Subject: Executive meddling and the stuff stars are made of
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Posted on: 2019-10-01 20:27:00 UTC

I think you're correct about executive meddling.

Mind, I actually liked KK as a young'un, but... uh... yeah, you're 100% right, it isn't... great. It wasn't terrible, but it certainly isn't a paragon of anything. I wouldn't want to revisit it now.

So why do I suspect executive meddling having something to do with it? Well, maybe it's my own bias but I just want to think that Pearson's better than this. Before he started churning out Kingdom Keepers, he teamed up with Dave Barry and wrote a book series that I actually do remember fondly. And that series was Peter and the Starcatchers. Not to be confused with Peter and the Starcatcher, the truly abysmal stage adaptation that ruined everything that made the original great and threw in a random, terrible, vaguely transphobic gag right at the intermission that cheapened the whole experience even more than it had already been cheapened by the many, many, many horrible problems with it.

No, the books were actually good.

For those of you that are unaware, Peter and the Starcatchers begins as a retelling of the Peter Pan mythos, exploring the origin of Peter, the Lost Boys, and the various other inhabitants of Neverland. But it really does have a personality all its own. The first book is... well, it's good, but it's hardly the best. It introduces us to Peter, his friends and the broader cast, as they become the people they're going to be later on (at the start, they're just ordinary orphans...), as well as the magical Starstuff that grants people strange powers and does... other things.

But the books really get good later on, as with Peter and company well-established, the series gives itself license to go in all manner of outlandish directions, starting with taking the traditional Peter Pan element of shadow theft and making it truly, genuinely scary. We get a suitably cosmic villain, a sense of the wider universe, and a whole lot of lighthearted humor and wacky adventures to lighten the mood. The fourth book takes full advantage of Peter's eternal childhood to give us a (relatively) short timeskip, providing a real sense of just how hard it will be as everyone around him grows up and giving the series as a whole a perfect send-off.

The less said about the sequel series, the better...

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