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katsarisI'll be getting Harry Potter Saturday noon -- but till then here's one last review I'd been planning to write for a while.
A while ago I got "Peter and the Starcatchers", partly because I've become something of a small fan of the whole Peter Pan mythos. It's supposed to be a "prequel" to the story we know by J.M. Barrie.
It was rather disappointing.
It's a somewhat decent adventure story, I guess. But it's just that.
The books' problems can be synopsized by the fact that it wasn't a true prequel. Not even in the basic facts -- not in the characters' personalities, and not even in the characters' lives. But it's not just that -- the mood, the point, the theme or lack thereof... they're not Peter Pan.
And IMO they're inferior.
Let me divide the problem in two:
Problems concerning the "Starstuff" and rationality.
I've nothing particularly against the idea that there was a specific mysterious substance that gave both a human-born Peter his sorta-unique abilities and was back in ancient times responsible for the creation of the ancient gods who were also in reality human-born.
Peter Pan is unaging and can fly after all, and the ancient gods were also unaging and could travel through the air whenever they wanted to. Makes sense for someone to build a piece of a story out of *this* connection, not particularly strong though it may be.
But then this book has the "starstuff" be responsible for the creation of every single mythical or fantastical creature there ever existed, from mermaids to centaurs to fairies to even the Loch Ness Monster....
...and as if that's not sufficient, it seems that it wants to make the starstuff responsible for everyone unusually talented (for good or ill) ordinary human being -- including Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Attila the Hun...
...and at this point you go "What the he..?".
There's a certain thing called suspension of disbelief. You strain it too much and it breaks. But breaking the suspension of disbelief isn't even the exact problem. The problem is this: There are connection that you build and they can increase delight and enjoyment, they enrich the world you depict. Such was the case with most of the "DaVinci Code" - the author there took certain small linguistic and artistic details, otherwise may be considered insignificant or trivial, and bringing them together he created something of earthshaking meaning. And that meaning increased the significance of all the elements that composed and "proved" it.
But when you take elements of already great significance -- famous monsters, ancient deities, great artists, or notorious conquerors, and then you say "they're all due to this 'starstuff'" then that's the kind of connection that *diminishes* your universe. It reduces it all to starstuff-this and starstuff-that. Blah, blah, blergh.
It felt as if the authors felt a responsibility to make a rational science-fictiony universe out of Peter Pan. At which point I have to wonder "Why?"
Peter Pan's not a rational universe. It's a universe based on faith and imagination and feeling. Shadows fly away and need to be chased and sowed back on. Neverland and the internal dreamworlds of the children visiting it have fluid boundaries. Fairies are born from children's first laughter and live or die depending on your faith in them.
Not all the starstuff of the world can attribute for *these* elements of the real Peter Pan story -- and that's why, of course, the authors of this supposed "prequel" utterly ignore them in their pursuit of organized rationality.
And moralizing rationality. IIRC the original Peter Pan story, the big crocodile there didn't have any moral attached other than "there are big monsters with clocks in their bellies that hunger for pirate food". Here the big croc becomes the point in a lecture of the evils of animal cruelty and English white-man snobbery.
My response to that would be that a) A man who's ready to kill little children for doing no worse crime than landing on his island isn't in the moral position to make lectures about animal cruelty and b) A prequel to Peter Pan is not the place to make lectures about animal cruelty one way or another.
Childish heartlessness and cruelty is after all one of the *points* of the original Peter Pan. And we're not lectured about it there -- we experience it.
Which leads me to the second point:
Problems with Peter Pan
Let me start with the factual problems in this supposed prequel, and move to the more personality-oriented ones later on.
Peter Pan's not an orphan.
It bears repeating because the authors of the "prequel" seem to have forgotten it: Peter Pan's not an orphan. Peter Pan's parents' didn't die, he simply left home. It's a major plot-point in the original novel that he returned home one day to find the window closed, and his parents with a new baby, having forgotten about Peter.
It's that piece of the story, after all, which when recounted to Wendy and her brothers, convinces them to return home. Did the "prequel" authors not bother to reread the story even once before writing their piece?
But it goes beyond mere facts -- it's about personality also: This Peter feels way too responsible. Feels way too adult. He's too polite when talking to grown-ups. Is too considerate of others.
