girlofprey

So Pennywise is It, but - without giving away too many spoilers - the point of It is that it's a shapeshifter, so Pennywise is also sort of a face that it puts on. It's the face that it puts on most regularly, and when it wants to lure children rather than scaring them, but when they get down to where It lives (in a physical sense), it's something slightly different, and acts slightly different - and it frequently puts on other faces to appeal to one of it's victim's specific fears, in which case it again often acts differently. And since It isn't real, it's something Stephen King made up, it also seems easier to split them up into Stephen's separate ideas in a sense, even though he probably mostly wrote them to be the same thing, and different aspects of the same thing. There's even a pretty good explanation for why Pennywise - when It is Pennywise - acts so differently from It, but it still sort of left me with the feeling that Pennywise, as an idea, was a lot more compelling than It - which was probably also the point of the book, in a way that was probably quite important really. Essentially, Pennywise comes off as a horror monster, and It is essentially a metaphor/embodiment of all fear - so you can have different reactions to them, depending on what you're looking for out of the story, or which parts you enjoy the most. And different adaptations handle it differently - the new IT film, for example, didn't really have It at all, they just stuck with Pennywise as the enemy, although they're apparently doing a sequel based on the adult parts of the book, so we'll see if they bring the other stuff up then.

I hope this helped, although it probably didn't help at all. It can appear in many different forms, and then has some sort of other existence entirely cosmologically. In terms of Pennywise and It though, it's probably easier to think of them in terms of God in Christianity - It is sort of the more abstract force like God, and Pennywise is sort of like Jesus, actually doing stuff and the one all the more specific, interesting stories are written about.

I love IT. I have a cold at the moment, so there's a chance this just won't make any sense entirely.