So I’ve never really liked how OUAT integrated most of the Peter Pan mythos. Killian Jones is my favorite character but he doesn’t really match the Hook from the novel. Stuff like their version of the Pan, Frankenstein and Oz characters bother me because unlike the other fairy tale characters, they come from a single definite source. The Frankenstein stuff is hopeless and there’s already one fanfic author who made Whale actually work for me as Victor and whose characterization I use for my headcannons. So here’s my thought for Killian (which completely ignores all of the stuff about Wendy and her brothers that they added, it doesn’t add much to the plot anyway).
Killian is not the Hook from the Peter Pan book and neither is the Pan that the gang fights in Neverland. The book all happened mostly as written but at some point Wendy returns to Neverland after that adventure and something g happens. Maybe during one of spring cleaning trips? I don’t know, whatever the case Wendy ends up in the world of the Enchanted Forest along with the crew of James Hook. James himself is, of course, dead, in the stomach of the crocodile. Wendy, as Red-Handed Jill, takes over as captain and she leads the crew for a while in their new world. Everyone in the crew is unfamiliar with this world as they all come from the same world as Wendy. Neverland was supposed to be connected to an alternate version of Earth, a slightly more magical one than the Land Without Magic where folk lore and the like are real and stories like Peter Pan and Alice and Wonderland and Mary Poppins can take place. Maybe King Arthur’s Avalon was real in this world and stuff like the Trojan War and the Odyssey actually happened (I’m also ignoring season 5 here). The details of Wendy’s home world are not important, I just think those additions are neat.
Anyway, Wendy sails as captain for some time before disbanding the crew. During this time, she falls in love with one of her crew members, an Irishman named David Jones, Davvy for short. The two end up having two boys together, Killian and Liam. At some point Davvy, who took up as captain with some of the crew members who wanted to keep sailing, ends up cursed with the Flying Dutchman because the name is just too convenient for that to have never come up. Wendy goes ashore and raises her boys, helped by Mr. Smee who managed to have his own son at some point. Killian and Liam are raised on stories of England, and on Peter Pan and Neverland. Which is why when Killian ends up losing his hand to his own crocodiles he takes up the moniker of his childhood stories.
Meanwhile, whatever happened that led to Wendy and the pirates being sent to the Enchanted Forest also led to Neverland being opened up to it and being infected by its foreign magic, weakening Peter. Some timey-wimey stuff happens and children from this new world star dreaming of Neverland. One of these kids is a boy named Malcom who would one day manage to find his way there in person. Malcom takes out Peter and takes over as Pan. He’s who the gang fight in Neverland and Rumpelstiltskin sacrifices himself to kill, permanently because he doesn’t need to come back and cause problems.
OUAT mostly stays the same through to the end of season 3A, after that so what you will. I just like picturing Killian surprising Emma with knowledge of the Land Without Magic that doesn’t make sense based off of what he learned from his mom.
Anyway, that’s mostly my idea for a premise for a canon-divergent fic that I think would be neat.
I’m getting pretty annoyed with the trope in fic that Morpheus is out of touch with the modern day. I get that he talks pretty formally and is an ancient being, but he’s also the personification of every living thing’s collective unconsciousness. He’s going to know all the same everyday stuff of any modern person that’s in their unconscious mind. The fact that he was trapped for a century, or 80 years depending, wouldn’t change that. Especially if you consider the comic canon that he’s Dream for the universe, not just Earth. Just because he missed humanity’s jump in tech doesn’t mean any of it is new to him. There are probably plenty of alien planets with similar and more advanced technology he would have known before he was imprisoned in the first place. I just don’t like that idea and I see it way too often.
Okay, so I don’t even know why I care anymore because I’ve already decided that Harry Potter is overrated and I should be done with it but I can’t stop thinking about how JK Rowling messes up magic in North America. I’m not even going to bother getting into all the issues with what she said about Native American magic, that’s a whole different problem that I don’t have the knowledge to competently talk about. My biggest issue is with the political landscape of the magical community I. The United States. Does she not know anything about how Congress and our branches of government work? There is just not possible way for there to be a magical president before the United States as a country was formed. Also, there would be no magical president at all, is there a magical prime minister in her books? No, there isn’t, there is a Minister of Magic, so it should be the Secretary of Magic. Further, what the hell is with Ivermony somehow being the only school for magic between all of the United States and Canada, does she have any idea how big these two countries are? We aren’t little island Britain that can pull off having one school, we are a massive continent, it’s complete unfeasible even if we did have the same culture of boarding school as they do, which we don’t. If you aren’t going to bother doing any research about the country you’re writing about before you starts describing a secret society in their midsts, don’t write anything.
The strength a the demigod is dependent on the strength of the relationship between their parents, the more a god cares for their mortal lover the more favored their child is. That’s why Percy is so OP, Poseidon adored Sally.