In the original story, the first and last adjective characterizing Peter Pan is "cocky". And the ones in between are "young and gay and heartless", the adjectives characterizing all the children who fly. I'm not sure I can apply any of these to the Peter Pan of the "prequel". The Peter Pan of the prequel is the nice and responsible young man that you'd like your daughter to be *dating* instead of the young devil-child that seduces your children away from their rooms and into a land of heartless joy away from their parents' tears.
Even when hearing that he'll most likely never grow older he says something to the point of "Oh. Is that good or bad, sir?". How responsible and careful and cautious. How unlike Peter Pan. Even when seeing flying rats and other miracles he still doubts his own eyes in favor of some effort to find a "rational explanation". Here's a rational explanation for you, boy -- it was magic. Why are you having so much difficulty accepting it?
Peter Pan of the stories said about his many enemies "I forget them after I kill them". Peter Pan's head is full of himself. He cares and he forgets -- he loves and he forgets -- he kills and he forgets. He may have wept for Tinkerbell's death (it's been a while since I've read the novel), but a mere year later he couldn't even remember she ever existed, no matter how much Wendy tries to make him remember.
Peter Pan is a bittersweet story about a fearless and heartless boy who kills and forgets.
The prequel is a bittersweet story about a brave responsible young man who you're sure will never forget anything worth remembering.
The Peter Pan of the "prequel" shouldn't have even been able to fly under the "rules" of the original novel.
There was perhaps only one paragraph of the novel that I've felt to be true Peter Pan and it lies in the very first page. "Peter was the leader of the boys, because he was the oldest. Or maybe he wasn't. Peter had no idea how old he really was, so he gave himself whatever age suited him, and it suited him to always be one year older than the oldest of his mates. If Peter was nine, and a new boy came [...]] who said he was ten, why, then Peter would declare himself to be eleven. Also he could spit the farthest. That made him the undisputed leader."
Yes! *Yes*! *That* felt like true Peter Pan. The hint of a not entirely stable reality, malleable by just an effort of will from Peter's inherent cockiness. Too bad it's only in one paragraph of the whole novel.
And perhaps the second story-element that I liked was the talking dolphins - but only because they were blissfully unconnected to the starstuff which got awfully annoying after a while.
There were lots more tiny problems in the story -- a lack of any coherent explanation about the "Others" (at times it seems as if they're a special type or group of people, e.g. when Molly says that the Starcatchers have spies among them -- at other times it seems however to indicate anyone greedy enough to want to have some starstuff for his own), or the story patting itself on the back over its own stupid cleverness (e.g when someone says he hopes it's the last the world hears out of a monster that happened to creep into Loch Ness -- that just made me groan). But the above were the basics.
...
Peter Pan and his origin
This isn't about the book anymore, it's about something that I'd been planning to write even before I read it. People familiar with "Gargoyles" will understand this section better. Because the creator of that series had said that he eventually planned to connect *every* myth and story out there with his cosmos.
And after a while, a guy interested in Peter Pan will start thinking about how Peter Pan would belong in that universe. Most of it isn't that difficult, if you allow for some small changes that Gargoyles Universe does to all the myths incorporates -- Gargoyles universe is rules-free enough. Neverland in a pocket dimension, kinda like a lesser and different sort of Avalon; Tinkerbell a member of the Third Race: the race of fairies and gods and djinns alike: But what about The Boy (tm) himself?
Giving everyone a partly divine ancestry is the sort of Mary-Sueish thing that, alas, many fanfiction authors are prone to. I've done it myself and I think in some cases it doesn't hurt. After all you could hardly throw a stone in mythical-era Greece without hitting a guy with Zeus or Poseidon or Apollo or *someone* divine as his father or grandfather.
Peter Pan as a fully-human appealed to me the best, and in truth there wasn't any need to give him any Third Race ancestry at all... No reason whatsoever -- outside perhaps the author's own words. "And he was only half-human". And also this sequence:
These words are from the little-known true prequel to Peter Pan, namely the "The Little White Bird" by Barrie -- which tells his origin.
Don't blame me if I get from there only the elements that suit me. :-) These are just idle musings after all, and in the Gargoyles way, details may change and all things are true but only for a given value of "true". Stories need not be perfect-to-the-letter if they're accurate in their soul.
Anyway, only half-human and a Betwixt-and-Between: In the Gargoyles universe this would mean that Peter Pan has a parent in the Third Race. *g* Suits me just fine. It's always amusing to seek for a divine parentage and mythical connections.
Sometimes similarity in names itself becomes the first step to finding nifty little connection which are almost certainly coincidences in reality, but are nice thoughts to start using as what-ifs. Oberon, chief of all the Third Race, leader above all mythological pantheons worldwide, kinda sounds like what the name Hyperion could evolve to. And then you start thinking about how in Odyssey even Zeus treats with respect and perhaps even subservience the sun-god "hyperion Helius". And how such overleadership seems common in other pantheons as well -- Seth and Horus in the Egyptian pantheon bring their dispute to the sun-god Ra who judges between them. (sun-god Helius?) And from Helius to the overgod "El" who in Mesopotamia (or perhaps Phoenicia, I don't remember right now) seems to play a similar role of overlordship to the more local gods that were fighting over control of their pantheon. And you think: If this was Gargoyles, then El and Helius and Hyperion and Oberon would all fit very nicely together as one entity.
What I mean is this: if you seek out these connections, things start fitting more often than not. My "Names and Forms" fanfic concerns Minos, the man who became king of Crete after a white bull arose out of the sea and some (Plutarch I think, though not sure) said to be a foreigner and had problems with Poseidon, combined with Min the Egyptian god of fertility who had a white bull for his symbol, combined with Menes (the first king of Egypt who had both the bull and the hawk as symbols) and was sometimes identified with Horus the Elder (the sun-god of the hawkish form), combined with Hierax of the Maryandynians (who transformed into a hawk after getting into a fight with Poseidon).
Similarity of names, similarity of qualities (hawk, white bull, kingship, problems with Poseidon) led me then to combine character and decipher an origin for a character.
And now I started thinking about potential parentages for Peter Pan. And I started thinking about the Greek mythological figures first, mainly because I knew them best -- though at first I thought that I'd not first anything particularly fitting and I'd have to move to more obscure Celtic figures, before I found something that combined atleast two fitting qualities. After all Peter Pan has been a very England-related figure.
But here's the first two Greek deities that sprang to mind.
Dionysus came to mind first, because the arrogance and fearlessness of the boy reminded me of Dionysus -- and there's something drunken in Peter's whole world, and something heartless and ever-young in Dionysus. And one of Dionysus' characteristics was how he had young women follow him out of the cities, which brought vaguely to mind Peter luring Wendy away from her home...
But there I felt the similarities end, if they had even begun. Perhaps if the original Peter Pan was a bit more like the one in the recent (and wonderful and mostly faithful) "Peter Pan" movie, where he feels a bit more adult than in the original story, and his taking away Wendy feels just a bit more seductive -- but not even then. Dionysus is vengeful in his heartlessness, he's cruel and not playful.
But the next deity that sprang to mind was Hermes.
And the connections started flowing:
- Peter Pan left the crib at the age of 7 days to fly away. Hermes left from the first day to steal his brother's oxen.
- Peter Pan is famous for flying. And even though no god has shown a problem in doing so, Hermes is so famous for it that he must have really enjoyed doing it or be really talented in it.
- One of Hermes's first doings was invent the pipes. Peter Pan plays them.
- Personality-wise, both are tricksters.
But in truth the two clinchers were the following, and one of them hit me so strongly that it stunned me -- though the reason will probably be understood only by those well-familiar with Greek mythology. When skimming once again over the text of Peter Pan, I read:
Peter Pan, a psychopomp. Just like Hermes.
The other clincher is the following: The *other* Pan. The goat-footed one. His father is supposed to be Hermes also.
That never really made very much sense to me, same way that it never really made sense to me that Persephone's father was Zeus -- it's one of those cases where you start thinking that the ancients didn't really have any reason to choose any one specific god as the father and so randomly picked a guy up for the parentage in question. In the terms of the Gargoyles universe, perhaps the father of Persephone belonged to some whole different pantheon that the Greeks had never even heard of at the time.
And in the case of Pan, one has to wonder (always in the terms of the Gargoyles universe) if the ancient Greeks got the right father but the wrong son. Perhaps Hermes wasn't the father of goat-footed Pan, perhaps he was the father of the trickster flying boy Pan, Peter Pan.
Or perhaps he gave the same name to two sons.
But either way, Peter's father is Hermes. That's *my* story anyway. Please don't have me committed. :-)
A while ago I got "Peter and the Starcatchers", partly because I've become something of a small fan of the whole Peter Pan mythos. It's supposed to be a "prequel" to the story we know by J.M. Barrie.
It was rather disappointing.
It's a somewhat decent adventure story, I guess. But it's just that.
The books' problems can be synopsized by the fact that it wasn't a true prequel. Not even in the basic facts -- not in the characters' personalities, and not even in the characters' lives. But it's not just that -- the mood, the point, the theme or lack thereof... they're not Peter Pan.
And IMO they're inferior.
Let me divide the problem in two:
Problems concerning the "Starstuff" and rationality.
I've nothing particularly against the idea that there was a specific mysterious substance that gave both a human-born Peter his sorta-unique abilities and was back in ancient times responsible for the creation of the ancient gods who were also in reality human-born.
Peter Pan is unaging and can fly after all, and the ancient gods were also unaging and could travel through the air whenever they wanted to. Makes sense for someone to build a piece of a story out of *this* connection, not particularly strong though it may be.
But then this book has the "starstuff" be responsible for the creation of every single mythical or fantastical creature there ever existed, from mermaids to centaurs to fairies to even the Loch Ness Monster....
...and as if that's not sufficient, it seems that it wants to make the starstuff responsible for everyone unusually talented (for good or ill) ordinary human being -- including Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Attila the Hun...
...and at this point you go "What the he..?".
There's a certain thing called suspension of disbelief. You strain it too much and it breaks. But breaking the suspension of disbelief isn't even the exact problem. The problem is this: There are connection that you build and they can increase delight and enjoyment, they enrich the world you depict. Such was the case with most of the "DaVinci Code" - the author there took certain small linguistic and artistic details, otherwise may be considered insignificant or trivial, and bringing them together he created something of earthshaking meaning. And that meaning increased the significance of all the elements that composed and "proved" it.
But when you take elements of already great significance -- famous monsters, ancient deities, great artists, or notorious conquerors, and then you say "they're all due to this 'starstuff'" then that's the kind of connection that *diminishes* your universe. It reduces it all to starstuff-this and starstuff-that. Blah, blah, blergh.
It felt as if the authors felt a responsibility to make a rational science-fictiony universe out of Peter Pan. At which point I have to wonder "Why?"
Peter Pan's not a rational universe. It's a universe based on faith and imagination and feeling. Shadows fly away and need to be chased and sowed back on. Neverland and the internal dreamworlds of the children visiting it have fluid boundaries. Fairies are born from children's first laughter and live or die depending on your faith in them.
Not all the starstuff of the world can attribute for *these* elements of the real Peter Pan story -- and that's why, of course, the authors of this supposed "prequel" utterly ignore them in their pursuit of organized rationality.
And moralizing rationality. IIRC the original Peter Pan story, the big crocodile there didn't have any moral attached other than "there are big monsters with clocks in their bellies that hunger for pirate food". Here the big croc becomes the point in a lecture of the evils of animal cruelty and English white-man snobbery.
My response to that would be that a) A man who's ready to kill little children for doing no worse crime than landing on his island isn't in the moral position to make lectures about animal cruelty and b) A prequel to Peter Pan is not the place to make lectures about animal cruelty one way or another.
Childish heartlessness and cruelty is after all one of the *points* of the original Peter Pan. And we're not lectured about it there -- we experience it.
Which leads me to the second point:
Problems with Peter Pan
Let me start with the factual problems in this supposed prequel, and move to the more personality-oriented ones later on.
Peter Pan's not an orphan.
It bears repeating because the authors of the "prequel" seem to have forgotten it: Peter Pan's not an orphan. Peter Pan's parents' didn't die, he simply left home. It's a major plot-point in the original novel that he returned home one day to find the window closed, and his parents with a new baby, having forgotten about Peter.
It's that piece of the story, after all, which when recounted to Wendy and her brothers, convinces them to return home. Did the "prequel" authors not bother to reread the story even once before writing their piece?
But it goes beyond mere facts -- it's about personality also: This Peter feels way too responsible. Feels way too adult. He's too polite when talking to grown-ups. Is too considerate of others.
In the original story, the first and last adjective characterizing Peter Pan is "cocky". And the ones in between are "young and gay and heartless", the adjectives characterizing all the children who fly. I'm not sure I can apply any of these to the Peter Pan of the "prequel". The Peter Pan of the prequel is the nice and responsible young man that you'd like your daughter to be *dating* instead of the young devil-child that seduces your children away from their rooms and into a land of heartless joy away from their parents' tears.
Even when hearing that he'll most likely never grow older he says something to the point of "Oh. Is that good or bad, sir?". How responsible and careful and cautious. How unlike Peter Pan. Even when seeing flying rats and other miracles he still doubts his own eyes in favor of some effort to find a "rational explanation". Here's a rational explanation for you, boy -- it was magic. Why are you having so much difficulty accepting it?
Peter Pan of the stories said about his many enemies "I forget them after I kill them". Peter Pan's head is full of himself. He cares and he forgets -- he loves and he forgets -- he kills and he forgets. He may have wept for Tinkerbell's death (it's been a while since I've read the novel), but a mere year later he couldn't even remember she ever existed, no matter how much Wendy tries to make him remember.
Peter Pan is a bittersweet story about a fearless and heartless boy who kills and forgets.
The prequel is a bittersweet story about a brave responsible young man who you're sure will never forget anything worth remembering.
The Peter Pan of the "prequel" shouldn't have even been able to fly under the "rules" of the original novel.
There was perhaps only one paragraph of the novel that I've felt to be true Peter Pan and it lies in the very first page. "Peter was the leader of the boys, because he was the oldest. Or maybe he wasn't. Peter had no idea how old he really was, so he gave himself whatever age suited him, and it suited him to always be one year older than the oldest of his mates. If Peter was nine, and a new boy came [...]] who said he was ten, why, then Peter would declare himself to be eleven. Also he could spit the farthest. That made him the undisputed leader."
Yes! *Yes*! *That* felt like true Peter Pan. The hint of a not entirely stable reality, malleable by just an effort of will from Peter's inherent cockiness. Too bad it's only in one paragraph of the whole novel.
And perhaps the second story-element that I liked was the talking dolphins - but only because they were blissfully unconnected to the starstuff which got awfully annoying after a while.
There were lots more tiny problems in the story -- a lack of any coherent explanation about the "Others" (at times it seems as if they're a special type or group of people, e.g. when Molly says that the Starcatchers have spies among them -- at other times it seems however to indicate anyone greedy enough to want to have some starstuff for his own), or the story patting itself on the back over its own stupid cleverness (e.g when someone says he hopes it's the last the world hears out of a monster that happened to creep into Loch Ness -- that just made me groan). But the above were the basics.
...
Peter Pan and his origin
This isn't about the book anymore, it's about something that I'd been planning to write even before I read it. People familiar with "Gargoyles" will understand this section better. Because the creator of that series had said that he eventually planned to connect *every* myth and story out there with his cosmos.
And after a while, a guy interested in Peter Pan will start thinking about how Peter Pan would belong in that universe. Most of it isn't that difficult, if you allow for some small changes that Gargoyles Universe does to all the myths incorporates -- Gargoyles universe is rules-free enough. Neverland in a pocket dimension, kinda like a lesser and different sort of Avalon; Tinkerbell a member of the Third Race: the race of fairies and gods and djinns alike: But what about The Boy (tm) himself?
Giving everyone a partly divine ancestry is the sort of Mary-Sueish thing that, alas, many fanfiction authors are prone to. I've done it myself and I think in some cases it doesn't hurt. After all you could hardly throw a stone in mythical-era Greece without hitting a guy with Zeus or Poseidon or Apollo or *someone* divine as his father or grandfather.
Peter Pan as a fully-human appealed to me the best, and in truth there wasn't any need to give him any Third Race ancestry at all... No reason whatsoever -- outside perhaps the author's own words. "And he was only half-human". And also this sequence:
"Then I sha'n't be exactly a human?" Peter asked.
"No."
"Nor exactly a bird?"
"No."
"What shall I be?"
"You will be a Betwixt-and-Between," Solomon said
These words are from the little-known true prequel to Peter Pan, namely the "The Little White Bird" by Barrie -- which tells his origin.
Don't blame me if I get from there only the elements that suit me. :-) These are just idle musings after all, and in the Gargoyles way, details may change and all things are true but only for a given value of "true". Stories need not be perfect-to-the-letter if they're accurate in their soul.
Anyway, only half-human and a Betwixt-and-Between: In the Gargoyles universe this would mean that Peter Pan has a parent in the Third Race. *g* Suits me just fine. It's always amusing to seek for a divine parentage and mythical connections.
