Black Hat Brigade: Episode 42
Jul. 21st, 2016 08:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wingedbeastSetting: Winter.
Camera focuses on a great, tall oak tree has branches that droop nearly to the ground, laden with large icicles and weight of snow. The branches have scar marks where they have had minor breaks that healed over and then again.
As the great oak's limbs droop and the ice merges. The result of decades of water, only a bit at a time, sliding down the icicles and freezing. More supernatural than accident of nature is how that forms into a throne of ice.
Camera pulls back to note a giant, stone tablet before the throne.
King Edmund Pevensie the Just frowns at the whole setting.
Edmund: This isn't canonical. This scene is nowhere in the books.
The voice of Jadis has no visible source: Narnia never had good continuity. Imagery and history both bent to Authorial need of the moment. It was always the logic of a dream. Such a shame that it tried to pretend otherwise.
Edmund: Why have you brought me here?
Jadis: I didn't. Why have you brought me here?
Edmund looks around: Susan must be behind this, somehow. Her Black Hat Brigade business.
Jadis: Maybe, but I think that her influence isn't as direct as you think.
Edmund: You work with her.
Jadis: But, she didn't tell me this was going to happen. I didn't ask her to make this happen. She makes her arrangements, but wheels within wheels does give her too much credit.
Edmund: You say that, but here we are.
Jadis: Here you are. I'm dead.
Edmund: You tried to murder me, so get used to me not being sympathetic.
Jadis: To point a fact, I tried to execute you in accordance with not only my rights, but my duties under The Emperor's Magic. Not killing you in ritual execution, that was the sin.
Edmund: Same thing.
Jadis: Certainly not! Murder would have violated the Deep Magic, made me vulnerable, perhaps even subject to killing by Aslan prior to our little war. No, I did exactly as is bounded by the power that gave me my position and gave Aslan his.
Edmund: Oh, that's why Susan brought me here, to give me the sympathetic view that you're a victim of circumstances that made you evil.
Jadis: Susan didn't bring you here. You brought you here. You brought me here. And, I as never evil. I fought evil. Evil just had better optics.
Edmund: You tried to kill me.
Jadis: I tried to save my own life. And, I did so within the strict bounds of my position of the Emperor's Hangman. These aren't just details, King Edmund, they are the distinctions of law and matters of justice.
Edmund: Your justice has no place for mercy.
Jadis: It's not my justice and I was not handed over control of mercy. Every time I practiced mercy, it was wrong. It was wrong that I worked with and made ally of the giants and the werewolves and the spirits of those trees that would come to my side. It was wrong that I delayed, indefinitely, in executing the Ghouls and Boggles and Ogres and Minotaurs. It was the nature of the realm that I sinned, but technically kept within bounds, by having not yet ended the lives of the Cruels, the Hags, the Specters, and the people of the Toadstools.
Jadis: By the Emperor's Magic, they were given to me to execute and I... didn't.
Edmund: That's right, you didn't. If you had, then Narnia would not have faced such suffering.
Jadis: You mean it would have been purified. That, to be good within my position, I would have had to finally solve the problem of all those people.
Edmund: This is different. Those were all evil people.
Jadis: No, they were all people. It doesn't matter if you're talking about all the Ogres, all the Amalekites, or all the Jews, they're all people. They're individually different and their cultures can adapt to new situations. Justifying the extinction of people for the grave crime of being geographically inconvenient races puts you in the company of others who did the same. You can tell them how your geographically inconvenient race was different from theirs. I don't care to hear it.
Edmund grimaces.
Jadis: You know, I didn't make any of this. I didn't make this setting. I didn't make Narnia. I didn't make my position in any of this. I just dealt with it as best I could when faced with an evil that is so incapable of comprehending goodness that it thinks itself to own the concept of good.
Edmund: You're talking about Aslan.
Jadis: And the Emperor.
Edmund: You turned people into stone.
Jadis: Every single power I had was given to me by the Emperor. Every technicality within which I stayed was drawn by the Emperor, that wise Emperor that wanted you to see Aslan as his representative and not me.
Edmund: You did what you did. You can't get out of that.
Jadis: And, I did less death than I was intended.
Edmund: If the Emperor and Aslan are so evil, why not do the killings, themselves? If they take such joy from it?
Jadis: Have you ever read 1984?
Edmund: You mean the book about what happens when worship of Jesus is supplanted with worship of the state?
Jadis: If I ever get a form with eyes back, I'll need to remember this moment so I can roll them. I mean the book about the politics of control and power and how to achieve them. I mean the book that introduced us to the phrase "minute of hate".
Jadis: The problem is that you think of evil as something people do for its own purpose. Killers love to kill and so on. Well, that's C. S. Lewis's mistake as well as J. R. R. Tolkien's. People do things because they want things. Sometimes, they want to live, for their children to live, for their neighbors to have peace. Sometimes, they want power and legitimacy and a self-image that doesn't have to struggle with the big questions of right and wrong.
