merlin – Clementine Fraser

child questioning immortality

My son has just started listening to Queen, and the other day I heard one of the songs they did for the soundtrack to Highlander: ‘Who wants to live forever’. Got me thinking. Would we really want to live forever? What would it do to us to live forever?

Okay for starters, there are quite a few people about whom I shudder at the thought of them living forever. I’m not just talking about the really evil people… .Does that make me a bad person? That does make me a bad person. Geoff from accounting is fine. Really. But it’s a valid thought – If we lived forever, would we want to be around the same people forever? Would they start to really bore us? In fantasy fiction you often have elves or other immortals who have all lived for well over 1000 years and they all know each other. You’d surely get super tired of the same stories, again and again: Continue reading “Who wants to live forever?” →

life, Musings on Fiction and Tropes, Personal

Friendship – in life and in fiction it keeps me going

August 29, 2017January 29, 2018 Clementine Fraser

One of the most precious things to me has been the friendship of those who come into my life. Marriage breakup, work stress, self esteem issues – all have been made easier by the love of my friends. Our friends reflect us to ourselves. Often we have friends who serve different needs in us. We have the crazy friend, the sweet friend, the super awkward friend, the friend who loves super cheesy music and doesn’t care what anyone thinks (I think that last one might be me..)

We also have the friend who listens to us for hours when our hearts bleed out through tear tracks on our face.

The friends who laugh with us and comfort us are precious. The treasure that they are can be overshadowed by a focus on romantic relationships, despite the fact that romantic relationships can often end in heart-ache and true friendships tend to last forever. I’m sure we’ve all had that wonderful joy of seeing a friend after many years and feeling as if no time had passed at all. Friends love you even when they discover that you were the one who left the passive aggressive reminder note that they’re telling someone else about, and when you’re brave enough to tell them it was you they laugh for 10 minutes straight and then hug you. Continue reading “Friendship – in life and in fiction it keeps me going” →

Musings on Fiction and Tropes

It’s a Kind of Magic

August 24, 2017January 29, 2018 Clementine Fraser

Magic seems so real when you’re a child. The world is a miraculous place where caterpillars turn into butterflies and you’re taught to wish on stars. When the world is so full of possibility, the idea of magic doesn’t seem out of place. Magic explains the world.

I can’t remember when I stopped truly believing in magic. Maybe it was when i figured out that Santa wasn’t really real, or that the wishes I made on stars actually didn’t get heard. Of course, it might have been when that picture of the witch that I saw so vividly in my head looked like a green painted mess on the paper in my art class. Whenever it was that I figured out magic had no place in our world, I definitely remember my sadness and disappointment that I could never be a magic user, or visit magic realms where I would (naturally) suddenly discover that I was a long lost saviour bursting with magic. Like I said: disappointing. My desire to see magic actually exist was, for the most part, equally satisfied and fuelled by falling into enchantments in books.

Enchantments give our world some hope that things can not just be better, easier, more fabulous, but that there is some meaning behind the meaningless. Some sparkle to be added to the banality of existence. Continue reading “It’s a Kind of Magic” →