justatinysootsprite:

6stronghands:

moderntrickster:

zlot:

fleete:

lotstradamus:

• sneaks into people’s bedrooms in the middle of the night
• literally steals children and spirits them away
• supposedly all of these children are ”lost” and fell out of their prams and whatnot but he also happily absconded with wendy, michael and john who were not even a little bit lost 
• chopped a man’s hand off and fed it to a crocodile nbd
• (peter is supposed to be a child can we bear this in mind) 
• at the end when he rescues the lost boys et al he sneaks onto the jolly roger and slaughters ten pirates before they even realise he’s there
• boy is a stone cold killer yo
• and slightly just keeps a running verbal tally through all of it like those children are so unfazed by Peter Pan, Killing Machine
• and a couple of quotes from the text to top it all off: 
• and when [the lost boys] seem to be growing up, which is against the rules, Peter thins them out;
• peter thins them out
• okay
• and my personal favourite: 
• He often went out alone, and when he came back you were never absolutely certain whether he had had an adventure or not. He might have forgotten it so completely that he said nothing about it; and then when you went out you found the body;
• THEN WHEN YOU WENT OUT YOU FOUND THE BODY
• ?????????????????????????

I wrote my undergrad thesis on that little fucker!! Protip: read the original novelization of Peter Pan. It will weird you the fuck out.

My favorite part is when he scares Hook by mimicking the croc’s ticking noise. Except, in the book, he doesn’t do this on purpose. Instead he’s swimming along to the ship, hears the ticking, and starts ticking along, compulsively. For a few minutes, he sort of FORGETS that he’s human and his mind goes animal-blank, and he’s just rolling along ticking like the crocodile because HE THINKS HE’S A CROCODILE. Fun times.

My thesis was about how he’s a fundamentally amoral character. He does what he likes, and whenever anything happens that could result in character growth, he just FORGETS it.

Peter Pan is seriously like the scary child monster in a horror movie.

If you read the first appearance of Peter in Barrie’s The Little White Bird (later published alone as Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens), it is fairly apparent that Barrie originally conceived of Peter as a ghost of a child who died of exposure in the park overnight, and who now buries other children who get lost in the park after the gates are shut. It ends: “But how strange for parents, when they hurry into the Gardens at the opening of the gates looking for their lost one, to find the
sweetest little tombstone instead. I do hope that Peter is not too
ready with his spade.”

Peter Pan: sort of a kid, but mostly some kind of child-shaped GOBLIN OR SOMETHING idk

That is 100% where Peter came from, but the story is even more complicated and bizarre than that. Barrie spent twenty some odd years writing and revising Peter Pan, in various incarnations, and the true story behind how LWB, Kensington Gardens, Peter & Wendy, and Peter Pan came to be is  just… it’s quite unsettling, really. More or less so, depending on which rumors you believe about Barrie and how much stock you want to put into various biographies. But I do recommend you read the Lost Boys biography (Andrew Birkin) if you want to know the truly uncomfortable history behind it.

And yes, Peter was meant to be demonic and amoral, in Barrie’s own words. In fact, Barrie loudly complained about the statue of Peter in Kensington Gardens, because it didn’t “convey the devil in Peter”. Although, I reckon he was more pissed off by the fact that the sculptor, who Barrie paid out of his own pocket to erect the statue, used another boy as the model rather than the images that Barrie gave him to use and, frankly, if I was paying for something like that, I’d be pissed off too.

We need to talk about Peter

no one mentioned that he is twelve years old and has never lost his baby teeth and is described as having tiny tiny teeth with wide wide gaps, which is when i stopped reading the book, and liking peter pan, forever