THEORY — Henry is actually Peter Pan

[nonnie]

I listened to OTHER SIDE OF MIRROR … the PETER PAN episode and the more I read the book and listened to their pdC the more I want HENRY to be or become Peter Pan.

http://othersideofthemirror.libsyn.com/
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I kind of think HENRY has a lot of the attributes of Peter.

Henry is naive, idealistic and innocent…. but he is coming to age loosing his innocence.

Peter is thoughtless and Henry can be thoughtless of both Regina and Emma… he has an idea of who they SHOULD BE and if they are NOT his ideal he turns on them.

Peter does not seem to like adults… he has a limited child understanding of the world… black and white no grey …. reasons why what he wants can not hold true….

What do you think?
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[timespacer]

After listening to the podcast, I agree! I don’t know why I didn’t see all the obvious parallels earlier. I’ve believed for a long time that Henry might run away to Neverland but I didn’t really consider him being Peter Pan because I’ve suspected Baelfire might be Peter Pan ever since we saw him fall through the beanhole in “The Return”. But you are right that Henry is a much better fit to the story. It’s looking more and more like Daniel will get to have cream in his coffee! (i.e. Bae has been to Neverland but he is not Peter Pan.)

I think part of the reason I didn’t initially consider Henry as a candidate for Peter Pan is that back in Season One, I was assuming that all the Fairy Tale Land stories took place in a different universe and a much earlier time, so that the stories somehow made their way to our world long after they had happened. Hence, Henry couldn’t be Peter Pan since he was born in our world eleven years ago and Peter Pan was written in 1904. But now we have seen that time and space are not really barriers between our world and the many fictional worlds. We’ve seen that the time at which Regina enacted The Dark Curse in the Enchanted Forest was synchronized with time in our world so most of the events in the flashbacks took place just a few decades ago, while many of the stories were first written in our world centuries ago (the original story of Cinderella goes back to an origin some 2500 years ago.) So it is perfectly consistent with what we have already seen that Henry might become Peter Pan in the future.

Since OUAT is a fantasy, not sf, I assume they will never dig too deeply into exactly how the different worlds are connected in time. But I find myself wishing for a sf spinoff of OUAT that would address that question! I’d love to see a description of how ideas from our past are communicated to other universes and influence events and characters there. There is after all, enough “wiggle room” in the non-local nature of quantum mechanics to allow lots of creative approaches to this question . One of my favorite descriptions of a similar process is in Neal Stephenson’s novel, Anathem.

[Phee]

@TimeSpacer wrote:

I think part of the reason I didn’t initially consider Henry as a candidate for Peter Pan is that back in Season One, I was assuming that all the Fairy Tale Land stories took place in a different universe and a much earlier time, so that the stories somehow made their way to our world long after they had happened. Hence, Henry couldn’t be Peter Pan since he was born in our world eleven years ago and Peter Pan was written in 1904. But now we have seen that time and space are not really barriers between our world and the many fictional worlds. We’ve seen that the time at which Regina enacted The Dark Curse in the Enchanted Forest was synchronized with time in our world so most of the events in the flashbacks took place just a few decades ago, while many of the stories were first written in our world centuries ago (the original story of Cinderella goes back to an origin some 2500 years ago.) So it is perfectly consistent with what we have already seen that Henry might become Peter Pan in the future.

I still don’t see how the timing would work, because Henry was very definitely born in our word 11 years ago, roughly 100 years after our world heard the story of Peter Pan. If he is still yet to become Pan, we never should have heard of Pan before, because he doesn’t exist yet.

[RumplesGirl]

I think Henry could become a potential Peter Pan but he wasn’t one to begin with. I think there are many “Pan’s”–Nealfire being one of them.

"He was a lot of things to me" "The only conclusion was love"

[timespacer]

@Phee wrote:

I still don’t see how the timing would work, because Henry was very definitely born in our word 11 years ago, roughly 100 years after our world heard the story of Peter Pan. If he is still yet to become Pan, we never should have heard of Pan before, because he doesn’t exist yet.

