User blog:AustinDR/Reevaulating Jadis



So with the Jadis the White Witch, everyone knows that she was the main antagonist of the first of the Chronicles of Narnia books The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe where she ruled over Narnia, set up a police force, banned any judicial systems and banned humans from entering into Narnia due to a Golden Age Prophecy that stated that she would be overthrown by two Sons of Adam and two Daughters of Eve. Any human that was to be seen in Narnia would be punished with death. In the year 1000, Jadis met Edmund Pevensie realizing that he was one of the figures mentioned in the prophecy. She uses her powers to create addictive food to further tempt Edmund into returning to meet with her so she could dispose of him and his siblings. She also had the tendency of stoning several creatures alive and using their bodies to decorate her palace. This fate would end up befalling on a faun named Mr. Tumnus when he was harboring Lucy Pevensie. This climaxes in the news that the Great Lion Aslan was returning, thus meaning that the White Witch's reign was soon to come to an end.

With her powers weakening, the White Witch decides to go ahead and execute Edmund to keep the prophecy from fully coming to fruition. She still had the legal ownership over Edmund's life which she informs Aslan and his camp of. Aslan meets with her in secret and opts to die in the place of Edmund. The White Witch agrees and she executes Aslan on the Stone Table, but not before making it clear that she was going to kill Edmund regardless of the deal. However, because of there being a Deeper Magic, Aslan is resurrected and joins his reinforcements in the battle against the White Witch. He then attacks her and kills her thus ending her reign. Some creatures loyal to the White Witch tried to bring her back with a dark ritual only to be stopped and killed.

But this was not chronologically the first book in the series. It came first, but it wasn't actually the first in the chronological order of the Narnian timeline. The Magician's Nephew reveals that she was the queen of another dimension called Charn where she got into war with her sister. Having learned a dark spell that the elders had tried to hide, she uses a spell known as the Deplorable World to destroy all life in Charn except for the user. In the book, it describes the desolate wasteland that Charn had become, and completely disappears when the White Witch left it. So...it's not really offstage villainy when you have more than enough descriptions of the wasteland to get a good picture of what happened. She then goes on a rampage in London when she gets brought to Earth and later tries to tempt Diggory with an apple that would heal his mother of a sickness. She then fled because there was no evil in Narnia since it was freshly created by Aslan.

Other than that...unsure on the White Witch. From her actions in the first book, she seemed to be a generic evil overlord who did what you'd expect an evil dark lord to do over the setting. But.....then you get to what she did in The Magician's Nephew where she destroyed a world simply because she didn't want to be overthrown, I feel it edges her a bit past being a generic evil overlord. But I otherwise don't really feel to attached here, so I can accept if that isn't the case with others.