Sex and Candy:
A long meta post about Jadis and Edmund and Things That Code Kinky

But if you don’t want to deal with the Teal Deer, you can just watch this short vid



They totally were and everyone knows it.

You just can’t do anything with it.

Even with the kids being slightly aged up for this round of movies, Edmund still can’t be more than twelve in those scenes. That’s just not gonna work. Well, it could work, there are just some things to keep in mind.

First you have to get past the worry that other people will think there’s something seriously wrong with you. And be careful about where you post it and who you show it to (if Strikethrough started because of a drawing of a naked seventeen year old movieverse!Harry Potter who is played by someone who was over eighteen at the time, when the legal age in the UK, the character and the actor’s country of residence, is sixteen, Narnia chan writers should kinda worry).

Second, even if you get past that, you’re still not out of the woods on the age thing. Like Charlie said on “Two and a Half Men” in reference to his eleven year old nephew obsessing over a ballet teacher, “it’s like a dog chasing a car. Never gonna catch it and even if he did, he couldn’t drive it”. Edmund would have no clue what to do if Jadis actually invited him to sleep with her. He barely understands what he’s supposed to have a clue about-it’s there, the attraction but he doesn’t really understand it yet. And she probably wouldn’t enjoy herself at all. There’s nothing an almost immortal part djinn, part giant wants more than an eleven year old.

Not unless the intent was to control and humiliate. Which we already have in the handy dandy symbolism of the candy and the whips and chains. She’s never going to give him what he wants, that’s the point. She keeps promising the Turkish Delight to make him do what she wants, how far can she get him to go?

ETA: It was pointed out in the comments that his age might have nothing to do with it because she might be a child molester. Which is...fair. Because she sort of is. And also that humans are exotic things in her world and she cares nothing for our taboos anyway.

For the most part, the explicit Jadis/Edmund fics I’ve seen that take place during their book canon interaction are just so painfully awful that it’s better if people leave it alone. It should be something the characters can’t bring themselves to say out loud, that everyone else will wonder about for years after, Shameful Things Are Implied and it’s an era when people Did Not Speak of It. Aslan even said “don’t ask him about it.” Of course that goes against all contemporary instinct to talk out our emotions but they are not contemporary characters. I’ve seen some great non explicit fics (they don't have to *do* anything to get the point across), and I bet someone could do a great AU with a…non eleven year old Edmund.

Part of the intriguing creepiness of their relationship is exactly what is not being said out loud. What the author may not have even realized he was writing and would insist that he never meant to write. Because these books are supposed to be about the innocence of childhood, right? Except a common factor in books like that is the reality that once you’ve become a grownup you can’t ever truly go back, you can’t unknow or unexperience something, you can’t revirginize yourself. So he’s trying to write this story that is totally free of anything sexual, but it doesn’t work because so many of his grownup issues are tied up with sex. Tied up. Heh. That was totally unintentional. The harder he tries to repress it, the more it comes bubbling up from his subconscious and we end up with some fairly disturbing themes as a result. I am torn between wanting to know where it comes from and NOT AT ALL wanting to know and omgbrainbleachnow. He can’t have done it on purpose because that would make these books even darker than they actually are, and they are surprisingly dark for their reputation as books that aren’t at all dark. Right? Or not, maybe he did and most people just don't pick up on that.

But really, for all the insistence that there was nothing sexual meant, the character of Jadis is repeatedly described as “beautiful” and has powers that only seem to affect men. The movies make this really blatant, with Jadis having the ability to practically hypnotize Peter and Caspian. LWW mentions her origins as a "descendent of Lilith" (even though Lewis does a retcon of this in Magician's Nephew and every film adaptation glosses over it). Lilith, of course, is a famous succubus in Semitic mythology, chiefly known for a) stealing children and b) causing erotic dreams in young men.

Someone who is already kinkily inclined themselves is more likely to notice it. I picked up on it the first time around (that I can remember). Five or six years old and I’m going “whoa, I’m uncomfortable but in kind of a good way” (I was, if possible, even more of a pervert when I was younger than I am now because I was unfettered by logic or reality). But as someone who has written more than my fair share of kink fic… I mean, I’ve written these types of scenarios, it fits scarily well.

I could really do without the dwarf though. I've also written stories with abuse in them (among other things), and this pings a lot of stuff on the Abuse O'Meter. It adds a whole new layer of subtext to Edmund's entire character arc. I thought I'd been reaching, before, when I compared him to Felicity from AGATB. Maybe I'm not reaching at all.

I get the feeling she developed a strange kind of affection for him, as much as she could ever like anyone, which is unlikely. He’s not like the other men she gets to in the stories. He has a greater potential to Go Bad than Diggory ever did, but he’s smarter and quicker on the uptake than Uncle Andrew. If the world was different…say, if she was human, or if he was Charnian, he might have made a good royal consort.

Except he’s not and he has to die. Which makes it an abusive situation. It’s a little “Narnia: SVU”. He is lured in by her “kind and motherly” act, but finds that he’s now spending all his time trying to placate her, even after she starts hitting him. He basically just takes it and takes it, his only proactive moments come when he’s trying to protect the animals. Not once does he even attempt, even *think* about making a break for it (interestingly, Diggory and Polly do, they run the first chance they get). Not even when he realizes his life is actually in danger-he tries to stand up for the animals, and he keeps lying to her but he never actually tries to run (we have his thoughts in the book, and not once does he consider running).

He’s smart that way, because he wouldn’t get very far. Peter would try to take some clear action, and it’d just get him killed sooner. But it’s also very realistic, because when you’re in that type of relationship, you don’t necessarily realize you could run and it takes a while to realize you even should. Maybe you’re even debating whether you actually want to.

Because that’s another interesting facet of their relationship. If you look at it from the right angle, there’s dom/sub stuff going on.

Look, I’m not saying it’s healthy D/s. It’ so very, very unhealthy that if they were playing in a contemporary, real world “scene”, all their friends would be begging them to break up. But then if they were in the real world she’d probably seduce him into helping her conduct large scale jewel heists or something. I have never been in a bad D/s relationship but I have written about them (and had friends who were in them) and this has all the earmarks of a character who wants something they don’t really “get” yet, and doesn’t know where to get it except from exactly the wrong person and is too inexperienced to even realize it’s a bad situation with the wrong person until getting out has become extremely difficult. It takes them longer than other people because they’re thinking “but I want this person to treat me mean…but I think, maybe not that mean” (and then you find out they enjoy torturing small animals and might be trying to kill you).

But Edmund’s reaction to her is very specific and totally different from any other man she interacts with in the series. It starts way, way before she turns mean and abusive on him, it starts a couple of minutes after they first meet. Tilda Swinton and Skandar Keynes do this entire dynamic the best of all so far (but then, the director told them to pretend they were on a first date, so deliberately adding in the romantic subtext unintentionally upped the kink factor to uncomfortable levels, I can’t get through that scene where he looks up at her with the powdered sugar all over his mouth without snickering).

Jadis speaks to him in a tone that threeoranges called a “dominatrix voice”. A negative review of the movie on a website I lost the link to complains that Edmund “sold his family out for a dominatrix session”. I am fairly relieved to realize at least five other people picked up on it, it’s not all in my admittedly sick, sick mind.

However, it still doesn't really work when he's eleven, so you've got a situation that would be interesting with an adult but is just really kinda scary in canon, because she's, you know, someone who should be confronted in a "Dateline" sting.