obisgirl, I know we’re just gonna have to agree to disagree on this topic, so I’m not posting this in an attempt to change your mind, simply to present the opposite viewpoint. 🙂
@obisgirl wrote:
When you love someone you fight for them, no matter what.
Their situation is more complicated than that. The fate of 1000s of people rested on Emma’s shoulders. Neal was considering all of them, before himself. It’s similar to how he sacrificed himself to save the Darling boys.
Neal was ready to leave her the moment he knew he could end up in jail, it took Emma to argue and to tell him she loved him to make him stay.
He didn’t want her to get in trouble, and felt she’d be better off without him. Again, he was thinking of her safety before thinking of his personal wants.
And yet Neal took the deal August proposed him, he left her high and dry in her happiness bubble, Neal offered her a home, he promised her Tallahassee.
There is nothing worse, than giving someone high expectation, high hopes and then shatter them to pieces. Neal broke Emma, he crushed her heart.
They were both dreamers, who had had a glimpse of happiness for the first time in a long time. Lofty dreams of happy endings aren’t guaranteed. Crap happens that’s beyond your control, and crap happened to the two of them. Crap happens to us all. I was married once and thought it would last forever. But crap happens to mess stuff up. That’s just life. Neal can hardly be held responsible for having hoped for the best during the brief time they were happy together and both felt invincible. He couldn’t predict the future.
“He left her go to jail so she could fulfill her destiny ” this is not a valid argument, Neal was afraid to be reunited with his father, he didn’t want to go back to him. He chose himself over Emma. He didn’t leave her for her greatest goods, but for himself. He even admitted that he ran because he was afraid of his dad. He wasn’t running to allow Emma to fulfill her destiny. He ran because of his dad. Knowing Neal’s background now as Baelfire, he could have stayed and helped her, fought August but he didn’t.
If Emma fulfilled her destiny, then that meant that Rumple would achieve his goal of finding Neal. If Neal was just scared of being reunited with his father, he would have just stayed with Emma, thus screwing up her breaking of the curse. If Emma didn’t achieve that, then Neal could rest easy that Rumple would never find him. Instead, he set her on the path towards getting the job done. Ten years down the track, the moment was finally upon him where his father was coming for him, and yes, he was scared. Given his complicated history with his father, I personally can’t blame him for having been freaking out of his ever loving mind.
How many prisons for ladies exist in Phoenix? If Neal wanted to find Emma he could have found her. Within the ten-eleven years they were apart.
He had already committed to sacrificing being with her for the greater good. Even if he believed that to be the right thing to do, that doesn’t mean he stopped wanting to be with her, and stopped wishing they could be together. But he quite understandably didn’t think he’d have much of a chance of explaining the situation and being forgiven. We’ve seen how much convincing it took for Henry to get Emma to believe. Why on Earth would Neal expect that Emma would believe him if he told her the truth?
Back To The Future III was on here last night, so this parallel is fresh in my mind. When Doc goes to tell Clara that he’s leaving, she demands to know the truth. So he tells her that he’s from the future and built a time machine and has to take it back to the year 1985. Her reaction is to tell him how cruel it was for him to play with her emotions like that and he should have just told her the truth, that he didn’t really love her. Then she slams the door in his face. That’s how it would have gone down if Neal had tried to track Emma down at any point during those 10 years. It would not have worked out, and she’d have just ended up hating him more than he believed she already did.
When he received that postcard from August, he could have gone to SB, and tried to apologize to Emma. But Neal never came back. He was happily engaged to Tamara and it was all he wanted: He didn’t want Emma, he didn’t need her.
Neal was in denial. He’d known for 10 years that the day was coming when he’d have a chance to explain things to Emma and hopefully get back together. Suddenly, that day was about to arrive. He’d convinced himself she wouldn’t forgive him. He was scared to face her, which IMO is a perfectly understandable emotion. Then along came Tamara, and you know that she worked all the moves to manipulate Neal to sink her claws into him, because that was her mission. And being with her was easy for Neal. It meant he had an excuse to not have to try again with Emma, and fail, and hurt her all over again. It was easier this way. I’m not saying that was the right choice for him to make, but I totally understand why he made it, because often in life, we all choose what appears to be the easier path.
