I am longwinded
Jun. 2nd, 2010 02:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lady_songsmithI started out to ramble a bit about plot and worldbuilding in the Nightmare Queen story, and I did, indeed, ramble. And then I had five pages and wasn't even halfway done with the stuff I was going to talk about. So I guess this is part 1 of... hopefully just 2, but apparently I'm long-winded.
In this part: some plot events to come, duties of the Four, Narnian society
I've said before that I know more about the plot, yet I'm still stuck. What happened is: I've got a couple of key events, but I don't have the linkages between them. I've been trying to work backwards from things I know are coming to where I am now, but that's only been successful to a limited degree. So this is a bit of a preview of upcoming attractions, as I ramble my way through what I know and what I don't.
The next thing I know about with any certainty is Susan's discoveries at a foreign court. I'm not sure if it's going to be Evrath, Ymar, or the third one involved in that mess that I haven't named yet, but I know she's in meetings with other royalty and/or high-ranking officials. Probably not actually at the foreign capital, but closer to the border. Still, there will be enough people around for plenty of intriguing and so forth, and Susan will be able to piece together a few mysteries. The key point she'll uncover is that an outside element has been manipulating events, prodding people to rasher, more aggressive or violent choices than they might otherwise be inclined. These are agents of the Nightmare Queen, willing and not. Unfortunately Susan isn't going to get the chance to tell anyone her discovery immediately. She's about to become an unwitting agent of the Queen herself.
You see, the longer a person suffers from the Queen's nightmares, the more she can influence them. Eventually she can bring them entirely under thrall, and actually control their actions while they sleep, rather like a sleepwalker. Except more dangerous. This is one of the ways she's working in Narnia and the neighboring lands.
Why Susan? The internal logic, that is -- the external logic is "because it will be interesting." Susan is more open to the Queen's influence than the others because the dreams are hitting her harder. The more emotion, the easier it is for the Queen to exercise control over a victim. It doesn't even need to be negative emotion, necessarily; it's just easier for her to induce fear and rage than love and joy. I believe there's a precipitating event which pushes Susan over the edge: a sharp shock that gives her a night or two of truly vicious nightmares and lets the Queen in. This is one of the things I'm working backwards to, and so far my thoughts are tending towards the event being an attack or battle of some kind, a surprise -- ambush, assassination attempt, something like that -- very bloody and brutal, and possibly involving a betrayal by a Narnian, possibly someone in the Guard, who may or may not have been in the Queen's Thrall.
So Susan comes under Thrall and the Queen tries to force her to kill Peter -- I think. To do something to Peter, anyway. She's got enough strength to resist partially, but -- something happens, this bit is all fuzzy still -- and Susan flees the camp, to get away from Peter and the compulsion beating at her. This all happens really fast, one night's time, and she's sort of half-awake, trying to get out of the Nightmares, not thinking clearly. The Queen's got enough control left to influence where Susan runs to, and eventually Susan's going to make her way to the Nightmare Queen herself. But that's later, and that's very fuzzy still.
Let's see, what else? Peter contracts the Waking Sleep, either before Susan tries to kill him or in the process/as a result of that attack, still sorting that out. So he's wandering in fever dreams, Susan's vanished, the entire camp's in an uproar, and there's an army and a delegation across the border watching all this. Edmund comes flying up from the southern camp (that may or may not be a figure of speech), and Lucy's summoned from the Cair with her cordial (so much for keeping one of them in residence). Meanwhile, we get the second of the three deus ex machinas I've allowed myself -- when you really do have a resident god it's difficult to avoid using them, but I'm trying. First one was getting back into Narnia, and I'm holding the third in reserve for the end game -- when Peter, in the midst of his feverish nightmares, has a vision of Aslan, who reveals the otherworldly origins of their enemy. 'Round about here I hit a secondary sticking point, but I think it's more that there's only so far I can go with great big gaps in my foundation plot than that I won't be able to work out what comes next when I get there. If I get there. Urk.
