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Keeper of Neal/BaelFire's Blood Magic, Neverland Crossbow, FTL Clothes,Room at Granny’s, Charming & Emma’s Father/Daughter Hugs, Henry's Neverland Crossbow, Rumplestlitskin/Mr.Gold's FTL Walking StickAskMikey sometime this week!
Yay!!!!!!!! an Ask Mikey
Keeper of Neal/BaelFire's Blood Magic, Neverland Crossbow, FTL Clothes,Room at Granny’s, Charming & Emma’s Father/Daughter Hugs, Henry's Neverland Crossbow, Rumplestlitskin/Mr.Gold's FTL Walking StickAskMikey sometime this week! https://twitter.com/MRaymondJames/status/427180050597687296
YAY!!!!
Just because I’m in the mood
Love it
"He was a lot of things to me" "The only conclusion was love"What a lovely SF meta:
Out of all the arguments against Swan Thief/Fire, I think one of the ones I understand least is the argument it can’t be endgame/is unrealistic because they’re first loves.
I don’t understand how it’s unrealistic. People are all different. Every relationship is different because everyone is different.
There are people in the world who marry the first person they truly love. Their childhood best friend, the person they fell in love with in high school or in some cases don’t have a love till college. Sometimes longer. Point is it can and does happen. And while it may not be the most commonplace, it’s more common than people believe. One of my best friends in high school got married to her high school love. Neither had a serious relationship before that. And they met back in middle school! Also as a nursing student, I’ve had the pleasure of meeting many others who’ve been as fortunate. Just because it’s normal for people to have multiple relationships this day in age before they settle does not mean it can’t happen that people find the one on the first try, nor does it make it unhealthy if they don’t decide to branch out. It makes them blessed (or lucky if you prefer). And honestly, with how much they’ve been tying fate onto Swanfire I really don’t think it is out of the question that it’s true love, it’s entirely possible.
Everyone is different. Some have many relationships before they settle. Some have a couple. Some people get married a couple different times. Some don’t even want to get married and are simply content being a significant other to another person. And some end up with the person they loved first. None of these is any more or less realistic than another. It just seems to me by saying it’s impossible to have a true love the first time around is painting everyone with the same brush and saying the only acceptable way is if we have multiple relationships before we settle. That’s the ultimate thing about love- we don’t get to pick and choose where, when, or how we give our heart to someone. Love is not an on/off switch.
Also, to those who say Emma said she needed Neal for their family and for Henry… she didn’t say Henry needs you. She said *I* need you. The writers have constantly said they intended for Emma and Neal to still be in love. To quote the “Who Is Baelfire?” short- “One of the reasons he and Emma got along so well and fell in love….” Not just love, in love. It’s not just puppy love, or first love, according to Adam and Eddy they fell in love. And it hasn’t faded.
I could be totally off base here I just don’t understand the backlash against first love.
Also, let’s not forget that on the show, we have a clear example of first love as true love: Snow White and Prince Charming! Of course it’s possible for two people to fall in love a decade ago and still be in love today. Otherwise NO relationships would ever work out, because we’d need to get a new partner every decade. Of course, people grow, but the point is they either grow together or apart. In Emma’s case, she never outgrew or forgot Neal.
"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
“Who Is Baelfire?” short- “One of the reasons he and Emma got along so well and fell in love….” Not just love, in love. It’s not just puppy love, or first love, according to Adam and Eddy they fell in love. And it hasn’t faded.
That’s my favorite bit
Also, #AskMRJ this Thursday!
"He was a lot of things to me" "The only conclusion was love"This is such an excellent essay. I love it!
Neal Cassidy is Indestructible: Emma’s Fallen Fairytale
Why?
This began as my thoughts on why Neal will not be the character that is rumored to die before S3’s curtain falls. But before I could assemble them all, quite frankly, plenty of people in the fandom wrote perfectly compelling arguments for Neal’s living on, and made any points that I would have made myself.
But still, I think there’s a touch more to be said about Neal and Emma and their story.
For a long time I’ve thought that Emma, and all aspects of her story (from her abandonment to Henry to Neal) have been given to us, really, like a bent sort of fairytale (as opposed to a fractured one). Fairy tales grow in their natural, magical habitat: the Enchanted Forest. (So Once would have us believe.) But Emma was sent from that magical world into ours: the World Without Magic (on a sort of reverse-Narnia trip). And so her story, her fairytale (she is a princess, after all), is a bruised one: a fallen fairytale.
I put forward that this is the story we’re watching (that the writers are writing): the bruised and bent fairytale of Bailbondsperson Princess Emma Swan. Because that’s what you get in the World Without Magic (and don’t we residents know it). Perfect loves and ‘I will always find you’ are few and far between, and plenty of us never get them.
The World Without Magic makes finding your happy ending hard (far harder than in the Enchanted Forest). You get no helps, no shortcuts. What you get is a life in the foster system, a man whom you love and who leaves you, and a child you feel you have no other option but to give away. That’s your story in the World Without Magic.
But that’s the thing about Emma and her fairytale, that’s the hope she gives us all.
Fairytales, at their heart, are wish-fulfillment. When you wish upon a star, find your prince, conquer your oppressor, live happily ever after. We take hope from fairytales, from Sleeping Beauty being kissed awake after a hundred years, from someone learning to love a Beast, and so on. And Emma’s bent and bruised fallen fairytale is no different. Is her past that different from Cinderella being forced into servitude or Snow White being driven from her home? Her attitude toward life might be less sunny than theirs is shown to be in their Disney incarnations, but the circumstances of all their lives are similarly bleak. And just as we take hope/see the wish fulfillment from their stories, we take hope/share in that wish fulfillment from hers.
Who among us hasn’t wanted to believe that that person we were so desperately in love with and who left us for no reason we could ever reconcile ourselves to actually had a good reason? Actually was trying to have our best interests in mind?
What adopted child hasn’t dreamt at night of her parents, imagining they really had wanted her? Or (as Henry’s fairytale is also Emma’s) that his father loved him and would someday show up and want to be a part of his life? Or that their parents (divorced/separated/whatever) might reconcile?
Who hasn’t at one point wanted a former lover to show up and want us back?
And who among us, (sometimes years after, even) has not wished we could go back and change something about how we behaved/the choices we made in a relationship? Alter the way we left it (if not the outcome)?
Emma’s fairytale says these things have the potential to be healed, to be understood and explained and forgiven. It’s about being open to letting the future heal the hurts of the past; relationships renewed, parents and children reunited, and above all a story where abandonment cannot be reversed, but can be repaired, and where trust can exist again.
And that happy ending can’t exist without the main players in Emma’s story: Henry, Snow, Charming, and Neal.
–
Neal’s own bruised fairytale, of course, began in the Enchanted Forest, and experienced several stops at magical locales along the way. Interestingly, his father is the Dark One, and his grandfather Peter Pan, but he has never been shown as magical (yet Emma, the progeny of unmagical parents, IS magical).
But his destination was always meant to be the World Without Magic, and though Magic began him on his trip and has visited him along the way, once he got here to stay, as far as we know he was without it. And so his ‘fairytale’: village coward’s son gains wealth and influence when his father takes on the mantle of the Dark One, de-volves into a poverty and homelessness far worse than anything he experienced in his early life in the Enchanted Forest.
And the role reversal of the unwitting peasant falling for royalty occurs when he falls in love with Emma (Disney’s Sleeping Beauty shows quite the opposite paradigm—Prince falls for peasant girl, though Rose herself was ignorant of her own nobility, as is Rapunzel of Disney’s Tangled—as is Emma).
Neal seems to be part of several separate fairytales (which he alone connects together). The Dark One and Baelfire. The Darlings and Peter Pan/the Dark One and Peter Pan, and this fallen fairytale of Emma’s. (And who knows how many more to come…)
He’s only really essential to happy endings in two of them, and that’s Rumple’s and Emma/Henry’s. If Rumple really is dead (which we kinda pretty much know he’s not), then Neal dying is immaterial to that story, which already had its conclusion (a dead Rumple not being able to know whether his son got a happy ending or not). But Neal is crucial to Emma and Henry’s fairytale. To its happy ending.
If anything, the fallen fairytale of Princess Emma shows us that you can find love in the World Without Magic. But hanging on to it (or losing it and then later letting it back in) is hardest work without the help of magical shortcuts.
But in the end, I fully expect a happily ever after. And that can’t happen with Neal dead, because as Emma said in the Cave of Echoes, the whole reason she had wanted him dead was because she didn’t want to re-experience the pain (deal with the past). But any good reader knows, if you can’t work through the past you can never really move forward. And if Neal is killed, there is no way to work through things with him.
At this point in the series, Neal is essential to both his own happy ending, and to Emma/Henry’s. If you end his life, then you’re writing a very different story than the one I’ve seen scrolling out on my screen since the Pilot.
"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
This is such an excellent essay. I love it!
ALL OF THIS. ALL OF IT I SAY!
"He was a lot of things to me" "The only conclusion was love"Applause and Neal hugs for all,I just read at least 8 to 10 pages. And I’m impressed.
Someone mention that Hansel and Gretel gave them Swanfire vibes without the romance of course because they were two lost thieving kids taking care of each other, who really just wanted a home and family.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKUZtKCPjk4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iL3chLqvOA
"I will be kind but I will speak my mind."
Someone mention that Hansel and Gretel gave them Swanfire vibes without the romance of course because they were two lost thieving kids taking care of each other, who really just wanted a home and family.
Yes, the theme of “family always finds each other” was very prominent in True North. It was the first episode in which Henry asked about his father and Emma told him the story about the fireman. This theme was repeated in “Heart of the Truest Believer,” when Henry told PP, “My family is different. We always, find each other.” I really think that this theme is the heart of the Swanfire family dynamic going forward.
On an interesting side note, Kataman wrote that Chris Gorham might have been filming with Jennifer Morrison and MRJ on Jan. 24. Chris reportedly left Vancouver Jan. 25. This lends creedence to my theory that Chris Gorham’s character is going to play an integral part in the lives of both Emma and Neal.
"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
crack theory what if Chris character is son or grandson of Dorothy. Neal landed on Dorothy’s farm. He was found by Chris, taken in by the family. And they taught him the ways of the world. The family loses the farm, Dorothy ends up at nursing home. Chris and Neal are force to try to make it out there on there own. Something happens and they are separated. It seems to be a running theme that Neal is always separated from potential family units. This could be another example of one. Later in life Emma meets Chris who helps her get situated after prison and once again with the false memories. This would be another tie into how Neal and Emma’s love constantly intersect. I love the idea that would be new August someone to bring them together instead of breaking them apart.
Even if Chris is not related to Neal. I love the idea of Dorothy being the one to take in Neal when he first came to our world because she would understand him and help him. She will tell him about Oz and WW, giving him inside info to help in present sense. But of course Neal is separated from her from a series of unfortunate events that often happens when he close to having a home or family.
"I will be kind but I will speak my mind."
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