The characters belong to Barries' heirs and the rest to whoever hold the rights to the 2003 movie Peter Pan by P. J. Hogan.

THE DARK HALF

Neverland is a place where dreams dwell, dreams lost in the transition between childhood to adulthood.

There are different kinds of dreams and different kinds of desires: some are pure, borne from the drive to do good and those are the desires that usually are not put aside, then there are the dark desires and those people are ashamed of and are hidden in drawers along the unrealized dreams.

Peter Pan and the lost boys had run from their homes and from their families because they feared the responsibilities that came with age, they feared losing their dreams.

Hook instead was the sum of unspeakable dreams and shameful desires purged from a good man's mind and soul that had been given flesh. Hook hated that man for his rejection, he hated George Darling because he had ejected every grains of wickedness, malice and resentment from himself, creating that concentrated of evilness to which Wendy, in her stories, had given the name of James Hook: her father's alter ego, everything her kind and gentle father was not.

Hook's dismay at seeing George's children had been great. He was a captive of Neverland and its tyrannical ruler but most of all he was prisoner of his own loneliness. For a long time he had envied his better half for his freedom and the love of his family. He saw in Wendy, of the three children the dearest to George's heart, a symbol of hope: she was so similar to her mother that she could be for Hook the companion Mary was for George. With her by his side he would never be alone again, he would never be loveless again.

ELECTRA

Wendy knew nothing about the Oedipus's complex or about its female version: the Electra's one.

She loved dearly her mother and she was envious of the special attentions she reserved for her father. Wendy believed that what she felt for her father was contempt, she saw him as a weak and inapt man and therefore she couldn't, for the life of hers, understand why the fearsome pirate James Hook's description was a mirror of her father's looks. She couldn't understand why, when she was describing his eyes, the colour of forgets-me-not, it was her father's eyes that came to her mind. When she saw for the first time the pirate in the flesh, that night on top of the Black Castle, she wasn't afraid. That man, so similar to her father in looks but so different from him in everything else, had attracted her. The impulse to came out, touch and hug him, look into his eyes and confront them with her father's had been strong. She didn't do it however, she didn't dare to, but the desire to do so had filled her with confusion and shame.

Being with Peter was awesome but by Hook's side she had felt excited and safe at the same time. He was the father she wished she had: determinate, even if somehow sadistic, capable and able to elicit respect from his men. He listened to her storytelling as her father never had and had showered with the kind of attentions Mr Darling usually reserved for his wife. He had been nice to her: kneeling in front of her and drying her tears with his lacy handkerchief, he had hold her to his chest and it had been comforting, like been hold by her father's arms, even if his breath smelled of tobacco and her father didn't smoke. He kissed her dump cheeks and then her lips and it had been like he had been fruitless looking for her hidden kiss. His short scraping beard had prickled her skin and his breath had mingled with her own, but it had smelled of tobacco and liquor and she had swooned. She had never saw her father kiss her mother like that and therefore she and been confused and pushed him away. He had smiled and didn't kiss her again like that.

Only near the end she managed to untangle her father from Hook. The pirate had become too overbearing, too violent. When he had offered her a place on his ship as an alternative to the plank, he had brushed her lower lips with his fingers, a clear insinuation to the fact that accepting his offer she would be accepting more of his too intrusive and too intimate kisses. She had been unable to accept.

Now she observed her father with different eyes, looking for the cruel pirate captain on his visage and staring at his lips whenever he kissed his wife. Wendy couldn't prevent the sensation of the ghostly touch of these same lips on her own: she suspected she knew what kissing George Darling was like.

DONKEYSKIN

George Daring was a good man, he was usually so very mild-mannered and nice but in that moment he felt a burning jealousy and a devastating desperation consuming him. It was Wendy's wedding day and today, tonight, another man was going to take home his firstborn child, his only daughter. On that terrible day she ceased to be his and acquired another man's name. His Wendy was a radiant vision, her hidden kiss lingering on the right side of her smiling mouth. He saw her fiancé try, and fail, to catch it. Whoever was she holding it for?

She was beautiful in that moment, as they waited alone in the church antechamber for the nuptial march to begin. Wendy wore her mother's wedding dress and Gorge Darling's blurred sight made difficult for him to tell her apart from his wife. He was seeing Mary there, at his arm: her eyes, her smile and her kiss hidden on her rosy lips, the kiss belonging only to him. He was remembering their wedding day, how marvellous she had been, how happily he had helped her out of that very dress during their wedding night. That night another man was going to do the same for his Wendy. Suddenly she stopped smiling to him, her gaze become sad and thoughtful. It was as if she could read his mind and knew what he was thinking. Confidently she wrapped her arms around his neck and offered him her lips to kiss.

Mr Darling never learnt that in that moment of madness, lust and burning jealousy, his eyes turned from the colour of the forget-me-not to ruby red and that Wendy felt the sharp point of a hook dig in her back as they share that forbidden embrace and she verified that, indeed, her father and Captain Hook kissed the same.

The dark half is a book by Stephen King. It scared me so much when I was a child that I never managed to read past the first chapter and I never tried again.

Electra was the daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. Her mother, along with her lover, killed Electra father when he came back from Troy (Agamemnon had killed Electra's sister before leaving to go to war so personally I don't blame her mother). She was devastated and spent her days crying on her father's grave. When her brother Orestes came back seven years later she convinced him to kill their mother.

Donkeyskin: when I was a little child and I read for the first time this fairy tale I thought nothing of it. Only later, as a grown up, I realized how wrong it was for the king to want to marry his own daughter.

AN Before seeing the movie in 2003, I believed Hook to be Peter's father figure and the authority role model the "child" has to, figuratively speaking, kill to become an adult. Then Jason Isaacs portrayed Hook AND Mr Darling in the same movie and it was like I was seeing it for the first time. Wendy is the narrator who tells the tales of Peter and Hook, her imagination give them life and therefore Hook is her father figure. But I have to admit that it was that something of perverse in the relationship between Wendy and Hook in the 2003 movie that made me do the Wendy/Gorge Darling thing.