.

She shouldn’t be pressured to learn in her martial lessons because he doesn’t want her to have to fight to survive

She shouldn’t have to do chores because he wants her to have fun and be free

She shouldn’t learn about people’s bad intentions so that she never lives in fear of the people around her

This commission was requested by Marija on Vgen! :>

They wanted a cute #malleo drawing of them cuddling :>

Commissions will be available again at the end of July!!!! (+ the vice housewardens keychain presale also ends end of july!!!)

is it?

because they say in the movie that it'll take 11 years or so for communication with earth to happen, which means that if ryland grace starts tumblr blogging right after he wakes up, it could take anywhere from roughly 5-ish earth years for his posts to show up. (taking that tumblr posting takes a lot less internet than it does to have a phone call that's active and always updating).

BUT

It was a comfort, to know there was no way to save him. Another comfort, that he would be useful and boring enough to be spared, and canny enough to spot the danger.

Then Jonathon Harker shows up, young and earnest and innocent. He praises the food and asks for recipes for his young bride-to-be back home, and they can see in his face how in love he is. They see too his enthusiasm, his fascination. He blushes when he looks at the women and averts his eyes, he consults his phrase book so he can better give compliments.

He's young enough to be their son. Maybe the innkeeper has a child close to Jonathon's age--a son just starting his own life, a daughter a little younger peeking through the door and sighing at the handsome traveler. Or maybe their child would have been Jonathon's age, if only--but no, they must not think that.

But they do think it, and so the innkeeper's wife begs him to take the rosary "for your mother's sake" and it's not really Jonathon she's talking to. The innkeeper whispers to his friends and customers and old gossips, and they pass it to the passengers on the coach. The coachman is taken back too, the money the Count sent weighing heavily in his pocket. To refuse to drive him means death, to warn him is pointless.

Everyone on the couch is older than Jonathon, old enough to know what the devil in the castle does to the young and earnest and innocent. They all carry their own protections, and one by one they offer them to this poor fool who doesn't understand and wouldn't believe, but he's too polite to refuse and kind enough to see their concern and be touched by it.

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.

The big thing that would, not necessarily mean that it wouldn't sell as Victorian fiction, but would make it somewhat unique, is that no-one conquers anyone, or tries to. Grace and Rocky only ever approach each other as equals--their knowledge is asymmetrical, but neither one can definitively be said to be "more advanced". And at the end, even though the Eridians have clearly gone to a lot of effort to set Grace up with some very nice digs, it doesn't feel like it's in the same neighborhood as the "Intrepid Explorer Gets Pampered By Natives" trope, mainly because he hasn't been given a position of any authority (except in so far as you consider "Schoolteacher" a position of authority). But he isn't getting input on any government decisions, is my point; he hasn't been handed the keys to the kingdom. Meanwhile, the extraterrestrial life that actually is dangerous is a single-celled organism--we're never given reason to believe that it's capable of thought, let alone malice.

So seeing all this play out with the scientific knowledge and popular prose sensibilities of, say, the 1880s strikes me as an interesting proposition.

The big thing that would, not necessarily mean that it wouldn't sell as Victorian fiction, but would make it somewhat unique, is that no-one conquers anyone, or tries to. Grace and Rocky only ever approach each other as equals--their knowledge is asymmetrical, but neither one can definitively be said to be "more advanced". And at the end, even though the Eridians have clearly gone to a lot of effort to set Grace up with some very nice digs, it doesn't feel like it's in the same neighborhood as the "Intrepid Explorer Gets Pampered By Natives" trope, mainly because he hasn't been given a position of any authority (except in so far as you consider "Schoolteacher" a position of authority). But he isn't getting input on any government decisions, is my point; he hasn't been handed the keys to the kingdom. Meanwhile, the extraterrestrial life that actually is dangerous is a single-celled organism--we're never given reason to believe that it's capable of thought, let alone malice.

So seeing all this play out with the scientific knowledge and popular prose sensibilities of, say, the 1880s strikes me as an interesting proposition.

I don't know if a 19th-century author could conceive of the real-time translation software and artificial voice that the movie had. Maybe Grace picks up on Eridian quicker than he does in the film. And just for fun, maybe we say that he was a music teacher as well as a science teacher, and so had a small instrument among his personal effects (a violin, or a flute) that he uses to "speak" Eridian himself.

I don't think Victorian Grace would mentally name his new friend "Rocky". That seems too informal for someone he just met. Maybe, on the assumption that this is another scientist, he dubs him "Dr. Stone"?

Of course, that means we can't have the absent mate being named "Adrian". Maybe Grace picks the name of a gemstone?

Unfortunately, it's far more likely that Victorian Stratt has to be a man. Unless... she's the monarch of something, and has taken charge of the project from there?

the woke left: young and fashionable. visible tattoos. often enjoys matcha, lavender flavoring, oat milk, and cold foam. pretty decent customers.

sweet old man: drinks very sweet iced lattes, pays in cash, puts all of his change in the tip jar. sometimes orders hot coffee and i get scared that his shaky old man hands will spill it and he'll get burned but that has not yet happened and god willing never shall.

evil old man: only wants drip coffee and declares it ridiculous that any other form of coffee exists. some variants only want americanos and these variants are even scarier. watch out.

sweet old woman: might need her daughter's help to order but is very bubbly and open to trying new things. compliments baristas freely and frequently.

evil old woman: does not want coffee and only wants sweet tea or soda. will not tip even if she spends three hours in the shop repeatedly asking baristas to fetch things for her.

errand husband: either stiltedly recites an order to you or shows you the order in their texts/notes app. needs to step out of line and make a phone call if you ask any follow-up questions.

grindset girlie: always wearing scrubs, an apron, and/or a name tag. orders the exact same thing every day and knows the exact change she'll need to pay for it. her regular order is both extremely caffeinated and extremely sweet.

#mamabear: is actively wrangling two to four children while ordering. order changes repeatedly because the children cannot decide if they want a muffin or a cookie or apple juice or chocolate milk etc. for some reason these women are always wearing an article of clothing or carrying some personalized item that says "mama" on it.

schoolchildren: band of two to eight adolescents hanging out after school. extremely indecisive but generally quite polite and tip well.

amnesiac in love: grown adult who needs their partner to tell them what they like. gets asked a question about their own preferences and turns to their partner to answer for them. generally acts like a shy child looking to their guardian for behavioral cues if you try to interact with them and only wants to talk to mommy i mean their wife.