Can someone explain Pennywise to me?

[mr friendly guy]

I have seen a few Stephen King adaptations, eg the original and modern Carrie, some sequel of Firestarter, the Tommy Knockers. The only King work I read was the Dark Half. Before seeing the 2017 movie, I had very little knowledge of King's novel "It," of which the titular character takes the form of the clown Pennywise.

Now according to wiki, Pennywise has an arch enemy, which is a giant turtle who created our universe. Oooookay. So he is universal level of power but gets beaten by a bunch of kids with metal rods and baseball bats. What?

[Khaat]

From the wiki http://stephenking.wikia.com/wiki/It_(creature)

Throughout the novel It, some events are described through It's point of view. It describes itself as the "superior" being, with the Turtle as someone "close to It's superiority" and humans as mere "toys." It states that it prefers to kill and devour children, not by nature, but rather because children's fears are easier to manipulate and then interpret into a physical form. Thus children are easier to fill with terror, which It says is akin to salting the meat.

It is continually surprised by the Losers' victories over it and near the end, It begins to question if It is not as superior as it had once thought. However, It doesn't believe that the individual children are strong enough to defeat it. Only with "the Other" working through them as a group does It believe they can harm it.

[Solauren]

Simply put: In human terms, Pennywise is a deluded psychopath.

[NeoGoomba]

And, at least in the film, his power is derived from fear, hence why he targets children. Once that fear is gone, though, he becomes vulnerable. But he's still capable of some wild shit against "fearless" opponents or whatever.

[Q99]

It's a being from outside our dimension who comes to feed in our world, and it's true form is called the 'Deadlights,' which can't naturally exist in our world (so to an extent, it's a 'powerful being limited by having to be here').

In the cosmic sense, Pennywise plays a very long game- consumption vs the turtle's creation (or at least that's how Pennywise sees it), which says to me that things would not stop at the occasional waking to kill large numbers, but it's scope would expand. So despite being ancient in our eyes it's still very early in it's process.

Pennywise is defeatable because in our world it takes forms, and with those forms comes the weaknesses of said forms (i.e. a werewolf vulnerable to silver, and so on), and it doesn't understand humans. That and it's to a large extent a mental entity, so the emotions of those who face it are very key, as we see in their power of belief.

Finally, above both Turtle and Pennywise/It is Gan, another entity who plays a soft hand in things, and empowers the Losers through their belief. Or to put it another way, the Loser's actions, especially their emotional content, allowed Gan's power to enter them and do the job.

So there's a direct sense of what happened, the mental sense (their mindset and belief vs fear), and the cosmic sense of Gan and the Turtle using humans, which It views as insignificant, as an unexpected weapon to kill Pennywise.

It's sort of Lord of the Rings esque. Just as Sauron could never conceive of a Hobbit being behind his downfall, similarly Pennywise saw no threat from that angle til it was too late, but it was coming from the angle of the victims that allowed them to win, and allowed the Turtle and Gan to kill (or at least kill part of- Dark Tower indicates Pennywise still exists, but lost much) Pennywise without a cosmic throwdown.

There's a similar thing in other King books, where evil has overt power, and good opposes it indirectly.

[Lost Soal]

Both adaptations make a rather large change in that Pennywise Is not defeated by physical force in the books but by shamanic battles which involved grabbing/biting his tongue and following it to his actual source, during which they actually come across the Turtle. Even that might only have worked because they believed it would, it's been a long time since I read It so my recollections aren't perfect but the subjective and somewhat confusing nature of the final fights are probably why they were changed in both adaptations.

[JLTucker]

Is the book worth reading? I didn't like either of the adaptations, especially the new one, but the characters are interesting enough to me that I want to know more.

[mr friendly guy]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Alp_a88 ... 0gTV4wgptm

This review tells you the difference between the 1153 page book and the adaptation in the 90s. The broad story is the same but there are quite a few things different in the book which doesn't really interest me much. Such as the Losers having sex when they were still 12 year olds.

[Elheru Aran]

I liked the book, but then I'm capable of reading a big-ass book in a few days (given time to do so), so that isn't an issue for me.

As to the content... quite honestly, once you take away the stuff they covered in the 90s miniseries and the 2017 movie, mostly what you get is extra background on the main characters, vague Kingian metaphysics, and that creepy as hell sex scene? It's mostly just padding because my god the guy needs an editor SO bad.

[GuppyShark]

Hah, Stephen King is the poster child for "So big a name the editors just let him do whatever".

[Agent Fisher]

Hah, Stephen King is the poster child for "So big a name the editors just let him do whatever".