sanfordmay

@belegorm: I should say a darling rather than the darling, and from childhood before concepts of religion and its ramifications are well formed. But childhood passions die hard.

Oh I'm not debating either side. Your comparison points are perfectly valid. I'm just saying the only one who could know Lewis's intent was Lewis, and by the most credible reports he said, no, it was not his intent. He could have lied. But I don't know why he would. As mentioned elsewhere, though raised a Christian he became an atheist but for most of his adult life he returned to his faith, and devoutly so. He wrote widely in theology: allegories, opinion, analysis and personal memoir. Certainly at the time children's books with an overt Christian foundation would have been well received in his native UK. So he could've lied but he had no clear reason to lie. Perhaps he meant more that the Narnia novels meant what the reader wished them to mean, and that, for him, did not require an interpretation of a Christian message. Maybe he was too close to the work to see how influenced he was. Who knows. But, again, he said no, I didn't mean it that way.

@kcin: And specific to John Carter, Michael Chabon is an exceptionally talented and durable novelist. But he can't write a screenplay to save his life.

@believer258: Influenced, of course. Intent is the debate. Lewis is reported to have denied setting out to intentionally write Narnia as a Christian parable. He was very close to his youngest stepson and his stepson said the same thing, that he and Lewis had discussed it purely privately and Lewis insisted he set out only to write the books as children's fantasy stories without any particular intent to imply a Christian message. They were, as Lewis apparently insisted, distinct from and unrelated to his theological writing. The debate started when some Christians began to sort of co-opt the Narnia novels to religious purpose, which, again apparently, put Lewis's nose out of joint a bit. And later his stepson took up the banner of defending his stepfather's original intent for the novels. It gets sort of heated because the Narnia novels are darlings of both agnostic and atheist fantasy fans and of the fundamentalist Christian community. Two groups that don't often see eye to eye. And they both want it their way.

I'm Episcopalian so it doesn't exactly bug me if the Narnia books were written with religious intent. But the most credible accounts relate Lewis said they were not and I figure we have to take the author at his word.

I'm sorry, too, for the OT, too. But it's kind of an interesting story.

@mellotronrules: And, fairly, there are plenty of times innovative content is so poorly executed it's awful, and derivitative, low-risk material is so well executed, it's highly entertaining no matter you've seen it all before a dozen times.

We're importing a lot of international content for fresher material these days, too. Either remade Hollywood style, or in the case of most of the TV programming, just released over here, subtitled as necessary.

@lestephan: You need a PS4 debug unit but Xbox One retail units have a developer debug mode. It comes with a don't try this at home warning from MS, but the idea is devs and press don't need purpose-built debug units to execute prerelease code. More likely, other than PS4 has become the review copy default this generation, is that they were still optimizing the Xbox One dynamic upscaling late in the day and the PS4 version was more representative of the retail release.

@demoskinos: I bet you've never gotten a TL;DR in your life!

@dusker: I can't believe the volume of horror movies coming out recently. It Follows, I'm going to have to wait for DVD release. I blew it on the iTunes rental: My wife and I figured we'd wait and rent it a little later, then the movie really took off and was no longer available for rent as long as they usually are while also in theaters.

@thatpinguino: I'd fall out of my chair over either of those, too. The original source material becomes obscured by its progeny, though it's still the wellspring for millions of stories. Alas, something else we've lost with the downfall of a good liberal arts education in addition to specific technical training: people's window on the history of human culture gets far smaller and a lot more opaque. Eventually technical innovation will also suffer from that gap in education.

@thatpinguino: Ha. No doubt. Reminds me about the debate flares up now and again, over whether or not Lewis's Narnia novels, particularly Wardrobe, are Christ stories. Does it matter? Christ stories abound. They're everywhere.