In Manhattan, Emma had to run after him to catch him, cause Neal was still running away from her and when she did, Neal yelled at her, (it’s almost if he doesn’t call her names) and he told her that if he had known about her he would never have approached her.
Do you realize how rude it is to say that? Emma needed to be told she did matter to him, that she meant something but Neal laughed at her, broke her heart again.
Why not apologizing back then? Why not telling her she did matter to him?
He didn’t know who she was when they were running, only discovered that once they’d stopped. Then he stopped running, and invited her to sit down and talk. As for telling her he never would have gone near her, he’s just saying that it would have saved both of them a helluva lot of heartbreak if they’d never got together, and that’s a fair statement IMO.
When Neal met his son, it was cute, okay, but when Emma warned him about not breaking his heart the way he had broken hers, Neal’s reaction was to laugh at her. Okay it could be because he was nervous and yet, at the bar, Neal could have apologized but he didn’t.
He didn’t outright laugh at her. It was a half laugh half sigh that said, “Oh snap, you got me there,” right before he commented how they’re all messed up, and they can’t let Henry end up the same way.
Then, there’s looking back to the event post-Manhattan. Remember, how we all hated how Henry treated Emma after he found out that Neal, his bio-dad was alive? All that time together and Neal never sat Henry down and explained to him that Emma was trying to protect him and never meant to lie and hurt him? ‘Cause that would have been the fatherly thing to do, to call him out on his rudeness towards his mom. It never happened.
I personally never hated Henry for how he treated Emma, because I thought it was a natural reaction for the kid to be pissed at being lied to…again…by one of his mothers…the one he’d actually trusted.
We don’t know that a conversation like that didn’t happen off screen, but even if it didn’t, I can’t fault Neal for it, because he’s known Henry for all of a few weeks and is still getting to know him, so is still in, “fun dad” mode as opposed to, “disciplinarian”. I have a close friend, and her four kids call me their Aunty, but I don’t feel like I have the authority to tell them off or correct them on major issues, because it’s not my place, and not having kids myself, I don’t wanna do or say the wrong thing that may unintentionally go against what their parents would say. This is similar to how I see Neal’s position when he was still getting to know Henry.
Neal keeps mocking her, trying to get a jealous reaction from Emma. It’s not only childish, it’s really mean. Emma is wounded because he found Tallahassee with someone else, because he moved on and it’s like Neal is trying to prove to her that he’s over her now. It’s mean, rude and unacceptable.
He never believed her, in her aptitudes, her skills, everything that makes her Emma. He doubts her, he never believes her and treats her like a child. Yes, Emma’s super power doesn’t work sometimes but come on, she was spot on about Tamara the whole time and it wasn’t jealousy or had nothing to do with wanting to get back together with her ex.
I’ve never considered him mocking her as a means to belittle her. Their situation is very emotionally complex, and he’d been thrown for a loop and wasn’t sure how to react, so he was slightly on the defensive, as a means of keeping his true feelings bottled up, because if he didn’t, it’d spell emotional upheaval and heartbreak for everyone involved, including Tamara, who he had no ill will for at that time.
Neal never showed any interest about getting back with Emma, never. He took him a long time to apologize, and I think it wasn’t enough, I saw it like a tentative to calm her down, because she was after Tamara.
IMO, his apology was 100% genuine.
Neal wanted to marry Tamara all along, it doesn’t matter if she was evil or not, Neal did love her, he did want to marry her and he did find his Tallahassee with her.
Neal wanted to believe that he would be happy with Tamara. She was a no magical strings attached, regular, real world girl, and she made him happy. He hasn’t had many chances at happy in is life, and any time he did, magic would intervene to rip it apart. So Tamara was a safe option. But in his heart of hearts, Emma is the one he’s always wanted to be with.