I noticed when I was plotting a timeline that I really don't know much about what Ed and Lucy are up to while Susan is busy falling under the Nightmare Queen's spell and Peter is... ok, actually other than the fever I don't know much about what he's up to etiher. Anyway, something tells me that the key to pushing past the Wall O'Doom lies with one or both of them (or possibly Peter, but I don't think so), so I've been trying to figure out what it is they're doing. I know in general terms; we covered that in the council scene when they divvied up the crises of the day, which wasn't hard because it followed from the same division of duties they'd used all through their reign.
I see the Four as sharing duties, so there's overlap between each of the siblings within certain spheres. The most obvious example would be Peter and Edmund sharing military leadership. Of course, I think they each have certain strengths so that even in these shared areas they serve different functions -- unless they need to step into the other's role, and carry it alone, for a little while. Peter is definitely the strategist, the one who makes the brilliant plans for victory, while Edmund is his logistics man (hi, rth!) and, I think, also the tactician, the one who pulls their fat out of the fire when the battle plan is the first casualty. It's a role he shows as early as LWW -- no one else thought of going for the wand, after all. (Incidentally, in my Narnia, that's a Big Fucking Deal and 'Wandbreaker' is his most frequent kenning in song and story.) Edmund and Susan, on the other hand, share intelligence duties. He mostly handles logistics again -- who's got what resources: troops, money, food. Susan keeps track of politics -- somewhere in my notes for a later scene I have a bit where Edmund muses that she keeps influence webs in her head the way he and Peter keep maps. She knows not only the who's who of foreign courts, but who owes what to whom and why. She does it to a lesser extent with Narnians; that's an area she shares with Lucy. The two queens deal with domestic (that's 'as opposed to foreign') matters, ensuring that Narnians are fed and sheltered, healthy, happy, and peaceful. Susan is more of a planner; she's the one who ensures the harvest is properly stored, seed for next spring set aside, sorts out the (dumb) herds and the hunting, and so forth. Lucy is more concerned with personalities. Like her sister, she knows everything about everyone, but where Susan focuses on what they do, Lucy knows how they feel. She settles disputes and negotiates deals between Narnians. Naturally this brings her into overlap with Edmund and his work in the law courts, though generally Lucy tries to step in before a dispute reaches that stage. Edmund turns to her for advice on how decisions in difficult cases will be received, or whether there are underlying nuances and histories not appearing in evidence. Peter, on the other hand, goes to her for advice on getting everyone to work together for the good of Narnia. Together Lucy and Peter tend to the country's continued prosperity, seeing that all the supply chains run smoothly and the various crafters, artists, traders, and guilds have what they need. Lucy smooths over conflicts and Peter keeps track of the finances. That brings him into Susan's sphere fairly regularly, as she manages other resources, and the two of them juggle foreign trade together, negotiating treaties, deciding on taxes and tariffs, and ensuring the safety of trade routes.
So it was more or less inevitable that Susan would go sort out the border crisis and Lucy would be settling the Narnians' disputes. Peter and Ed were a bit more flexible, but since the border crisis needed a bit of show and the Telmarine problem some investigative work, it makes sense to send Edmund south and have Peter play the flashy High King. As far as unraveling my plot problems, I think Lucy's more important. Two factors at work: the dissention among Narnians is an opening for the Queen to work, and Lucy's always had the connection to the land and the Deep Magic, which is going to have to play a role in resolving this whole mess because it's the Deep Magic that the Queen wants so badly. Although, come to think of it, there's an argument to be made for Edmund's connection to the Deep Magic as a matter of law... bah, I've just complicated myself again.
Anyway, Lucy and the Narnian factions -- Inter-Narnian relations are a mess, to be blunt, because there's two paradigms at work with an overlay of peace that's never really settled. Pre-Winter Narnia and Winter Narnia are two different animals as far as clannish relationships go; Golden Age Narnia looks more like Winter than Pre-Winter in that regard, but the old patterns are still lurking, ready to reassert themselves. Narnians have always been more factionalized than not; race, region, and clan divisions ensured that the average Pre-Winter Narnian was fairly insular: polite enough to the neighbors, usually, but prefering to avoid or ignore them. And there were always particular groups that got along less well; Black and Red Dwards, for the classic example, but also between types of Animals (certain herbivores were very nervous around predator species; territory clashes between solitary Animals and social ones were common), between regional/clan groups of Centaurs, even between Fauns and Satyrs (Fauns regard Satyrs as rather uncivilized, Satyrs see Fauns as over-civilized. They both tend towards a sort of condescending pity for the other rather than hostility, fortunately).
