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Post by Afgncaap5 on Feb 27, 2009 13:31:41 GMT -5
Man, I just had a weird dream.
For starters, I heard that the Cinematic Titanic folks had all boarded a plane to fly to a live show together, but that the plane crashed with no survivors.
And then there were these people who were doing house repairs or remodelling or something, and there was this one creepy, menacing guy among them who I knew very well I didn't want to come into my room when I was sleeping.
...and then the plot stopped going anywhere, and I sort of drifted into being awake.
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Post by Afgncaap5 on Mar 2, 2009 1:50:11 GMT -5
Argh. I hate having to get political, but this is an issue that I really care about. I want to say in advance, though, that I *just* heard about this secondhand, and haven't had time to properly research it, and as such I haven't personally checked the veracity of these details. If I find out that I was fed false information (and I sincerely hope that I have been), I'll let you know that it was all a hoax or a misunderstanding or something.
Anyway, President Obama is apparently proposing a bill called the "Employee Free Choice Act." The title is okay, it's got the phrase "free choice" in it and everything. But the title also doesn't say whether or not the bill will be for or against free choices (sort of like how the Patriot Act isn't necessarily endorsed by Patriots, or how World War II was misnumbered.)
The bill, if my sources are correct, involves taking secret ballots away from workers and getting them to vote in the presence of union officials.
I don't know why, specifically, the bill says this (I should really research these things.) My guess is that it's a suggested alternative to legally requiring workers time off to vote when the ballots open; if you have the ballots at the worksite, and let union officials oversee the procedings, then there's no real need to grant time off! People put in more work so the businesses don't suffer, workers get paid for the extra time they'll be at work (heck, we'd be paying them to vote for a few minutes), and the economy, arguably, is minutely better for the work done and the money spread. (Let's emphasize again, though: I've done no research yet, and this entire paragraph is just wild, almost baseless, speculation about possible motives and reasoning.)
My problem is that it puts the right to private voting at risk for workers. I don't want anyone knowing who I vote for, especially not people who I work for, or people I work with (or people in a related field.) Politics, in my experience, complicate the relationships between people, and while I know that people have bonded as friends over shared political interests, I know it isn't always the case. I neither want a boss or colleague to know that I oppose their views, nor do I want a boss or colleague to begin approaching me with political talks because they know that I share their views. It's intimidating and freaky either way (not that I think my current bosses or co-workers would act that way or think poorly of me due to my political views (they have all kinds of other reasons for thinking poorly of me;-)).
I have learned that there's another bill called the Secret Ballot Protection Act that, apparently, protects secret ballots (the name is a bit more clear on which side of the issue it comes down on.) I feel a bit saner knowing that this alternative bill is being batted around, though I'm still weirded out by the whole situation.
Now then. Time to actually go research this stuff and make sure that I've not accidentally wound up supporting the bill that legalizes puppy kicking or something. That'd be awful. And should I, miraculously, have been given the proper information the first time by my second-hand sources, I'm definitely going to be contacting my senators.
Heck, I might want to contact them either way, just to let them know how much I really love the right to a secret vote. Just to be on the safe side.
Okay, I'll stop talking politics now. Aren't webcomics great? Yeah. Yeah, they sure are. Mmmmm....webcomics...
