I do agree she's not a particularly well written or interesting character. In a series which has lots of interesting, well written female protagonists (Lucy, Polly, Jill, Jadis) she's a bit of a nothing character. 

In a way she kind of just feels like a tokenistic prize of romance, waiting at the end of the story.

I would sort of give the VDT movie screenwriters some credit for trying to develop her character more, but given that the majority of her scenes from the script got cut out, it all comes across a bit flat in the end 

@thef-maria I would say many of the same things about Ramandu's daughter. She unfortunately seems to exist only as a trope, a mysterious and incredibly beautiful woman for Caspian to conveniently fall in love with (when he barely even knows her), and we find out virtually nothing about her — not even her name, canonically — except that she later dies suddenly and horribly, murdered by the venom of a serpent-witch.

But I also always bear in mind that this is a relatively simple fantasy series for children, written in the early 1950s by a man who was born in the late 1890s, and some of his ideas and values and preferences are naturally not always going to match up exactly with what some readers may prefer in the 2020s. He also wasn't very particular about filling in the gaps in his stories, so there are plenty of instances where we never find out more about an intriguing person or place or event. It's unfortunate that Caspian's love interest is one of those, but there it is. He wasn't a Tolkien-style writer, spending years creating his own fantasy world in intricate detail and expanding almost endlessly on its history and the stories of key figures and only publishing a tiny amount of the entire saga in his lifetime.

But he (Lewis) did regularly encourage young readers who wanted more Narnia stories, or who wanted to know more about particular characters or happenings, to try writing those stories for themselves. I don't know what he would have thought of fan fic in the modern sense, but he was certainly happy for his readers to use their own imaginations to fill in whatever he hadn't said or hadn't thought of!

So I just remember all this when I'm tempted to be frustrated with the occasional things in the Chronicles of Narnia that aren't exactly how I might prefer them to be, and meanwhile I don't let those minor quibbles detract from my enjoyment of a fantasy series that's been part of my life since I was a young child, one that's come to mean more to me than just about any other fiction I've ever read.

I don't really mind NPCs. I know I'm supposed to see them as a writing flaw, but they don't bug me and I'm through pretending things bug me when they don't. I don't love NPCs or anything, but I don't hate them either. As you say, what's there to hate? (Or love?) 

Also, this might be controversial, but Caspian is not obligated to marry anyone to whom he's physically unattracted just as Susan isn't obligated to marry Rabadash and Aravis isn't obligated to marry Ahoshta. 

We actually aren’t told much about Ramandu’s daughter after her brief appearance in Voyage of the Dawn Treader.  She married Prince Caspian and had a son Rilian, and died tragically when a serpent attacked her, but that is about all we know about her other than that she was kind and beautiful.  I kind of wish that Lewis had developed her character more.  Although she is interesting I kind of wish Lewis had said more about her, but maybe he thought she would be more mysterious if less was said about her life.  In the Walden movie she is given a name, Liliandil, but her appearance in the movie is so brief it would not have made much difference if she had not been named as in the book.

Ramandu is a star at rest, daily growing younger with the fireberries brought by birds. How he has a daughter, and whether she is a part-star, we don't know. But it's not surprising that she is both beautiful and different from other girls this young king has met ( he is 17 in VDT, and 14 in PC, in the books). 
People who have only watched the Walden films may see him as an adult in both stories, which may affect their view of him. They may also have a different understanding of Ram's daughter as a sweet young thing; she is more dignified in the book (and BBC filming), and has a depth to her that is new to Caspian. Lewis did not describe the whole relationship, as his stories are for children.  

[The unfortunate addition of an attraction between Susan and Caspian was a mistake, in the Walden film. He's 14 in the book and she's 13. Ben was 26, and playing younger, but Anna was mid teens, playing c14. A late teenager could have played him as 14-17, he wouldn't have been attracted to Susan in PC, and we would have understood his immature dismissal of the freckled, squinting young lady earlier in the voyage. But this was not Ram's daughter's fault!]

I can't help agreeing with the post above, which @coracle made. 

@thef-maria  I also hate the fact that Caspian rejected many girls to go with the pretty one and just instantly flirted right away with Lilliandil and married her in a short period of time. And I don’t say he shouldn’t chose a girl he loved but when did he even get to love her? That wasn’t even love marriage it was just a flex marriage. People somehow see depth in it besides the whole medieval love thing and I suppose the GenZ has missed that.

That is the difficulty of King Caspian, as is made clear in the books. He is supposed to be the same age as Edmund's elder brother, Peter, when we first meet him in PC. Peter in VDL is studying for university entrance exams or something like that with Professor Kirke, when we read VDL. But King Caspian is by VDL aged 17, and still not quite an adult. And like most teenagers (including myself at that age), we all too often have immature ideas about so-called "romantic love", some of which we need to get rid of before we commit ourselves to marry anyone, ourselves. 

