Peter Pan is as Shitty as Every Other Child

Hello boys and girls

today I am going to tell you a story
about a racist sociopath from your childhood
he is not that special as far as racist sociopaths go
other than HE CAN FLY AND IS IMMORTAL
but yeah anyway
this story doesn’t start with Peter Pan
it starts with this girl named Wendy
and her brothers, Michael and John
they live in boring old London
which we are going to need to get out of ASAP
in order for this story to be any fun.

Luckily, Peter Pan decides to KIDNAP Wendy and her brothers
because he likes going over to her house to listen to bedtime stories
but he hates the commute.
The first time he comes by to hang out
she scares him so hard HIS SHADOW FALLS OFF
because he is a SHODDILY CONSTRUCTED PERSON
but she glues that shit back on
and then he’s like “Awesome, come to Neverland with me
you can be my mom.”
and Wendy is like “Uh”
and he’s like “No it’s okay
look I’m gonna cover you in magic dust and now you can FLY”
[just so you know
so many children thought they could fly after seeing this play
that the fairy dust rule had to be added in as a fucking safety measure
WRITERS: CHILDPROOF YOUR STORIES
CHILDREN ARE DUMBER THAN YOU CAN POSSIBLY IMAGINE.]

So by bribing her with performance enhancing drugs
Peter is able to convince Wendy to come back to his place
along with her two bros.
Unfortunately, Peter has already been shacking up with a fairy
a literal magic fairy named Tinkerbell
and Tinkerbell is NOT about to be usurped by some gullible sky-tramp
so when she sees Wendy coming
she rounds up Peter’s crew
(a gang of perfect idiots called the Lost Boyz)
and she’s like “HEY LOOK THERE IN THE SKY
IT’S A BIRD
PETER WANTS YOU TO SHOOT IT”
and boys love to fucking kill shit for no reason i guess
because they shoot wendy and she almost dies
but then they feel bad and make her their mother.

Here’s the problem
WENDY IS A GOD-DAMN CHILD STILL
SHE IS BARELY OLDER THAN ANYONE ELSE
so she starts doing all the things she thinks a mother does
like “give them medicine”
(actually just water in a bowl)
“feed them food”
(actually just pretend to feed them food)
and “force them to take naps.”
(there is no way to fuck this up because naps are amazing)
but her most important job
is to tell them bedtime stories
which she is really good at because her mom knows a ton of them.

But why the fuck do these kids care about bedtime stories?
THEY LIVE WITH A FAIRY, FOR CHRIST’S SAKE
THEY FIGHT PIRATES
THEY KILL PEOPLE LIKE EVERY DAY
nothing Wendy is telling them is more interesting than their actual lives
like one time they go out to the beach
and while they’re hanging out there some pirates show up
with a tied-up indian chick named Tiger Lily
(Tiger Lily is an indian as in native american
not as in actually from india
but it’s weird to call her a native american
because these people are nowhere near america.
The book calls them redskins
which is probably even worse.
They also call them Picaninnys
which i think is a little better
but ultimately what they are
are the products of the imagination of a racist child.)
So Peter is like “OH SHIT PIRATES GOTTA KILL EM”
and then he starts flying around punching pirates
ESPECIALLY a pirate named Captain Hook.

Captain Hook cannot possibly be this guy’s real name
he got ‘Captain’ from being a captain
and ‘Hook’ because he has a hook for a hand
which is like if I called my grandpa “Captain Cane”:
RUDE.
The reason Hook is missing a real hand
is that Peter Pan RIPPED IT OFF AND FED IT TO A CROCODILE.
Maybe you were waiting for the part where Peter was actually a sociopath
because you missed the part where he drugged and kidnapped three kids
well, here it is.
You don’t have to do that to someone’s hand
like, if you chop off someone’s hand
there is absolutely no reason to pick it up
unless you made a big mistake and you want to sew it back on.
Every other reason for picking up a severed hand is a bad reason
pretending to shake the hand? NOT OKAY.
dismembered high five? IN POOR TASTE.
feeding it to a live fucking crocodile
who then develops a taste for the flesh of the hand’s owner
and follows that dude around FOREVER AFTER?
ULTIMATE PARTY FOUL.

