a discouraging amount of dinosaurs

TOMORROW IS HALLOWEEN!!!

They’d treat the current Lost Boys incredibly differently! You could do a cool AU about that, but it is not canon.

Hook being one as shown here would be rad (this is rad) but is also pretty definitely not canon either. His whole shtick is about treating the backstory of having been an upstanding Eton boy from a prominent English family who ‘went bad’ and turned to piracy as some grandiose tragedy despite the fourteen different levels on which it’s ludicrous and thus very funny to an adult audience, and to a lesser extent a child audience in its original era.

Whether the pirates are in fact actual humans with actual human origins, or just fantasy-manifestations of Neverland like say the mermaids, is the ambiguous point. Their entire identities are comprised of child-friendly pirate cliches.

(Murder is here treated as child-friendly lol.)

Peter forgets them after he kills them; there are always more.

Lost Boys are reportedly sourced from babies and toddlers who fall out of their strollers ‘while the nurse is looking the other way’ and get sent (maybe by the fairies Peter used to live with in London but also this is satirical so it’s not gonna make sense) to Neverland if they’re not claimed in seven days, like lost luggage.

This is incompatible with Hook, which is fine for transformative purposes but, again, not canon. (Peter’s own may-or-may-not-be-true stated backstory is he found his way home after getting Lost and his mother had replaced him with a new child, a betrayal he has never gotten over.)

Now, increasingly infamous fact, Peter did ‘weed [the boys] out’ if they seemed to be growing too much, though whether they actually had control over this via mindset or he only thought they should because he did is never clarified. It would make a lot of sense either way with the stated cosmology.

Peter Pan is very spooky and amoral on purpose but I get really fed up with the tendency to oversimplify that into ‘he’s the bad guy.’

That’s missing the entire point! He’s not the bad guy! He’s a danger, but in a morally neutral sense. He’s the hero and the monster and that is the whole-ass point.

He’s the product of an inability to develop advanced moral sensibilities due to supernaturally arrested development, and possibly being dead.

(Also a lot of what’s wrong with him isn’t even the spooky fairy business but the effects of what 'being a boy’ meant in James Barry’s imperial cultural framework, that encouraged intense fantasy violence way more uncritically and with less nuance than we tend to a hundred years later.)

Innocent and heartless is an oversimplification of what children are like, of course, but you still have to keep both parts! Peter is both. His empathy very much exists, is furiously powerful in odd moments, but it’s crippled and limited by his inability to grow as a person, to learn and make connections, because those are among the roads to growing up, and he will not consent to that.

Real compassion requires an understanding of suffering that costs a portion of your innocence. Peter can’t have that. Not that, or any of its comforts, because he will not bear the cost.

He chooses, over and over again, to remain what he is, and the novel Barry wrote around his original stage script has intense horror vibes but only in that he explicitly depicts growing up as a catastrophic loss of self, but clearly shows that the alternative of stasis as depicted in Peter is terrible in its own way.

(The Hook movie is actually the adaptation that’s most faithful to the original themes, which always annoyed me as a kid because they never adequately accounted for what motivated Peter to alter that ancient conviction so the core character arc of the whole film lacked foundation. Like?? You want to just imply this feral being fell in love with a very special girl who we learn nothing about, and altered his entire nature for her???? I’m supposed to believe that with no support whatsoever? Blah.)

Listen to me. Look me in the eye while I am saying this to you. Listen.

me, responding Pavlovian-esque by feeling immediate dread: