Emma + Baelfire = Swanfire

[RumplesGirl]

RumplesGirl wrote:

*rocks back and forth* 322 title…322 title…322 title..

YOU GET ALL THE COOKIES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And Slurpeez108 too!!! (several of us called it in fact….)

But can we please talk about the rainbows and puppy dogs that come with that title, because suddenly I am on cloud nine

[RumplesGirl]

I made this one back in October. Go me!

Full of epic win!!!!!

Believe a Lost Girl and a Lost Boy can find their way home. Together.

"He was a lot of things to me" "The only conclusion was love"

[RumplesGirl]

THIS VIDEO SEEMS ODDLY APPROPRIATE RIGHT NOW.

#DONTTOUCME

"He was a lot of things to me" "The only conclusion was love"

[RumplesGirl]

OMG

It just dawned on me.

“There’s No Place Like Home” is also the S4 finale title of LOST in which the following things happen

(sorry if you haven’t seen it)

1) Sawyer sacrifices himself so that Kate can get off the island (he stays behind) and Kate and Jack end up together, because Kate realizes that she loves Jack.  (Sawyer is VERY Hook)

2) DESMOND AND PENNY REUNITE.

Why is that in all caps?! Because Desmond and Penny are the modern equivalent of Odysseus and Penny (hence why her name is Penelope.) They were each others CONSTANT. The one person that is like your marker in the universe, around whom you revolve no matter how many years, or betrayal or heartache or loss or pain.

Oh god. I am going to die over here.

"He was a lot of things to me" "The only conclusion was love"

[RumplesGirl]

This is the phone call between Desmond and Penny in the episode “Constant” which was then played to its conclusion in No Place Like Home where they re-meet

Years of separation because of FATE, everyone told Penny to stop looking, to get on with her life and she tried. She got engaged, even! but it wasn’t enough. Desmond was her constant. And so she looked for years for him. Never giving up hope. And this moment basically destroyed me. And now I have all these SF feelings thinking about all this (if you’ve never seen LOST it’s super confusing cause Desmond is jumping through time at the same time…but go with it)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JUuCK3IEtk

And the motto for Desmond and Penny? ALL WE REALLY NEED TO SURVIVE IS ONE PERSON WHO TRULY LOVES US.

I’m fine. (no I’m not)

"He was a lot of things to me" "The only conclusion was love"

[heatherc1275]

OMG It just dawned on me. “There’s No Place Like Home” is also the S4 finale title of LOST in which the following things happen (sorry if you haven’t seen it) 1) Sawyer sacrifices himself so that Kate can get off the island (he stays behind) and Kate and Jack end up together, because Kate realizes that she loves Jack. (Sawyer is VERY Hook) 2) DESMOND AND PENNY REUNITE. Why is that in all caps?! Because Desmond and Penny are the modern equivalent of Odysseus and Penny (hence why her name is Penelope.) They were each others CONSTANT. The one person that is like your marker in the universe, around whom you revolve no matter how many years, or betrayal or heartache or loss or pain. Oh god. I am going to die over here.

And you did this to me WHY???!?! OMG, the feels right now. I bawled when Penny & Desmond reunited and I honestly forgot that NPLH was the title of that episode too! Season four wasn’t the best one of Lost but they really hit the nail on the head with their finale that year. BTW-Sawyer jumped out of a helicopter into the water to save everyone from crashing. Just as a frame of reference for what he actually did to save Kate and the other five Oceanic folks on that chopper though I don’t know if it’s significant or not (could be, might not be…who knows at this point, LOL).

#HopeforSwanFire #AlmostHome #NoPlaceLikeHome

 

#MoreBOOMLessGloom

[RumplesGirl]

And you did this to me WHY???!?! OMG, the feels right now. I bawled when Penny & Desmond reunited and I honestly forgot that NPLH was the title of that episode too! Season four wasn’t the best one of Lost but they really hit the nail on the head with their finale that year.

