Story Pile: Narnia, Pt 4 — The Magician’s Nephew
Before there were Pevensies, there was Digory and Polly.
Before there was Narnia, there was the endless forest.
Before there was a White Queen, there was Jadis.
I give prequels a bit of a beating, on principle, which I think is incredibly fair because largely, a prequel is about making the world smaller and more boring. It’s about stepping to a point in a story where we know the conclusion and trying to find stuff in that experience that needs explaining, and is interesting to explain. It’s also often a cynical effort to keep using characters you like in a way that doesn’t require you to confront how they’ve changed by the story that people liked (Man, Obi-Wan Kenobi was such a dickhead and then the prequel series he was in made him so much worse). I am, simply put, not a fan of prequels.
But this prequel rules.
