I hate to dredge this up so many posts later, but I just want to clarify my words this morning and where I was coming from. First of all, Marty, I owe you an apology. I went back and looked at some older posts and did not find one anywhere that said that you hated Neal. I should not have put those words in your mouth, and I am sorry for doing so. I do want to revisit where I got that impression, though.
marty mcfly said:
I really didn’t come here to spew bad things about a great character, this is the only thread I dare post in, BECAUSE I probably feel exactly as you do. doesn’t that say something?
Marty, I say this in kindness – I can’t know what your feelings are on the matter. All I can go on are your posts. There are a couple of posts that you’ve made that have stuck out to me, and felt very much as if they were out of place in this thread. We are here as a ship thread; for those of us who feel the Emma-Neal relationship is a central heartblood of the Once show and that the two of them belong together. Some of us love other characters – Rumple, Snow, August, whatever – and I think we all try to be tolerant of each other. But it’s not unreasonable to expect to come here and find people who love Emma, love Neal, and love SF. We may express displeasure with them, but I think when you read that displeasure from people who have expressed sufficient love, it is easier to take it in the manner which it is intended. Displeasure, spoken in love, as it would be from a parent, comes from a place of first establishing the love.
I want to post a couple of things you’ve said, and I sincerely hope it can be taken not as an attack but as a manner of understanding *why* it is that I (and possibly others) have a hard time reading your criticism as displeasure-in-love. I bolded the parts that are most relevent to me, but quoted longer excerpts to hopefully put them in context. The first one is from April 2, less than a month ago –
I was never a “SwanFire” but I loved the STORY the way Rumple sacrificed everything in his life, name, soul, life, dignity, EVERYTHING for this boy long before he was even born…
I was the one to always want someone (Emma, maybe) to smack Neal upside the head and tell him to stop emotionally abusing his poor father. I was mad at Bea/Neal, yes I was, but not mad enough to want him DEAD!!!
And the second from April 11, so even more recent than that –
First of all to make it clear: I AM NOT A NEAL FAN. I never was a Neal fan, I wanted to smack him upside the head with a harry potter book a couple of times. I am a very big Rumple fan, though, and according to me, (I know some people disagree) Rumple has been a true hero from the beginning. From the time he was happily married to Milah, having earned himself a better name despite having grown up at the shadow of his coward father.
In a SwanFire thread, where we love Emma, love Neal, and love them together – how could we, as fans, not feel attacked by those comments? It’s as if I walked into someone’s home and said, “I am not a fan of your dog. He ate my shoes. But I am criticizing him in love!” Your posts, most of the posts throughout aftermath of Neal’s death, play out that you are a Rumple fan who is devastated for him to lose his son. That is totally understandable! I am not an uber-fan of Rumple, and I *am* devastated for him to lose his son. 300 years he looked for that boy! But, that boy spent 300 years feeling abandoned by his father. He didn’t know that his Dad spent 300 years trying to find him, he just spent 300 years feeling, “I wasn’t important enough to him,” and how can you not have immense sympathy for that? It’s not emotional abuse to react to actions someone has taken towards you. I have immense sympathy for Rumple’s decisions, as well – the show has done a brilliant job of explaining his motivations and his fears. I am in the camp (perhaps a bizarre camp) that I DO feel everything Rumple has done has been for the love of his son, while still feeling that the vast majority of Neal’s actions are reasonable (315 excepted.) I am also in the camp that feels not all collateral damage is justified, even if the initial actions are out of love for someone. No one, not a single anyone, has felt the force of that collateral damage stronger than Bae and his family – his love, and his son. Am I angry with Rumple? No, not really. But here, in this thread, my focus is the SF family. So just like I wouldn’t go into a Rumbelle thread and say, “I really like Rumple, I sympathize with him, I comprehend the story they are trying to tell with him and Belle and like both characters but they just don’t do it for me,” it frustrates me when people come into a SF thread in the midst of our grief and say things like, “I was never a SwanFire” or “I AM NOT A NEAL FAN.” Those are incredibly hurtful things to say to people who are hurting.
The ironic thing is that I am pretty thick skinned. But there are some in this thread who see a LOT of themselves in these characters and feel this loss as very, very personal. In the mere six weeks we have been here I have gotten to know some of these ladies quite well and when you walk into their “home” and start spewing about how you are not a Neal fan and want to smack him, they take that personally. When you identify with a character – if you are someone who has been abandoned, had life sh*t on you and never had something go your way – that’s as good as saying, “Your struggle is trivial and you should be smacked. The people who hurt you meant well, so your pain doesn’t matter.” I know you don’t *intend* for your posts to come off that way, but I am striving to explain how they *do* come off.
Here, in THIS thread, it should be our safe place. You are right that there is nowhere else to mourn Neal! But, here, we mourn Neal for NEAL, not for Rumple’s loss. Often, I read your posts that you want to mourn Rumple’s loss. That mourning is not irrelevent! It just comes across as insensitive in this thread, where you have stated you’re not a fan of the ship or of one of the characters in the ship.
Does it make sense to you why – as a SF fan who literally goes NOWHERE else in this fandom – I would feel attacked by your comments? We react to people based on our past bias of them, based on things they have done in the past. I am going to react differently to a stranger holding a door for me and saying “hi” in the grocery than I am an old friend, or a former stalker, you know what I mean? Our prior interactions determine our current reactions.
I have no issue if you want to post here – but I guess my hope for you (and for any non-SF fan who wants to post in here) is that you really take a step back and think about how it will be interpreted by those of us whose “home” this is. We have been told by the greater fandom, and to some degree the show 1) good riddence, 2) Neal is crap and deserved to die, 3) SF is ridiculous and far lesser than CS, 4) we are delusional 5) being kind, loving and sacrificial makes you a villain and 6) life sucks and then you die. Furthermore, some of us are suffering from whiplash, being told that history doesn’t matter, the story they laid out doesn’t matter, the central characters are no longer important. My wish is that anyone who wants to post in here is respectful of the fact that we are very much in reactionary mode, and be cautious of word choices and making sure criticisms in love are spoken IN LOVE, not as accusations. I know you apologized to RG this morning, and I appreciate that. No one deserves to be criticized for their opinions on the show, and I have no problem with varying opinions… just hoping that people who chose to enter a ship thread can be respectful of the ship and shippers within.
Hope this all makes sense. 🙂 -DSB
Cause this story needs some mending & a better happy ending...