I just returned from a brief stay in New Orleans (hope you had a happy Mardi Gras!), and on our way home, my husband noticed the movie Mufasa was available on the in-flight entertainment system.
I’ve been stalking this movie like it was prey since I heard (herd!) it was coming out.
I’m a huge Lion King fan. It played an enormous part in my childhood… and adulthood, let’s be real. I own all the movies, even the 3D version, and saw the incredible stage production multiple times. I had the stuffed animals and coloring books, jewelry and clothes, and the giant stickers adorning my bedroom walls.
Nala is my favorite.
Eventually, when I was too old to play “activity center” games on my family’s old desktop but needed to transition away from crawling on all fours and hissing (I roar quite poorly), I played the PC games for ages 12 and under. (There was one that had a version of Mancala bred with tic-tac-toe…! *nostalgic sigh* I digress.)
Anywho.
Mufasa certainly seemed like it would be pretty—the computer generation looked great in the previews. But I saw the sickly green splotch from Rotten Tomatoes, and I was unprepared to pay the $40 necessary to buy the digital copy during early release. I remained crouched in the tall grass, primed and ready to pounce on its inevitable “March release.”
And then, after a wonderful reprieve from a dull February winter in Michigan, we flew home from NOLA. In March.
The plane wasn’t even half-full before we scrambled for our headphones and pushed play.
I obviously hold an awestruck reverence for the original—its music, animation, voice acting, and the story itself. Tears come to my eyes every time I see the sun rising at its opening, and they roll down my cheeks with certain soundtracks and heartbreaking moments of tragic foreshadowing. I even hold a place for the canon of the sequel. It’s all gospel to me.
It is, apparently, not so sacred at Disney.
I go on this (so far, 300-word) rant (hold on tight!) because I’m currently writing a prequel novella to the Realm Riders Series, and the choices Disney made in this seminal story were, in my opinion, grievous. They hinted at everything that was important but sanitized the movie so thoroughly that even some of the lions were bleached (joke—if you haven’t seen it, there is a pride of white lions terrorizing the typical tan-colored kitties in residence).
But we all know where this story ends. We’ve seen the original movie. The hate between brothers is so well established that one kills the other. (If this plot element is a spoiler, shaaaaaame on you.) What wasn’t as well established was the why. What sparked the murderous jealousy that drove Scar (apparently an epithet he earned later in life) to kill Mufasa, his brother and the King of Pride Rock? Murder feels like an extreme reaction to… well, a history we don’t know.
And I would posit that we still don’t.
Because Disney didn’t tell it right.
This is not a statement of author arrogance or overzealous fan outrage. Let me explain.
The reason getting the backstory right matters is because backstory is key to character development and motivation. If you don’t know why your character is doing something, then you don’t know your character well enough to use them in the story. Prequels are all about the justifications for what came afterward—not to make it more palatable through a wishy-washy rewriting of history, but to explain the why of how it all came to be. And we only bother with this when the source material grabs us by the soul and shakes until we demand to be told why we’re being savaged.
In the case of TLK (oh, yeah, we’re so close, I can use abbreviations), there are characters whose motivations are clear, but the reason behind their character flaws is obscured by the limited scope of the story being told. It’s like Game of Thrones. There is lore because if we started at the beginning, we’d need two series to tell it all (hence, the prequel, House of the Dragon).
This was Disney’s House of the Dragon moment. And I must say, they nailed it: I found it equally unimpressive.
Here’s why. (Spoiler alert: I can’t be careful and effectively make my points, so if you don’t want to read on until you’ve seen Mufasa, please press pause now.)
Mufasa as Outsider
We (eventually) open on Mufasa and his parents, traveling the countryside in search of their next home. The three are alone on their journey, clearly separated from their pride for reasons that are never explained.