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Post by Afgncaap5 on Mar 7, 2009 1:35:43 GMT -5
[glow=red,2,300]THIS! WEEK! IN! WEBCOMICS!!![/glow] Okay. I wasn't going to post one of these this week. But so far this week, the last two panels of the saturday strip for 8-Bit Theater has made me laugh out loud, something that I really rarely do (I don't even type lol that often. Probably because I like to save it for times when I truly lol. Though when I do lol, I normally have reason to explain myself further, such as now. lol.) A bit of history on it: 8-Bit Theater is a Sprite Comic. Ordinarily, if you find a Sprite Comic on the net, it's a "bad thing." Sprite Comics are made by manipulating the images (or sprites) from video games. They're relatively simple to create once you figure out the mechanics of manipulating the sprites, and as such they are accessible by those who don't write the best jokes (or alternatively write jokes that only video game players will really get.) Most sprite comics aren't worth your time. 8-Bit Theater is the exception to the rule. Brian Clevinger not only puts a very obvious amount of time into his image manipulation, but he also writes humor that is simultaneously accessible while also being original (or at least as original as we want humor to be.) He also seems to have a pretty good grip on story structure and flow, for while his script outline has been layed out far in advance (he's following, roughly, the plot of Final Fantasy 1. They've made it as far as the final dungeon.) The characters are also good examples of how flat characters can be a good thing. (One could argue that all 8-bit characters are flat, but then they might get hit with a mallet.) From the simplistic naiivety of Fighter to the omnicidal madness of Black Mage and to the single-minded idiocy of Red Mage (these are their actual names), the characters are themselves through and through in a delicious way. Oh, and while it didn't happen this week per se, I love how needlessly petty and antagonistic Black Mage is in this strip. Heh-heh. "Mya mya mya mya." ;D
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Post by Afgncaap5 on Mar 13, 2009 3:15:59 GMT -5
[glow=red,2,300]THIS! WEEK! IN! WEBCOMICS!!![/glow] Woah, woah, woah! Ugly Hill has ended?! Woah! ...woah...man, woah. For those of you who don't live on webcomics news like I do, this might not strike you as big news. And in a medium where new comics begin and end every day, even if you're aware of the comic itself this might not seem like such a shocker. But Ugly Hill has a bit of historical inertia to it. Lemme fill in the gaps. Paul Southworth, the creator of Ugly Hill, first came to my attention with the creation of Blank Label Comics. Paul, at that time, had gained some moderate successes for himself with a comic called Crazy Larry (which, alas, is one of maybe six webcomics that I've not read. Sorry, Paul! It's on my reading list, I swear!) Crazy Larry ended and Ugly Hill began very nearly right at the formation of Blank Label Comics. Now, the formation of Blank Label was big news for webcomics. Before Blank Label, webcomics would normally either exist as a single, lone wolf off in the wilderness, or as a member of a very large conglomeration of webcomics. Imagine that the little webcomics were independant kingdoms and that the big conglomerations were continent spanning empires or something. Anyway, Blank Label was formed when a group of webcomic artists, including Paul Southworth, left one of the big webcomic collectives, Keenspot. They had no real gripe with Keenspot, they just decided that they could do better. So they struck off on their own to split ad revenues, promote each other, and generally see how their fortunes fared. And it was a resounding success (now imagine a group of small countries deciding that they want independence from the empire that's existed for centuries and forming some sort of union of states under a single flag. ...or something like that, but without the big empire being villainized, since Keenspot wasn't really at fault for anything.) Anyway, Blank Label was a big success, then Howard Taylor joined them and they got even bigger, and life was good! Ugly Hill was involved in Blank Label since the beginning. Heck, Ugly Hill was a minor casualty in the Second War between Webcomics and Wikipedia (webcomics won, sort of.) Ugly Hill even had a crossover with PvP, the webcomic that, were it not for Penny Arcade, would probably be recognized as the biggest/most succesful gamer webcomic around. Now that Ugly Hill is ending...well, I don't know what to think. I'm not a regular member of the Ugly Hill forums, and I mainly read Ugly Hill at the Blank Label central hub instead of its own website, so I don't really know what, if anything, Paul has planned for his future. I do hope that I'll be seeing more of your work soon, Paul. And I also hope that I'll have a chance to see some of the Ugly Hill folk again in the future. ...of course, I said the same thing when Kris Straub ended Checkerboard Nightmare and started focussing primarily on Starslip Crisis (or Starshift Crisis as it was called then.) Now I barely think of Chex, Vaporware or Lyle Zillion (is that even his name? I don't think that was the lawyer's name, man I'm getting forgetful). My main thoughts are of Memnon, Edgewise and Jinx when I think of Straub now. So maybe it's for the best. Either way, I wish you well, Paul Southworth. See ya 'round!
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Post by Afgncaap5 on Mar 14, 2009 23:15:29 GMT -5
Well, I can scratch off one more "big name" musical from my list of musicals to see.
