My friend had stipulations once

In the last bit of the book, Vetinari gives the poisoned candle to Drumknott, revealing that he had learned about the plot early and had been feigning his symptoms to keep Vimes prodding into the heralds and the guilds, while actually snipping off the candles to make them look like they had burned down to stubs.

I misread this that instead Vetinari had learned about the plot and was still snipping off the poisoned candles, but was still burning enough of them to poison him a little bit. To keep up the symptoms, but never enough to actually kill him. As a treat, I guess. For fun.

This is harder and harder for audiences to grasp, and I sympathize, honestly, because we have become more keen over the last couple of decades, and we've noticed how many stories have been sold to us as an ideal we should reach for that would be harmful to us if we did so - stories intending to propogandize values centered around control or subjugation

but you have to learn to recognize when that's what is happening and when a work is simply clumsy, indulgent fantasizing shared with others, and how to settle your jerking, trigger-happy reflex when you notice something in a work of fiction that shouldn't be emulated in real life. That's not what fiction is. That is not, at base, its purpose or intent.

recognizing that a situation would be abusive if it were real does not mean that all stories where those situations happen are inherently ABOUT abuse. Unless we have reason to believe the writer is indeed trying to propagandize societal control on some level, then the story is about what the writer says it's about, because it's not real

there's no one with agency involved, there is only what the fictional fantasy writer wanted to happen in their fictional fantasy world. You being able to identify "if these two people existed this relationship would be abusive" doesn't change the intent of the text. It's GOOD that you can identify that! It's actually excellent! It's a necessary component to experiencing fiction and keeping yourself safe in the real world, but it doesn't change the intent of the text

You are absolutely, Capital R Right: if these people existed and treated each other this way, it would be abusive. But they don't exist. They are Anne Rice's Barbies, and she makes them kiss rough and mean and murderous and underage and incestuously, but through it all they remain Barbies, and she had zero responsibility to explicitly designate those Barbie relationships as abusive for the benefit of a reader who feels like they can't trust a fictional text unless it spells things out for them in real-world morality parables.

Peter Pan edited by Anne Hiebert Alton (2011)

(sorry to interrupt joke post but) this is true!

Children not clapping did happen too, (and some were even expected to have hissed, which was later written into the 1928 playscript and 1911 novel). But my all time favourite anecdote about it is from Pauline Chase (who played Peter)'s intro to Peter Pan's Post Bag 1909:

Children love to clap their hands at the play because then they feel that they are really part of it, and you can see them holding their hands poised ready to seize an opportunity. Their great chance is when I ask them to clap their hands if they believe in fairies, and so save Tink's life. But they are very wrathful if any one claps who has the reputation of being a cynic, and once there was quite an uproar in the front row of the dress circle because of a girl who clapped. Those about her pulled down her arms angrily. "How dare you clap," they cried, "when you know you don't believe in fairies!" There was one dreadfully hard-hearted little boy who came to the theatre not to clap. That was his object for coming, and he came round "behind" to tell me so in the middle of the play. His teeth were firm set. "I won't clap," he said doggedly; "I'm not going to clap." And when the time came he didn't clap; above the clapping of all the others I could hear him shouting from a box, "Peter, I'm not clapping."

Specifically, the pertinent part: