Pan's Shadow

[Grimmsister]

tiara_rose mentioned the fairytale “the shadow” by HC Anderson in chat yesterday.

Its a story about a man who looses his shadow, it comes back to knock on his door, but as an individual man, they live together for several years the shadow growing larger and fatter and the man growing thin and sick. The shadow asks the man if he instead will be his shadow for a while since he has always so longed to have a shadow of his own, the man agrees. Eventually the shadow kills the man and takes over his life and personality.

So they changed Places. Thats what I think has happened to our Once-Pan. Pan said in the flashback (in the last episode I think) that its very lonely on the Island, perhabs it got so lonely he started talking and playing with his own shadow.

[kfchimera]

Over the summer we had a thread, where Girl_hits_Car brought that story up, and we discussed it.  A more famous Andersen story is of course “The Little Mermaid.” and in 2 episodes, they are introducing the Little Mermaid as a character, and have talked about connecting her in some way with NL .   Andersen’s tale is pretty disquieting, and shadows and darkness are in western culture generally portrayed as bad things. While they might subvert that norm, the shadow so far has come off pretty creepy.  On the other hand, it also has not displayed a lot of cunning or intention, with how easily Bae countered it as a child with a match.   Mostly we just do not know a ton about it, and whether there’s more than one.

Why did it swoop on Greg, and not Tamara, and so far, has not attacked anyone else?  It came when called to Roland, but it appeared to come uninvited to Wendy’s house, shortly after Bae arrived.

We have many guesses about where they could be going, but so far we have not yet been introduced to the Shadow as a separate character.  I definitely think it is.  I feel it is using Pan, and while Pan is himself not evil, he has done a lot of bad and horrible things, cruel things, as the shadow feeds on the negative emotions and nightmares.

There’s a lot of symbolism with Neverland and dreams.  I’ll probably reference this in another thread, but the way time works in NL seems to be like how we perceive time in dreams.  A dream might seem but a moment, but when you wake, you’ve been asleep hours.  On the other hand, you could feel emotionally as if you have spent years in a dream, then when you wake, it has not been much time at all.  In the original Barrie play/novel there are also references to NL being a place of imagination and dreams.

Of course the flipside of dreams are nightmares, all the fears and scary things we do not want to be true.  The shadow might represent that, and might be a conscious sort of dark entity feeding on the nightmares.

It’s possible the writers might have some nod or reference here to the concept of Dreamtime in the australian aboriginal sense.  The concept is very parallel to Jung’s collective unconscious, that it is to quote the Wikipedia:

an eternal part existed before the life of the individual begins, and continues to exist when the life of the individual ends. Both before and after life, it is believed that this spirit-child exists in the Dreaming and is only initiated into life by being born through a mother.

So if they are tackling the Andersen stories, where themes of the soul become a bit more prevalent, yet setting it in a land heavily associated with dreams, they may be mashing up some kind of soul/dream connection.  This in turn ties back to the “dreamwalking” and the sleeping curse, and wraith references still hanging out there somewhat unresolved, but possibly plot points the writers will get to in the back half of season 3. From what we know, the Shadow won’t appear as an actual character until the end of this first half of the season, so possibly they are setting it up to lead into the next half in someway.

“If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn't be. And what it wouldn't be, it would. You see?” -- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass

[Grimmsister]

More thoughts on this

Peter Pan is the Chimera monster from the Pegasus myth:

In the myth of Pegasus, the hero Bellerophon captures the winged horse Pegasus and uses it to fly to the town where the monster Chimera has been wrecking havock. He beats the monster with his intelligence. The Chimera is a monster made up of three different animals- a lion a goat and a serpent. Pegasus is also the horse, that when he scratched his hoof in the dirt, a spring would burst out and if you drank from it you would be filled with poetic inspiration and wisdom.

In Once. We allready saww that Hook got the sail made from Pegasus feathers and thats how he got to Neverland the first time- Neverland=the town being wrecked by the Monster- The Monster=Peter Pan, remember; the Chimera monster is made up of more then one being, Pan is made up of Peter the boy and his Shadow wich is seperated from him to become a being on its own.
There is the spring on Neverland wich may somehow tie in to Pegasus like it does in the myth. And I think the star map we can see in Neal’s old cave, when they hold up the coconut-light, is of the star Constellation Pegasus.
So perhabs Hook and Neal will be Bellerophon combined and will therefor be the ones to outsmart Pan and beat him down.

But most important on this theory is the Chimera=Pan.

Chimera in genetic terms Means an animal that is composed of two or more different populations of genetically distinct cells that originated from different sorces. Chimeras are formed from at least two fertilized eggs or early embryos fused together. Each population of cells keeps its own character and the resulting organism is a mixture of tissues…. Get it ???

This is so interesting to me… If this theory doesn’t hold with the Once show, I will have to write my own novel or tv show with this twist. That would totally be a hit 😉

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