Found an awesome meta from ladyhacksaway on tumblr and said I would post the entire thing because it’s flawless.
Hi, i’m one of your followers that kind of ships both CS and SF. I get conflicting reports from both sides on exactly what Emma meant by what she said in the cave – CSers say she wants to move on, while SFers say that’s not what she said, that she loves him and needs time to get over the pain. I’d love some of your thoughts on what she said to him, if you’d care to share 🙂
Oh I’m so glad to hear I have followers who ship both! I definitely love Emma and Neal’s relationship and I consider myself an SF shipper in addition to CS too. 🙂
I went ahead and replayed the scene to get a direct quote:
“From the moment I saw you in New York, the instant you stepped back in my life, I knew – I knew I’d never stopped loving you. And before I even had a chance to take a breath, I lost you once more, and all that pain that I had pushed down for all those years, it just came rushing back and I – I didn’t know if I could go through it again. I love you. I probably always will. But my secret? Is that I was hoping that this was a trick. I was hoping you were dead, because it would be easier for me to put you behind me than to face all the pain that we went through all over again.”
Now, to me, quotes can’t be taken completely out of context because they don’t exist in a vacuum, so let’s talk about that first.
The only person we have ever heard before now tell someone that they loved/were in a relationship with that they wished they were dead was Milah to Rumpelstiltskin. Comparing Milah/Rumple to Emma/Neal isn’t new, they did it throughout “Manhattan”, but now they’re bringing it back. For more immediate context, we have Hook telling Emma that he “didn’t believe he could move on from his first love, his Milah, until he met her.”So, walking into this scene, we’ve got a parallel with a failed relationship that led to bitterness and hate, and we have talk of moving on from first love and finding hope for finding love again.
Breaking down the language: “All that pain that I had pushed down for all those years, it just came rushing back.” This holds true with what we heard her tell Snow and Charming – she didn’t feel loss, she felt anger. Neal had left her again. She didn’t feel like he’d been taken from her, she felt like he’d abandoned her again because it compounded with the breaking of the levee of all of that pain she’d bottled up for so long that made her feel like he had never loved her. That’s the pain Emma means, and she says “I didn’t know if I could go through it again.” It’s too much for her, it’s agonizing to the point that she feels like she’s breaking from it.
But none of that is her secret. She doesn’t feel like it’s a secret that she has always loved Neal, her deep dark secret isn’t that she still loves him. That’s a given – because Emma was never the one whose feelings came into question. She had loved him, and he’d been the one to hurt her, to walk away. So, put that way, why would her secret reiterate what she claimed her secret wasn’t? If the secret was intended to say “I want to get back together with you but I need time,” then why would that be a “but” compared to how she’d said she loved him and he caused her so much pain and anguish? That’s not a but, that’s a repetition. The only way for it to be a “but” is for the secret to be at odds with what she’s told him about her feelings. “I love you” when coupled with “I want to get back together with you” is an “and” statement. “I love you” coupled with “there is too much pain for me to be willing to go back to that” is a but statement. And what we have here is a “but.”
Emma says “I hoped you were dead because it would be easier to put you behind me than to face all the pain we went through all over again.” She doesn’t see a happy ending coming from this. She sees pain coming back to hurt her when she already said it feels like too much. In order to move on, completely and truly, they have to face the pain he caused her.
Putting him behind her means she never has to think about it again, it means she doesn’t have to do the hard thing that she’s doing right now which is acknowledging that while she loves him, the pain is too much. Putting him behind her is not moving on, as I’ve said a dozen times to all the people expecting Neal or Hook to die this season – it’s the cheap cop-out. It saves Emma from making a choice, from making a decision and choosing her own happiness.
The hard path, the path that Emma has to be on now, is the one where she has to value her own happiness and self-worth and find a way to either stop loving him with him right in front of her, or deal with knowing she will always love him but can’t be with him because it hurts too much.
Having to face Neal hurts Emma. That’s what it comes down to. Emma is admitting that their relationship is causing her emotional pain, and by facing him, she’s going to have to find a way to stop that hurt. With Neal back, she has to work through the pain instead of just burying it down. That’s what she is saying – she still plans to find a way to stop hurting, but now she has to go through it instead of trying to forget about it.
You could still say “well, maybe she’ll go through it and then, after she’s given time, go back to him!” But again, quotes don’t exist in a vacuum, and Neal got some 3 minutes of screen time in “Ariel.” The big Swanfire reunion and half the ship only got 3 minutes of screen time. Neal is something that Emma needs to overcome, he is the embodiment of all the hurt in her past that she needs to get through in order to be happy again.
If Emma just needed time to heal and then go back to Neal, if we’re acknowledging that Emma has this huge roadblock between her and her relationship with Neal, then why is Hook necessary? What does he contribute to the story, and where the hell can his possibly go when it took 300 years to find a second love? Why do we have another character in that same episode declaring his love for Emma, and why do we have her continuously building this deep bond with him? This episode nailed it with the “love triangle” by pointing out what CS fans have been saying all along: Swanfire doesn’t need an extra obstacle. If Swanfire were endgame, or what Emma wanted, we wouldn’t need Hook there to make her feel more conflicted and more uncertain and more torn. She already has that because of the pain Neal caused her. That’s a big enough roadblock to keep them apart while Neal struggles with his “nasty habits” and Emma struggles to trust him again.
Instead, it’s juxtaposed with Emma offering full trust to someone else, and building a relationship with them. Emma is the roadblock to Swanfire, not Hook, which is why to further the context of this quote, when Neal says “I’ll never stop fighting for you” a minute later (and not “I love you (too)”, let’s talk about that) – it gave everyone pause. Fighting against what? The only person keeping him from being with Emma is Emma herself. Just what is Neal promising to fight? He doesn’t know about Hook yet. And he stops the fight by acknowledging, after watching Emma do magic, that he’d be okay with it if Henry was the only thing that came of them being together.
Scenes don’t exist in a vacuum, they exist in the scheme of the full picture. Between the framing of the “Ariel” scene, and the follow-up, what we see is two adults who are trying to reconcile the pain in their past and move on and struggling to know how to do that. Emma knows that she can’t just snap her fingers and stop loving Neal – but she has to move on somehow, because the pain is too much for her to keep carrying around with her. Anyone who’s been in a relationship with somebody that’s bad for them knows how hard it is to let go, and how much harder letting go of someone who’s hurt you too much is than letting them back in to do it some more.
Adam has stated really clearly that there is no love triangle. There is no way to interpret this for Swanfire being the intention, because only one couple has been kissing, one couple has been building a relationship, one couple has been building trust, one couple has been getting one-on-one time consistently: Hook and Emma. In order for Swanfire in the present time to be considered legitimate, you have to think of it as a love triangle, and it’s simply not one. The writers have admitted they have no designs on such – which means the relationship we’re watching unfold is the one that’s actually marked as a relationship right now, not the one that hasn’t been together in 10+ years.
Keeper of Captain Swan's first kiss