Reply To: Emma + Baelfire = Swanfire

[kfchimera]

So much to catch up on, none of it inspiring too much hope, mainly because a lot of my doom comes from my awareness of things writers say about Hollywood.  There is a reason the screenwriters for the Hobbit chose to invent Tauriel, bring in Legolas and forgo  the prosthetics for some of the dwarves, when none of the original story had a romantic triangle in the Hobbit like that.  Jackson and Boyans are pretty geeky, reverent almost to Tolkein but at the end of the day what makes a good movie cinematically,  and commercially are not always what makes a good story in a book.

There is an article I saw about fan pandering, will have to link another time but though it did not mention OUAT, feels spot on about this show.  A&E want to keep their jobs, and jobs for all their staff, that is what they want.  Of course they choose to write things in various ways, but if there is debate in the writers room, and room for creativity, if they had to sit down with MRJ when they figured out where it was “going to go” , it sounds to me they did not know it would go to this place when they made him a regular.  It also seems from the backtracking on no flashbacks to maybe, cannot say and that with how time works on the show, that maybe, that they are at least aware that there is a divide in the fandom, not consensus that Neal dying was just a totally great thing in this story of hope and second chances.

I want them to understand that, regardless of what they choose to do, want to write or say,  NOW,that my interpretation is based very much on things they themselves said  at earlier points in time, things they must have known but did not say so it feels like they either lied or changed their mind,  finally the things they cut out.  I know they radically reinvent things like Runple’s dad, as it is about shock and  twists, misleading turns, and devoting screen time to characters and events that apparently we should just ignore  since the characters do.

Hook getting a wardrobe change does not bother me overly much, nor finding a new moniker for him.  Even Cora got a power  suit in S B, and we do not refer to her exclusively as Queen of Hearts, nor to The Dark One, Or The Evil Queen, nor any other character by their evil Archetype name.  Trouble is Killian was imbued by some in  the fandom  with a meaning of a romance novel pirate personality, that strips the character of some complexity and his flaws.

Do the character flaws matter?   They did not in S3 but perhaps the next shock could be that suddenly they do.  I am not hoping for that sudden bad writing flip flop, that I think inevitably would come from making characters care about things they previously expressed  no worries over, danced around, or did not discuss when it would have made more sense to discuss.  I can call Colin’s character Jones rather than imply positives he has not earned, nor negatives he in part did overcome (he is not a anything for revenge, evil lackey for hire no questions asked type right now, so that is growth, but it feels like they gain a lot of that by showing us more unscrupulous acts in the past to say see how much better he is now, rather than writing him as acting in clearly more noble ways. ) Slurpeez pointed out the scenes that are offputting, but I do not assume the writers mean to do anything with it, as they are too caught up in writing a villain fairytale.  I guess I will believe that A and E think virtues matter when they write like it does, but their choices for Neal, Graham and even last-minute redemption for August suggest not so much.  If their story is like Regina said about Joanna being murdred by Cora, see being good gets you nowhere–the key is to be bad but convince people, even yourself, that you want to be good so they forgive anything you do, even if you keep doing it, then it is a story I find disturbing.