Epilogue
Scar sat smiling on a rock below the promontory of Priderock as his lionesses dispersed in dismay. From all around came the baying hordes of hyena. The moon shone down unwarmingly. Scar looked up to it and remembered. He was at long last the king of Priderock. He had finally triumphed over Mufasa and Ahadi and what had so long been denied him was now all his. Power - pure power to do anything he wanted - just so long as the hyenas agreed. More and more poured over the rocks behind him, voice after echoed voice lifted up to the moon until one in particular caught Scar's ear.
"Yeah, we were prepared all right. Prepared for all this!"
Scar turned and pushed forwards with a flourish.
"Ah, my friends. I'm so glad you could come to my little party tonight."
"What? You call this a party? Scar, come on? Where's the food?"
Ed laughed beside his brother.
"Food? Oh well, if you really must eat at a time like this I'll see what Sarabi's got 'lion' around." Scar looked up away from Banzai, "That really is an awfully bad pun of yours you know." He brought his head down menacingly. "You'll have to do better than that next time!"
"Whoa, now, that was Shenzi's, wasn't it Ed?"
Ed sniggered, nodding his head, sending droplets of saliva flying towards Scar.
"Oh, how revolting. Now you two, there's a little 'something' I want you to do. Oh it's so simple: you'll do it in no time. No time at all."
"Oh yeah, what?"
"Oh, nothing, it's just that I would so much like to see someone special again."
"Hey, what? Like Mufasa? Ha-ha-harr..." Ed joined Banzai in laughing.
"No, fools." Scar roughly clouted Banzai with the back of his forepaw. "You're going to find my mother and bring her back to the Pridelands."
"Your mother? Immue? 'Oh little Scarie, do eat your greens, yes, yes, yes!'"
"You'll not need a description then. So you'll be starting off right away."
"Immue. Now there's a real lioness, eh Scar? One of us, just like you."
"I said you'll be starting off..." he loomed down in front of Banzai, "NOW!"
"OK, OK. but you do look kinda like her close up!"
Scar roared. "Get out! And take your 'friend' here with you!"
Banzai pulled back sharply, yelped in terror and ran off with Ed at his heels.
~oOOo~
Some long tedious days later, and after a search of most of the lands surrounding the Pridelands, excepting the desert beyond the river which everyone knew was uncrossable, Banzai and Ed led a cautious and fearsome lioness back to the place which, for a few short months, she had almost called home. As she walked past the waterhole she stopped for a moment and wondered what might have happened had that fateful afternoon not been quite so hot.
She walked the few hundred lengths to Priderock slowly, taking in the sights she had remembered during long years alone. She was used to being alone, it was living in a pride that was unknown to her. Though she was returning to her son, the new king of Priderock, she was not returning home. She was to find the next few years with her son very difficult indeed...
Personal Notes
I wrote this story back in early 1997. It was a time when my storytelling ambition was not fully matched by my technical skill. As a result it is overly narrative heavy and somewhat clunky and unclear, particularly in what are now the middle chapters. This somewhat compounded by my experiments in out of order storytelling. However, the out of order material is arguably rather more successful than much of the supposedly more straightforward parts.
In this edited version I have not tried to hide these problems. I have tried to clarify the story rather than to change it. Splitting it into chapters has not always been simple. I have done it in order to fit the paradigm of this website and to make it more readable; presenting it in more easily digestible chunks.
My Ahadi is not very regal; he is in fact rather playful and often acts on impulse and instinct. Why do kings always have to be serious and magnificent? Not that my Ahadi could not have been magnificent should the situation have demanded it. I did this as it easy to make all kings alike and to fit the image most people have of kings (and queens). I wanted to clearly differentiate the various Pridelands kings: unsure Simba, tyrannical Scar, regal Mufasa, and the playful Ahadi.
In fact I wanted to make them lions, i.e. people, who happened to be kings; individuals, each with their own distinct personalities. I have also differentiated their presentations to match, and in this story I introduced the idea of presentation as adults, as well as that of cubs that the films give us. In the final story of my Pridelands timeline, The Huntress at Sunset, I go one step further, and show a presentation if a queen alongside her partner, the king.
All this is a result of something that is very important to me, that I don't play out the same scenes; the same safe, well-known scenes; over and over again and that I don't use the same characters. It's one reason for me concentrating more and more over time on female characters as I feel they get relatively little attention from many fanfiction writers. That and that the big issues in my life are most commonly associated with females such as gender equality and domestic abuse.
