suppose you have the misfortune of being brought into existence in, and being bound by the rules of, a world that's been built wrong.
if the Gnostics are correct then we're all in this position, all the time. but I am going to avoid grand pronouncements and speculations about the nature of the whole Cosmos, by sticking to a particular subset of Creation, an spectacularly faulty fictional universe called "Narnia", the dubious work of a mediocre writer named Clive Staples Lewis—"Jack" to his friends.
if you're a denizen of Narnia, you're basically forced to accept a lot of incomprehensible and incongruous facts about your own world.
for one thing you're forced to accept that your world will only live a few thousand years. its (sub)creator, Aslan, breathed life into the void only to take it away a few millennia later. why does Aslan do this? to outward appearances it's a punishment: Aslan disappears from Narnia for a long period, leaving the Narnians vulnerable to being tricked by a fake Aslan, whence Aslan permits his own (sub)creation to spiral downward.
if you're an animal in Narnia, you have to accept that there are creatures who look like yourself but who have been specially granted the ability to speak and reason—it's like there's an animalian master race, granted the privilege of bossing the lesser animals around. if a human (who isn't a monarch) bosses around one of the master animals, that's a crime; if a human bosses around a non-master animal, that's fine. it's not like the humans of Narnia are gonna give up eating steak just because some animals are sapient.
about those monarchs...even though Narnia was (sub)created by a deity bearing all the traits and behaviors of a lion, and even though Aslan specifically (sub)creates talking animals to live in Narnia, the rulers of Narnia are required to be human beings—who, by the way, aren't generally aware of Narnia and only ever find out about Narnia by a freak accident. hence the rulership of Narnia seems bizarrely arbitrary and left up to wild chances.
and yet Narnia is full of humans for some reason. peculiarly there's a massive group of human beings who are clearly designated NOT to be valid rulers of Narnia, maybe because they worship the wrong god, eat onions and garlic, and aren't pale-skinned. it is to be noted that the Telmarines disbelieve in Aslan but are permitted to rule anyway. I guess they don't make the mistake of eating garlic.
if you're a talking beast of Narnia, you adore Father Christmas, even though your world has no Christ.
Dionysos, Silenos, and the Maenads exist in Narnia, or maybe they simply popped round for a visit. Aslan pretends to have some power over them, although the very idea is ridiculous. there's also a huge complement of nonhuman, non-animal creatures like fauns and giants and witches who have no obvious origin, and whose fate is unexplained.
if you're a talking beast of Narnia you may get to survive the Apocalypse with your sapience intact; otherwise it will be taken from you, although considering that Aslan then destroys the entire world, perhaps it's not much of a loss. if you're a Dwarf (where do they come from? maybe Aulë also visited) or if you're a brown-skinned human who eats onions, exactly one of you gets to survive.
dismal place, Narnia. can you blame the denizens for giving up on Aslan? really?