42nd Street was an interesting musical. It was..."good," but I don't think it was my cup of tea. In many ways, I could even see how one might say it's necessary. It follows the format of so many "the show must go on!" plays/musicals that I've seen. I won't go so far as to say that it did that type of show first, but I will say that I think it was probably less blatant when the musical was first made.
In many ways, it's a prime example of the "Negative Drama" aspect of most Broadway musicals. Some guy from Ancient Greece (what was his name? Euripides? Sophocloes?) had a list of things that all dramas must have, and the order in which to have them. In his list for drama, Spectacle was mentioned last, and given the least amount of emphasis. Some have theorized that his long-lost mirror essay talked about what a comedy should have, and put them in the opposite order.
Whether he said that or not, that's how Broadway does its musical comedies a lot. Spectacle comes first and foremost, before plot, characterization, and even before the music in some cases. And 42nd Street may be the most obvious example of this that I've ever seen.
There wasn't much in the way of plot: just enough to help present a series of musical numbers, flashing lights and tap dancing steps to fly across the stage. The characters were certainly flat and didn't have much that you could call "story arcs" in them, and that's okay because for this kind of thing they didn't really need them. Indiana Jones doesn't really grow or change much over the course of his stories either, and I'm still a fan of his.
I don't know if I'll ever get an urge to go "see those dancing feet" again, but I'm glad that I saw it this once.
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Post by mummifiedstalin on Mar 17, 2009 10:27:11 GMT -5
I'm seriously not a musical fan. It may have been because my Mom had season tickets to some when I was smaller, and I associated them with forced "cultural" activities. But maybe it's because spectacle comes before everything else, even (and often) quality of the music, like you said. And "negative drama" is a nice way to put that. I still usually get the feeling with most musicals that the music is...obvious. I guess by that I mean that most of the time when I go to a musical, I hear what I'd expect to hear in a musical rather than something really novel. I don't know that that's a fair criticism, but, to put it bluntly, musicals bore me.
There are always exceptions, of course: _Into the Woods_ and _Sweeny Todd_ (although the movie left me flat, the actual Broadway production with Angela Landsbury was awesome). And, if I'm in a good mood, I'll comfortably sit through _Camelot_ or _Man of La Mancha_, but that's more because of the source material.
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Post by Afgncaap5 on Mar 19, 2009 0:30:47 GMT -5
Right. Those musicals had some good stuff to work with goin' in.
I sorta feel like the public at large doesn't really think about music the way that it used to. Sort of like with poetry. Not too long ago, the public at large would regularly read poetry as a form of recreation. And then T. S. Elliot came along and made poetry something that you needed a college degree to appreciate, and hey, what's this "television" thing? Let's try that instead.
I feel like the public perception of music has shifted similarly, though not so obviously. Worse, that perception has trickled into the mindsets of the people who actually produce/write musicals, and as such we have musicals being written that are geared towards this new understanding of music, effectively taking away some of the grandeur that the original stuff had.
I think the last musical that I watched where I *really* really liked the music was, I kid you not, Seussical. I don't know if the massive crossover of Dr. Seuss characters just lends itself well to Broadway style music, or if the particular stories just had the right umph (it was primarily "Horton Hears a Who", with a hefty percentage of "Horton Hatches an Egg," and a dozen or so other books included to signififcantly lesser degrees (Cat in the Hat narrating, of course)), but something about that musical really connected with me in a way that I'd not felt in a while.
It might've been the flow of the music. The musical itself might have almost been just one big gigantic song with occasional interruptions. The themes were repeated, echoed and blended very well (particularly the "I have wings, yes I can fly" song. Seriously, I didn't care for the song half as much as I loved all of the later thematic references to it.)
Oh, and Little Shop of Horrors was always a favorite of mine (I'm not talking about the Rick Moranis musical movie, or the original movie by a director familiar to many MSTies, but the stage musical that came between the two. Although the two movies are both worth watching for their own reasons, in my opinion.)
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Post by Afgncaap5 on Mar 22, 2009 21:59:56 GMT -5
How the heck do people get into loops?
I swear, people avoid telling me things. Not through any malicious intent on their part, not through any desire to see me embarrassed or anything, it just doesn't happen.
