- Joined
- Mar 4, 2019
I have to disagree with this. When you look at the world of fantasy, you almost never see people copying Lewis and his heavy use of multi-layered allegory, or even blindly aping the surface-level "cobbled together" appearance of the Narniad. Rather, you see a thousand and one Tolkien rip-offs, which imitate only the superficial qualities of his ideas, and that are about as creative as bad fanfiction. Lewis is often, wrongly, perceived as the childish amateur in comparison to Tolkien, because they're both lumped into the "fantasy" genre, despite the fact they were actually writing different genres; Tolkien was writing a heroic epic akin to Beowulf, while Lewis was writing a fairy story in the spirit, if not the structure, of mediaeval English epics such as The Faerie Queene. The comparison falls apart completely when you look at the full body of work of both authors. Lewis was a lover of layered symbolism and hidden meaning in both what he wrote and what he studied, whereas Tolkien put everything in front of the reader. They are different people, whose authorial intentions are as far apart as those between Harry Potter and Game of Thrones, both of which are also lumped under "fantasy", yet nobody would even pretend were in the same category.
A number of people have tried to write take-thats and deconstructions of the Narniad, some of which have apparently been quite good, but they all suffer the same problem of motivation and misunderstanding intent; they see the superficially spiritual elements of the Narnia books and are written to undermine and deconstruct those elements, but they miss the underlying themes and structure of the series, so they end up as superficial as the thing the authors believe they're trying to criticise. They also, in every case, display the underlying resentment of the author, which degrades the experience and makes them rather negative to read.
Also, Narnia isn't an Isekai.
