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[adrotate group="5"]"He was a lot of things to me" "The only conclusion was love"
Molly wrote: On fan bases, to suggest that Hook will be saved due to fan demand is to hold the Hook fan base above all other character fan bases… Also, Hooks fans have not been able to bring in the ratings, and that means they don’t have the power to break the show if they don’t get their way. ABC is in this for money, not any kind of love of Hook. I suspect that sometime within the next few weeks, the ABC marketing team in charge of pushing Hook for OUAT will have to explain the lack of return on investment in that decision. Advertisers are likely not happy with the show as they were likely promised higher ratings. The face if OUAT’s middling ratings is Hook, not Neal.
I agree. The ratings have actually decreased over S3a, which largely tried to whitewash Hook’s character and then promote him on Twitter as the face of OUAT (at the expense of the other main characters and their dedicated online followers). The numbers just don’t add up though and the ratings hit their all-time low in 3×11, despite being called a “fan favorite” by DianeReed in her interview. For me, it was just average at best. If the promo department continue to push for Hook then they’ll be ignoring the ratings and numbers don’t lie. If something isn’t working then it doesn’t make sense to continue to push it. I hope A&E are smart enough to realize that not everyone is as “hooked” as they need to be in order to recapture viewers.
"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
I am starting to believe more and more that Neal dies. Which makes me really sad. 🙁 At this point I would trade any other character for him (except Belle). I know nothing is confirmed, but not seeing Neal anywhere, the graveyard scene with everyone but Neal there, and this article ( Hook “not going anywhere” ( honestly it seems to me like Adam is doing damage control) and when asked about Neal they are like “his character will grow”and then go to say Graham also had growth…. really????). They may be fooling us and if that turns out to be true I will be more shocked than I ever was. But I doubt it. Usually when spoilers come this way they are what they seem to be. I remember for example when someone posted a spoiler during the filming of the last episode of the 2nd season that Rumple left Belle in Storybrooke and when Adam was tweeted about it he was like “it may not be what it seems” or sth like that and all the while I am thinking “yeah, right, it’s exactly as it seems”, and I was right, so I’m not holding out too much hope now.
What I do know is if they kill off Neal I will never believe in a million years that the death was story driven. If it was someone like Hook I would believe it (even though I love Hook and I really don’t want him to die). But if it is him I don’t care how many times Adam says it was planned, I won’t believe him. Fake killed him ten episodes before just to kill him again now? They couldn’t even make some very minor deaths stick like Blue Fairies, but hey lets kill one of the most important characters and pretty much the catalyst for the whole story? Yeah, not buying it! Sorry, I don’t want to bring anyone down, just trying to express my opinion.
As far as keeping hope, Neal dying would be the most devastating to that theme.
We all know whether he is downright killed or sacrifices his life, it will be extremely devastating for every character (even as Molly mentioned, Regina will feel the consequences with Henry, etc). We didn’t even see that portion when Neal fell down the portal in S2/s3A because Henry was kidnapped. But no matter how heroic and valiant they make it, it will be a feeling of “the end”. This is it. This is a gigantic hole, and it will take its toll.If Hook sacrifices his life and does the heroic thing, while Hook fans and CSers alike will mourn, it will be a different kind of mourning. It will be a pirate becoming a hero. As devastating as it will be for them, it will be like Rumple sacrificing his life-it will exude hope in a way that this show does. Someone who consistently does cowardly things, with a glimmer of hope, back and forth, back and forth, finally doing the heroic, brave thing. Neal has already done heroic things and already sacrificed so much. It will be a sad sad story of a boy, then a man who could never ever get it right no matter how much he sacrificed for anyone. That doesn’t give me hope. That makes me feel like… “the end”. That’s it for him and there’s no more hope.
I’ve said before, I don’t hope Hook dies. NOT AT ALL. But if/when it happens, I will probably cry like I did at the end of Going Home. Because it will stir a place in my heart that is inside all of us– we want to believe people can change. Hook desired to change for Bae, even though we know he had a hidden agenda. Bae was his connection to Milah, so I have to believe there was a part of him that wanted to, even if he didn’t know how and had no intention of actually doing it. The want to want to change is sometimes what gets the process going. Not even the want. The want to want. I’ve seen it happen with people I’ve known in my life even.
Hook’s conversation with Regina in 3×01 will always stay with me. And even their convos at the end of s2. Hook has this conflict within himself and I think the navy captain from his good form days has been lured out by the heroes around him.
I’m not saying Hook’s death would give people hope. I’m saying the circumstances around his death could actually speak more, mean more, and be of greater value to the lessons and story of hope they’re trying to portray than killing off Neal.
