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@darkonedearie, As RG stated a general rule of television is “show, don’t tell”. Hook started as a villain so he did bad things, that’s all fine and dandy because, as a villain, Hook’s not meant to be likeable. His actions in season 2 support this such as his treatment of Belle.
However, villains can sometimes be charismatic to the point that sometimes you can’t help but like them because they are so enjoyable to watch whether it be through a wicked sense of humour or such a nuanced performance. With every villain character there is a “moral event horizon”. Basically it’s how far can a villain go before they become too unlikeable. If you want to redeem your villain, you absolutely have to make sure they don’t pass the moral event horizon, and if they do and you still want to redeem them then you have to work really hard to SHOW the redemption in order to make the audience believe that it is genuine. Even then, the audience may not forgive the character for their past actions.
IMO Once has failed completely in that regard with Hook. They’ve had him cross that moral event horizon but rather than showing us him trying to redeem himself, rather than making us believe he genuinely wants to atone for his past mistakes, they’re just telling us he’s redeemed and expecting us to accept it. They seem to think and hope that if they don’t mention Hook’s past misdeeds then the audience will forget about them. The thing is though they keep showing Hook doing bad things.
I have tried to like Hook since his introduction and every season when I reach the point of thinking maybe he’s not so bad, he then goes and completely screws it up.
The only episode I genuinely did like Hook was Tallahassee when he and Emma climbed the beanstalk.
He screwed up season 2 by his actions towards Belle.
He screwed up 3A by treating Emma as a prize to be won, even declaring that he “will win it”
He screwed up 3B by basically using Henry to get in with Emma then making the decision to get Henry out of town without telling Emma anything about it.
He screwed up 4A by trying to blackmail Rumple for his own gain then crying foul when it backfired on him.
He did something in 4B that I didn’t like but I can’t remember what it was. It’s probably written in one of the favourite/least favourite moments threads for season 4.
He screwed up 5A by going for personal attacks on Emma and calling Milah “soiled”.The more the writers try and just whitewash Hook’s misdeeds, the more unlikeable he becomes.
[adrotate group="5"]All magic comes with a price!
Keeper of FelixI just want to speak to the debate over the show’s intended message vs the audience’s reaction — so some of the stuff @thedarkonedearie was bringing up. Any text (citing RG’s broad use of the term here) anticipates its own reception. As in, any work of fiction (or non-fiction) is going to have not just an intended audience, but a kind of inbuilt “script” for how it’s meant to be read/viewed/consumed. Another way of putting it, say something reaches its intended audience. Now, if you’re a text, you want to control for how that audience experiences you. The best example I can give is a scientific argument. If you’re a scientist writing an article, you have to convince a potentially skeptical audience of the arguments you’re laying out, while precluding them from going “Wait a second, that assumptions seems totally bogus”. So you sort of “argue” with your anticipated critics before any critics have even piped up or know you exist. That’s the “script.” For fiction, there’s another kind of script. Say, if your text is a drama, you don’t want your audience to accidentally think it’s a subtle parody, so you “coral” them in the right direction (through pacing, language, style, plot points etc).
In this sense, nothing is ever JUST a text (or TV show). There’s nothing that doesn’t have a “script.” Things can have ineffective scripts, but you can’t have something without one — simply put, we wouldn’t be able to make sense of it. (There were literary and cultural experiments that did try that, of course. Postmodernism for example. But that’s a totally different conversation).
Regarding Hook and many of the other villains, OUAT has at least two contradictory scripts: the one that RG, POM, Bar Farer, and many folks here in SF are pointing out — that has to do with rape culture, misogyny, seemingly condoning reprehensible actions and never having to take responsibility for them etc. That’s mostly done through “showing” , to borrow POM’s contrast set. And then there’s another script, that’s mostly what the show “tells” us, and that another faction of the fandom obviously finds convincing — that’s the CS=epitome of romantic love script (and so forth). The particularly outrageous part of this is that early in S1 OUAT was promoting itself as a feminist show.
I don’t exclude the possibility that this tension is deliberate, but whether it is or not, I think if we take a reception studies approach, and look at how the audience is divided, then you just have to assume that’s what the show does, pragmatically. It’s peddling 2 mutually exclusive messages at the same time.
