Peter Pan is a week-old baby when he leaves home, and he never ages past that marker. It’s the semi-autobiographical tale of a man becoming enamored of a little boy who he wants to steal away from his mother in order to befriend the child, he makes up the story of Peter Pan, the fairy/bird/baby who lives in London’s Kensington Gardens.

Barrie began the story of Peter Pan in his 1902 novel The Little White Bird. Barrie (as Hook) and Michael Llewelyn Davies (as Peter Pan) Wikimedia Commons | Asch jr. Peter Pan’s two origin stories - both fictional and real - are immensely dark and sad J. Because since the character’s inception, Peter Pan has been both fantasy and nightmare, both for Barrie himself and for the family of little boys who inspired him throughout their short, bleak lives. Then all of the darkness and creepiness that lurks beneath the surface of Barrie’s fantasy island, and all the sinister tragedy that wound through Barrie’s life, suddenly becomes legible. You don’t even need to change the mythology of Neverland all that much - you just need to turn the setting of Neverland from a game, with game logic, into the literal truth. It’s remarkably easy to recast Barrie’s “gay and innocent and heartless” Peter as a villain, and just as easy to reimagine Captain Hook - the former Eton student who is obsessed with “good form” - as a hero (see Once Upon a Time, The Child Thief, Hook and Jill, and dozens of other recent Peter Pan retellings).

It’s true that we live in an era that’s particularly prone to giving dark-and-gritty reboots to beloved children’s properties (see Anne of Green Gables but with PTSD and sex-and-murder-filled Archie Comics), but Peter Pan seems to lend itself particularly well to this kind of transformation. And most of those reimaginings, Lost Boy included, have tended to transform the eternally innocent Peter into a villain.

Since Peter Pan’s EU copyright expired in 2008, reimaginings and remixes of the story have flourished, including most recently Christina Henry’s Lost Boy: The True Story of Captain Hook. Peter Pan, the boy who wouldn’t grow up, is the expression of the dream that they may not have to, and as such he is both beautiful and tragic.īut in our own era, the idea of a child who never grows up has a decidedly sinister bent to it. Barrie wrote that line about Peter Pan in 1911, it was generally taken as the expression of a beautiful and melancholy fantasy: Children are so lovely and so innocent that it seems a shame that they have to stop being children eventually.

The Annotated Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie