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@The Watcher — the gif is quite possible the best thing ever. Seriously.
Some disparate thoughts:
I don’t think I’ve seen Hook since I was a kid, but for some weird reason I always misremember Hook as being played by Alan Rickman. Like, I know it’s Dustin Hoffman, but for some reason I keep thinking Rickman. Probably because of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves came out around the same year.
@RG — “Twilight effect” – that’s brilliant 🙂 I can see how this has 2 aspects that are particularly nefarious, at least from a feminist standpoint. First, it’s a story that masquerades as having a female character at its center, but is really about the male love interest’s manpain. In this sense, it’s insidious — Bella offers a blank slate on which the audience can project itself, but then one is boxed in through the story’s bait and switch tactics. Namely, that the male character is actually a villain, but since he’s the real “hero” of the narrative, the morality of the tale is twisted to accommodate his viewpoint.
Jessica Jones offers a conscious metacommentary on this. You can see Killgrave constantly attempt this re-centering — the ‘what about me and my pain’ — only to have Jessica systematically shoot these attempts down.
Re- actor’s hotness. What’s funny about this is that I think there are other components in the mix here. For example, with something like 50 Shades of Gray, even if the male lead weren’t actually attractive, the story would still have its fans (say, if Christian Gray were played by James Spader). However, if he weren’t super wealthy, it would be immediately denounced as abusive and creepy. Imagine Christian Gray as an unsuccessful bum living in his mother’s basement. I suspect the story would lose much of its alleged hotness factor, and get a whole lot of ewwws!
With OUAT and Colin, the hot honorable pirate trope is of course nothing new. Actually, it’s a classic — think Rafael Sabatini’s Captain Blood series (for which I admittedly have a very soft spot). I mean, that was written in the 1920s, if I’m not mistaken. But as others have mentioned here already, that sort of “pirate with a heart of gold” is not in fact how Hook is written. He’s every bit not the thing he claims to be, yet all the other characters seem to be taking his self-centering activities and efforts at face value. To reprise the Jessica Jones analogy, he’s a Killgrave type who is successful at spinning his view of the story.