Reply To: Emma + Baelfire = Swanfire

[textbookone]

To me it still feels like Hook doesn’t really know Emma. He’s always making reference to her being The Savior, and a number of other superficial titles and things that are not Emma at her core. He is convinced that they are kindred spirits and that they understand each other on some deep, profound level, but I still feel like that’s just his observational skills skewing the information he’s gleaned in the direction that he wants it to go. He thinks he knows her struggles, but has he ever asked her about them? Have they ever actually had a deep conversation where they get to know the heart of each other? Yes, you can get a lot from people’s actions and body language, but how deep can you really get from just watching (and making lewd, suggestive comments every 5 minutes)?

I agree completely that Hook has an obsessive personality. I would assume that it’s likely the thing that’s driven him his entire life and quite possibly has kept him alive in more than one situation. Without having a driving force like that he wouldn’t have found a way to stay alive for so long, he wouldn’t have as much motivation to get himself out of Neverland and to make some of the deals he has. Without something to obsess over life probably has no meaning and he would be forced to actually look internally and ask “What have I done with my life? What was it all for?”. I feel like he started to do that ever so slightly at the end of season 2 and into the beginning of Neverland, but then Emma came in as a big shiny distraction, critical character analysis ceased completely, and obsession took over again. For without it, life has no meaning.

This whole thing reeks of the superficial nature of most fairytale romances. Girl sees boy from across a room/boy sees pretty girl sleeping under a curse, both are smitten, one kiss decided that they should be together forever. Romances in fairy tales has almost always been perfect examples of infatuation, obsession, and pedestal raising, but very rarely are they rooted in reality, with the idea of where does the couple go after the “Happily Ever After”. What I had always loved about OUaT was it’s drive to show us more depth to the stereotypical fairy tale relationships, to show us that depth the the original texts lack. Sometimes they have succeeded (Snow and Charming) and sometimes not so much (Cinderella and Thomas, though there was more depth shown to their SB tale than in EF).

With Hook and Emma I feel like they’re backtracking, showing us instead an obsessed pirate with an idealized version of who Emma is. I will admit that by now Hook and Emma have spent much more time together, so they probably at least know each other a lot better now than when this whole things started, but there are still too many secrets and lies to even consider this being a healthy, functional relationship. Perhaps the situation makes it impossible for a relationship like that to grow, and it needs to be unhealthy for each party to realize that this isn’t what they want, but that there’s enough substance here to work on making better, but I don’t know. If A&E want to convince me that there is reality to the things happening, and that it is the thread that hold everything together, they need to do a lot more work to convince me that Hook and Emma could ever be a real, functional, healthy relationship where each party gets enough of what they want and they need to balance each other out.

People are saying that Hook has changed for Emma, but that is an immediate hallmark of an unhealthy relationship. When people change for another person they are often denying who they actually are. It can breed resentment and anger when the other person is either unsatisfied (feeling like they’ve changed so much, but their partner still isn’t happy), or betrayed (when it seems like the partner hasn’t tried to accommodate for them at all). I’ve been in those kinds of relationships, and I’ve seen them happen to other people. No one is ever happy in the end. If change is going to occur it needs to be at someones own choice, because they want to be a better person themselves, and not because someone is trying to get another person’s attention, or to prove that they can be the mate that they think another person wants. Maybe that’s what Hook is actually doing, either consciously or subconsciously, but there is a certain dishonesty to it that bothers me, and I have a really hard time believing that anything True Love related could exist or be created with a foundation like that.

I have a whole separate thing related to this for Swanfire, but I’ve somehow been typing this for 15 minutes and I need to get ready for work. I’ll try and think through my points on the subway and give you the back half later today.