I tie all my Pridelands stories firmly into The Lion King. As in To be a Queen, I do that in this story in an epilogue. Showing that my Pridelands is not so much an alternative Lion King world, it is a stream of stories with The Lion King at its heart. Precisely how Scar, the cub, turns into Scar as we see him in Lion King, is not something I have yet written much on. I may well never write it. I see the progression as essentially inevitable, but the precise route it takes is, at this time, and ever since February 1997, not all that important to me.
In this story I present my take on why Scar is like he is, a common theme back in nineties Lion King fanfiction. What he is, is a narcissist. All Scar cares about is Scar, and in my Pridelands, his mother. No one else matters. Scar is not "turned to the dark side" by any external forces: there is no "evil" in my stories, He's not born good, and turned bad. He wasn't mistreated by his father, brother or even Sarabi as have all been suggested in fanfiction. Indeed here Scar and Mufasa like each other, and would have been together far more if it weren't for Immue.
Instead he is like he is because he was brought up that way, just as he wasn't scarred later in life; rather he was marked at birth. Scar's scar being an outward sign, a mark of his internal "badness", in both The Lion King and most, if not all fanfiction. In Simba's Pride, to give it a little credit, Kovu's scar is used a mark that others have to see past, to see the "real" Kovu.
Whether Scar could have ever been comfortable with his brother as king, which might be a more typical "alterative universe" fanfiction scenario, is a moot point: he is the product of his environment, his parents and his upbringing. There could not have been a Scar without any one of these elements.
Right from the start his mother instilled in him that he was the rightful heir to my Pridelands. She really believes it; though I make it clear it isn't actually true. Scar grows up with a powerful, unshakable sense of entitlement that by the time of The Lion King has grown into full blown hate of anyone and anything that he perceives as being in the way of what is rightfully his; even though in truth it is nothing of the sort. He really believes he is the rightful king, and that Mufasa is the usurper, despite all evidence to the contrary. This scenario is rare, if not unique in fanfiction, but is common, usually in much lower-key ways, in real life.
There are real life Scars everywhere: (almost) one in every family - just as Zazu says, which is, of course where I got the original idea from. In many lives they are just a pain: they ruin family occasions and the like; Zazu's right again. However, as partners they ruin lives, and can be very dangerous. Get them into power, running companies and organisations, and you've got a pretty unpleasant place to work. Put them in charge of countries and… well, think of any dictator and the horrors that they do and you've can see the damage: "disappeared" people, political prisoners, work camps, rigged elections, one party states, police states, secret police, killing fields, mass murder, genocide, world wars. Compared to that, what are a drought, famine and a few disgruntled lionesses?
I also wanted to show that this behaviour was not confined to males. Females can be, and are in real life just as narcissistic. It generally manifests somewhat differently, but it there nonetheless. So I gave fanfiction one disturbed lioness: Immue. Here though I made a important point: these people, as damaging as they so often are, tend to get things done; they make things happen for good or ill. Without them our lives would be safer and easier and arguably happier, but they would be less interesting and far less dynamic.
In my Pridelands stories Immue is the driving force. It is she that makes Scar the lion he is, and thereby gives us The Lion King. She too, by one fleeting appearance, provides the story of To be a Queen. She's the trigger for the events of my original The Pridelands script. She doesn't appear in The Huntress at Sunset, but that story really is set in the desolation caused by the fallout of her presence and actions. As soon as she meets Ahadi here in A Shining New Era, my version of the Pridelands begins spiralling increasingly out of control toward ruin, only to be finally resolved in Huntress.
Why Akase and not Uru? Well, I never did like Uru as a name for one thing. More importantly however, I wanted to differentiate my Mufasa's mother from others. I also wanted her to be somewhat naïve and too trusting. Here Akase, the name was invented by Brian Tiemann in his unfinished story, "The Pride", is not mother to both Mufasa and Scar, but just to Mufasa; Immue being Scar's mother.
How does that work exactly? Well, here I have to point out one of the key distinctions between my stories and most other Lion King fanfiction in that my lions are rather more naturalistic. In all my stories I make clear distinctions between love, physical intimacy and reproductive duty, especially for the males. Some readers, especially younger ones, have problems with that and don't "get it". I don't worry about that: they are not the readers I write for. If you are old enough to be able to draw the lines between each; and it really is a matter of age: maturity and experience; then my stories are for you. Then, less mature readers also can't "get" that Scar need not have been "made that way" by someone or something else. It's something that most people learn the hard way through often bitterly painful life experience.
That then is A Shining New Era. In a way, that I felt I needed to write these notes at all is a sign that it's not a good story. All this should have come through in the story itself; I should not have needed to explain anything. I did say my storytelling ambition was not fully matched by my technical skill…
It is not too late to review. Reviews and comments are always welcome, even if you didn't like the story... but then you probably wouldn't be still reading, would you?
