I'd forgotten that he describes Rilian as looking like Hamlet, all in black!
The main reason I say that about C.S. Lewis not knowing what to do with the adult Peter is that Peter is the only one of the Pevensies who doesn't appear on stage in HHB. It's possible that the plot just doesn't require him, especially since Edmund is there to take on on the heroic warrior role, which does make for better continuity with the first half of the book, but I tend to think there's more to it than that. And then in TLB Peter comes across to me as very flat and generically noble. Many of the characters are pretty flat in that book, but Lucy starts seeming a lot more like Lucy when they get to the episode with the Dwarfs refusing to be taken in. Possibly I'm also influenced by the Baynes illustration of Tirian peeking through the stable door with Peter standing nearby looking like Superman. (I think a lot of my visual ideas about Narnia come from Baynes, which is why I cannot see Peter as blond! Of course she also draws Lucy with dark hair, in direct contradiction to her description in the books, so I'm not sure why I take Peter's dark hair as canonical.)
I've done some rather awful things to Peter in my own fanfic, the worst one being to place him at the liberation of Bergen-Belsen. I'm not sure why, except that I always feel the impulse to shake him up somehow.
Re: head-canon collision
The main reason I say that about C.S. Lewis not knowing what to do with the adult Peter is that Peter is the only one of the Pevensies who doesn't appear on stage in HHB. It's possible that the plot just doesn't require him, especially since Edmund is there to take on on the heroic warrior role, which does make for better continuity with the first half of the book, but I tend to think there's more to it than that. And then in TLB Peter comes across to me as very flat and generically noble. Many of the characters are pretty flat in that book, but Lucy starts seeming a lot more like Lucy when they get to the episode with the Dwarfs refusing to be taken in. Possibly I'm also influenced by the Baynes illustration of Tirian peeking through the stable door with Peter standing nearby looking like Superman. (I think a lot of my visual ideas about Narnia come from Baynes, which is why I cannot see Peter as blond! Of course she also draws Lucy with dark hair, in direct contradiction to her description in the books, so I'm not sure why I take Peter's dark hair as canonical.)
I've done some rather awful things to Peter in my own fanfic, the worst one being to place him at the liberation of Bergen-Belsen. I'm not sure why, except that I always feel the impulse to shake him up somehow.