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@RumplesGirl I feel Jessica Jones, the Librarians, and various other shows used Ouat as the poster child of cautionary tale of how NOT to do it. Seriously I bet the writers are like now we are not going to be like that one show with that crazy fandom. hahahah
I think this gif personifies my idea.
[adrotate group="5"]"I will be kind but I will speak my mind."
I support Hook and/or Emma throwing themselves in front of a train
Or…being pushed…
One of the best comebacks I ever heard against CS was to picture yourself being held down, sword at throat, being told that “when I jab you with my sword, you’ll feel it” but by the Dustin Hoffman version of Hook
Well then….
"I could have the giant duck as my steed!" --Daniel Radcliffe
Keeper Of Tamara's Taser , Jafar's Staff, Kitsis’s Glasses , Ariel’s Tail, Dopey's Hat , Peter Pan’s Shadow, Outfit, & Pied Cloak,Red Queen's Castle, White Rabbit's Power To World Hop, Zelena's BroomStick, & ALL MAGIC^exactly. No one would ship Emma with that outside of Crack!Fic
"He was a lot of things to me" "The only conclusion was love"I don’t know the stats now, but I do know that a few years ago, the majority of OUAT watchers were women under the age of 35. That ultimate sweet spot of advertising, between the ages of 18 and 25, was especially high. So, yes, young but I don’t think they are so young that they’ve never read/watched any of those classic moral tales. I think a lot of it (sadly) comes down to the “Twilight effect” but not the series itself. The guy is super hot, described as perfect in every way while the object of his desire is a blank slate, perfect for audience insertion. And suddenly the guy can do no wrong because of said hottness and because the reader/viewer has inserted themselves in the place of the object of affection and being told by the author how that should feel. Hook is (apparently) super hot; Emma has always been our “everyman” for the audience caught up in the mythical world. CSers got caught up in the feeling of what it would be like to be “wooed” by Captain Hook when he looks like Colin. One of the best comebacks I ever heard against CS was to picture yourself being held down, sword at throat, being told that “when I jab you with my sword, you’ll feel it” but by the Dustin Hoffman version of Hook. Now do you still ship CS? Probably not. The act both versions of Hook commit are the same but one is romanticized and becomes a shippable moment because that Hook is hot. It’s what we, as women in this society, are told is acceptable and desirable. It’s the adult version of telling a little girl that a boy picks on her on the playground because “he likes her” and she shouldn’t fight back or put up resistance because then he won’t like her anymore. Hey, look. I brought this back to rape culture.
THIS!!!! @RumplesGirl hit the nail on the head on this one!
Moral of OUAT: If the guy’s hot with a beard….forgive him for every sin and label him your true love….even if he did just try to send your whole family to Hell ten seconds ago.
What made Neal such a better choice for Emma wasn’t because he was hot, her baby daddy, or her true love…..it was because Neal was a grown man who knew who he was and what he wanted in life…..Hook is an alcoholic, morally confused, selfish man-child….and if they try to use Hook’s past as an excuse for him, let’s weigh out who had it worse….Hook whose father sold him and his brother into the military or Neal who lost his mother because of said pirate, then lost his father who couldn’t choose him over power, sent to NL where basically the root of all Stilskin Men issues lives, and was basically on his own ever since….yet Neal still managed to come out on a moral higher ground despite his far rougher background than the One-handed drunk.
And now that I think about it….CS hate Papa Hook for selling Hook off into the service, but seemed to have forgotten that it was Hook who sold Baelfire off to Peter Pan.
@RumplesGirl I feel Jessica Jones, the Librarians, and various other shows used Ouat as the poster child of cautionary tale of how NOT to do it. Seriously I bet the writers are like now we are not going to be like that one show with that crazy fandom. hahahah I think this gif personifies my idea.
ROFL!! Who would’ve guessed OUAT would become a cautionary tale for other shows!
I support Hook and/or Emma throwing themselves in front of a train
Or…being pushed…
"If you go as far as you can see...you will then see enough to go even further." - Finn Balor
The point is that you shouldn’t ship Anna and Vronsky, or Healthcliff and Catherine — they’re a terrible idea!
Funny you should mention Tolstoy. I just finished watching an adaptation of War and Peace in which Natasha Rostova nearly runs off with Anatole Kuragin, an unscrupulous cad–much like Count Vronsky. Anatole’s pursuit of Natasha is like that of a wolf stalking a lamb. Natasha, who at first rejects him, nearly succumbs after he makes her believe he’d commit suicide due to her rejection of him. Against all caution and good sense, Natasha thinks that this form of control is somehow what “love” means: obsession and possession. If it weren’t for the intervention of Natasha’s loving friends and family, her good name would’ve been ruined.