Sigh. Just kinda threw up all my thoughts and not sure how to close…#hopeForNeal
[/spoiler]
Keeper Nealfire's/Bae's scarf, Henry and Neal's bribery ice cream sundae, Baelfire's sword, the coconut map, and more.
the problem with using the rating as a meter is this: if A and E are telling the truth that the death was planned in between S2 and S3A then the ratings of S3A (and it’s heavy Hook focus) have nothing to do with the death. The death precedes the less than stellar S3A ratings. I think A and E love Neal, a lot. I think they were very excited to introduce the audience to Neal but at the same they introduced Neal’s foil in Hook. And Hook took off. He was a classic character, he wore leather and eyeliner, and he was very sexy. HUGE portions of the fandom took to him like a fish to water. And so they promoted the heck out of him because he was a shiny and pretty. And Neal got left in the dust, time and time again forced to play second fiddle. They put the focus elsewhere. And now it has been over a year since our introduction to Neal and we’ve never had a proper NEAL episode. But we’ve had two for Hook and one more coming in 3×17. It’s easy to talk about centrics being “death” episodes but if that were true, then we’d have no characters left–Snow, Charming, Rumple, Regina all get tons of centrics and they’re alive. I adore Neal and if they kill him then I am going to be rethinking my love of this show because I don’t think it makes narrative sense to kill him. But I can see A and E doing it because Neal wasn’t as well received as Hook. Clear the way for the more popular endgame, in other words. But I do have faith that A and E are telling their story (but the question remains, “how much of their story has been tainted by fan demands)
"He was a lot of things to me" "The only conclusion was love"CrownedWithLaurels wrote: I’m not saying Hook’s death would give people hope. I’m saying the circumstances around his death could actually speak more, mean more, and be of greater value to the lessons and story of hope they’re trying to portray than killing off Neal.
That is how I see it too. Neal dying after all that build up around his character: him surviving his near-death experience, his renewed hope to have a second chance, his quest to get back to Emma and Henry, his Papa’s sacrifice to save him and Belle, and Emma’s dream of finding home. All of those things would feel so pointless and in vain if Neal were to die for real this time.
By contrast, Hook’s end being a heroic one feels like it really could be story-driven: he’s stated wanting to change, said he’s willing to risk his life for love, shown he could step up when he needed to, but he’s still yet to really make a heroic sacrifice in the same way that Rumple and Regina finally did in 3×11. If anyone’s death seems to have been foretold, it’s Hook, whose main skill has always been at surviving, and yet which seems like an indicator to me he won’t. He was even called “dead guy of the year” by Emma a year to the day on which it was announced a main character would die. So, it seems to me like it makes the most sense, story wise, for Hook to meet his end than it would for Neal to do so. Hook meeting his end would deliver an emotional payoff without destroying ratings; heck, it might even improve ratings for all we know. The show’s ratings have been slipping steadily in S3a, around the same time the promo department decided mainly t to focus on selling Hook rather than other S1 characters.
Also I saw this on Tumblr in relationship to Neal and his survival and what that means overall given the theme of S3a
This is why i have hope for Swanfire. Neal’s poster is to believe in second chances. If he doesn’t get his chance I don’t know what I will believe.
Belief
ADAM: “I would say that belief is really kind of the theme of the season so far and we’re seeing how belief impacts on each one of our characters.”
EDDY: “For us, belief is so important in everything. You need to believe in magic. You need to believe in yourself. You need to believe in family. And Neverland runs on belief. So for us that was the uber-theme.”
ADAM: “We’ve tried to make a hopeful show about belief with all the obstacles that come from disbelievers and cynics in the world and all those things that tell you to not believe in magic and the world is a terrible, terrible place. We want to try to find a way to find that light.”
EDDY: “For us, this is a show for believers — and that is a show about hope.”Well, of all the characters, Emma and Neal have had to grow up in the “real world” which can seem to be such a “terrible, terrible place” and yet, remarkably, Neal still has hope. While Emma was a cynic after growing up alone in the world, Neal always kept that eternal optimism about him. He might’ve been scared to believe Emma could ever forgive him, but he’s never harmed anyone out of malicious intent. Neal made a self-sacrifice to get Emma home; he didn’t want to do it; he had to do it. To give him an untimely death would be to show that good doesn’t win, and that characters like Hook, who’s repeatedly harmed people, get to have it all.
Also, I was rereading a Hollywood Reporter interview with A&E from Jan. 20, 2014 from
How many different endings did you toy with before you landed on what ended up on the screen?
Kitsis: That was the only one.