Sometimes similarity in names itself becomes the first step to finding nifty little connection which are almost certainly coincidences in reality, but are nice thoughts to start using as what-ifs. Oberon, chief of all the Third Race, leader above all mythological pantheons worldwide, kinda sounds like what the name Hyperion could evolve to. And then you start thinking about how in Odyssey even Zeus treats with respect and perhaps even subservience the sun-god "hyperion Helius". And how such overleadership seems common in other pantheons as well -- Seth and Horus in the Egyptian pantheon bring their dispute to the sun-god Ra who judges between them. (sun-god Helius?) And from Helius to the overgod "El" who in Mesopotamia (or perhaps Phoenicia, I don't remember right now) seems to play a similar role of overlordship to the more local gods that were fighting over control of their pantheon. And you think: If this was Gargoyles, then El and Helius and Hyperion and Oberon would all fit very nicely together as one entity.
What I mean is this: if you seek out these connections, things start fitting more often than not. My "Names and Forms" fanfic concerns Minos, the man who became king of Crete after a white bull arose out of the sea and some (Plutarch I think, though not sure) said to be a foreigner and had problems with Poseidon, combined with Min the Egyptian god of fertility who had a white bull for his symbol, combined with Menes (the first king of Egypt who had both the bull and the hawk as symbols) and was sometimes identified with Horus the Elder (the sun-god of the hawkish form), combined with Hierax of the Maryandynians (who transformed into a hawk after getting into a fight with Poseidon).
Similarity of names, similarity of qualities (hawk, white bull, kingship, problems with Poseidon) led me then to combine character and decipher an origin for a character.
And now I started thinking about potential parentages for Peter Pan. And I started thinking about the Greek mythological figures first, mainly because I knew them best -- though at first I thought that I'd not first anything particularly fitting and I'd have to move to more obscure Celtic figures, before I found something that combined atleast two fitting qualities. After all Peter Pan has been a very England-related figure.
But here's the first two Greek deities that sprang to mind.
Dionysus came to mind first, because the arrogance and fearlessness of the boy reminded me of Dionysus -- and there's something drunken in Peter's whole world, and something heartless and ever-young in Dionysus. And one of Dionysus' characteristics was how he had young women follow him out of the cities, which brought vaguely to mind Peter luring Wendy away from her home...
But there I felt the similarities end, if they had even begun. Perhaps if the original Peter Pan was a bit more like the one in the recent (and wonderful and mostly faithful) "Peter Pan" movie, where he feels a bit more adult than in the original story, and his taking away Wendy feels just a bit more seductive -- but not even then. Dionysus is vengeful in his heartlessness, he's cruel and not playful.
But the next deity that sprang to mind was Hermes.
And the connections started flowing:
- Peter Pan left the crib at the age of 7 days to fly away. Hermes left from the first day to steal his brother's oxen.
- Peter Pan is famous for flying. And even though no god has shown a problem in doing so, Hermes is so famous for it that he must have really enjoyed doing it or be really talented in it.
- One of Hermes's first doings was invent the pipes. Peter Pan plays them.
- Personality-wise, both are tricksters.
But in truth the two clinchers were the following, and one of them hit me so strongly that it stunned me -- though the reason will probably be understood only by those well-familiar with Greek mythology. When skimming once again over the text of Peter Pan, I read:
"There were odd stories about him, as that when children died he went part of the way with them, so that they should not be frightened."
Peter Pan, a psychopomp. Just like Hermes.
The other clincher is the following: The *other* Pan. The goat-footed one. His father is supposed to be Hermes also.
That never really made very much sense to me, same way that it never really made sense to me that Persephone's father was Zeus -- it's one of those cases where you start thinking that the ancients didn't really have any reason to choose any one specific god as the father and so randomly picked a guy up for the parentage in question. In the terms of the Gargoyles universe, perhaps the father of Persephone belonged to some whole different pantheon that the Greeks had never even heard of at the time.
And in the case of Pan, one has to wonder (always in the terms of the Gargoyles universe) if the ancient Greeks got the right father but the wrong son. Perhaps Hermes wasn't the father of goat-footed Pan, perhaps he was the father of the trickster flying boy Pan, Peter Pan.
Or perhaps he gave the same name to two sons.
But either way, Peter's father is Hermes. That's *my* story anyway. Please don't have me committed. :-)