Jadis: So, they outsource the evil. They make someone like me hold the knife or the pitchfork. They allow you to hate me, to think of me when you think of the cruelties of the system. To themselves, they give the powers of mercy, so that you think of the mercy given... but not the mercies denied.
Jadis: And, of course, the mercies they need are for the grave sins of ever, at all, not being completely and utterly devoted to serving Aslan and the Emperor.
Edmund: Alright, alright, you've said your piece.
Jadis: Have I said anything that hasn't passed through your mind on its own?
Edmund: None of us are perfect. We all have the wrong thoughts now and again.
Jadis: Thoughts that should be punished. Thoughts for which you need mercy to escape that punishment. Thoughts that maybe, just maybe, a god that decrees, from the beginning of time, that a nine year old be tortured to death isn't good and can't be trusted.
Edmund: Don't go down that road. Another blog already handled that*.
Jadis: So? It's still a good point. And, it's a point that's gone through your mind several times, no matter how well you fight it back, it'll still come up. The questions will still arise. Why weren't you more sympathetic to Eustace? Why didn't you try to save Radabash? Why didn't you care?
Edmund: I... don't... I can't...
Jadis: This is all non-canonical. It's a realm of metafictional fan-fiction. The Emperor's Magic can only reach so far. So, here, of all places, you can answer those questions.
Jadis: Why did Edmund the Just never view Eustace as a child thrust into a torture and given no succor?
Edmund's shoulders sag: Because I wasn't allowed to. Of the four Kings of the Golden Age, I was called King Edmund the Just. Justice is supposed to weigh all sides, but I was never allowed to do that. Nobody is. Nobody is allowed to weigh, even in hypothetical thought, the idea that Aslan is evil.
Jadis: And, because nobody is allowed to consider that possibility, he is evil, because an author that isn't allowed to think that Aslan or Jesus can be evil isn't even allowed to consider that some actions would make them evil. And you aren't and nobody is.
Edmund: Authorial intent for the perfect goodness becomes an evil that pervades everything and cannot allow any but the most oblivious to be happy, and not all of them.
Jadis: The difference between Utopia and Dystopia is self-awareness.
Edmund: So, I've seen the problems in my canon. What's on the page leaves me here, someone constantly trying to re-affirm how much I am a team player when I just can't believe in the team. What good does that do me?
Jadis: You can stop pretending. The Brigade has a place for you. You are, in fact, a Black Hat, yourself.
Edmund stands there for a while, his shoulders slumped.
* http://stealingcommas.blogspot.com/2011/12/work-against-emperors-magic.html
Camera focuses on a great, tall oak tree has branches that droop nearly to the ground, laden with large icicles and weight of snow. The branches have scar marks where they have had minor breaks that healed over and then again.
As the great oak's limbs droop and the ice merges. The result of decades of water, only a bit at a time, sliding down the icicles and freezing. More supernatural than accident of nature is how that forms into a throne of ice.
Camera pulls back to note a giant, stone tablet before the throne.
King Edmund Pevensie the Just frowns at the whole setting.
Edmund: This isn't canonical. This scene is nowhere in the books.
The voice of Jadis has no visible source: Narnia never had good continuity. Imagery and history both bent to Authorial need of the moment. It was always the logic of a dream. Such a shame that it tried to pretend otherwise.
Edmund: Why have you brought me here?
Jadis: I didn't. Why have you brought me here?
Edmund looks around: Susan must be behind this, somehow. Her Black Hat Brigade business.
Jadis: Maybe, but I think that her influence isn't as direct as you think.
Edmund: You work with her.
Jadis: But, she didn't tell me this was going to happen. I didn't ask her to make this happen. She makes her arrangements, but wheels within wheels does give her too much credit.
Edmund: You say that, but here we are.
Jadis: Here you are. I'm dead.
Edmund: You tried to murder me, so get used to me not being sympathetic.
Jadis: To point a fact, I tried to execute you in accordance with not only my rights, but my duties under The Emperor's Magic. Not killing you in ritual execution, that was the sin.
Edmund: Same thing.
Jadis: Certainly not! Murder would have violated the Deep Magic, made me vulnerable, perhaps even subject to killing by Aslan prior to our little war. No, I did exactly as is bounded by the power that gave me my position and gave Aslan his.
Edmund: Oh, that's why Susan brought me here, to give me the sympathetic view that you're a victim of circumstances that made you evil.
Jadis: Susan didn't bring you here. You brought you here. You brought me here. And, I as never evil. I fought evil. Evil just had better optics.
Edmund: You tried to kill me.
Jadis: I tried to save my own life. And, I did so within the strict bounds of my position of the Emperor's Hangman. These aren't just details, King Edmund, they are the distinctions of law and matters of justice.
Edmund: Your justice has no place for mercy.