Horowitz: That came very quickly as we were designing the end of the 11-episode pod. That just became this inevitable place we kept getting to. And we got so excited by it, particularly because — hopefully you’ll see in the second half — it leads very naturally to a whole new story we’re telling that hopefully as you look through the whole season, feels like they connected to each other and spoke to each other in thematic and character ways that make a lot of sense.Well, let’s look again at three of the main characters’ thematic development:
- Emma – Believe a lost girl can find her way home
- Neal – Believe in second chances
- Hook – Believe a pirate can be a hero
What, given the recent unmentionable spoiler, makes the most sense then from a story-driven perspective? Emma would not be able to find her way home if she were the one to die. Neal would not get his second chance if he were to die. Hook could be a hero by sacrificing himself. That is what makes sense purely from a narrative perspective. It doesn’t make any sense for A&E to say the characters’ themes are consistent through S3 and link the two halves together but then to kill off Neal rather than Hook.
If it’s true that Neal is the one to go, then how would his S3 motto of believing in second chances fulfilled? It’s wouldn’t be at all, because Rumple sacrificed himself to give his son another shot happiness, just not with him. To kill Neal off now would be to discount all of that S3 build up for Neal getting another go at things with his family and would also drastically alter Emma’s idea of home and belonging. Home is a huge mutual theme for both Emma and Neal, and Snow White encouraged her daughter to believe Neal could be alive because, “all happy endings start with hope.” That was in direct relationship to NEAL’S SURVIVAL. Now we have certainty that the theme for S3b is home. Sounds to me like they’re continuing to establish Emma and Neal as being one another’s idea of a happy ending.
"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 problem with using the rating as a meter is this: if A and E are telling the truth that the death was planned in between S2 and S3A then the ratings of S3A (and it’s heavy Hook focus) have nothing to do with the death. The death precedes the less than stellar S3A ratings. I think A and E love Neal, a lot. I think they were very excited to introduce the audience to Neal but at the same they introduced Neal’s foil in Hook. And Hook took off. He was a classic character, he wore leather and eyeliner, and he was very sexy. HUGE portions of the fandom took to him like a fish to water. And so they promoted the heck out of him because he was a shiny and pretty. And Neal got left in the dust, time and time again forced to play second fiddle. They put the focus elsewhere. And now it has been over a year since our introduction to Neal and we’ve never had a proper NEAL episode. But we’ve had two for Hook and one more coming in 3×17. It’s easy to talk about centrics being “death” episodes but if that were true, then we’d have no characters left–Snow, Charming, Rumple, Regina all get tons of centrics and they’re alive. I adore Neal and if they kill him then I am going to be rethinking my love of this show because I don’t think it makes narrative sense to kill him. But I can see A and E doing it because Neal wasn’t as well received as Hook. Clear the way for the more popular endgame, in other words. But I do have faith that A and E are telling their story (but the question remains, “how much of their story has been tainted by fan demands)
"He was a lot of things to me" "The only conclusion was love"(I can’t seem to spoil it out with the quote link 🙁 )
It’s wouldn’t be at all, because Rumple sacrificed himself to give his son another shot happiness, just not with him. To kill Neal off now would be to discount all of that S3 build up for Neal getting another go at things with his family and would also drastically alter Emma’s idea of home and would be the end of hope for a happy ending.
The fact that Rumple said what he did in 3×11 about Neal, and the fact that they went into season 3 knowing which character would die towards the end is HUGE to me. I don’t see the reason at all for Rumple saying that and making a big deal about Neal’s happy ending. If it’s him, they knew it then. Why even put a line like that in there? I don’t know… there’s just so much IN THE STORY to point away from Neal. I’d rather not deal with technicalities of individual words and phrases and whatnot to try and get a clue about the death. I see it all and it makes me sad. And sure it makes me afraid. But I have to keep reminding myself of the logical side.. the storyline and what we’ve seen and the theme of the overall season. Adam says the word “Car” in an interview and people will think he’s trying to secretly say Neal is dying because we first saw him in a car. You know? It is so stressful for me to get involved with that kind of thinking. I choose hope. Even though I still get bothered by everything, even though I still get sad… I choose to remind myself of the things I’ve seen and the things that are certain and the things that I DO know. That’s how we stay sane in the midst of this craziness.
Keeper Nealfire's/Bae's scarf, Henry and Neal's bribery ice cream sundae, Baelfire's sword, the coconut map, and more.
“The theme of the second part of the season, I would say, is home.” -Eddy Kitsis
Source: http://swans-glasses.tumblr.com/post/76094671269/the-theme-of-the-second-part-of-the-season-i
#MoreBOOMLessGloom
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