Jadis used these divisions to help her take over, and they also shaped the Winter battle-lines to some degree -- for instance, the reason Red Dwarfs tended to be for Aslan and Black Dwarfs for the Witch was that neither group could bring themselves to ally with the other. Once one had declared for a side -- and who chose first is lost to history -- the only options left for the other were to ally with the opposite side or try to stay neutral (which some of both did). Lucy, and sometimes the others, spent a lot of time mediating Dwarfish disputes.
Once Jadis took over, balances shifted for better and for worse. Better, because the common enemy united feuding Narnians against her. Worse, because new divisions were created, between the Witch's supporters and the rest of Narnia. Often this was individual, which was good since entire groups weren't at odds and there was a motive to look past race and clan to a person's motives. On the other hand, when anyone might be in her service, it was wise to be suspicious of everyone, and some of the more paranoid Narnians wound up more isolated than before the Winter (the Marsh-Wiggles were barely heard from all Winter, to the point that rumors spread Jadis had exterminated them). But there were also new groupwide divisions, where large numbers of a particular race sided with the Witch. The Wolves, of course, suffered from this because of the visibility of the Secret Police. Not all that many packs actually went over to Jadis, but very few went to Aslan overtly, since they were afraid of attacks from both sides. It was worse for several types of what are now collectively referred to as Fell Creatures. Not all of these races were always enemies of Narnia, but they sided so definitively with Jadis that they came to be wholly associated with her. Minotaurs and hags, for instance, had peacefully coexisted with other Narnians before the Winter. As someone says in a scene I've half-written, hags "weren't exactly pleasant company, but they went about their lives quietly and harmed no Good Creature." There are always bad seeds in any group, but it was not until Jadis that all hags were counted evil.
Enter the Pevensies, the prophecy, and Aslan. For the first year or so, everyone was too happy and too busy for the old divisions to reassert themselves. But the further from the Winter, the more the old patterns came back. And the Witch-created divisions never went away, as evidenced by the term 'Fell Creatures', an invention of the Winter. Deep-seated suspicion and resentment of Witch-sympathizers was the major problem in the early years of the Pevensies' reign, with more and more old clan divisions appearing as time passed. Respect and love for the kings and queens who broke the Winter mitigated the worst of it, but even so keeping the peace in Narnia was a full-time job. Lucy is very good at shaming people into getting along without seeming to, probably because, of all the siblings, she's the one who honestly believes there shouldn't be any divisions; that being Narnian is enough of an identity -- or rather, that it supercedes other self-identifications. The others understand too well why there are such conflicts.
Exit the Pevensies. Suddenly there's nothing holding this rather delicate web together. The search for the Four and the desire to honor their memory steadies it for a while, until accusations start flying about who's responsible for the Four's disappearance. Everything buried comes rushing back, ancient history gets dredged up, recent history doesn't need any dredging - it's always been simmering right below the surface. Fifteen years isn't near enough time to undo a century of mistrust. The council can still govern Narnia only because it's sufficiently diverse; there's usually someone on the council who can be accepted as 'one of us' by whatever group is opposed to their decisions, so they can eventually bring around the population. It's very much herding cats, though, and every decision the council makes has to be explained and argued in the public sphere again and again to get people to go along with them. The situation won't work for very long. At best, it can last until members of the council start dying. Without the Four's authority behind them, no replacement appointments would be accepted. Without a unifying authority, Narnia fragments and returns to insular groups, with the added paranoia of the Winter thrown in. By the time the Telmarines invade, there isn't much left of Narnia besides an idea.
