#it MIGHT have to do with understanding religious trauma/reclaiming your own body/name

[aletterinthenameofsanity]

A Defense of Susan Pevensie (aka Let's Talk About the Problem of Susan)

Got into a tiny itty bitty Narnia kick again and I was scrolling through the tags and saw someone complaining that people are going to "misinterpret" the Problem of Susan again and like...there might be some people who think that the Problem of Susan has to do with her being a girl but even to me when I wrote my series of Narnia character studies/fics at age 18 it was never about that. I understood that the line "lipsticks and nylons and invitations" was mostly about materialism and a lack of faith and Susan "forgetting" Narnia. But I still have a Problem with that, all of these years later. Aslan told Peter and Susan that they would never get to set foot in Narnia again. He told them that they would find their own kingdom in our world. And yeah, it's a Christianity metaphor, he's talking about the kingdom of heaven and all that, but he told Susan to find her own kingdom and she did. She moved on from Narnia because she found faith in herself and her desires in our world and found a way to actually cope with the returning-from-war-metaphor, found a way to feel at home in her own body even with the absolute dysmorphia she must have been feeling being transported back to her pubescent body after twenty years as a queen.

I don't blame Susan for finding power in whatever way she could find it. And hey, I don't blame her or anything she chooses to do after the series ends because her entire family dies in a train crash at age 21 and she is forced to identify the bodies. To be honest, I'd be shocked if she "finds her way to Narnia in her own way" for a very fucking long time if that's what she has to deal with, especially if she ever put the pieces together regarding what stole her family away in that train crash.

The Problem of Susan is about materialism and faith and power and purpose and grief and horror and a girl building her own kingdom because she had the last one wrenched from her fingers. It is a girl finding a way to feel at home in a body that will never feel like her own. It is a girl learning to love herself when it feels like god never did. It is a girl forgetting- or perhaps purposefully tucking away the memories of- a heaven that was denied from her even after she did everything she could to earn her place there.

The Problem of Susan is about Susan Pevensie, Susan the Gentle, because gentle people aren't born gentle; they make themselves gentle in spite of a world that has never been gentle to them. Because gentleness is not softness; it is an act of agency, of rebellion, of choice.

The Problem of Susan is about agency, about how Susan is framed in the narrative, about how a girl deciding to have faith in herself never should have been a problem.