Villain Deaths
Posted: Apr 08, 2020 7:59 am
When I was a kid, I defined the good guys of a story as the one who kills the bad guy. So it's interesting to me (probably not to anyone else) how few of the villains in Narnia are killed by the main character.
Aslan kills the Witch in LWW, not Edmund or Lucy. Glozelle and Sopespian kill Miraz in PC, not Peter. (Peter does kill Glozelle but he's in such a small role that I don't think of him as the villain of the book.) I guess you could argue that Rilian, who kills the LOTGK, is one of the main characters of SC but I don't think of him that way. The closest thing to a main hero defeats main villain scene in the books is when Tirian throws Shift into the stable in LB, and then it's Tash who finishes him off.
You kind of sense that the screenwriters for the Narnia movies were frustrated by this. (I'm sorry for bringing movies into Talk About Narnia. But I feel like it demonstrates what I'm talking about.) They didn't seem to want to outright change who killed the bad guys in any of the stories but that seems to have been because they didn't want to anger fans. While Aslan ultimately kills the Witch in the LWW movie, Edmund "kills" her in both the PC and VDT movies. You get the impression the writers thought that would been a better ending than the canonical one.
Aslan kills the Witch in LWW, not Edmund or Lucy. Glozelle and Sopespian kill Miraz in PC, not Peter. (Peter does kill Glozelle but he's in such a small role that I don't think of him as the villain of the book.) I guess you could argue that Rilian, who kills the LOTGK, is one of the main characters of SC but I don't think of him that way. The closest thing to a main hero defeats main villain scene in the books is when Tirian throws Shift into the stable in LB, and then it's Tash who finishes him off.
You kind of sense that the screenwriters for the Narnia movies were frustrated by this. (I'm sorry for bringing movies into Talk About Narnia. But I feel like it demonstrates what I'm talking about.) They didn't seem to want to outright change who killed the bad guys in any of the stories but that seems to have been because they didn't want to anger fans. While Aslan ultimately kills the Witch in the LWW movie, Edmund "kills" her in both the PC and VDT movies. You get the impression the writers thought that would been a better ending than the canonical one.