I finished Lost Boy, the story that literalizes Peter Pan, making Peter a particularly cruel af villain rather than Hook.

I find that literature that relies heavily on metaphor and meant to be a parable or proverb which gets this treatment from writers always end up churning out something less interesting than the original story because in literalizing it, they’re erasing the _point_ of the entire story. You still need to replace it with something better or more interesting, right? Instead they always rely solely on the subversion. Being critical of a story never meant to be taken literally is fine, if it also communicates something!

A story written by a grieving son and brother for a grieving mother in which their dead family member never grows up, which is in part, about accepting how someone chooses to grieve a child—becomes about that same dead child being fucking terrible and probably evil and cruel, if real. He’s _dead_! He’s not real, that’s why the damn story worked!

Nearly everything in the damn story is metaphorical, right. The notion that it’s interesting if he’s a dick because we’re ignoring the idea that he’s a dead kid and he’s real now and not a vector for grief is like, a weird flex... ???

I mean, It was an OK story. But when I thought about it after I had finished it, the more I had to ask but... why?