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So much pain. When my dad died, this was exactly how I reacted. I was overwhelmed by the pain that I couldn’t do anything except lay down somewhere and stare at the ceiling. It wasn’t even until much later that I cried. And here all Neal is trying to do is hold on to the edges of reality before it all pulls him under.
RG – I’m so sorry for you loss. No one could possibly know what the loss of someone they love feels like until it happens to them. Your experience gives you perspective and maturity. When my grandfather passed away last summer, I had a very similar reaction. I didn’t visibly break down in grief at the funeral like my cousins did. Though my sadness was less detectable to an onlooker, it didn’t make my grief any less real. I’m just a private individual, and I saved my tears for quiet moments when I was alone.
[adrotate group="5"]"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
Reposting for amazing reasons. This is probably one of the best Neal and Emma essays out there.
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
I’m just a private individual, and I saved my tears for quiet moments when I was alone.
Thanks. And sorry for your loss as well
And I would say that Neal might be one of the MOST private characters on the show. Because ever single time he’s put his heart out there, the same thing happens: it breaks. Of course he’s going to hide it away. It’s going to take someone *cough* Emma *cough* to show him that it’s okay to put it out on the line again. And at the same time she’s showing him it’s okay to do that, he’ll help tear down her remaining walls.
Reposting for amazing reasons. This is probably one of the best Neal and Emma essays out there.
This essay is probably one of my very favorites.
"He was a lot of things to me" "The only conclusion was love"Reposting this amazing pic because of how beautiful it is
"He was a lot of things to me" "The only conclusion was love"remember that time someone who was supposedly watching 312 filming swore they heard the crew calling Christopher Gorham’s character Henry and we were all convinced he was time traveling Henry from the future? remember that time vancity posted pictures of emma and hook walking up stairs for 310 and said he hadn’t seen mrj on set and then we got the actual scene and almost the entire main cast including mrj was in that actual scene? remember how we got the new york pics and the enchanted forest pics while we were still watching episodes in neverland and everyone was confused as hell because we had no way of knowing about the curse reversal and the fake memories three episodes out? this is your daily reminder that a good rule of thumb on the internet is receipts or it didn’t happen. nobody knows anything, and just as much as they might be RIGHT, they could also be wrong.
"He was a lot of things to me" "The only conclusion was love"^^ In other words, don’t trust hearsay, rumors, or paps. Take everything with a grain of salt.
"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’m just a private individual, and I saved my tears for quiet moments when I was alone.
Thanks. And sorry for your loss as well And I would say that Neal might be one of the MOST private characters on the show. Because ever single time he’s put his heart out there, the same thing happens: it breaks. Of course he’s going to hide it away. It’s going to take someone *cough* Emma *cough* to show him that it’s okay to put it out on the line again. And at the same time she’s showing him it’s okay to do that, he’ll help tear down her remaining walls.
Reposting for amazing reasons. This is probably one of the best Neal and Emma essays out there.
This essay is probably one of my very favorites.
Excellent essay is excellent. So beautifully put and I’m glad you guys have reposted so much good stuff today! I like reading awesome things instead of working, LOL 😉
I’m a pretty private individual myself and don’t often like my feelings out there much, but I can pretty much cry at the drop of a hat when I get emotionally affected by anything (you can imagine how much Once has made me cry over the last 2.5 years, LOL). Funerals and other things like them just wreck me to a point where I can barely function because my heart is made of marshmallow but I hate people seeing me cry more than anything. I totally understand that this isn’t how everyone deals with tragedies though and honestly, I think the people who deal with their pain so privately are normally the ones who are suffering the most. It’s a delicate thing to handle making sure those people feel loved, supported, and comforted when they need it most which brings me back to Emma & Neal. They totally get each other’s pain and now that Emma knows more about Neal’s past, she’s going to get his pain way more than ever once they finally see each other again. No one understands the longing for family more than each of them, no one understands loneliness better than them, no one understands trying to find your way in an unfamiliar place more than them, and no one knows how each of them deals with that unbearable type of pain better than each of them. I find myself wondering sometimes how many nights they spent together quietly crying or just feeling down about being alone in the world and trying to comfort each other. This was definitely not done by accident….they created these two characters to be this way and I think through season 3B we’re going to see them find their way back to each other and help each other heal their hearts and love again, together. <3
BTW-Totally random but I discovered last night that the digital postcards that Operation Tiger have been doing are going to keep going after the premiere this weekend. This makes me SO happy right now because I love seeing them in my Twitter timeline every day! 😀
#HopeforSwanFire #SwanFireAlways
#MoreBOOMLessGloomSomeday I hope to see a SwanFire video to the song Real Life Fairytale by Plumb.
It is so fitting for them, two fairytale-born, yet real-world characters. 🙂"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 find myself wondering sometimes how many nights they spent together quietly crying or just feeling down about being alone in the world and trying to comfort each other.
And now I have this image of them curled up inside the bug doing this.
*clutches chest*
It is so fitting for them, two fairytale-born, yet real-world characters. 🙂
Great song!
"He was a lot of things to me" "The only conclusion was love"
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