If you take a magnifying glass, and come right in on the CS stuff – yeah. They have a story. They have promise. I am not even decidedly anti-CS! They are fine, they are just not SF. But to me, it’s like those photomosaics – when you’re standing right up on it, yes, that is a photo of Aunt Myrtle and her beloved cat, but when you take ten steps back, hey, it’s really a fleck on Albert Einstein’s head! And that is where I think SF has the win as endgame. If you consider either potential pairing in insolation, they both have merit and potential to go forward. But Once is not a show of isolation. Once is an ensemble cast, where each thing someone does is affected by and continues to affect another. That’s a huge piece of the show, you know, the EQ enacted the curse to get back and Snow but it affects soooo many more people than that, it’s people they know, people they don’t know – people who don’t even exist yet (yes, Henry, I am looking at you.)
Welcome! It’s great to read your insights, and I totally agree with this point in particular.
To be fair to my above photomosaic points, zooming out, I guess I would say – the overall show – what is it? Emma’s fairy tale, right? So we have two potential stories here – Option A, Girl from crap background meets boy from crap background, they fall in love and restore faith in life. Get torn apart by a curse, faith gone, little family scattered in three different directions. Family reunited as curse is broken (and then torn asunder by a magic bean, curse repealing, re-cursing… you get my drift) work out issues and eventually live happily ever after. Option B, girl from crap background meets boy from crap background, they fall in love & restore faith. Get torn apart by curse, faith gone, family scattered, reunited with issues never fully resolved and then runs off with a pirate while boy meets demise. Which of those sounds like a fairy tale? (Frankly option B makes me want to curl up in my corner and bawl!!) Story-wise, I still do not see where the death of Neal makes the most sense
When you spell it out like that, it’s so clear that Emma and Neal are each other’s destiny and where the real-world fairytale is.
"That’s how you know you’ve really got a home. When you leave it, there’s this feeling that you can’t shake. You just miss it." Neal Cassidy