YMMV / The Magician's Nephew

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Jadis's description of her sister as someone even worse than herself. Apparently, the sister broke the pact that neither side should use magic in the civil war and would have been a worse ruler than Jadis herself. Jadis explicitly describes her sister massacring her soldiers down to the last man with glee. Was Jadis once more moral than her sister and had to become the tyrant she is to match the sister's forces? Or is Jadis exaggerating her sister's evil in order to justify herself to the children? Jadis also says that her sister refused to surrender despite knowing she had access to the Deplorable Word, implying she threatened her with the Deplorable Word; did the sister know Jadis was going to use it or did she think Jadis wouldn't go through with her threat? Or maybe they were both evil to begin with — their ancestors are implied to have been pretty consistently bad for many generations.
  • Uncle Andrew claims his godmother was descended from fairies and got the magic rings from Atlantis. Was Atlantis a real place in Earth's ancient history? Or was it another world whose inhabitants came to Earth?
  • It's left open whether the inscription on the bell in Charn was really magic or pure Schmuck Bait. Although given that Jadis put it there, it's possible there was some magic involved.
• Anvilicious: Aslan relentlessly hammers home the Aesop about the Fantastic Nuke, making it so obvious to Lewis' Cold War audience that the idea of humanity nuking itself into extinction was a very distinct possibility.
• Broken Base: Should you read this book first (chronologically), or The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (first in publication order)? The debate continues!
• Complete Monster: Jadis. See the series' YMMV page for details.
• Evil Is Cool: As rotten as Jadis is, you have to admit, she's still pretty badass. This book in fact makes her more badass than she had been in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
• Fanfic Fuel: The Wood between the Worlds. There are countless, possibly infinite portals to other worlds, but we only see three: Earth, Charn, and Narnia. This book also reveals that, in Earth's ancient history, Atlantis was real and Fairies existed, neither of which is ever mentioned in any of the other books.
  • The statement in chapter 1 that "Mr. Sherlock Holmes was still living in Baker Street." This places the chronicles squarely in the Wold Newton Universe of Philip José Farmer.
• Fandom-Enraging Misconception: Don't call this the first Narnia book. While the earliest in the series' chronology, it was written second-to-last and the multitudes of Call Forwards are lost on anyone who starts with it. And it really doesn't help that some editions label it as number one.
• Fanon: A couple of audio adaptations have given the story a Framing Device as Digory telling the events of the story at the Friends of Narnia meeting in The Last Battle. Some fans like this as a way of justifying its chronology coming right before the end of the series.
• Genius Bonus:
  • The description of the garden where Digory gets the apple is a direct nod to how John Milton describes the Garden of Eden in Paradise Lost.
  • The garden also has parallels to the Garden of the Hesperides in Greek mythology. Digory is sent to retrieve an apple from the garden like Hercules, and Jadis steals one from the tree just like Eris stole the Apple of Discord. What's more is that the Apple of Discord started the Trojan War, and Narnia's first queen is called Helen.
  • Uncle Andrew's godmother is an allusion to Morgan Lefay from Arthurian mythology.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Queen Helen is said to look beautiful in her simple attire, and would have looked tacky if she'd put on her best outfit. Years later Queen Susan, who has grown apart from her siblings and claims Narnia was only a game of make-believe they played as children, is said to only be interested in "nylons and lipstick and invitations".
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Jadis. Iconic British children's character? Last surviving member of an ancient, decadent species of Sufficiently Advanced Human Aliens? Committed Genocide from the Inside to prevent a war from ending unfavorably? Visits London and causes a commotion due to her unfamiliarity with Earth? Um, hello? It gets even better when you read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and see the Witch using the Fourth Doctor's modus operandi of charming people with sugary jelly candies. And then there's the magical wooden box in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and The Last Battle that appears normal on the outside and contains a whole world within...
• Moral Event Horizon: Jadis speaks the Deplorable Word, and kills her sister and the rest of Charn. She seems proud that she did so. She also claims that it's the sister's fault for refusing to surrender.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The very idea of Charn — a world where every living thing (except Jadis) is dead. It's completely empty and devoid of life. Polly and Digory can literally only hear their own heartbeats. Oh, and the sun is dying, too. Doesn't help that this was published in 1955, at the height of the nuclear arms race.
  • Digory and Polly come hair-raisingly close to losing track of which pond in the Wood Between the Worlds will take them back home, until Polly realizes they should mark it in some way. They're both reduced to Stunned Silence at the narrow escape of having to randomly search through the countless identical ponds for the rest of their lives.
• One-Scene Wonder:
  • Aunt Letty only features in the sequence when Jadis shows up in London. But she's unimpressed by Jadis's theatrics and assumes she's a drunk circus performer. She doesn't even bat an eyelid when Jadis throws her across the room.
  • The housekeeper also only features during this section and has even less page-time than Letty, but she still manages to be notable given that the narration consistently notes that she's having a blast with how ridiculous some of the scenes are.
• Salvaged Story: Polly is more heavily involved in the plot and has just as many adventures as Digory, which is a response to the Stay in the Kitchen attitude Lewis demonstrated in earlier books. This is believed to be influenced by his marriage to ardent feminist Joy Gresham. Notably, Aravis of The Horse and His Boy is a strong female character, and Lucy Pevensie fights in the battle towards the end — as does Jill Pole in The Last Battle. The only reason Polly isn't involved in the mayhem when Jadis acts up in London is because she's being punished by her parents.

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