Marriage is supposed to be a lifelong commitment - 54 years in my case - not just something based on a casual few weeks' visit at most, to Terabithia, even if the Duke's daughter was beautiful, which she was not. Unfortunately, as C.S. Lewis points out in several examples in his Narnia series, highly placed individuals, in Narnia, like King Caspian, or arguably Queen Susan in HHB, often could be expected to marry for other reasons than love or attraction, whether it is the Duke trying to marry off his freckled, squinting daughter to King Caspian, whom he sees as a worthy catch for her, or whether it is the Tarkheena Aravis being forcibly married off to an unattractive old man like Ahoshta, the Grand Vizier, because her step-mother hates her. 

No, we didn't see much of Lilliandil, either in the Walden film or in the book. We only see the first part of the Voyage of the Dawn Treader to the end of the world, where Lucy, Edmund, Eustace and Reepicheep part company with the Dawn Treader, to return to Cambridge. According to the beginning of SC, we learn that King Caspian called in at Ramandu's island to pick up the four remaining missing Lords, awoken from their sleep: Rhoop, Mavramorn (the one with the mustard), Argoz and Revillian to return them to Narnia. Any of King Caspian & Lilliandil's courtship would be done after that moment, I should think, and by the time they all reached Narnia, taking their time, they'd have a better idea of how they could get along together, in my view. In fact, it says something of Lilliandil's character that she wasn't going to commit herself to anything before the job, that King Caspian was assigned to do, was finished. 

C.S. Lewis never goes into "romance" much, but when in HHB's end, we learn that Aravis marries Shasta, it seems quite natural to me, that after so long in getting to know each other, they ended up relying on & trusting each other as well, being the monarchs of Archenland & the parents of Ram the Great. 

About the freckled, squinting daughter of the Duke of Terabinthia, in our world, neither condition is permanent, without remedy, in our world, at any rate, and it does seem cruel that Caspian turned her down. But when Susan & Lucy were sending pictures around at the end of LWW before coming back through the wardrobe, I can't help thinking that it was C.S. Lewis alluding to the Tudor King Henry VIII's unfortunate marriage to Anne of Cleves, the so-called "Flanders mare", whose picture was painted by Holbein. 

Since my last post was expressing a different opinion from the OP, I'd like to say that I'm really grateful to them for starting a topic in Talk About Narnia. It feels like all the discussion lately is in Movie Discussion which is kind of sad. I mean, the books are the reason we're interested in the movies after all. But I haven't been able to come up with any ideas for discussions specifically about the books myself.  

@narnian78 True but then again I don’t know with such a brief appearance why fans are so mad with suspian. 🤣

@icarus true and that is basically my whole point, praising the ship and hating on suspian over nothing. I’m not a super fanatic of suspian but at the same time it had like more context and more time, like Aravis and Cor had. They have this from the books… so why stuck in the romance?

@col-klink can’t really find that post, do you mean the one for saying Lilliandil was barefoot or what? 

@col-klink   Also, this might be controversial, but Caspian is not obligated to marry anyone to whom he's physically unattracted just as Susan isn't obligated to marry Rabadash and Aravis isn't obligated to marry Ahoshta. 

I agree with you & what you say isn't particularly controversial at all or for our broadminded readership, I should imagine. But in each of these three Narnian situations there was someone else involved who might have had a different opinion, such as the Duke of Terabinthia in Caspian's case, and Aravis' father & stepmother who planned to marry her off to Ahoshta. 

Caspian, himself, just arrived in Terabinthia, just as he just arrived at Aslan's table where he met Lilliandil (Ramandu's daughter). He wasn't really obliged to marry anyone, physically attractive or not, when he had a job to do first. It wasn't really his fault that the Duke might have thought of him as a likely suitable catch for his daughter. Nor was it Aravis' fault that her stepmother was trying to marry her off, was it? But in her case coercion definitely was involved, which is why she was running away. 

But what about Susan, who had been playing at sending pictures to likely princes like Rabadash who decided to pay a visit to Cair Paravel? Even when she was in Tashbaan, Susan dithered around quite a bit, didn't she? 

I don't think we were meant to buy into Ramandu's daughter's romance with Caspian too much, until we find out she died, killed by the Lady of the Green Kirtle. Now that is definitely a coercive situation her son got into, held in Underland against his will. 

@thef-maria I meant the post in this thread that Waggawerewolf27 quoted. Re: Your recent comment about Caspian and Susan. Do you mean you think fans who complain about the added romance to the movie being shallow when Caspian's canonical romance with R.D. was also shallow? I'd agree...except I don't know many fans on Narniaweb who criticized the romance in the Prince Caspian movie for being only based on looks. I've read people criticize it because they don't like the idea that every movie has to have a romantic subplot of some sort or the idea that a boy and a girl can't be platonic friends. 

Posted by: @thef-maria

@narnian78 True but then again I don’t know with such a brief appearance why fans are so mad with suspian. 🤣

I would guess because "Suspian" is non-canonical. Lewis clearly never intended Susan and Caspian to show any romantic interest in each other, and it annoys fans of what he actually wrote that the film-makers decided it was necessary. (And yet they didn't expand upon Caspian's relationship with the woman he DOES have a romantic interest in, which at least would have been consistent with the canon.) 

