Peter Panoddhio – Introduction
- CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR...Books One and Three
God Complexity
One advantage of playing god as an author is that you get to exact revenge by lampooning characters for who you have a historic dislike.
As an example, I present into evidence Peter Panoddhio: Portmanteau character. Bounty hunter. Abomination.
There many levels to my loathing for Panoddhio. Three to be exact since he’s a mashup of Peter Pan, Enid Blyton’s Noddy, and Pinocchio.
Why do I despise each of these characters? Let me count the ways.
The Ways Counted
Peter Pan seduces the Darling children with magic and lures them away from the safety of their family to a hostile, racist dystopia where their lives are constantly at risk. Pan himself refuses to grow up and encourages a gang of other young boys to do the same. It’s basically Lord of the Flies where the lord actually can fly.
Some see him as an exuberant symbol of carefree youth. I see a selfish, careless brat with a sociopathic aversion to responsibility. And don’t even get me started on his relationship with Tinkerbell. Too late, I already started!
Tinkerbell desires Peter romantically and views Wendy as her romantic rival. Tinkerbell is an adult fairy. And Peter Pan is a boy. So I repeat, Tinkerbell desires Peter romantically and views Wendy as her romantic rival.
I have never seen the appeal of Peter Pan. The entire story is…very troubling.
Pinocchio is a tedious, bland, wooden golem until he learns lessons which make him a slightly less tedious, bland, flesh golem. To be fair, he is conjured into existence so it’s his creator who is the real villain here, but Frankenstein’s monster is still a monster so…
Noddy is a Pinocchio-knockoff who fluctuates between irritating and exceptionally irritating by honking his car horn as he drives around Toyland. He wears a hat with a bell on it, which is what jesters did. And jesters are a lot like clowns. And clowns are awful. That’s not an opinion, it is a fact.
Character Assassination
Two of Panoddhio’s component parts—Noddy and Pinocchio—are made of wood, so it made sense that Pannodhio would be a wooden puppet. I am not a fan of wooden puppets, marionettes in general, ventriloquist’s dummies, or anything wooden with a human face, so I see a lot of my disgust for all these things channelled into the Panoddhio character.
As I write this piece I now have those animatronic dolls from the Disneyland It’s a Small World ride also in my head. They just stand there, day after day, nodding their heads, their dead eyes staring at you as you sail past, singing that cloying ditty over and over and over. So I guarantee there’s an element of them in Panoddhio also.
Panoddhio’s bounty hunter occupation was a natural extension of Peter Pan’s temptation of the Darling children and his modus operandi is lifted directly from that story.
Pannodhio suffers a particularly gruesome fate. That’s partly because City of Sweet Sorrow is a horror story and partly because of how much I loathe his component characters. Which as you can tell from the above is a lot.
Bonus Round
Pannodhio’s Lost Toys crew is a mash-up of his Lost Boys, and the Island of Misfit Toys from the classic Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer Christmas movie – which itself is full of horrors that I shouldn’t need to explain. Not Rudolph himself, of course, he’s a wonderful character so don’t worry, if I use him for anything I’ll be respectful. But everything else in that atrocity is fair game.