Take today's latest escapade for example: for a little over a week now, people have been planning my boss' surprise retirement party. There were signs up all over with the info, Steak and Shake in one city at 7 o'clock. (The astute reader might be a bit curious at this point, so I'll let you know that my boss was out of town for a week and wasn't around to see the signs.)
So tonight at about 6:30 I go to Steak and Shake, not sure what I'll be eating that'll fit my decision to give up all meats but fish (turns out they have fish sandwiches and fish fillets for a limited time.) A hostess asks how many in my party, and I say that I'm here a little early for a part that's going to happen at 7. She checks with the manager, and starts setting up tables for twenty.
Well, 7 comes and goes, and by 7:20 I'd made a few calls (I have no one's cell number, maybe that's why I'm out of the loop.) Eventually someone I'd called was called by someone else, and so she called me. I learned then that the party had been moved from Steak and Shake in this one city to a Pizza Hut in a city about half an hour away. Sadly, there was no real way I could leave the city I was in for about an hour, and so when I did finally get there, naturally everyone had left.
This is just the latest string in a long run that goes back years where I'm not informed about pertinent pieces of information. Do I just exude some sort of Information Aura that leads people to believe that I'll already know things so they don't need to let me know?
Now, to be completely honest with myself: I'm not good at putting two and two together. I tend to take a lot at face value, so when I get unusual information I just chalk it up to me being in an unusual circumstance rather than me being misinformed.
To use the example of the party again: a couple days back at work I was on my break. Two of the group managers were in the break room, talking about financing the party. One of them says, "How are we going to afford the pizza? How many will we need?" The other responded by saying that the company apparently had an expected "store usage" fund for things like retirement parties, donut budgets, and lots of quality of life stuff.
Now, an ordinary person might have said, "Wait a second. The information I had told me that the party would be at Steak and Shake. However, I have just learned that there will be pizza, and I know that Steak and Shake doesn't serve pizza. Something peculiar is going on!" This would probably lead to a few questions, and a quick explanation that the party had been moved.
I, on the other hand, had a completely different thought process. My thought process went, "Pizza? At Steak and Shake? Wow, we're really going all out for this party, aren't we? Well, Larry's a great boss, and he deserves it. Good for him."
So I suppose that if I started questioning things, perhaps I would be in on things more readily. However, that doesn't change the fact that I'd occasionally like people to just point out approach me and volunteer information, even if I might already have it. I mean, from what I hear, there's just all sorts of shindigs that I miss out on because people assume that I know. I really wouldn't mind having a social life, so I need to figure out how to stop being out of the loop all the time.
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Post by Afgncaap5 on Mar 23, 2009 14:28:05 GMT -5
Why oh why do people insist on referring to The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe as an allegory? It's not! It's not an allegory! It doesn't fit the definition of an allegory, it isn't received as an allegory, and C. S. Lewis bluntly said that it wasn't an allegory! Grargh!
At best, people do this because they don't know what an allegory actually is. They hear the term, think it sounds interesting and smart, and begin using it themselves. At worst, people do this in an attempt to make the first Narnia book out to be something that it isn't. I'm inclined to think it's the first one.
Allegories are not the same as metaphors. Or more accurately, Allegories are an incredibly specific style of metaphor. For LW&W to be an allegory, there would have to be many, many, many, many more comparisons, allusions and parellels between itself and the Bible.
More to the point, C. S. Lewis wasn't trying to define Aslan as a type of Christ figure. C. S. Lewis was setting up Aslan to be Christ. He had a fantasy universe here from which he was borrowing from dozens of other myths and legends, and naturally he wasn't going to leave out the one he believe to be true. Aslan is what he believes Christ would be like in a Fantasy universe, which is different from setting up a character to just be a Christ metaphor.
So please. Please. Stop calling it an allegory. I'm beggin' ya here.
-EDIT-
I came back because I thought of an example.
It was always Winter and never Christmas with the White Witch in charge, right? If it was an allegory, the winter would represent sin's control over the world. For it to be an allegory, the winter wouldn't have thawed until after Aslan's death. And then it would've become always spring/summer, but never winter. Winter never would've come again.
Then it would've been an allegory.