Lewis did claim at one stage that he didn't originally intend to write any more Narnia books after VDT, but as he seems to have written them all in pretty quick succession (apparently by the time VDT was published in 1952, he'd already completed the last four books), I suspect he did have a sequel at least vaguely in mind while writing about Caspian's voyage. And there IS a sound plot reason for Caspian to have a love interest by that stage, because the next book involves his son.

As I said, it's sad that he never saw fit to expand Ramandu's daughter into a proper character, but there are a whole lot of aspects of Narnia that he likewise never fleshed out properly. And again, he was happy for readers to use their own imagination to fill in the blanks. I don't normally read Narnia fan fic (and it isn't allowed to be promoted on this site), but I would guess lots of people have had a go at imagining her life before and/or after meeting Caspian and how their relationship actually unfolded. You could perhaps try looking for those, or writing one yourself. 

@courtenay 

The romance between Susan and Caspian was something created for the movie and was never in the book.  It didn’t upset me very much because the scene was very brief and didn’t slow down the movie’s plot very much.  I guess it would irritate some people, but I think there were larger departures from the books in the Walden films.

Getting back to the original topic, I was always disappointed that Ramandu himself did not appear in the Dawn Treader movie when his daughter was there for such a short time. They should have been there together. The scene with the birds bringing him food each day was completely omitted.  The scene from the book was certainly interesting enough for a movie, and I don’t know if Michael Apted ever considered it.  The BBC version took the scene exactly as it was from the book and included both Ramandu and his daughter. The Focus on the Family Narnia did something similar for audio. Interestingly enough, this was one of the parts of the book that I remember my elementary school teacher reading to us decades ago so it made an impression on me as a ten year old child. I had always wanted a movie or television version of the scene with Ramandu, the retired star, and his daughter.  It seemed so magical to me even though his daughter was only a minor character in the book.  🙂

I know Ramandu's daughter doesn't have a big role, but I think she's still an important one. I would think of her to be a devoted wife to Caspian and mother to Rilian, even though CS Lewis doesn't detailed about it, being a children's story. 

Her tragic death certainly caused a great blow to both Caspian and Rilian. Even though it's not explicitly written, there's that unbreakable bond between a mother and a child, which makes the scene of her tragic death so heart wrenching.

@narnian78   I was always disappointed that Ramandu himself did not appear in the Dawn Treader movie when his daughter was there for such a short time. They should have been there together. The scene with the birds bringing him food each day was completely omitted.  

Yes, you are right. Though I didn't miss BBC Ramandu's fantastic turban, so reminiscent of the original dome of the Elephant House at Taronga Zoo, when I was a child. 

I think the problem was that the retired star's role involved too much exposition, so they canned the character in favour of more picturesque action, such as the seven swords, green haze and a variation on Eustace's undragoning, which just ruined the film some more for diehard Narnia fans. Lilliandil's name could also have done without the "dil" bit, in my opinion, when a "dill'' is a relatively mild Aussie term for someone who has behaved stupidly, you might say.  But I suppose we should stick to it, or just call her RD. But without the presence of her father, and those scenes with the birds, she certainly loses a bit of gravitas and credibility. Especially when many of her scenes were also canned, it seems.

Did they keep in the bit where Lilliandil reminds Caspian & I think, Edmund, that in Narnia the Prince doesn't get to kiss the Princess until the job is finished first? That is, to sail to the utter east until they can't sail further & leave someone behind when they did, wasn't it? And then come back to collect the four sleepers, wasn't it? Or did that whole scene get swamped by actors playing teenaged boys behaving goofily? I can't remember, and it would be a pity to forget that bit, when it defines what Caspian has to do next to lift the enchantment on the 4 sleepers.

@thef-maria   @narnian78True but then again I don’t know with such a brief appearance why fans are so mad with suspian

I suppose "suspian" was meant to define Susan's character some more, when HHB was never filmed at all, and when @coracle said in her post, "The unfortunate addition of an attraction between Susan and Caspian was a mistake, in the Walden film. He's 14 in the book and she's 13. Ben was 26, and playing younger, but Anna was mid-teens, playing c14. A late teenager could have played him as 14-17, he wouldn't have been attracted to Susan in PC." I guess that the difficulty in getting actors the right age for their roles, was also a factor when casting the characters. 

Susan was supposed to be the practical one of the Pevensies, who seemed to enjoy traditional "feminine" interests and who likely expected leave school once she finished basic education, maybe do a typing course at business or evening college, go to work at a "fill-in" job, then marry and settle down with a family. I'd call her "Every teenaged girl" or Miss 1950's, when we used to see her like, in television ads or in films made by Disney or for younger people. In the book PC, she seemed to be hanging back uncertainly all the time, & when she, her brothers & sister & Trumpkin were on their hike to Aslan's Howe, she was the last to see Aslan. We don't see this sort of thing - nobody calls her a wet blanket, for instance - in Walden PC, though Walden did get her tendency to be bossy, right. At the end of LWW she had become a grown-up woman, but returned to being a schoolgirl, and it is only in HHB that we get a glimpse of what her life in Narnia had been like as a grown woman at that time.