Reply To: Emma + Baelfire = Swanfire

Congrats Heather! That’s awesome news!

It’s an interesting question but it’s also wholly subjective, isn’t it, because everyone–including all the various writers–have their own interpretation of the characters themselves.

I agree. I also think that it’s a difficult question to answer without having the entire OUAT picture already presented for analysis. Right now we’re making judgments and evaluations based on what we know of the story thus far, which gives value to whenever A&E insist we need to see the whole story first before telling them if we like something or not. I can understand what they’re getting at, but at the same time one of the few things they have consistently shown us is that they DON’T remember their own story anymore, or have written the narrative in such a way that only the most dedicated viewer will remember specific events and plot points from episodes or even seasons ago. Things get brought up and forgotten, and when things are left hanging like that it instills little confidence that whatever is coming up will ever properly address big incidents, big deaths, in a way that makes us understand them and better than we do now. And if the answer to a question is “BECAUSE PLOT”, then I would argue they haven’t told the story very well in the first place.

PLOT has taken over honest character development which is why the characters are not only coming across as OOC but also as bipolar as they keep changing their minds each and every scene.

I feel like we’re missing all these little character development moments, things that would justify when characters start to do things we would otherwise consider to be OOC. What else happened that led up to Neal wanting to use Dark Magic? Was there a conversation he had with someone, or a previous course of action he had already been down that left THIS as his only course of action? We don’t get enough time with certain characters, and most of them don’t give us enough exposition for us to really know what they’re thinking vs. what we’re being shown visually to make up for it. Obviously A&E and the writing team think there are enough perfectly reasonable explanations for what the characters are doing, but they keep neglecting to SHOW US. We keep having to make it up for ourselves and it ruins out suspension of disbelief.

I have more to say on this, but it’s probably part of the meta I started hashing out last night.