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Post by mummifiedstalin on Mar 23, 2009 15:57:37 GMT -5
Ahem.
<Puts on pedant hat>
As someone whose living is partially made by writing about and teaching the history of allegory, let me say that you are technically correct. Narnia is loaded up with allusions and figures from Christian theology/mythology that serve similar purposes. But it isn't an allegory. There's no character named "Fortitude" who never shows fear or takes a break. "Truth" isn't a woman dressed in white who can talk you out of your sinful ways, etc.
But for a modern audience which is used to books that fill themselves with ambiguity and then expect the reader to come to grips with that ambiguity by struggling with meaning, a book which even its author says is straightforwardly meant to tell the Christian story/stories to young people is, for all intents and purposes, an allegory. Even among really smart people, I've found, any book that claims to have, and in fact has, a single correct, preachy (for good or bad) moral is an allegory, for all intents and purposes.
And, in one sense, they're right. In most historical allegories, certain symbols have a very limited range of interpretation (i.e., a RIGHT one). Metaphor is supposed to play with a larger range of possible meanings, for the most part. So in some sense, if a book is preachy with an overwhelmingly straightforward and insistent moral message, then it's in the spirit of allegory, even if it you can't break down its figures in a specific allegorical manner.
Now, you could argue with me that Narnia isn't supposed to have such a strict limit on interpretation, and that much of it is fantasy for fantasy's sake. Then you'd be on strong ground. But if it's supposed to be what Lewis said it was, smart Christian literature for children, then it's allegory, even if weak allegory compared to, say, The Faerie Queene or The Pearl.
<removes pedant hat>
What happened? I blacked out there for a minute...
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Post by Afgncaap5 on Mar 24, 2009 3:38:49 GMT -5
Well, when speaking about LW&W, I do claim that it's Fantasy for Fantasy's sake. The dedication that Lewis gave to the book for his relative (a niece? I can't recall, and don't have a copy handy) stated that much. It wasn't until the following books that he was specifically writing his books to turn out that way, with Silver Chair and Last Battle being the closest to what I'd call an allegory. Furthermore, I'd take issue with the assertion that any story with a moral to be learned is an allegory. Is Shadow from American Gods also a Christ allegory? Is Harry Potter an allegory for truth or honor or acceptance in a corrupt system? Is Indiana Jones an allegory for ingenuity and freedom in the face of potential tyranny? I would argue that no, these characters and the stories that they come from are not allegories. We're certainly free and encouraged to analyze their escapades with the potential to learn what we can, but doing so is purely optional. If you took the stone table and Aslan's death out of LW&W, you'd still have a decent fantasy story (although a potentially less satisfying one.) On the other hand, if you took all the pro-America-should-go-to-war symbolism out of Casablanca, you'd barely have enough movie to compete with a blooper reel. The majority of people may decree allegory to just be "metaphor on steroids," but I maintain that they're just as wrong about that as they are about the usage of the word "ironic."
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Post by mummifiedstalin on Mar 24, 2009 7:38:26 GMT -5
Well, when speaking about LW&W, I do claim that it's Fantasy for Fantasy's sake. The dedication that Lewis gave to the book for his relative (a niece? I can't recall, and don't have a copy handy) stated that much. It wasn't until the following books that he was specifically writing his books to turn out that way, with Silver Chair and Last Battle being the closest to what I'd call an allegory. That may well be. And, you're right, I've always felt a real difference between the first book and the rest. With Silver Chair in particular (and from then on), the message gets more and more heavy handed. LWW had plenty that was wonder for the sake of wonder that the rest don't. I think it may be why, even before the movie, tons of people read the first one and then just dabbled in the rest. I agree completely...when I'm wearing my literary historian's hat. What I meant was that I think we're seeing a change in the common reception of the word "allegory" in which its coming to mean any literary/artistic work that's guided by its message rather than entertainment/creative/ambiguous motives. You can blame reviewers for that, or even people who didn't pay close attention in English class. But right or wrong, that's what the common usage for it is coming to mean. Even a bunch of my students already recognize that, and when they turn in papers wanting to say that some story or poem has a moral meaning, they often start throwing the word allegory around, even when it isn't appropriate. I think that, really, it's less about "allegory" and more about our cultural attitude towards entertainment. In the Renaissance, for example, *any* good literature was supposed to have a moral core, an idea that went back through the Middle Ages and all the way back to Horace. If it didn't, it was mere decadence and even dangerous. Thus, you have tons of people, like Philip Sidney, who write "Defences of Poetry" and what not, trying to say that telling lies for fun can actually have moral outcomes. Allegory was just an extreme form of that where the moral reflection worked in a very literal, sometimes mechanical symbolic way. A character stood for a virtue, say, and you figure out what the author means by watching what happens to that virtue. Now, though, we often respond to explicitly moral or religious literature as "preachy." Consequently, people call it "allegory" to distinguish it from literature that either doesn't seem to have a message to send or which has a much more ambiguous or realistic/representational approach. It's a historical misuse of the term, but I can understand why it's used.