So naturally Hook wants to murder Peter
and Peter is such a cocky asshole
he almost pushes Hook off a cliff
but then sticks out his hand to save him
so Hook STABS HIM IN THE HAND
and then leaves him and wendy to die
on a rapidly-submerging rock.
Wendy gets away because there’s a little life raft there or something
but Peter has to die
which he’s totally okay with, because in his words,
“To die will be an awfully big adventure”
PROVING ONCE AGAIN THAT HE HAS NO REAL UNDERSTANDING OF DEATH.
Then a bird sacrifices its children to save him though
so it looks like Peter gets to spend another day
not learning about consequences.

Peter comes back home
and the whole Picaninny tribe is super pleased with him
because Tiger Lily is safe
(PS: the pirates caught her trying to sneak on board and murder them all
by herself
so she’s pretty cool)
so by way of saying thanks
they agree to guard Peter’s underground base
in case the pirates show up.

GUESS WHAT? THE PIRATES SHOW UP.
They show up at the worst possible time:
right when Wendy has told Peter that she’s going back to boring London
and taking all his friends with her.
See, she was actually kinda starting to have a thing for Peter
so she was like “Hey Peter, how do you feel about me”
and he was like “You are like a mom to me”
and she was like “AW FUCK, FRIENDZONED”
and also it turns out she has no idea how to be a mom
and she misses living in a house instead of a dirthole
and she is worried about PIRATES
and all the Lost Boys sort of see her point
because at this point they have been kids for god knows how long
and the whole time they have been killing pirates basically nonstop
so they are seriously warped
they have no idea what normal life is like
and they would like to give it a try.

But right when they’re all about to leave
the pirates jump on the Picaninnies and kill most of them
instead of adhering to what the book calls a time-honored tradition
of waiting until morning and letting the indians ambush them to death.
Then they steal the war-drums
and start beating on them like the Picaninnies won
so Wendy and co are like “Oh I guess it’s safe to go out now”
and then they get kidnapped by pirates
and Peter has no idea
b/c he’s already decided that his friends are disposable and gone to sleep.

When Hook is tying up the prisoners, shit gets even worse
because he discovers that Slightly, one of the lost boys, is fat
(dunno how he got fat when all their meals are imaginary
the book says he drank a lot of water
which makes me think of him as a balloon filled with warm piss)
what this means is that there must be a way into peter’s hole
that is big enough for a fat child/Captain Hook to fit through
so he finds that hole
and sneaks down to murder Peter in his sleep
but for some reason he can’t get through the door
so instead he just poisons peter’s “medicine”
which he refused to take because fuck wendy
and also because IT’S JUST WATER.

Then Captain Hook leaves and Tinkerbell shows up
(she was gone because fuck wendy)
and she’s like “PETER, EVERYONE IS KIDNAPPED”
and Peter is like “DANG”
and Tink is like “ALSO YOUR MEDICINE IS POISONED”
and Peter is like “LOL NO IT’S NOT”
and he starts to drink it
so Tinkerbell has to take one for the team and chug the poison instead
and peter is pretty pissed until she starts dying
but then he’s just sad
except it turns out Tinkerbell can’t die if children believe in faries
and luckily children will believe fucking anything
so she comes back to life with no problems
(this part is way more dramatic in the play.
you can tell he tried to make it work in the book but it’s pretty dumb.)

Once again saved from the consequences of his dumb actions
Peter sneaks onto the Pirate ship by pretending to be the crocodile
frees all the prisoners
kills all the pirates
and then front-kicks Captain Hook into the real crocodile’s mouth
which Hook gets all smug about because it isn’t sporting.
SPORTING?
YOU’RE A PIRATE, BRO
ALSO DEAD.