When Mufasa (separated from his parents in truly traumatic Disney fashion—so they did that right) meets the cub who will quickly become his adopted brother, Taka (our one-day Scar), Taka is hailed as the prince of his pride. Meanwhile, Mufasa, now a seeming-orphan, is considered an “Outsider” and feared by the pride’s pathetic excuse for a king. The king’s mate, Eshe, vouches for the young cub, and Mufasa is “relegated” to live with the females in a power play that King Obasi thinks is necessary to maintain Taka’s primogeniture. (So, Obasi obviously has some insecurity issues.)
This was all an interesting take on the tale. Never was Scar noted as the completely unrelated “brother from another mother.” Nor were we ever given the impression that Mufasa was not the elder brother and successor to a long line of kings in his royal family. But as these character details were relatively assumed from a history of similar storylines in the genre, I was prepared to abandon my (reasonable) preconceived notions, simply to see where they took it.
The Would-Be Curse of Obasi
In his years with Eshe and the lionesses, Mufasa cultivates his sixth sense, becoming the ultimate mix of masculinity and female intuition. Meanwhile, Taka, as he is groomed for the role of king, learns little more from his weaselly father than the fine art of “protecting the others while taking a nap.” Put off by his father’s laziness (not indoctrinated by it), Taka decides to find out what Mufasa is learning with the lionesses and follows him and his own mother—at a distance—when they go on a hunt.
Eshe and Mufasa come face-to-face with a pair of bleach-blond bullies intent on obliterating any lion who is not a snow-white member of their pride. In the skirmish, Mufasa saves Eshe and accidentally kills the prince of the rival pride while Taka runs for the hills. When they return to report the incident to Obasi, Taka is shamed for his cowardice and sent away, with Mufasa as bodyguard, to start a new pride elsewhere while his family is slaughtered.
The pride seems to do a relatively poor job of holding off the bloodthirsty Kiros and his lioness assassins. One sudden cut scene later, the murderous pride is on the pair’s tails. As the chase scene closes, Mufasa and Taka meet Sarabi and her new attendant Zazu, who have been similarly chased from their pride by Kiros and his rag-tag band of snow-colored thugs.
Princess Sarabi
As the pair pal around with Sarabi, Taka confides to Mufasa that he is in love with her. In true subjugate-Mufasa fashion, he does what he can to tout his royal brother, but Sarabi sees through it all and falls for Mufasa.
Taka is, well, rather enraged by this.
In much the same way that Taka stands in line to be king of his pride, Sarabi was princess to her own before Kiros slaughtered most of her now-far-flung ranks. While I love a good Disney Princess, Sarabi’s royal status among her own pride could destabilize the contention between the brothers instantly, if only the writers hadn’t included this canon-defying love triangle between them.
In TLK, when Scar assumes the throne in his brother’s stead, he offers the position of Queen to Nala, and Sarabi is deposed outright. Now, might one argue that this could be an act of vindictiveness in the wake of her rejection all those years ago? I suppose.
But I argue: wouldn’t a murderously jealous Scar be more likely to force Sarabi to remain at his side at his coronation rather than offering the position to some other female within the pride? There were other lionesses to choose from, like Nala’s mother, Sarafina, who were more Scar’s age and whom he might have known better than Nala.
Realms, if we’re going to be realistic, as the pride’s King, Scar would get to court all the ladies, right? So, if Sarabi were to rebuff him again, he could simply rule without a specified mate, as he ends up doing in the original movie. (Of course, if we go there, then Simba and Nala might be half-siblings, so it’s probably best to avoid this option altogether.)
Had the writers skipped the unlikely love-triangle option, then Sarabi’s insistence that Mufasa has what it takes to be king could inspire in Taka a deep-seated fear of losing his kingship to the brother he mistakenly believes will try to usurp him.
This would mirror Obasi’s tenuous and fearful grasp on his own kingship—which resulted in Mufasa’s relegation to a life with the ladies and a lesson to Taka to maintain power through deception. Like his father, Taka could wallow in the bitter uncertainty of his divine right and cultivate the vengeful jealousy that warps him throughout his life. This, I think, was the kind of justification we were all expecting for Scar’s regicidal tendencies (that is, if you ignore the supposed Scar-is-just-jealous-of-Mufasa-as-the-older-brother-and-king part of the canon). Of course, Taka was put off by his father’s kingly lessons, not inculcated with them.