And just to drive it HOME more

"He was a lot of things to me" "The only conclusion was love"

[Lauren]

thought id share some pretties and i think lizzie was it wanted a sig doing? well whoever it was ive done it and hope you like 😀

 

#BOOM

 

or just done this one

#BOOM #Swanfire #Always #Pancakes #Haven #Fate

[dontstopbelievin]

Ooh boy, I could see that title going a whole lot of different ways… but wholeheartedly agree that it ties into our duo.  Huh, who might find their “home” in the finale?

So before I jump into the convo I want to give a quick intro to me – I hope that’s okay to do here in this thread – I honestly don’t anticipate posting much outside of it.  I have learned to stick to my kind!!  I think my ship history is relevent for my POV on things so I’d like to share it, though perhaps it is just me being self-important.  Anyways I feel like if you cower in a corner of someone’s castle and they kindly offer you cocoa, you should make yourself known :p

Anyways, I am not new to fanbases or ships, but it’s been a long time.  I come from the age of message boards and mailing lists – we did not have tumblr, or twitter, and if you wanted to interact with the subject you sent fan mail or went to an event!  So half the cast interacting directly with fans is all new business to me – I am still trying to decide if I like it lol.

My shipping history includes mostly “true wuv” couples, and a few that didn’t fare so well.  Some real, some fake – I have sat through every itineration of possible union, separation, reunion, triangle, marriage, kid with other people, death, back-from-the-dead, memory potion, insanity, comeuppance, rose-colored glasses, parallel, foreshadow, spoiler, spoiler denial, shipping war… you name it I sat through it.    Generally speaking – even for couples that would be considered canon/soulmates/endgame – it “never ends well,” which I put in quotations, because it’s literally what I told myself to defer from joining the fanbase for the last, oh, year?  (Gee, thanks for joining us at this sensitive time, you all say.)  Somehow I always end up way too entangled in the fanbase and have in fact met most of my besties via ships!!  That said, I have not had a ship in close to a decade; my last ship ended up in a weird spot where things got a little too real… too close to the subject matter to remain just a fan, having ended up knowing a bit too much to actively participate in the fanbase, but not quite close enough to legitimately be involved on the other end of things.  Quite frankly it sucked, since it was not happy times and I have no interest in doing that again!!!  It was at that point that I swore off shipping, because I just get too attached and then get my little heart broken.  “It never ends well, self,” I said.

Why I am here then?  Well other than the inevitable heartstring tug that makes us all shippers, I had some encouragement and some logic.  My roommate (one of the aforementioned besties) and I have watched Once since its premiere, although I am learning now that I mayhaps did not pay quite as much attention in the early days as I should have.  She has a ridiculous love of Bae (and I am rather fond of him, too!)  At some point last season, my guess would be shortly after Manhattan, she was exaulting her love of Bae and I sighed and said something to the affect of, “Yeah, and if I was allowed to ship, I could totally ship those two…  But I’m not and I won’t so I can’t.”  I held strong through the rest of the season and then over the summer, you know, life.  By the end of the Neverland arc, I had to utilize all of my willpower to not plop “Once forum” into my google box, but thankfully (?) holiday travel rescued me and I survived the hiatus without giving into my shipping.

We gained a third roommate in the fall – she did not watch the show so we would watch it on Sundays after she went to bed.  By the end of 3A she was curious and wanted to sit down and watch it with us.  We were all “Well see that’s Rumplestiltskin but he’s also the Beast and the Crocodile and Peter Pan’s his…. no. This won’t do.  You have to watch it from the beginning.”  The library’s waitlist took entirely too long (in fact I just now cancelled it, I was still 7 people out!) so we ended up buying both seasons.  So as the show came back, the three of us sat down to watch the show from the beginning.  May I just say, if you have not taken the opportunity to do so, DO THIS, the show is soooo much richer the second time around.  Some of my SF observations come from this, as A&E have done some crazy little things that tell me there is an amount of foresight and planning that goes into things.