The Nightmare Queen accelerates the process in a number of ways. First by engineering the removal of the Pevensies before their time, second by interfering with Aslan's ability to manifest in Narnia, and third by encouraging suspicion and hostility among Narnians while simultaneously putting pressure on the country through outside forces.
In this part: some plot events to come, duties of the Four, Narnian society
I've said before that I know more about the plot, yet I'm still stuck. What happened is: I've got a couple of key events, but I don't have the linkages between them. I've been trying to work backwards from things I know are coming to where I am now, but that's only been successful to a limited degree. So this is a bit of a preview of upcoming attractions, as I ramble my way through what I know and what I don't.
The next thing I know about with any certainty is Susan's discoveries at a foreign court. I'm not sure if it's going to be Evrath, Ymar, or the third one involved in that mess that I haven't named yet, but I know she's in meetings with other royalty and/or high-ranking officials. Probably not actually at the foreign capital, but closer to the border. Still, there will be enough people around for plenty of intriguing and so forth, and Susan will be able to piece together a few mysteries. The key point she'll uncover is that an outside element has been manipulating events, prodding people to rasher, more aggressive or violent choices than they might otherwise be inclined. These are agents of the Nightmare Queen, willing and not. Unfortunately Susan isn't going to get the chance to tell anyone her discovery immediately. She's about to become an unwitting agent of the Queen herself.
You see, the longer a person suffers from the Queen's nightmares, the more she can influence them. Eventually she can bring them entirely under thrall, and actually control their actions while they sleep, rather like a sleepwalker. Except more dangerous. This is one of the ways she's working in Narnia and the neighboring lands.
Why Susan? The internal logic, that is -- the external logic is "because it will be interesting." Susan is more open to the Queen's influence than the others because the dreams are hitting her harder. The more emotion, the easier it is for the Queen to exercise control over a victim. It doesn't even need to be negative emotion, necessarily; it's just easier for her to induce fear and rage than love and joy. I believe there's a precipitating event which pushes Susan over the edge: a sharp shock that gives her a night or two of truly vicious nightmares and lets the Queen in. This is one of the things I'm working backwards to, and so far my thoughts are tending towards the event being an attack or battle of some kind, a surprise -- ambush, assassination attempt, something like that -- very bloody and brutal, and possibly involving a betrayal by a Narnian, possibly someone in the Guard, who may or may not have been in the Queen's Thrall.
So Susan comes under Thrall and the Queen tries to force her to kill Peter -- I think. To do something to Peter, anyway. She's got enough strength to resist partially, but -- something happens, this bit is all fuzzy still -- and Susan flees the camp, to get away from Peter and the compulsion beating at her. This all happens really fast, one night's time, and she's sort of half-awake, trying to get out of the Nightmares, not thinking clearly. The Queen's got enough control left to influence where Susan runs to, and eventually Susan's going to make her way to the Nightmare Queen herself. But that's later, and that's very fuzzy still.
Let's see, what else? Peter contracts the Waking Sleep, either before Susan tries to kill him or in the process/as a result of that attack, still sorting that out. So he's wandering in fever dreams, Susan's vanished, the entire camp's in an uproar, and there's an army and a delegation across the border watching all this. Edmund comes flying up from the southern camp (that may or may not be a figure of speech), and Lucy's summoned from the Cair with her cordial (so much for keeping one of them in residence). Meanwhile, we get the second of the three deus ex machinas I've allowed myself -- when you really do have a resident god it's difficult to avoid using them, but I'm trying. First one was getting back into Narnia, and I'm holding the third in reserve for the end game -- when Peter, in the midst of his feverish nightmares, has a vision of Aslan, who reveals the otherworldly origins of their enemy. 'Round about here I hit a secondary sticking point, but I think it's more that there's only so far I can go with great big gaps in my foundation plot than that I won't be able to work out what comes next when I get there. If I get there. Urk.
I noticed when I was plotting a timeline that I really don't know much about what Ed and Lucy are up to while Susan is busy falling under the Nightmare Queen's spell and Peter is... ok, actually other than the fever I don't know much about what he's up to etiher. Anyway, something tells me that the key to pushing past the Wall O'Doom lies with one or both of them (or possibly Peter, but I don't think so), so I've been trying to figure out what it is they're doing. I know in general terms; we covered that in the council scene when they divvied up the crises of the day, which wasn't hard because it followed from the same division of duties they'd used all through their reign.