Tolstoy had a way of using these cautionary tales to warn against the debased part of human nature that mankind is capable of; yet the writers of OUAT do not. Instead, they seem to be suggesting that men like Anatole or Vronsky are somehow to be commended, admired and desired by women. Instead of intervening to help spare Emma from Hook as do Natasha’s friends and family, Emma’s family go along with and indulge Emma’s adolescent behavior. So why are they going to the Underworld to save a man who just tried to kill them all? I used to maintain that it was just the audience’s perception of CS, but after 5×11, it’s the portrayal of the CS dynamic which is so destructive. It’s this back-and-forth is-Hook-reformed-or-not yo-yoing that has me totally fed up.
So why doesn’t this come across for the CS portion of the fandom? Are they just very young viewers raised on Twilight, but not yet exposed to these more complex moral tales?
As you mentioned, these love triangles are nothing new, but what is new is rooting for the lech to end up with the heroine. Does no one recall 3×17 when Hook was literally dressed in black armor? While I loved the new Star Wars, I was disturbed to discover that certain people somehow ship Rey with Kylo Ren, after he tortured her, tried to kill her, and killed his own father. It’s just unfathomable to me.
"That’s how you know you’ve really got a home. When you leave it, there’s this feeling that you can’t shake. You just miss it." Neal Cassidy
@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.
The girl that was rewriting S5 with neal just added the 510 rewrite(this chapter is all the Camelot scenes, and the final chapter will be all Storybrooke)
"I offended you with my opinion? Ha, you should hear the ones I keep to myself".
While I loved the new Star Wars, I was disturbed to discover that certain people somehow ship Rey with Kylo Ren, after he tortured her, tried to kill her, and killed his own father. It’s just unfathomable to me.
This exactly. Right here. It just squicks me. Almost as much as CS. I am also disturbed by the Kylo Ren fandom for the same reasons. My guess: the same people that ship CS ship Reylo.
In this sense, it’s insidious — Bella offers a blank slate on which the audience can project itself
Ironically, as crap as Twilight is, making Bella a blank slate is quite an ingenius idea (it doesn’t work for the movies so much) but for the books (which fortunately I’ve never had the desire to read) it’s quite clever. By making Bella so blank, the young female reader would subconsciously insert themselves into that role and thus would care about Bella that much more and be invested in the success of that relationship. The problem comes in that Twilight’s readership have likely never been in a romantic relationship themselves and therefore their perception of what a relationship should be like is influenced by the media they consume such as books, television, films and magazines, not to mention real life situations eg a child growing up in a family whose parents have a healthy and loving marriage/relationship are likely to hold that as the standard on what a good relationship should be like.
Media influences people for better or for worse. That’s not to say that all media should be sanitised into a wholesome cookie-cutter image because it is actually through the “safe” exposure to dangerous situations (through media depicting violent/abusive scenarios, and real life experiences such as children climbing trees/jumping off things and falling down, that people learn what to do to protect themselves from such dangers in the future or what to do if they find themselves in such a situation. Most shows that depict a woman in an abusive relationship would do their best to show why she should get out the relationship and how she can do that.
The dangerousness of Once, Twilight and 50 shades of Grey is that they are showing an abusive relationship, but rather than depicting why the woman needs to get out of it, they are showing that she is enjoying it and that it should be idealised. For young impressionable viewers/readers this is their first exposure to a romantic scenario and thus their impression of what a relationship should be like.
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!
I disagree. I think that as long as a guy is hot, people will still ship him with somebody. Even if he is an absolute arsehole, the female protagonist will be shipped with him because he’s misunderstood, he can change for the better with love, he just needs someone to care about him, etc etc. It’s a well known trope called “Draco in leather pants” and often goes hand in hand with “Ron the deatheater” ie the bad boy is woobified into “just needs love” whilst the more heroic character is vilified.
Tv tropes has more detail
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DracoInLeatherPants
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RonTheDeathEaterWith 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.
The problem with Hook is that the character hasn’t transitioned gradually from villain to hero like Regina but has just suddenly been switched. We’ve not seen him repent for his past misdeeds, and in current day he’s still spiteful toward Rumple just because he can (see 4A), we’re TOLD he’s redeemed himself but we’ve not been SHOWN it. Hook giving in to the dark side is supposed to be this tragic heartbreaking moment but it rings hollow because he’s not shown any genuine progress, DarkOne Hook is the real Hook coming out to play after having been forced to play nice for Emma.
Hook is always motivated by what he gets out of doing something, he wants Emma therefore he’ll do what it takes to get her affections. Notice how when he turns on her because she displeased him, he went for personal attacks. Emma has a hard time opening up to people, she let down her walls to Hook (and he likes her having walls so he can break them down, ie he likes having her emotionally depend on him and make her feel good about herself because he’s the only one she should allow to do that. Her family won’t understand like he does etc) and Hook uses that to keep her emotionally dependent on him.
Once is presenting CS as a good relationship that should be idealised and it’s not.
All magic comes with a price!
Keeper of Felix
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