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Post by Afgncaap5 on Mar 24, 2009 18:27:03 GMT -5
I can understand as well, but in addition to being a pedantic raver it makes my common sense redundancy detector kick in. This shift, which has decades (possibly more) of historical and societal inertia behind it, is pushing the word "allegory" to just mean "metaphor." And if it just means "metaphor," then why not just say "metaphor"? You'll wind up saying a word that more people around you will recognize (and as an added benefit, you'll be more correct.)
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Post by mummifiedstalin on Mar 24, 2009 19:19:37 GMT -5
I can understand as well, but in addition to being a pedantic raver it makes my common sense redundancy detector kick in. This shift, which has decades (possibly more) of historical and societal inertia behind it, is pushing the word "allegory" to just mean "metaphor." And if it just means "metaphor," then why not just say "metaphor"? You'll wind up saying a word that more people around you will recognize (and as an added benefit, you'll be more correct.) Ah, but I don't think that's quite it. (And speaking of pedantic hats, I wrote my MA thesis on various theories of metaphor, so I'm biased.) Metaphor compares two different things, each of which can potentially change the meaning of the other in the comparison. For example, if I say, "that wave was a monster," it can mean BOTH that the wave was like a monster (huge, scary, loud, etc.) but also that a monster is like a wave (a force of nature, something I might see as a challenge to overcome, etc.). Vehicle and tenor are, to a large extent, interchangeable. Allegory doesn't work like that at all. It's only one way. Fiction means moral lesson. But not the other way around. In an allegory, once you have the kernel of meaning (so the theory goes), you can dispense with the fiction. It's there as a prop to remind you of the real moral (or whatever) truth. Once it's decoded, you're done with the dross of imagination and move on. Now, granted, that's a very medieval view of allegory. But I think it's what people mean when they talk about a movie being an allegory: it's real point isn't the acting or the entertainment but the message. A metaphorical piece keeps bringing you back to the metaphor because both sides keep unlocking new potential in each other. Neither the wave nor the monster exhausts the potential meaning of what happens when you compare them. But in allegory, the meaning exhausts the symbol. Now, the best allegories are more complicated than that. But it's the spirit of why people call "moral" movies or books allegories: the moral is the most important part.
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Post by Afgncaap5 on Mar 25, 2009 13:53:18 GMT -5
Ah, but if the moral is the most important part, then I'd return to my theory that LW&W (and other Narnia books) aren't allegorical. With the possible exceptions of Last Battle and Silver Chair (and mmmmaybe Magician's Nephew, maybe), the primary point of the Narnia books was not the moral, but rather the narrative. I mean, what about The Horse And His Boy? Lewis' motive behind the Horse And His Boy was, "To write a horse book." (There's a genre that we don't see quite as much of these days, I think. Or maybe it's just my imagination.) Sure, there's symbolism in it, but it's really beside the point. Which I'd argue can extend over the entirety of the series, with the heavy Christian imagery being there primarily because it's what Lewis believes and not necessarily because it's something the he hopes will wind up converting people (though I'm sure he wouldn't mind it if it did.) (As a side note, I've not gotten around to reading or watching the Golden Compass yet, but I'm wondering if that book and the ones that follow could be deemed allegories in the same way that the Narnia books have been (by which I mean incorrectly. ))
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