and am forever bitter about susan

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.