The darkness did clearly affect Rumple, no denying that but look at the degrees. You called Rumple ruthless but I strongly disagree with that, especially in terms of Rumple vs Hook. After the initial taking on of the DO’s curse and the first few months, Rumple did not murder anyone to our knowledge (you can speculate but canonically within the story, he did not). Instead he chose to make deals. He chose to give people what they wanted (or thought they wanted) in return for other favors. Yes, he manipulated the HECK out of people and situations but always played into what those people claimed to have wanted and always gave them a choice.
I am going to have to disagree that Rumpel didn’t murder people. The mute maid and cart guy six months after he became the dark one, Milah a few years after he became the dark one, Gepetto’s parents 60 years before curse, Cinderella’s fairy, Gaston, in the years right before the curse.
He also aught Cora and Regina both how to take a heart so that they could murder people. He brought that gypsy girl to Regina’s magic lesson, so Regina could murder her. He purposely taught Regina magic so that she would eventual become so evil that she would do the dark curse. He created the dark curse which was only cast through murder. He was going to torture and murder Robin Hood, but didn’t because Belle helped Robin escape and begged Rumpel not to murder him. We see Rumpel in the flashbacks few an far between, but he has done his share of murdering throughout history.
Rumpel doesn’t get a pass for helping other people to do evil just because they wanted it. That doesn’t make it not partially his fault too, doing bad deals was still wrong, especially when he knew that they would lead to someone being murdered or cursed or separated from their loved ones. That doesn’t make Hook good or better, but Rumpel wasn’t a nice guy either.
Whoa, so many pages!
Speaking of villains getting a redemption arc:
Regina was the only one who atoned for her sins. Not ALL her sins, she had MANY. but she certainly showed great progress.
1) she SAVED the people she spent years trying to kill
2) she was only good for Henry’s sake at FIRST but became good even though she didnt expect good things to happen as a reward. She gave up Henry to save the town. Etc.
She is delightfully crazy, emotional, stormy, and regrets nothing because “it got her her son”
So she might never be fully redeemed in the sense that she had all her sins erased. But as a person she definitely grew TONSHook, otoh, never grew at all. Look at the apology to Belle, as an example. He said “sorry?” Regina was alot more sincere in hervapology to Belle.
And yet all of this blatant hypocracy brings me to think that it is ultimately a show about good vs evil, and evil could stare you right in the face and you wouldnt realize it. (A line regina said in season 1 to david)
Hook vs Rumple
Evil vs Good
Obviously
Isnt this why they never cut Rumple a break? No matter what he is a villain? Even when he is good he is villain
When he almost died from so much darkness, he sencerely begged Belle to go with will so he wont hurt her when he is a zombie dark one when Rumple is dead. This was when he had not even a tiny flicker of humanity left in him
From what i heard Hook was not as good to Emma while a fresh DO
The mute maid who drew the picture of the dagger and ended up in Augusts room? The mute maid sounds as shady as Augus who knew WAY too much for a guy living and growing up in the lwom.
The cart man who was turned into a snail? Milah? Those happened almost immediately after the curse took over. And Rumple regreted it ever since. (See what he says to regina about turning people into a snaail etc.)
He taught Cora magic? That did not make her a monst. SHE chose to listen to the king. she ripped out her heart and became a villain. And lets not forget SHE gave up zelena. Fora was bad to the bone. Nothing on her master.
Regina was also raised with darkness. She had her mom as influence. Rumple only sped up her evilness so that he could help her redeem herself through filli g thay hole in her heart with a child etc.
ARG! I just lost a whole post. The forums ate it–TWICE. *breaks out hammer*
I am going to have to disagree that Rumpel didn’t murder people. The mute maid and cart guy six months after he became the dark one, Milah a few years after he became the dark one, Gepetto’s parents 60 years before curse, Cinderella’s fairy, Gaston, in the years right before the curse.
Milah I’ll grant and recoginze that I rather forgot about her.
The mute maid and the cart guy are within the pre-losing-Bae time period I already stated was the “murdering” time
Gepetto’s parents and Gaston were cursed, not killed. The former can be uncursed if someone chose to do so. The latter we only recently learned was dead
The Fairy I’ll also grant as I forgot about her.
Rumple is not a good guy. He’s manipulative, and can be cold and cruel. But he also recognizes his own villainy–“I’m the villain. And villains don’t get happy endings” (and then dies to save the town without having first tired to kill them all). That to me is a big difference. It certainly doesn’t make him a saint and if anyone has listened to the podcast this season OR read anything I’ve written, they know that I’m really struggling to still like/defend Rumple like I did in seasons past.
"He was a lot of things to me" "The only conclusion was love"Hook is good no matter what he does, while Rumple is bad no matter what he does.
This show should get very interesting when it gets back on track
To ease some tension….or maybe get a chuckle…this is something I found on Neil Gaiman’s tumblr today.
But what I loved more than the chuckle was what he had to say: “I worry that people might fail to write good books because they think these warnings are real rules. There are no real rules. Tell good stories and tell them well and don’t leave the reader feeling cheated at the end.”
That’s the only real rule in writing (Gaiman said so, so it must be true. #GaimanIsThatGood). I had no problem with CS having a time together and even remaining friends afterwards even if I strongly disliked Hook–all relationships help us grow as people even if they don’t last forever. I wasn’t rooting for Hook’s death back in S2 and actually had some truly great headcanons–Hookriel! But…
Now I, the reader of this text called OUAT, feel cheated. (Wait, this was supposed to get a chuckle. Eek. I’ll walk away now)
"He was a lot of things to me" "The only conclusion was love"What you depicted here is the “battered wife syndrom”. She did something that pissed off her boyfriend, and he becomes violent towards her or other people, instead of putting the blame on him, she blames herself for making him angry. This is a syndrom that is common in abusive relationship.
Yes, but in real life, people aren’t literally being controlled by a “dark force” that was transferred into their body through a magical sword from Camelot. To compare it to real life abusive relationships doesn’t really seem fair. The writers are trying to make us believe that he literally had no control over what he was doing. If he literally can’t control it, it’s not fair to loop him into the category of “abusive boyfriends.” If he was always abusive, but just controlled it better when he wasn’t the DO, then ok. But he was not like that with Emma pre DO. This felt like it came out of nowhere. They want us to believe this darkness forced him to do these things. I think there is a difference. Not downplaying abusive relationships here, and I do see the parallel you are trying to make, it’s just this show is way too cray cray for me to think logically about it and attempt to compare it to actual real life relationships.
Emma and Hook’s relationship is without a doubt depicted as abusive before Hook became the dark one. Just like Rumpel was a coward and a murderer before, being the dark one just upped the traits that were already there. Hook was a murderer and their relationship was abusive and then he became the dark one so he had less control. He was still the same.
We’re back to the reason why we still watch–because I think this show speaks to a lot of social problems in our world and I like to talk about those. I guess it comes down to where you stand on the philosophical question of it the author is dead or not and what is text. For me, text is everything that is written about the show including this comment right here. A and E (and other writing staff) are not “gods” (in terms of the philosophical question, not an infallible sense) who have the final word on what is good, bad, and appropriate in their show. They might create the original text but everything that exists around it is text and equally valid.
So agree, i have never understand this idea that the writers are god and everything they say about the show is somehow more valid then how other people view the show. It isn’t. They don’t get to decide what is rape or what is a healthy relationship or what is misogynistic or what is racist or even what is canon. Just because they are writing a tv show doesn’t mean they get to decide those things. Morality exists and discussion surrounding it, the struggle of learning to talk about those important issues, is a valid reason to watch a television show and cannot be dismissed because some writers don’t understand what they are writing.
For me it’s far more than that they don’t even think about it. You can’t think about something you don’t realize is a problem. They have fallen into pretty typical depictions of men and women that exist in media. They are problematic depictions. Greatly problematic. But until they recognize that these depictions are problematic, then they won’t course correct. I don’t want to start talking about privilege because that’s a whole other issue but in media like TV it is often very hard for white heterosexual men to write compelling healthy relationships because they don’t understand that some of the things they’ve been shown and told are romantic…aren’t. But they sit in a place of privilege and don’t have to confront what it feels like to be stalked, abused, toyed with, made into objects. Again, I point to Jessica Jones as something everyone should be watching. (broken record, I know)
Exactly agree. The writers just don’t even have any clue what they are writing and that is not okay.
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