Yet, Sarabi’s royal status has the potential to mitigate this formative issue altogether. Taking Kiara (Simba’s only daughter, thank you very much—I’ll get to that in a minute) as our canonical example, if the first-born child stands to inherit the royal role in her parents’ stead, then Sarabi’s claim to her throne could have elevated Mufasa to kingship over a separate group of lions. Obviously, there were many prides throughout the countryside, so both brothers could have ruled their own, perhaps even on bordering territories, and lived happily ever after.
How did the writers not reason this out?
The love triangle with Sarabi creates the tension that her royal blood could technically negate through this dual-king scenario, but if she hadn’t been a princess, we wouldn’t have needed the love triangle to create the rulership tension of the original movie’s storyline.
(What’s more, Sarabi’s royal status is later ignored when Mufasa becomes king in his own right, so her previous standing among her scattered pride is essentially meaningless.)
But, ya know. Retcon is a cool option, too.
(Said no one.)
Taka’s Betrayal
Realm-bent on avenging his son’s murder, Kiros and his pride stalk Mufasa and Taka through snow-capped mountains (not that their lighter coloring ever gives them the advantage over their prey).
Burned by Mufasa and Sarabi’s love, Taka meets with Kiros and offers up Mufasa in exchange for his own life. Bereft of his son, Kiros seems to adopt Taka outright (in his creepy and suspicious way), but the pair never bond. Nor does Kiros have much of an opportunity to teach his wicked ways to Taka, who grew up a decent lion, despite his father’s lazy and fear-riddled guidance. Other than his bitterness over Mufasa’s lousy work as his wing man, Taka’s cowardice (which we infer to stem from his father’s example, but it’s never explicitly shown) seems to be his only personality flaw. Suddenly—despite his relatively moral upbringing—he is ready to offer up his self-adopted brother to a band of murderers because Mufasa stole his crush?
It simply doesn’t track—because they didn’t do the groundwork. Taka’s impatience with his father’s behavior induces him to seek out alternate examples of guidance, and he chooses to watch what the lionesses are teaching Mufasa instead. This is a smart cub who knows, thanks to Eshe and Mufasa, right from wrong. Therefore, his inherent cowardice isn’t enough—we need to see him indoctrinated by his father, even in a subconscious way, so that when his morals fail him, there’s a deep-seated reason for his fall from grace.
Take young Simba, for example. Even as a cub, he knew he shouldn’t defy his father and go into the elephant graveyard. His ethics were too ingrained by his parents to think his behavior was exemplary. We needed Taka’s morals to be destabilized by his upbringing in the same, albeit opposite, way.
The Scar
As the group treks across the snowy mountains, Zazu creates minor avalanches to cover their tracks. So, to facilitate the betrayal, Kiros instructs Taka to use his claws to scar the exposed rockfaces along their path to lead the assassins to them.
This is an excellent detail. It roots Scar’s future nickname not in a mere facial injury but in a deliberate act of betrayal. His own name, therefore, should, in theory, haunt him—and twist him—for the rest of his days. In this, Disney nailed it (in a good way this time), and I was thrilled by this tortured canonical addition.
But the way Scar receives his iconic disfigurement left me comparatively cold. Regretting his decision to deliver his brother to the murderous lion pride when Kiros finally catches up to Mufasa, Taka jumps between them, and Kiros deals the blow that cuts across his eye.
While I appreciate Taka’s act of self-sacrifice that takes a step toward his redemption, and how his own choices inevitably scar him physically, this could have gone another way to further cement his future hatred. What if Mufasa had been the one to scar his face, either accidentally, in a fashion similar to the Kiros incident, or deliberately. Realizing Taka was now against him, Mufasa could have attacked the brother threatening his life. This would give Taka a physical reminder of his brother’s supposed betrayal (either the theft of Sarabi or the throne) and would have had the added benefit of later grieving Mufasa every time he looked at the scar he cut into his own brother’s face.
