🇵🇸 Free Palestine 🇵🇸 Male, 29, ace. My own collection of interests, opinions, and ideologies; mainly used for hyperfixating on current media obsessions, though. I play Warframe and other fun games on PS5, gamertag is peruvianpangolin Header art by http://biorust-art.tumblr.com
✊🧱 YOU FIST, I FIST, WE ALL FIST OUR IMPERIAL FISTS INTO THE AIR! FOR DORN! FOR THE EMPEROR, FOR THE GOOD OF MANKIND!
I've been in Love with Old style graphic posters, The texture, The angular style, this One is inspired By soviet propaganda and those big murals The Diamonds from Steven Universe had of themselves, simple but effective design, Perfect for me who HATES drawing Primarch Armour with even Cell of My body.
But I really enjoyed doing This One and applying The paper folds and dots and slight effects, and Dorn IS a Very Angular and Delightful knucklehead with The BIGGEST Golden Heart, famous for being imune to corruption due to his autism— AURA, aura, his Aura. I should draw him more.
you don't need to write a dark deconstruction of Peter Pan where he's willing to kill people and his state of eternal childhood makes him morally ambiguous, JM Barrie already wrote one and it's called Peter Pan
To clarify, this post isn't about the misconception thrown around by clickbait online listicles that "Peter kills the Lost Boys when they get too old"*. Any real horror that comes from the story, IMO, is about Peter as a VICTIM. His very existence is a tragedy.
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.
* That's basically a throwaway line that he tells Wendy as a sort of brag, and imo I think we're supposed to take it with a grain of salt, since Peter is established to be a habitual liar and mis-rememberer of events, especially when he thinks it might make him look cool. The Lost Boys we meet in the original 1911 novel go home with the Darling children and are adopted into the family, something which you might not know if you only saw the Disney movie, so we know they aren't "actually dead and Neverland is heaven" and Peter didn't kill them after the Darlings left. In the official sequel, Peter Pan in Scarlet (yes there is a canon sequel, it was written in 2006 by Geraldine McCaughrean after she won a contest put forward by Great Ormond Street Hospital, the owners of the Peter Pan IP, it's amazing and everyone should read it right now) we actually meet some of the OTHER Lost Boys who were banished by peter for "growing up" and are still stuck in Neverland, and they still know Wendy (she comes back every year for the spring cleaning until Peter just... forgets about her). So there's no real evidence that Peter really did kill any of the Lost Boys, and in fact more evidence to the contrary - the closest we see him come to that is when he believes Tootles has accidentally shot and killed Wendy. When it's revealed that Wendy is fine, Tootles is forgiven entirely.
These two stories work so well as mirrors to each other that I sometimes like to say that AIW is an imaginary world running on a child's version of "adult logic" whereas in Peter Pan the "real" world runs on child logic. Why do mothers seem to know everything? Well...
Mrs. Darling first heard of Peter when she was tidying up her children’s minds. It is the nightly custom of every good mother after her children are asleep to rummage in their minds and put things straight for next morning, repacking into their proper places the many articles that have wandered during the day. If you could keep awake (but of course you can’t) you would see your own mother doing this, and you would find it very interesting to watch her. It is quite like tidying up drawers.
Obviously your mom can literally rummage through your thoughts! This is the most out-there example but generally in the story children's ideas about the world are just objectively correct. Mr. Darling's work is very abstract except for the idea of sums and small talk, Mrs. Darling can watch her kids through night-lights, the stars talk to Peter; I often say that Peter Pan is so surreal that, were it to come out today, could only be marketed to very young children (who would accept the weirdness of a fairy tale) or adults/very advanced readers who are used to surrealism (who can understand when not everything is meant to be understood in a book). Alice In Wonderland definitely has a current day reputation of being surreal, but I think Peter Pan deserves that as well, it is BUCK-WILD in some parts.
@fagboysupreme could def explain this better than me because whatever brainworms i have for Peter Pan he has the wondrrland variety
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.
i also want to point out the third point of this triangle that came much much later, "Coraline", where the alternate world is instead what an adult would assume a child wants. idk that i need to brainstorm more on but theres something there about alternate worlds in service of a child's mindset.
ohhhh the concept of carl lying under oath at one of stratt's trials. he is being investigated too, of course, and she will vehemently deny anything untoward in her legal statement for his case, but first they are sitting in the same courtroom together and carl is being asked about the astronauts and it's truly routine, this small section where they emphasize that all of them went willingly, a predictable pressure point that stratt's legal defenses will use to try to argue the charges down, but both carl and eva and the god she belives in can feel the tightness in her chest as he calmly confirms that all astronauts volunteered for their mission. that there was never manipulation or coercion beyond statements of facts. that science officer doctor ryland grace requested an earlier coma be induced for his nerves. yes, carl was there when the doctor put him under, as a security measure. no, doctor grace did not seem conflicted or upset. he believed in the hail mary, says carl, and the half-truth sits oddly in their stomachs for the rest of the day.
ive heard the argument that transitioning is a "voluntary surgery" and so its not necessary. while its true that medical transition is an elective surgery (all elective surgery means is that youre not going to die immediately if you dont have it now, as opposed to emergency surgery), most surgeries are elective. still, ive seen people argue, "would you let someone cut off a limb if they didn't want it?" and id say, yes. ive seen it done before
ive worked in hospitals for a long time, and years ago i saw a patient very frequently. he came in once every month or so, inpatient. one day he told me what he kept coming in for. he had a knee replacement, but it kept rejecting. so the hospital would take it out, keep him, and then put it back in. he told me that he was fighting to just have it amputated. he said he was in his 70s and he just didnt have enough time anymore to spend it all in the hospital. he said that he felt he could live a better and more fulfilling life for the years he had left if they just took the leg off. he could get a prosthetic and just not have to go to the hospital all the time. he said that the doctors were fighting him on it but that was what he wanted. i said that i understood, and that i hoped he could get that amputation
anyway, some time passed, and i saw him again. i asked whats up, he was beaming and said, "i got it done! they took the leg off!" i was like, "hell yeah man, how are you feeling?" and he said "well it hurts right now but im not gonna have to come here all the time anymore." he left the hospital some time later, and i never saw him again, which is all you can hope for when you work in a hospital
he also had an elective surgery, a "voluntary" surgery. he chose to have an amputation because he was suffering with the limb intact. and thats really what we're doing too. yes, transition surgeries are elective, but that doesnt mean that theyre not necessary to improve the quality of our lives
idk. i told my dad about this years ago, and my dad said he couldnt understand choosing that. but i could. and i hope hes still out of the hospital. i hope he never goes back