Anyways, my anti-ship resolve was weakening and my bestie (the original roommate) did not help any.  It had turned to, “If I was allowed to ship, I would totally ship them…” and her reply was, “I am already on the boat, get on it with me.”  “But it never ends well!”  There were multiple whispery conversations over several evenings held away from the other roommate – mind you, she was still all, “Wait, who’s Katherine?  And who was the EQ’s true love?” – as we tried to discuss the current show without giving it away from her.  This junk is hard, friends!  Pretty much impossible to discuss SF when sitting on the couch with someone who does not yet know Bae = Neal = H’s father = not a giant craphead who ditched Emma, when you don’t want to spoil it.  So, whispered conversations it was, and they mostly went like this – “No, no, I’m not getting on the ship.”  “Crap, I think I’m standing next to the ship.  I might be looking at it but… I’m not getting in.”  “So, this ship I am contemplating boarding…”  “I think I have one foot on the ship.  Crap.” I ended up allowing myself to find the fanbase of the show – see it’s not a ship if you’re just discussing the show! – and of course that was the beginning of the end.

In the meantime, we have just finished S1.  Took from Friday night until the following Sunday, not too shabby!  Second roommate is all “Okay?” and “Henry’s so cute” and bestie and I are all “Squee!!  Six more episodes!  Except not really ’cause next but not really so then five after that!”  Second roommate pretty much thinks we’re insane, but that’s cool, we warned her about that before we agreed to room with her.  (See aforementioned “too close” ruined fanbase, she doesn’t really know about all of that, either… too complicated.  :/)

So as we worked our way through S1, I had bestie trying to get me on the ship, and then I logic’d myself into it.  The long and the short of it is, with all of my other ships (every.single.one) there were – simplified – two major heartache issues: 1) ridiculous amounts of talking about having babies, held out as an endgame prize, but pretty much just having loss/babies with someone else, and 2) couple go splat.  The latter is usually due to crap like a headwriter change, actor’s contract up, whatever, not story or actual plot reasons!  So I had an epiphany one day, I said, “Self, this duo that you are fighting so hard not to ship already HAVE a kid, and I have every confidence that they’re endgame, so why exactly is it that you feel this ship is risky?”  I really couldn’t argue with my own insanity, so I put conditions on fandom, which was pretty much, come into this from a fair, balanced POV.   No more rose-colored-glasses, I wanted to make SURE I was confident of their endgame status before I allowed myself to take that leap.  I made myself read a significant chunk of the general threads, check.  Mostly what I found though is that I really love the fanbase thing… and I have really, really missed it.  But if I am going to do it it has to be cautiously, evenly and fairly, with eyes wide open.  I am not interested in rose-colored-glasses’ing a situation only to be blindsided by the inevitable.  So I also required myself to read the CS thread… okay, I want to be honest and say, I said I was going to read the whole thing, but 800 pages… and just no.  So I read the first chunk and the last chunk and a handful of well-written metas – enough to feel I had a balanced view of the situation, and yeah, my shipping tendancies did not change.  (More on this later.)  I planned on reading the entire SF thread before I was allowed to post but, well, 800 pages and if I’m gonna fanbase it up I want to fanbase it up!!  I’m on pg93 – I WILL read them all, just might take a couple of weeks.  :p

Anyways, enough about me.  I want to wrap this up with my justification for why I am so confident SF is endgame.  Because the truth of the matter is, as a casual viewer, I had no question.  I knew there were CS shippers, it didn’t surprise or bother me, but when I stepped into the fanbase I was utterly SHOCKED to find out I was rooting for the underdog.  Say what?!  That is not how it read at ALL to us, as casual viewers.  As I read, in calculated form, what the CS folks had to say I have to concede they make some really good points.  I can see where they are getting what they are getting!  And I do not begrude them for it.  So I questioned, a bit, my confidence in endgame.  I poked around a bit more and considered it, and for me, I think here is what it boils down to.

