Line #10 YMMV/TheProblemOfSusan


1	* AlternateCharacterInterpretation:
2	** Greta posits at the end that Susan was an ActionSurvivor, rather than a FallenPrincess, having survived an arbitrary god.
3	** Is Professor Hastings going NeverMyFault to the God that deserted her? If she is really Susan from ''Literature/TheChroniclesOfNarnia'' then Susan was the first one who deserted her siblings -- since she's not there at the Friends of Narnia meeting and wasn't on the train with them when they died. On the other hand, as Professor Hastings points out, it's DisproportionateRetribution to make her have to identify her brother's body when he was decapitated, with flies buzzing around the corpses.
4	** One has to wonder if Professor Hastings is just claiming she was punished as a result of "finding sex" as a way to avoid confronting what she really did in her past.
5	** If Professor Hastings isn't Susan, then was her turning to children's literature a means to cope with the trauma of losing her entire family, and the Narnia books hit too close to home? Meanwhile, the professor just looks back on her life with contentment during her DyingDream.
6	** Did Hastings/Susan die peacefully, or did Aslan just save her for last like in the dream?
7	* DeathOfTheAuthor: Greta believes Susan is denied entry into Aslan’s Land due to "not believing" and "the sin of Eve" (lust/sex). Professor Hastings suggests Susan was being arbitrarily punished for simply "liking nylons and parties". Neither seem interested in considering C.S. Lewis’ own explanation for why Susan is excluded: in response to a 1955 letter from a young girl named Marcia, he wrote that Susan's failing in becoming "too keen on being grown-up" was that she had become petty and arrogant. And rather than viewing her as being permanently banished for that like Greta and Hastings do, he had hope Susan would overcome those character flaws and rejoin her siblings, but such a story would be "longer and more like a grown-up novel than I wanted to write".
8	-->''"The books don't tell us what happened to Susan. She is left alive in this world at the end, having by then turned into a rather silly, conceited young woman. But there's plenty of time for her to mend and perhaps she will get to Aslan’s country in the end…in her own way."''
9	* {{Narm}}:
10	** God (Father, Son, and Holy Ghost) saying repeatedly how Mary Poppins is even better than he is.
11	** Greta's nightmare is so over the top with its dark imagery it is hard to take seriously.
12	* NightmareFuel:
13	** Professor Hastings calmly describing that a train crash causes a lot of damage to a body. She had to go and identify her entire family, where the bodies were taken to a nearby school; flies were flitting about, and her brother "Ed" was decapitated in the crash. The professor was half-fearing, half-hoping, that the body she identified wasn't Ed's.
14	** [[NightmareRetardant If you aren’t put off by how gratuitous it is]], Greta's nightmare of Aslan and Jadis killing the children. Aslan eats her whole body but just leaves her head!
15	* OnceOriginalNowCommon: After a decade of revisionist fairy tales like ''Literature/{{Wicked}}'', ''Series/OnceUponATime'' and especially ''{{Film/Maleficent}}'', Neil Gaiman's efforts here seem pretty cliched and arbitrarily dark. Especially with how RonTheDeathEater is applied to Aslan.
16	* {{Squick}}:
17	** The opening paragraph has Professor Hastings dreaming of a dead centaur, looking at his penis and wondering how they mate.
18	** Greta's nightmare has Aslan and Jadis having sex after killing Susan and her siblings.
19	* WhatDoYouMeanItsNotForKids: It’s definitely ''not'' the same target demographic as the original book, specifically due to the explicit sex between Aslan and the White Witch.

Context YMMV / TheProblemOfSusan