So Wendy is like “Wow thanks for saving us, Peter
you’re still an asshole though, bye.”
But Peter’s like “I’LL SHOW YOU WHO’S THE ASSHOLE
I’LL RACE YOU HOME AND LOCK YOUR WINDOW
SO YOU’LL THINK YOUR MOM FORGOT ABOUT YOU AND COME BACK AND LIVE WITH…
Oh wow, it’s me. I’m the asshole.”
So Wendy goes home and her mom is very stoked
she is so stoked she agrees to adopt four new children on the spot
and she raises all of them and they all get high-paying adult jobs
and then many years later Peter shows up
and he’s still a kid but Wendy is a grown-up
and Peter is like “AW FUCK WHAT HAPPENED”
and Wendy is like “It’s okay Peter
you can have my daughter”
and Peter’s like “Any port in a storm i guess.”

So he takes Wendy’s daughter until she gets sick of him
and then later she gives him HER daughter
and so on and so on
like the way some tribes sacrifice virgins to volcanoes.

So the moral of the story is lock your fucking windows.

The end.

9 thoughts on “Peter Pan is as Shitty as Every Other Child

  1. So is the whole London Blitz thing from the Disney movie just a fabrication of said movie, or is it just not that important? Cause I always intepreted Peter Pan as the way these children cope with the horrors of war around them. The lost boyz are the Brits, the Pirates are the Nazis, the Indians are the Americans and the crocodile… he’s an abstract of the horror and chaos of war, constantly looming on the horizon.

    Or am I just reading too much into it?

    • Well the original play dates back to 1904, and the novel came out in 1911, a few years before everybody knew how fucked the world was about to get, so I think that’s Disney. That’s a cool interpretation though.

    • It’s been quite a long time since I watched the first movie, but wasn’t the blitz happening in the second movie “Return to Neverland”, which was mainly about Wendy’s daughter Jane? Given the fact that Wendy is already grown up within the sequel, it’s quite impossible for her to have been growing up within the same war.

      But I agree with Ovid, the idea is marvellous! I just think you confused the first movie with its sequel.

      • I’ll confirm: the war is in Peter Pan 2: Return to Neverland. There is no war nor mention of it in the original Disney Peter Pan movie.

  2. Have you read Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, Barrie’s first version of the Peter Pan story? (The story is excerpted from his adult novel, The Little White Bird, which is a VERY STRANGE BOOK about a creepy guy with Issues.)

    Peter flew away from home when he was a week old baby, and spent so much time hanging out with a flock of crows and a band of fairies in Kensington Gardens, that by the time he decided to go home and see his mother again, she’d had another baby and put bars on the nursery window. Peter immediately concludes he’s been replaced, goes back to Kensington Gardens, and spends his time digging graves for abandoned babies who die in the park. He also has a fling with a four year old girl who stayed behind in Kensington Gardens after dark, and builds her a house so the fairies won’t kill her. In return, she gives him an invisible goat, which he rides around on when looking for dead babies to bury.

    Barrie was a very strange dude.

  3. There’s a reason Barrie had a preoccupation with dead kids and being young forever; it’s actually really sad. He had a brother who his mother thought was the best kid in the whole world, but then his brother died when he was still young. His mother got all catatonic in a dramatic Victorian way, she wouldn’t even leave her bed. She couldn’t really grasp her son’s death. At one point Barrie walked into her room and she was like “David, you’re still alive?! Oh, wait, it’s only you…”.
    Growing up as “only you” kinda messed with him, so he started writing stories about boys who died young or never aged, just like what happened to his brother.

  4. I’m pretty sure Picanniny was a super racist way to say “little black children” in ye olde times. Aka if you were a kid in the 60s or 70s your grandma might still call little black children picanninies. So, let’s just leave it at “Barrie was hella racist” 😛

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