If you take a magnifying glass, and come right in on the CS stuff – yeah.  They have a story.  They have promise.  I am not even decidedly anti-CS!  They are fine, they are just not SF.  But to me, it’s like those photomosaics – when you’re standing right up on it, yes, that is a photo of Aunt Myrtle and her beloved cat, but when you take ten steps back, hey, it’s really a fleck on Albert Einstein’s head!   And that is where I think SF has the win as endgame.  If you consider either potential pairing in insolation, they both have merit and potential to go forward.  But Once is not a show of isolation.  Once is an ensemble cast, where each thing someone does is affected by and continues to affect another.  That’s a huge piece of the show, you know, the EQ enacted the curse to get back and Snow but it affects soooo many more people than that, it’s people they know, people they don’t know – people who don’t even exist yet (yes, Henry, I am looking at you.)

When you back up and look at the overall “poetry” of the show… it’s blatant.  In my mind’s eye, there’s kind of the lineage on the left side, Emma on up, and the lineage on the right side, Bae on up, two converging lines that meet down in the middle at Henry, and it’s just so so so so clear.  It’s been discussed ad nauseum, the reason for the curse and the one who would break the curse – that’s the arc of the show.  To use the photomosaic again, the magnified story is “EQ enacts curse to get back at Snow; Emma will save all,” but when you back it out, you realize not at all – they are ALL pawns in the larger story, which is Rumple retrieving his son.  That’s something that bestie and I both missed the first time around, and I think the second roomie missed it, too.  It’s so easy in those early episodes to get focused on, “Who’s the guy on the motorcycle?”  “August,” “No, what CHARACTER is he?!” and the red herring of August-as-Bae that it’s easy to miss the full story of the thing.  It was amazingly apparent to both of us; in fact, as we watched the scenes in Gold’s shop in 1×22, I was thinking about how it had totally flown over my head, and bestie turned to me and said something to the effect of, “I missed what they were going for, completely, the first time around.”  I think before we have S2 we’ll need to have the debate about whether to point that out to second roomie – does it give too much of the story away?  Ruin the fun of “meeting” Neal and then watching the show lead us to the Bae = Neal connection?  I suspect it might, so perhaps we’ll leave well enough alone.

Anyways, to distill further from that… that is what makes me incredibly chill about the spoiler-that-shall-not-be-mentioned.  I think there are two possibilities; it is story-related, as A&E have said.  Or it is not, it is outside-forced (actor, TPTB at the network, whatever,) and they are covering – which is understandable.  The fact of the matter is, if it is outside-related, and the outcome is gonna suck, it’s gonna suck – period.  There is nothing we can do about it, that outside force is going to change the course of the story and that stinks but there’s nothing there to analyze & wig out about.   It’s done, for reasons that totally ruin the show (IMO.)  But if we choose to trust A&E (and that is something I have a reallllly hard time with, TPTB is what screws my couples more than anything – but I have zero history with them, so I suppose I will choose to trust them,) then there’s no issue.  I am going to try to spoiler the paragraph below but RG you’ll have to forgive me if I screw it up!!

If you look at the story of Baelfire, exclusively, zoomed in (and yes, I know this is going completely against the photomosaic argument I gave above,) it’s plain to me what HAS to be his happy ending.  Bae has this history, that goes back generations.  His grandfather ditched his father, with NO regard for his wellbeing.  His father ditched him, this time out of (a very misguided) attempt for love, but it broke him nonetheless.  Miraculously he found a family, and (what we now know to be) the familial legacy of his grandfather ripped that away from him.  He spent “centuries” being this utterly lost little boy, until he met someone who “got” him completely and fulfilled that sense of family that he desperately craved.  And then – surprise! – that family legacy crept up again, this time at the hands of his father, and he had to let go of that sense of belonging he’d finally received.  This guy is now beyond broken, he is utterly shattered.  A decade later, when he finally gets another go at his family, he has 5.3 seconds with them before he gets bean-portaled and shadow-flown all over creation before being curse-zapped right back from whence he came… sans family again.   What goes beyond shattered?  Pulverized?  Powdered?  I mean, really.  And then, wait for it, curse-zapped back again, or something, I dunno, but reunited with his family for another 4.7 seconds  (for a total of ten seconds, my friends,) of familial happiness before he is offed.  REALLY?  That is not story-driven.  That’s a load of junk is what that is.  And I just have a hard time believing it’s where A&E are going.  Alternatively, if that last step changes to… curse-zapped back again, and reunited with his family so that they can work out their issues and finally, FINALLY have those connections they have craved all of these years and – most importantly – not abandon his child, THAT is story mastery.  I cannot see any sense, at least not any story-driven sense, of cutting it off at the knees.

