Merf. Thinking is Hard.
jhameia replied to your post: jhameia replied to your chat: Watching Hook IIRC…
shall i share with you my peter pan to hook continuity feels? :PA PERSONAL INVITATION INTO YOUR BRAIN?
YES PLS!
WELL OK SO
the very last few paragraphs of Peter Pan is about how Wendy and the Lost Boys (who all followed Wendy & Co. back) grew up, and Wendy’s sad feels at “betraying” Peter Pan. Inexplicably she gets married and has her daughter while living in the same house, and Peter never visits for years and years to know about this, because, well, Peter Pan has better shit to do in Neverland or something.
So one night Peter Pan comes flying in and he thinks everything is the same as before and—and this is important—when he notices Wendy’s daughter all he says is “hullo, is this a new one?” while not noticing that Wendy is basically shrinking back in the shadows afraid to show her face to him. And she has to tell him, no, that’s my daughter, and Peter is like haha lolwut and Wendy comes out of the shadows and then it’s Peter’s turn to be scared of her, because now she’s an adult, and he gets pissed off at her for growing up and she flees the room all sad and shit.
When she comes back in, Peter Pan and her daughter are flying around the room and Peter is sort of a symbol of all that is ephemeral and apparently he can’t retain memory of what happened worth shit (because if he did, how could he really keep his childhood? everything needs to remain new and fun and novel for him, see) so he’s not mad at Wendy anymore and her daughter is going to basically take her place as his mommy-figure.
And I imagine that this goes on for years, until her daughter grows too old to accompany Peter Pan to Neverland
BUT the thing is, Peter gets used to the idea of Wendy being an adult, and because he comes back to pick up Wendy’s daughter (whose name I don’t remember) he also keeps interacting with Wendy-as-adult and I imagine that occasionally he asks her questions about what it’s like to have grown up.
So by the time Moira is born and old enough to replace Wendy and her daughter as Peter’s mommy-figure, Peter’s been exposed to enough adulthood to start wanting more than a mommy-figure, and start wanting something more on equal terms, and that’s where he gives up the thimble as representative of a kiss, and opt for a real kiss instead, because his exposure to Wendy-as-adult has inculcated some new expectations in him on what one could expect from life.
So he stays and grows up to be an adult.
But Wendy at the end of Peter Pan the book always remember what it’s like to be a child and treasures that childhood feeling, and in Hook it’s clear that she’s continued to carry that feeling with her throughout (she runs an orphanage or something, iirc), which is why she’s disappointed with Peter at the beginning of Hook—because he’s forgotten that childhood feeling, and completely lost what it meant to him to remain a child for years and years and years. Yes it was good for him to have grown up, because how else could he have those experiences of falling in love and having a family with Moira? But he also lost other things in the meantime, having grown up a typical businessman who’s too busy for his own family and is neglecting his children as a result.
The thing about Tinkerbell is completely fucking tacked on and I think a bit unnecessary because in the Barrie book it clearly states that fairies don’t live a long time and Tink has pretty definitively passed on by the time Peter meets Wendy’s daughter and it was kinda thrown in there to, I think, show how Peter and Tink’s relationship has changed now that Peter has grown up. Also because after Peter rediscovers his boyhood he apparently still needs a fucking reminder to go rescue his children and Tink is the one who delivers the Awakening Kiss that reminds him that he is in fact an adult and has shit to do. Funny how dudes always seem to need to have women to wake them up to all the greatest things in their lives or something.
What bothers me most re: book-movie continuity is how the Lost Boys appeared to have picked the oldest-looking among them to be their leader (and later, Peter picks the largest boy of the group to take over the golden sword), because in the book, Peter is the youngest, and therefore the most imaginative, and that’s why he’s the leader. BUT WHATEVER.