But the other issue here is Taka doesn’t kill Kiros to cement his contrition. Instead, a boulder, dislodged during an earthquake under Pride Rock, falls into the pool of water in which Mufasa and Kiros are battling and plunges Kiros irretrievably into its depths.
Taka does manage to dig his claws into Mufasa’s paws (callback!—or is that call forward…?) and pull him out of the water, but because he did little to save his brother beyond taking a single blow to the face, Mufasa is relatively unimpressed with Taka’s change of heart. Frankly, I don’t blame him.
Had Taka taken an active role in Kiros’ death, perhaps Mufasa could have forgiven his mistake (and it would have made Mufasa’s infliction of the scar even more agonizing). Instead, Taka adopts the name Scar, of his own volition, as a personal reminder of the blemish on his near-perfect record (excepting a couple cowardly choices and the whole betrayal of his brother thing) throughout the film. What’s more, Scar chooses his soubriquet at Mufasa’s disavowal of the name Taka, which he apparently would rather synonymize solely with his brother’s former moral character.
This creates another fracture in character. Mufasa—angry as he is at the moment—welcomes his brother to stay in the pride rather than banishing him, as other suggest. Yet, he still punishes him with a new and rather plaguing moniker. While all this conveniently rubs salt in Scar’s wounds, the nickname seems to go against Mufasa’s established humility, as well.
And because the right-of-kings issue is not sufficiently distorting Scar’s worldview (thanks to the love triangle), all he can do is feel the sting of Mufasa’s half-slight in the wake of his renaming. Scar’s bitterness, therefore, seems to stem more from guilt than Mufasa’s mounting attempts at usurping his rule by denigrating Scar. Guilt—without that anger twisting it into something misguided—doesn’t lead as convincingly to blood-thirsty regicide… or fratricide.
A Vote for the King
Before this fateful renaming, the now-named “Milele” pridelands become aware that Kiros and crew are in hot pursuit. Mufasa, Sarabi, and Rafiki appeal to the other animals to help them fight the snow-skinned lions. The animals hesitate, of course, but are eventually persuaded when Mufasa acknowledges their individual gifts as species that, pooled together, could stop the singular and limited tactics of the killer predators.
Complimentary as Mufasa is in his succinct rallying speech, I find it strange that flattery is what motivates the other animals. These creatures know of Kiros’s reputation. Some have even been chased into this territory by Kiros’s pride, which has been wreaking havoc across the land for some time. Rather than acknowledge that they need to work together to take out the dozen or so bad actors that will spread imbalance, kill heedlessly, and ruin their ecosystem, the animals still make out Kiros & Co. as the lions’ problem.
On a side note, this is fascinating as a character-building moment for Scar. Flashing forward for a moment: remember when Scar becomes king in TLK? He allows the hyenas free rein to hunt, unchecked by the pride, and the overhunting wipes out their food source. The lands around Pride Rock are decimated by his imbalanced rulership in much the same way that Milele would be if Kiros were allowed to run roughshod over it. (And yes, I know Pride Rock is in Milele, but as we never knew the name of the lands surrounding Pride Rock until the Mufasa movie released, I’m differentiating the time periods with this distinction in names.)
Anyway, because Taka has limited exposure to Kiros and is, therefore, not indoctrinated by him in his villainous ways, he has no ingrained pattern for his reckless behavior to subconsciously follow when he later becomes king. One might argue that his lack of exposure is precisely what allows him to repeat Kiros’s mistakes in rulership. But his own father, Obasi, pitiful as he was as a leader, upheld the balance that maintained fruitful pridelands. And Scar saw enough of Kiros’s reign of terror to know his murderous, imbalanced tendencies would lead to ruin. Yet, he falls into the same trap when he becomes king. (Of course, perhaps by then, he’s probably too twisted to predict the logical conclusion to his careless choices.)
After Kiros is killed and his lionesses are defeated, the animals come together and essentially nominate Mufasa as king. Humble as always, he tries to deny the mantle, but everyone insists he has earned it.
Earned it.
Not inherited it. Not married into it. Not usurped it, even.
Earned it.
This, of course, helps to rub Scar all kinds of wrong ways, regardless of whether they’ve done a solid job of establishing his backstory.
It also completely ignores any status Sarabi had among her pride, rendering her royalty completely unnecessary to the story.
Most importantly, though, it breaks the pattern of primogeniture. Yet, Mufasa resumes that tradition with his own son years later. To bring it full circle—(of life!)—Mufasa embraces a tradition that subjugated him in his adopted family and, as part of a presumably non-royal family originally, he was never in line to experience the fruits of, as a prince would. Yet, it is suddenly the go-to method of succession for Mr. Earned It, which further bolsters the original idea that he was one of a long, inherited line of lion kings.
That, and the speech he gives Simba, which he was told by his own father, about the kings of the past living in the stars and guiding future generations—always.
You know. And that.
I Can’t Not
I’ll spare you a digression into the childish song lyrics (like a genocidal maniac telling his future victims they’re about to “go bye-bye”), less-than-catchy musical numbers, and the ridiculously campy scenes with Timon and Pumbaa that garnered only the occasional “ha.”
But I simply can’t ignore any discussion of the reason Rafiki is telling Kiara the story of her grandfather: because Simba is away with Nala, who is giving birth to their second child.
Not everyone loved the sequel to TLK (although the music in that movie far outscored the music in Mufasa—a surprise, coming from the incredible Lin Manuel Miranda). But it still established more of the canon, which actually applies to Mufasa in a retroactive sense.
As I mentioned earlier, if primogeniture in the lion community brooks no gender inequality, then the oldest born inherits the throne. This is what could have given Sarabi clout as a princess (and minimized the contention between the brothers, if not for the love triangle) and Kiara her status as Simba’s only heir.
I’ve watched TLK II a time or twelve, and never, in its entirety, did Kiara have a sibling. I understand their desire to foster a juxtaposition to Mufasa and Taka by birthing her younger brother into the tale. It’s the Circle of Life once again—only, her warmth toward her sudden-sibling is supposed to give us hope for a better cycle this time around. Yes, yes, fine.
But Kiara doesn’t. have. a. brother.
She grows up and falls in love with Kovu, an outsider whom Simba banishes—clearly never having heard or learned from his father’s origin story—and never, ever are we made aware of the existence of her younger brother.
So, not only are we retconning canon by adding characters who don’t exist, but Simba’s actions in TLK II essentially ignore the entire history of his father’s prequel story. And if Rafiki bothered to tell Kiara the tale, he most certainly could have told Simba, if Mufasa didn’t have the chance before he died.
Realms, if Rafiki is clairvoyant, as they stress in Mufasa, then why couldn’t he have even nodded to the idea that Simba will make this mistake again with Kiara in the future, just to retcon a decent tie-in? I mean, if we’re gonna do it, let’s do it—right?
Hrrrumph.
Realm Riders Series Prequel
I’m clearly triggered by all this not only because of my deep, boundless love for The Lion King, but also because I’m in the middle of writing a prequel novella that tells the backstory of a handful of my characters on the D’Erenellean side of the Realm Riders Series (more on that in a minute).
But I’m also twitching and wringing my hands because these canon-battering mistakes were avoidable.
Disney had all the bones—even winked at half of them—to create motivations in Mufasa for the characters’ behaviors in TLK, and all would have resonated with, even deepened, the connection we feel to those characters in the classic. (Even the halfway retcon of Rafiki nodding at the repeated mistake Simba will make with Kovu later would have gone a long way to clean up the mess with TLK II.)
But they sanitized the story dramatically. Perhaps this was done to make it more digestible for kids—less traumatic, less gory, less vaguely political, less historically triggering…. I don’t know their reasons. Yet, by rewriting story elements (including adding entire characters) and ignoring the canon set in stone in ’94 and ’98, they didn’t do the characters’ backstories justice.
And they could have. Which is what kills me.
