absent eschaton

Once upon a time in a faraway land, there was a tiny kingdom. Peaceful, prosperous, and rich in romance and tradition. Here in a stately chateau, there lived a widowed gentleman and his little daughter, Cinderella.

Peter, like a lot of mythological fairies and fae folk on which he's based, is stuck in a sort of eternal childhood not just of body, but of mind. While to another child this would obviously be a dream come true it becomes VERY clear over the course of the story that he's deeply suffering under the surface. Peter Pan was written partially as a critique on Victorian and Edwardian ideas about childhood innocence. JM Barrie, when describing some of the fundamental traits of children, calls them gay, innocent, and heartless. Peter being morally grey is text, not subtext.

I'm not saying a more adult-oriented retelling shouldn't exist, I'm a grown-ass man who still loves this very story. But shouldn't it touch on a topic less shallow?

You exist in a state of eternal play. No parents to tell you what to do - or take care of you. You have all the friends you want, until they start to grow up, and you stay the same, no matter what you do, and you don't know why. Finally one day you bring home a "mother" who isn't a grown up, and it's so much fun! It's amazing! But she starts getting scared because she's forgetting things, forgetting the way her own mother looked (her real, grown-up mother, the thing you never had, the thing you hate and want most of all), so she leaves you, and you let her go, because you have to. And maybe she comes back, but every year she's more and more different until suddenly, you don't know her anymore. But that doesn't matter, because she has another little girl, so you can have another mother, so why not start again?

And you do. And thus it will go on. As long as children are gay, and innocent, and heartless.

OK @ilovedthestars PEER REVIEW BUT ALSO. A L S O.

so wonderland is in practice a reverse of neverland. neverland works on kid logic so everything makes sense to kids and only to kids, and this kind of nonsense leaches out into the real world and that's why mr. darling's job is just The Concept Of Business and why crawling into the doghouse is treated as a reasonable response to upsetting your children.

wonderland, by contrast, is as nonsensical as it is because it's about societal rules and the way children are treated by adults, none of which makes much sense to a kid. especially during the time it was written. certain sections of it parody old virtue poems that children had to read in school and that probably seemed super dumb and arbitrary but you had to do it anyway. despite having lots of personality, alice is rarely allowed to be an active participant in her own adventure because she keeps getting pushed and pulled and kicked out of places and asked to perform pointless tasks and play stupid games.

they both meet at a sort of central point of "children see things in a very specific way and adult things are basically just nonsense" to the point that mr. darling's Nebulous Business Job is more or less an equivalent to "painting the roses red", representing the vague childlike idea of Having A Job and Having A Boss You Hate

alice is also notably sort of weird? granted wonderland turns out to be a dream and in dreams you just sort of accept things as standard, but she doesn't really do that. her reactions to most things are "well hey now i don't care for your wacky talk" as opposed to "holy shit why are we playing croquet with birds??" like she recognizes the circumstances as weird but not the earth-shattering weirdness that it so clearly is.

an edgy alice in wonderland story can and should, in my opinion, be more like Pink Floyd's "The Wall" -- it should be about tangibly representing stuff like childhood trauma. or, to contrast, it could be about the fear of growing up, the fear of responsibility. but to me the best "edgy" takes on wonderland are just about taking the pre-existing twisted world of wonderland and twisting it further. Jan Svankmajer's "Alice" is a good example of this, it's a relatively faithful adaptation of the story but replaces wonderland's whimsy with a sort of beige, crusty vibe, using a lot of animal skulls and other creepy things. it relies on the uncanny valley, to an extent.

a peepan and alice crossover is something ive had in the back of my head for awhile now, because either way there's an interesting interaction. if alice goes to neverland, she'd probably have a really good time? like she certainly wouldn't question not having to attend school, at least up until what she wants out of neverland clashes with what peter wants. if peter goes to wonderland, it would further dive into the arbitrary nature of childhood, only from the perspective of a person who has never had to experience anything resembling a normal childhood. which i think is objectively cool as shit.