning of the first age. I fell in love with writing Sauron in this, he’s a rather delightful awful.

Obsidian Sister, more cartoons, more sibling relationship drama, lots of hopeful worldbuilding for something that I kind of lost interest in. A good read on review though.

Do you respond to comments, why or why not?

Yes! I love comments and getting replies to them so I always try to respond. My only regret is that it can sometimes take me too long to get people their responses. @everyone I am sorry!

What’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending?

Probably my most recent one? I do tend to lean towards canon compliant vignettes when I’m bored and those can be bittersweet at best but not outright tragic. In most stories there’s a seed of hope, however deeply buried it is.

Do you write crossovers? If so, what is the craziest one you’ve written?

No crossovers that I can recall. Keep in mind that I’ve forgotten a good portion of that 75 fic backlog.

Have you ever received hate on a fic?

A few times but it was mostly confusing? I simply didn’t know what to do with it. It’s like being handed a dead lizard by a cat, yes, you’re very proud of this but I’m not sure where it’s supposed to go.

I did once spend several paragraphs defending Elwing in the comments of a story I’d written about Elwing.

Do you write smut? if so what kind?

Not attached to this fake internet identity I don’t.

Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Yes, one of them showed up on Wattpad once? I only found out because I was googling a nice fic rec someone wrote for the same story. In the end I didn’t do anything about it. Maybe my entire oeuvre is on Wattpad but I doubt it because I stopped writing Avengers fanfic a very long time ago.

Have you ever had a fic translated?

Several of my Silm fics have been translated into Russian. It’s a privilege every time and I love going and seeing the final result!

Have you ever co-written a fic before?

No. Used to do a bit of silly RP when I was younger but it’s not quite the same.

What’s your all time favorite ship?

Hmm, I like Silvergifting quite a lot but I have a weak spot for trios. They feel more harmonic. Eonwë/Elwing/Eärendil is probably my favorite Silm ship, for example, though I’ve only written the one story for them. If we’re talking favorite of all time then I suppose we’d have to go back to the basics. Nancy Drew/Bess/George.

What’s a WIP that you want to finish but don’t think you ever will?

Often by the time I exert the energy to put something down on paper I’m already pretty committed to finishing it? A lot of my drafting goes on in my head so I only have a few WIPs in type from the past year and only one that I think I can discard as abandoned. It’s a Micheal and Sasha Magnus Archives Spirally self delusion and dreams story.

What are your writing strengths?

Decent worldbuilding and turn of phrase? I know I can make a sentence hit, which is good. And I am quite proud of some of my backstory work and research, including some hard scrabble conlang despite my absolute lack of a linguistics background

What are your writing weaknesses?

Too bogged down by melodrama, too many runon sentences, poor grammatical skills. Also I struggle a lot with giving characters distinct speaking voices; they all end up sounding like me which is no good. I’d like to be better at descriptions as well.

What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?

I swap my standards around depending on the feeling of the story and the concepts I’m trying to convey to the reader. Fëa might work for a short specialist one-shot about Gondorian scholars discussing elven concepts but then in a story from Celebrimbor’s perspective I’d use the more generic “soul”. Formality, familiarity, ease of access to lay Tolkien readers, the perspective of the characters and what their “native tongue” is keeping in mind that most of the Silm+ is designed as a translation. There are lots of factors. Same goes for a story with terms in Chinese or another extant language.

What was the first fandom you wrote for?

On this account? A book about teens and magic. Online? The 39 Clues, a co-written boook series for middle grade children. Ever as a human being? It depends on if you count when I was very small and would lead my sisters in games where I was Aragorn niece and we were fighting at the Battle of Pelennor Fields.

What’s your favorite fic you’ve written?

I’m fond of The Thousand Stories, for all that it’s experimental and indulgent. It was a chance to really explore stories about stories and what else is fan fiction for?

It looks like just about everyone else has been hit so @ameliarating and @feanorianethicsdepartment do feel welcome to take a swing if you’re so inclined.