There’s a tendency in fanfiction that I’ve noticed to kind of de power Superman and Wonder Woman in favor of making Batman and the Batfamily look better. Part of this is probably because of the overwhelming amount of stories centered on Batfamily dynamics and that when writing shock and awe fics people want familiar characters to be their outsider pov, but it just doesn’t work right with Superman and Wonder Woman.
Another part of this is probably because of how the characters get presented in the comics, unfortunately both Superman and Wonder Woman have had to deal with a lot of flip flopping with their powers because the characters were made too powerful and the turn back to try and make them less overpowered has backlashed into making them too weak at times depending on the story. Not to mention how since Batman is part of the trinity that is the face of DC they want to make him equal to the other two within the canon, and it just doesn’t work. I don’t care how smart he is, Batman just cannot handle the problems Superman and Wonder Woman face, he’s only human.
I don’t know, it’s just a common occurrence for a popular character to try and have their real world popularity reflected in the comics, even when it doesn’t work, Batman and Spider-Man have that problem, the latter significantly more so than the former since Batman actually does play a pretty important role to the Justice League, just not quite to the point as he is represented, I think.
Is Lucy’s luck ever really explored? They hint at there being something special, especially around the Tenrou Arc but nothing ever really comes of it. I think it would have been neat to take that plot device and actually go somewhere with it, Celestial Spirit Magic as a whole really could have gotten more development, I think. The idea of it has so much potential and the Heartfilia family history too, a matrilineal line of celestial spirits who may or may not come from nobility in a country where the Princess/Queen is also a celestial spirit mage? (was that ever confirmed in the manga or it is it anime only?) I guess the worldbuilding in general is a lot of wasted potential. Mashima gave us such a wonderful world and then never really explores it, kind of reminds me of the lost potential in Naruto and its political landscape which could have been so interesting and then was ignored in favor of cliche shounen power boosts and big energy/monster fights.
So I’m not really sure how Jorge read a story about a ruthlessly pragmatic but arrogant man having to suffer the consequences of his own hubris and came out with the idea of that same guy needing to learn to be ruthless after ten years of war but wonky narrative decisions aside, all the songs really are amazing, it blows my mind.
I’m always amazed with how much talent is on display when you listen to music.
There are a good few flaws to this movie but if I were to make one change and leave it mostly alone, it would be the time skip after Kirk gets on the shuttle to Starfleet Academy, right after he meets Bones. Instead of jumping ahead to his final year as a cadet I would have it be more like 7 years, and introduce him as a new transfer to the Enterprise as a Lieutenant or Lieutenant Commander.
You can still have him get off on the wrong foot with Spock because of the Kobayashi Maru, but it can be because Spock doesn’t approve of him getting a commendation for what he considered to have been “cheating” and then they just rub each other the wrong way to start. The rest of the gang are all already posted as lower ranked members. I think you could have a fun scene of Kirk reuniting with Bones and Uhura (with very different reactions going on there).
You can still have Kirk overhearing Uhura about the communication because he’s with her roommate, it’s just that the room is a ship cabin instead of a dorm. Basically, instead of the Academy stuff you just have Kirk getting adjusted to the Enterprise. Maybe have Commander Una be injured or on leave or something so Spock is the Acting First Officer at the time.
Then the distress call from Vulcan comes in and the ship get assigned to check it out. Everything else from the time they’re out of warp could pretty much be the same but it would make more sense for Pike to name Kirk as Spock’s Acting First Officer when he goes over and for the gang to be taking over for their commanding officers when they’re injured during the attack from Nero. It just would make so much more sense for already instated officers to take on the roles they do then not even graduated cadets.
(I know this thing is, like, 15 years old now but I was rewatching Beyond and it made me think)
The one thing I’ve never been able to understand are those unfinished stories that have no proper explanation as to what happened to the author. The ones that say they haven’t been updated in years but when you read the author’s note it sounds like they are still writing it and plan to regularly update, some even specifically promise an upcoming update that never came. What happened? I get that since it’s fanfiction these stories are being done at the author’s leisure and we can’t expect too much, but is it that hard for the author to write a quick note saying they’ve abandoned the story or they’re going on hiatus? Why just leave it without explanation? The not knowing is one of the most frustrating things about fanfiction, even when compared to the over abundance of horrible out of character stories.
So the one thing about the old Superman movies I’ve never liked has been the Jesus analogy. The idea that Joe-El sent his son to earth so he could guide the humans and be their savior. I think Smallville did this too and I didn’t like it then either. Why would a man from a completely different planet who has never been to Earth and has no reason to care anything about it except as the planet where his son is going so he doesn’t die on Krypton care at all about saving humanity? He was facing certain death as his planet died around him and risked a lot n the chance that his son would survive being sent away in a ship, why would he spend any time creating a plan where he ordered his son to be alone and isolated apart from the species he was being sent to spend his life around. It just doesn’t make sense.