I see the Four as sharing duties, so there's overlap between each of the siblings within certain spheres. The most obvious example would be Peter and Edmund sharing military leadership. Of course, I think they each have certain strengths so that even in these shared areas they serve different functions -- unless they need to step into the other's role, and carry it alone, for a little while. Peter is definitely the strategist, the one who makes the brilliant plans for victory, while Edmund is his logistics man (hi, rth!) and, I think, also the tactician, the one who pulls their fat out of the fire when the battle plan is the first casualty. It's a role he shows as early as LWW -- no one else thought of going for the wand, after all. (Incidentally, in my Narnia, that's a Big Fucking Deal and 'Wandbreaker' is his most frequent kenning in song and story.) Edmund and Susan, on the other hand, share intelligence duties. He mostly handles logistics again -- who's got what resources: troops, money, food. Susan keeps track of politics -- somewhere in my notes for a later scene I have a bit where Edmund muses that she keeps influence webs in her head the way he and Peter keep maps. She knows not only the who's who of foreign courts, but who owes what to whom and why. She does it to a lesser extent with Narnians; that's an area she shares with Lucy. The two queens deal with domestic (that's 'as opposed to foreign') matters, ensuring that Narnians are fed and sheltered, healthy, happy, and peaceful. Susan is more of a planner; she's the one who ensures the harvest is properly stored, seed for next spring set aside, sorts out the (dumb) herds and the hunting, and so forth. Lucy is more concerned with personalities. Like her sister, she knows everything about everyone, but where Susan focuses on what they do, Lucy knows how they feel. She settles disputes and negotiates deals between Narnians. Naturally this brings her into overlap with Edmund and his work in the law courts, though generally Lucy tries to step in before a dispute reaches that stage. Edmund turns to her for advice on how decisions in difficult cases will be received, or whether there are underlying nuances and histories not appearing in evidence. Peter, on the other hand, goes to her for advice on getting everyone to work together for the good of Narnia. Together Lucy and Peter tend to the country's continued prosperity, seeing that all the supply chains run smoothly and the various crafters, artists, traders, and guilds have what they need. Lucy smooths over conflicts and Peter keeps track of the finances. That brings him into Susan's sphere fairly regularly, as she manages other resources, and the two of them juggle foreign trade together, negotiating treaties, deciding on taxes and tariffs, and ensuring the safety of trade routes.
So it was more or less inevitable that Susan would go sort out the border crisis and Lucy would be settling the Narnians' disputes. Peter and Ed were a bit more flexible, but since the border crisis needed a bit of show and the Telmarine problem some investigative work, it makes sense to send Edmund south and have Peter play the flashy High King. As far as unraveling my plot problems, I think Lucy's more important. Two factors at work: the dissention among Narnians is an opening for the Queen to work, and Lucy's always had the connection to the land and the Deep Magic, which is going to have to play a role in resolving this whole mess because it's the Deep Magic that the Queen wants so badly. Although, come to think of it, there's an argument to be made for Edmund's connection to the Deep Magic as a matter of law... bah, I've just complicated myself again.
Anyway, Lucy and the Narnian factions -- Inter-Narnian relations are a mess, to be blunt, because there's two paradigms at work with an overlay of peace that's never really settled. Pre-Winter Narnia and Winter Narnia are two different animals as far as clannish relationships go; Golden Age Narnia looks more like Winter than Pre-Winter in that regard, but the old patterns are still lurking, ready to reassert themselves. Narnians have always been more factionalized than not; race, region, and clan divisions ensured that the average Pre-Winter Narnian was fairly insular: polite enough to the neighbors, usually, but prefering to avoid or ignore them. And there were always particular groups that got along less well; Black and Red Dwards, for the classic example, but also between types of Animals (certain herbivores were very nervous around predator species; territory clashes between solitary Animals and social ones were common), between regional/clan groups of Centaurs, even between Fauns and Satyrs (Fauns regard Satyrs as rather uncivilized, Satyrs see Fauns as over-civilized. They both tend towards a sort of condescending pity for the other rather than hostility, fortunately).
Jadis used these divisions to help her take over, and they also shaped the Winter battle-lines to some degree -- for instance, the reason Red Dwarfs tended to be for Aslan and Black Dwarfs for the Witch was that neither group could bring themselves to ally with the other. Once one had declared for a side -- and who chose first is lost to history -- the only options left for the other were to ally with the opposite side or try to stay neutral (which some of both did). Lucy, and sometimes the others, spent a lot of time mediating Dwarfish disputes.
Once Jadis took over, balances shifted for better and for worse. Better, because the common enemy united feuding Narnians against her. Worse, because new divisions were created, between the Witch's supporters and the rest of Narnia. Often this was individual, which was good since entire groups weren't at odds and there was a motive to look past race and clan to a person's motives. On the other hand, when anyone might be in her service, it was wise to be suspicious of everyone, and some of the more paranoid Narnians wound up more isolated than before the Winter (the Marsh-Wiggles were barely heard from all Winter, to the point that rumors spread Jadis had exterminated them). But there were also new groupwide divisions, where large numbers of a particular race sided with the Witch. The Wolves, of course, suffered from this because of the visibility of the Secret Police. Not all that many packs actually went over to Jadis, but very few went to Aslan overtly, since they were afraid of attacks from both sides. It was worse for several types of what are now collectively referred to as Fell Creatures. Not all of these races were always enemies of Narnia, but they sided so definitively with Jadis that they came to be wholly associated with her. Minotaurs and hags, for instance, had peacefully coexisted with other Narnians before the Winter. As someone says in a scene I've half-written, hags "weren't exactly pleasant company, but they went about their lives quietly and harmed no Good Creature." There are always bad seeds in any group, but it was not until Jadis that all hags were counted evil.
Enter the Pevensies, the prophecy, and Aslan. For the first year or so, everyone was too happy and too busy for the old divisions to reassert themselves. But the further from the Winter, the more the old patterns came back. And the Witch-created divisions never went away, as evidenced by the term 'Fell Creatures', an invention of the Winter. Deep-seated suspicion and resentment of Witch-sympathizers was the major problem in the early years of the Pevensies' reign, with more and more old clan divisions appearing as time passed. Respect and love for the kings and queens who broke the Winter mitigated the worst of it, but even so keeping the peace in Narnia was a full-time job. Lucy is very good at shaming people into getting along without seeming to, probably because, of all the siblings, she's the one who honestly believes there shouldn't be any divisions; that being Narnian is enough of an identity -- or rather, that it supercedes other self-identifications. The others understand too well why there are such conflicts.
Exit the Pevensies. Suddenly there's nothing holding this rather delicate web together. The search for the Four and the desire to honor their memory steadies it for a while, until accusations start flying about who's responsible for the Four's disappearance. Everything buried comes rushing back, ancient history gets dredged up, recent history doesn't need any dredging - it's always been simmering right below the surface. Fifteen years isn't near enough time to undo a century of mistrust. The council can still govern Narnia only because it's sufficiently diverse; there's usually someone on the council who can be accepted as 'one of us' by whatever group is opposed to their decisions, so they can eventually bring around the population. It's very much herding cats, though, and every decision the council makes has to be explained and argued in the public sphere again and again to get people to go along with them. The situation won't work for very long. At best, it can last until members of the council start dying. Without the Four's authority behind them, no replacement appointments would be accepted. Without a unifying authority, Narnia fragments and returns to insular groups, with the added paranoia of the Winter thrown in. By the time the Telmarines invade, there isn't much left of Narnia besides an idea.
The Nightmare Queen accelerates the process in a number of ways. First by engineering the removal of the Pevensies before their time, second by interfering with Aslan's ability to manifest in Narnia, and third by encouraging suspicion and hostility among Narnians while simultaneously putting pressure on the country through outside forces.