Ship aside, Neal HAS to be able to be a father to Henry, and not abandon him, for this to truly be a good story of paternal redemption.  Dying (even if it is for him) does not do that.  Dying for his son (or “dying” as the case may be) was a marvelous redemption arc for Rumpel; Rumpel who always put himself first and his child second.  Neal has shown, already, that he is willing to do anything for Henry – Henry comes first.  He (much like Emma, though hers was more reluctantly,) has been a parent to him since he has known he existed.  “Course correcting” the legacy of this family requires Neal to be there for Henry, truly support him and not leave him fatherless.  I am guessing it is not accidental that although Henry had a parent and a reasonably good life for his first ten years, he did not have a father figure – that cycle was continued, even utterly unwittingly.  To bring the character of Baelfire full circle, Neal needs to be a present, involved and loving father to Henry.  Full stop.  The end.

To be fair to my above photomosaic points, zooming out, I guess I would say – the overall show – what is it?  Emma’s fairy tale, right? So we have two potential stories here – Option A, Girl from crap background meets boy from crap background, they fall in love and restore faith in life.  Get torn apart by a curse, faith gone, little family scattered in three different directions.  Family reunited as curse is broken (and then torn asunder by a magic bean, curse repealing, re-cursing… you get my drift) work out issues and eventually live happily ever after.  Option B, girl from crap background meets boy from crap background, they fall in love & restore faith.  Get torn apart by curse, faith gone, family scattered, reunited with issues never fully resolved and then runs off with a pirate while boy meets demise.  Which of those sounds like a fairy tale?  (Frankly option B makes me want to curl up in my corner and bawl!!)  Story-wise, I still do not see where the death of Neal makes the most sense.

All right, enough noveling for me.  Hopefully y’all don’t mind chatty houseguests.  😉  This totally did not even scratch the surface of my notes, and quite frankly, that scares me a bit… clearly I should have come aboard sooner.

Cause this story needs some mending & a better happy ending...

[kfchimera]

Everyone, so many lovely pictures, thoughts, videos! I love that graphic ArtsDeeva did with the “In your eyes song”.

RG: I agree–Desmond and Penny were my LOST OTP– but I also liked early “Chair”– LOST SPOILERS [spoilers] and that’s exactly what makes me nervous in a way.  A&E wrote that sweet but sad ending to CHAIR.  As for D&P, in the end, I remember Desmond went into that chamber thing but can’t remember if he survived it.  I do remember he and Penny loved each other though and I guess for me that’s what it comes down to here.  I love that Neal loves Emma, and that she loves him, and whether or not the writers do the fairytale thing or drown this in more angst, it won’t change the potential this story had and how much it moved me to care about the characters and what might or might not happen to them.  I will hope on, especially with these title spoilers and how often HOME has been referenced in SF scenes, that this genre is calling for a less angsty ending.  I’m just prepared and will be thankful for all the fun we’ve had discussing with those of you who also see what I see in Neal and Emma’s story.  If the writers go a different direction, I imagine I’m just not going to feel all that invested or connected to it, but I suppose as ever I will wait and see how they write whatever they write.    [/spoiler]

“If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn't be. And what it wouldn't be, it would. You see?” -- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass

[Author]

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