That’s what I thought back in Season One, but we now know the same thing is true for all of the characters with Fairy Tale identities. We saw in “Broken” that time was frozen in the Enchanted Forest for the same 28 years that it was frozen in Storybrooke. So unlike the real world in which there is no such thing as “absolute time” (see side note below if you are curious), Storybrooke and the Enchanted Forest measure the same time intervals. Regina enacted the curse 29 years ago so she and many of the other characters (Snow , Charming, Red…) were probably born roughly 30 years before that, meaning many of our key characters weren’t born until about 60 years ago (roughly around 1950) but their stories existed in our world hundreds of years before that. So we heard of Snow White more than a hundred years before she was born. How will they explain that? I don’t know. Since it is a fantasy, they might not even try. I like to think perhaps the writings in our world somehow cause events in the other worlds which lead to the fictional characters and events eventually coming into being there at a later time (although not as exact copies of our world’s version of the characters). We’ve also seen that our characters can manipulate time since the curse caused time to be frozen in Storybrooke for 28 years. Hence, the Snow White of OUAT wasn’t born until sometime around 1950, even though the story of Snow White was published by the Brothers Grimm in 1837.

Since Snow and the others were born more than a hundred years after their stories were written in our world, I think Henry could also have been born a hundred years after his story was written. I don’t mind if a fantasy violates the physical laws of our world so long as they remain internally consistent. I’m happy to see them introduce fairies, dragons, and magic so long as that magic follows a consistent set of rules and doesn’t contradict itself. But contradicting reality is OK in my book.

(Side note on the real-world nature of time: General Relativity shows us that time is a local phenomenon, and observers moving relative to each other, or in different gravitational fields, may measure time very differently. Thousands of years might elapse for one observer while another would measure only moments. But this does not seem to apply in the fictional universe of OUAT where they seem to imply that there is a link between time in our world and time in Fairy Tale Land.)

[Phee]

@RumplesGirl wrote:

I think Henry could become a potential Peter Pan but he wasn’t one to begin with. I think there are many “Pan’s”–Nealfire being one of them.

I could buy it if there’s more than one Pan, (like the god Pan had multiples), like it’s a title or position one can hold, and Henry is a future one, and Bae was one in the past.

@TimeSpacer wrote:

That’s what I thought back in Season One, but we now know the same thing is true for all of the characters with Fairy Tale identities. We saw in “Broken” that time was frozen in the Enchanted Forest for the same 28 years that it was frozen in Storybrooke. So unlike the real world in which there is no such thing as “absolute time” (see side note below if you are curious), Storybrooke and the Enchanted Forest measure the same time intervals.

This doesn’t confirm to me that the time runs parallel. It just says that a chunk of time that lasted the same amount of time was frozen in both worlds. I put that down to the two lands being tied together because they’re on opposite ends of the curse, but don’t think it indicates that FTL and SB exist side by side on the timeline. I still think they all jumped forward a couple 100 years or so when they came here.

[kfchimera]

It’s true that the timeline issue suggests that many of the fairytale characters’ stories unfolded in the Enchanted Forest after the stories became popular here, but I think there is an important difference between all of them and Henry. Unlike the other characters, Henry knows about the story of Peter Pan (or at least, we assume he does since he grew up here). So in a way it is a time loop sort of story, if he became Peter Pan, since he would already know about the character. Talk about being a legend in your own mind!

“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

[obisgirl]

@Phee wrote:

This doesn’t confirm to me that the time runs parallel. It just says that a chunk of time that lasted the same amount of time was frozen in both worlds. I put that down to the two lands being tied together because they’re on opposite ends of the curse, but don’t think it indicates that FTL and SB exist side by side on the timeline. I still think they all jumped forward a couple 100 years or so when they came here.

You’re probably right about that because didn’t Neal say something to that effect in “The Queen is Dead” to Emma when Hook showed up in Manhattan to kill Gold? If he hadn’t made a pit stop or something in Neverland before coming to our world, he would have been decades older.

[RumplesGirl]

Centuries actually.

Emma: So you know Hook?

Neal: It’s a long story. Short version, is this world wasn’t my first stop when I left home.

Emma: No?

Neal: If it was, I’d be a couple hundred years old by now.

"He was a lot of things to me" "The only conclusion was love"

[jbwood5]

I think Neal came straight to our world and hook and the lost boys happened to becoming here as well at the same time and they convince him to go to neverland with them. It would explain the photos of ping bae in the storybrooke area and hook with the lost boys.

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