Prequels are popular because they’re riddled with callbacks to the source material we loved enough to want to dive into its history. But issues arise when we try to rewrite the story with our flashy new ideas of how it should have been. I get it—the temptation to improve upon your ideas is… devilishly divine. Once canon is out there, though, it must be adhered to. That’s not to say there can’t be misdirection, lies, and other supposed falsehoods peppered into the original story to add mystery and contention—as long as those things are cleared up later in the original source material. We can’t destabilize these elements after the fact, like the bizarre movies that end in the revelation that the entire tale was nothing more than a fever dream. Once we know the outcome, we must move within its strictures. No rewriting history.
One of the greatest challenges as a series writer is maintaining plot continuity as books come out in the series. Unless you write all the books and shore them up before you publish them all, chances are good, you’re going to have to work within the strictures you created for yourself in your published material. Published = canon. Pure and simple.
But this is honestly where I think a lot of the fun comes in. I do love a challenge.
I was sitting with an author friend over lunch the other day, and she told me of this story she was preparing for publication. But as she got closer to the finished product, she realized there were some plot holes that needed attention to satisfy the reader’s curiosity, if nothing more. Taking her tale in its current form as canon, we worked through ways of entangling the characters and their fates to sew up the holes and weave an even tighter tale. It required no massive plot changes or added characters.
It’s the kind of entanglement I love to perform within the Realm Riders Series. So, I found the process invigorating.
In the case of my prequel, I knew most of the history already because I knew my characters’ backstories. (That’s how I knew I could write the novella in the first place.) My characters have taught me a few things along the way, but I generally knew what I’m now seeing inked out before me. Because I had to—that’s my job.
The Premise
My yet-untitled prequel tells a pair of entwined stories:
Sixteen years before our main storyline, we’ll see the making of the Upwoods in their current, contentious form. In the wake of the loss of his brother and mother, Beval Junior trains at Keaton to become a Realm Rider under his father, a rigid taskmaster whose teaching methods pride embarrassment over positive reinforcement. During this time, a young Ethelinda of Alston also comes to train at the drakiary, and an illicit entanglement forms between Beval Senior and the new student. Bitter from his losses and his father’s years of foul treatment, Beval Junior censures his father for the affair, which he views as a betrayal of his late family members’ memories. But King Badrick has more pressing concerns for his Head Rider than his son’s disapprobation, and Beval Senior chooses to seduce Ethelinda into making a terrible decision on his behalf….
Eleven years earlier still, we see how the succession from King Edmundus and Queen Norma to Queen Orla and King Badrick affects the lives of both the Riders and their beasts. Queen Norma’s green, Avice, takes Princess Orla’s white, Deowynn, under her wing as they use their dragon magic to prepare for the arrival of the prophesied Heir Rider twenty-six years in the future. But everything must be in place long before the Heir is even born because, for some, time is running very, very short.
(That’s right, folks, we’ll have chapters in the dragons’ POV in this one!)
Perhaps obvious to those who have read the main series novels, I needed to know a lot of the plot points that take place in this prequel as a way of setting up Rhoswen’s tale. We needed a history of turmoil to presage her role in the story.
But the history of the characters—whether comprised of years of building resentment or the bonds forged in times of crisis—informed how the characters would react to the situation unfolding before them in the main storyline.
Why does Beval Junior despise his father?
How could Beval Senior be so callous toward his one remaining family member?
What really happened between Ethelinda and Beval Senior during her days at Keaton?
How do the dragons handle their clairvoyance, and how does that knowledge affect their relationships with their Riders, especially when it comes to the use of their magic?
(I explore all of this in the prequel.)
Knowledge of backstory is what makes characters believable because their history motivates and defines them. It’s how you know, as an author and a reader, whether what the characters are doing rings true to their personality. It’s how the characters make authentic choices that further the plot. It’s how you know, as an author, if you did it right.
Wait, did I already explain that at the start? Hm. I guess I’ve come full circle… (of life!).
-HA
Have you seen this kind of thing in other works? You can vent here; it’s a safe space. Plus, it might give examples that help your fellow authors!
