this is super interesting – ruby-dear archive

mokeyokeplusfan:

disneyfairies2005-2007:

History of pixie hollow

Wait…. Portal? Separate place from Never Land? That pixie dust tree?

My guesses on what happened: Just as Ring of Belief was still a little delayed at the time and they were still seeing to change the Tinker Bell story but not to much at the moment so they released trailers and such, they decided to use some things from the movie In The Realm of Never Fairies, they decided that Ring of Belief would make a nice origin story and for some nice content in the book and in the Disney Fairies website (remember the screensaver and the same story) but I noticed that the girl on the Ring of Belief page looks similar to early concept art of Victoria? (the girl in the trailer) so and who knows when they were on in the movie while making the book… maybe this book took a lot of the lore from the film as this Tinker Bell would be pretty heavy with lore and Tinker Bell would be released and they hoped kids would be able to understand things better with the book if the movie were to ever release… I don’t know. ???????????????????

What happened in terms of the origin story: I think the Fairies relied to much on the system of belief and this lead to their destruction? Or maybe someone broke the ring for a second time… The question that needs to be asked is the timeline of events of the Tinker Bell movies.. what happened after they found Mother Dove and how does everything play out especially with the new timeline….

@asktheneverfairies what do you think?

It’s hard to tell what connection they would possibly have made from the film-era to the book-era, especially seeing as they were working with so many different plots for the Tinker Bell movie in those early stages.

With the depictions of the purple Pixie Dust Tree that existed in the early-version TB film and the Ring of Belief page from In the Realm of the Never Fairies, I also love to point out the illustration of the Pixie Dust Tree as seen in Tink, North of Never Land!

That book was published in 2007, so before the finished product TB came out in 2008. I wonder if they had already scrapped the original film by then but just used the illustration anyway. Just a year doesn’t seem like enough to produce a whole new animated film, unless…well, they were working on it for longer and Sharon Morrill’s version that she was having people work on concurrently was tossed, leaving behind remnants of her ideas in a couple of the early books but ultimately washed away.

I just don’t know how they were ever going to connect the books and movies if they start out with such different worlds, unless the history of Pixie Hollow as stated in the pics above was going to come into play in the movies, with those dark tones and plot. Were they actually going to show the battle destroyed the Pixie Dust Tree?

Otherwise, and this is also something I always need to remind myself before I get too frustrated–all the authors of such books in Disney franchises like the Fairies are hired/contracted to write a book or however many and then they come up with it entirely on their own Dr. Nnedi Okorafor discussed the DF book she wrote about Iridessa (Iridessa and the Secret of the Never Mine) on twitter and said the story was 100% her creation, Levine stated the books she wrote were entirely hers. so I believe the way it works is that it’s on individual authors to write what they want to for the series and Disney just to stamp approval and publish it.

All that basically boils down to is, in the early 2000s before the first Tinker Bell movie was fully developed/released, the authors they contracted (Gail Carson Levine, Kiki Thorpe, Laura Driscoll, etc) had to work with what Disney told them the series premise was back when they didn’t have a single solid plot for the story. They gave Levine suggestions for characters, but the only absolutes were that Tinker Bell had to be in it and Captain Hook couldn’t. (She put Captain Hook in anyway.) Her interpretation of Never fairies drew a lot of inspiration from James Barrie’s work and she incorporated the importance of belief, but ultimately her Fairy Haven is her won creation.

I think the rest of the authors hired after her had to follow the example she’d set up with her Fairy Haven (but by that time perhaps Disney had decided it’s definitely called Pixie Hollow, so that’s why only Levine used “Fairy Haven” and the rest Pixie Hollow.)

I think all the books up to Silvermist and the Ladybug Curse can be pointed to as belonging to the era before DF authors knew exactly what the movie characters were going to be like. Levine had made up these fantastic personalities for characters like Rani, Prilla, Beck, Dulcie, etc. so they all used the same characters and expanded on what she did while the movie team was still working on who Fawn, Silvermist, Rosetta and Iridessa were. Vidia doesn’t seem to factor into the “early version” plot we’re discussing, so they might have added her to the changed vision of the story some point after Levine’s 2005 book since she made such a good antagonist for Tink.

Anyway, Silvermist in Silvermist and the Ladybug Curse is shown with blue eyes and her original dress style which you can see her in the deleted scenes and pixie preview from the early version. If the illustrators at that time were working with a blue-eyed Silvermist concepts, they had to be using the original character models.

I do have a point!!! I’m coming to it….now. The movies and books were possibly never supposed to be connected, otherwise Disney would have set up some kind of guidelines for the authors they contracted to follow. They likely just wanted books to publish and get some attention/fans to the series before the Tinker Bell movie came out, so they let Levine do her thing, and when she was done doing her thing the other authors followed her footsteps and kept going with the Pixie Hollow she had invented, while the movie crew did its own thing and kept on with their version.

Eventually the authors and illustrators could see the movies and work with those character personalities (Iridessa, Lost at Sea marks the true beginning of that for me, because Fawn and the Mysterious Trickster and Rosetta’s Daring Day exist in some nebulous betwixt-and-between state IMO) but of course they’d already been too deep in the book-universe of Pixie Hollow so it remains.

I got very off-topic, didn’t I? The ring of belief plot itself, it honestly just confuses me in a way that I understand why it was nixed, even if I think it could have made for an interesting film. If it had been explained HOW Tink broke the ring of belief, I wouldn’t mind and I would find it easier to talk about the plot itself. With the ring itself being described as such an abstract/symbolic thing, I don’t know how Tink could “break” it.

Ring of belief = fairies keep children’s belief/imagination alive, children keep fairies alive. How can Tink single-handedly break that chain? What could she do that causes children to stop believing in fairies en masse, or does she do something that prevents fairies from being able to reach the mainland to make kids believe? How do Peter and Hook factor into it?

We can get back to all this, for now I’ve rambled too much.