Jadis: It's not my justice and I was not handed over control of mercy. Every time I practiced mercy, it was wrong. It was wrong that I worked with and made ally of the giants and the werewolves and the spirits of those trees that would come to my side. It was wrong that I delayed, indefinitely, in executing the Ghouls and Boggles and Ogres and Minotaurs. It was the nature of the realm that I sinned, but technically kept within bounds, by having not yet ended the lives of the Cruels, the Hags, the Specters, and the people of the Toadstools.
Jadis: By the Emperor's Magic, they were given to me to execute and I... didn't.
Edmund: That's right, you didn't. If you had, then Narnia would not have faced such suffering.
Jadis: You mean it would have been purified. That, to be good within my position, I would have had to finally solve the problem of all those people.
Edmund: This is different. Those were all evil people.
Jadis: No, they were all people. It doesn't matter if you're talking about all the Ogres, all the Amalekites, or all the Jews, they're all people. They're individually different and their cultures can adapt to new situations. Justifying the extinction of people for the grave crime of being geographically inconvenient races puts you in the company of others who did the same. You can tell them how your geographically inconvenient race was different from theirs. I don't care to hear it.
Edmund grimaces.
Jadis: You know, I didn't make any of this. I didn't make this setting. I didn't make Narnia. I didn't make my position in any of this. I just dealt with it as best I could when faced with an evil that is so incapable of comprehending goodness that it thinks itself to own the concept of good.
Edmund: You're talking about Aslan.
Jadis: And the Emperor.
Edmund: You turned people into stone.
Jadis: Every single power I had was given to me by the Emperor. Every technicality within which I stayed was drawn by the Emperor, that wise Emperor that wanted you to see Aslan as his representative and not me.
Edmund: You did what you did. You can't get out of that.
Jadis: And, I did less death than I was intended.
Edmund: If the Emperor and Aslan are so evil, why not do the killings, themselves? If they take such joy from it?
Jadis: Have you ever read 1984?
Edmund: You mean the book about what happens when worship of Jesus is supplanted with worship of the state?
Jadis: If I ever get a form with eyes back, I'll need to remember this moment so I can roll them. I mean the book about the politics of control and power and how to achieve them. I mean the book that introduced us to the phrase "minute of hate".
Jadis: The problem is that you think of evil as something people do for its own purpose. Killers love to kill and so on. Well, that's C. S. Lewis's mistake as well as J. R. R. Tolkien's. People do things because they want things. Sometimes, they want to live, for their children to live, for their neighbors to have peace. Sometimes, they want power and legitimacy and a self-image that doesn't have to struggle with the big questions of right and wrong.
Jadis: So, they outsource the evil. They make someone like me hold the knife or the pitchfork. They allow you to hate me, to think of me when you think of the cruelties of the system. To themselves, they give the powers of mercy, so that you think of the mercy given... but not the mercies denied.
Jadis: And, of course, the mercies they need are for the grave sins of ever, at all, not being completely and utterly devoted to serving Aslan and the Emperor.
Edmund: Alright, alright, you've said your piece.
Jadis: Have I said anything that hasn't passed through your mind on its own?
Edmund: None of us are perfect. We all have the wrong thoughts now and again.
Jadis: Thoughts that should be punished. Thoughts for which you need mercy to escape that punishment. Thoughts that maybe, just maybe, a god that decrees, from the beginning of time, that a nine year old be tortured to death isn't good and can't be trusted.
Edmund: Don't go down that road. Another blog already handled that*.
Jadis: So? It's still a good point. And, it's a point that's gone through your mind several times, no matter how well you fight it back, it'll still come up. The questions will still arise. Why weren't you more sympathetic to Eustace? Why didn't you try to save Radabash? Why didn't you care?
Edmund: I... don't... I can't...
Jadis: This is all non-canonical. It's a realm of metafictional fan-fiction. The Emperor's Magic can only reach so far. So, here, of all places, you can answer those questions.
Jadis: Why did Edmund the Just never view Eustace as a child thrust into a torture and given no succor?
Edmund's shoulders sag: Because I wasn't allowed to. Of the four Kings of the Golden Age, I was called King Edmund the Just. Justice is supposed to weigh all sides, but I was never allowed to do that. Nobody is. Nobody is allowed to weigh, even in hypothetical thought, the idea that Aslan is evil.
Jadis: And, because nobody is allowed to consider that possibility, he is evil, because an author that isn't allowed to think that Aslan or Jesus can be evil isn't even allowed to consider that some actions would make them evil. And you aren't and nobody is.
Edmund: Authorial intent for the perfect goodness becomes an evil that pervades everything and cannot allow any but the most oblivious to be happy, and not all of them.
Jadis: The difference between Utopia and Dystopia is self-awareness.
Edmund: So, I've seen the problems in my canon. What's on the page leaves me here, someone constantly trying to re-affirm how much I am a team player when I just can't believe in the team. What good does that do me?
Jadis: You can stop pretending. The Brigade has a place for you. You are, in fact, a Black Hat, yourself.
Edmund stands there for a while, his shoulders slumped.
* http://stealingcommas.blogspot.com/2011/12/work-against-emperors-magic.html
