Emma's Transformation

[nevermore]

Right now, part of me thinks that Emma is actually trying to destroy the darkness but in order to do so, she had to become Darkness. Sort of…infiltrate the enemy and destroy it from the inside.

I like that idea. The super cliche ending sentence with Emma declaring that she’s the Dark One could be read in two ways, I think. A) She really thinks she is now Big Bad now, and must act accordingly (Yawnz). Or B) she is trying to convince someone that she is on Team Evil. I wonder if the anthropomorphized DO curse becomes more and more autonomous with time, essentially with whoever is afflicted with slowing losing their mind. Perhaps she’s trying to convince the Darkness-induced hallucinations that she is no longer putting up a fight.

[RumplesGirl]

I wonder… Can TLK be initiated by the person who is cursed? It seems to me that the whole TLK canon hinges on the cursed person being saved by an outside intervention from someone who loves them no matter what, but also with no hope of the kiss saving them or having any sort of efficacy. At least, that’s how it’s been framed in Season 1 as well. It’s sort of like the Narnia wardrobe paradox — the wardrobe won’t act as a portal unless you don’t expect it to (I might be embellishing this, I haven’t read CS Lewis since I was a kid). Point is, I don’t think TLK would work if it’s goal driven. Arguably, this is why Belle/Rumple’s TLK didn’t work: not just because Rumple wasn’t willing to give up his powers, but because Belle was doing it for the wrong reasons. I think the same rules apply in this case — you can neither force a TLK on someone, nor extract one from someone you love to solve your predicament.

I would agree with all of this except for one big sticking point: Snowing TLK in S2A, specifically in the finale “The Queen of Hearts”.

Snow wasn’t trying to say goodbye and wasn’t under the illusion that there was no hope to save Charming. She kissed him because she knew it would work; she knew that TLK would achieve her goal of waking up Charming. Otherwise, your theory works perfectly well.

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

[nevermore]

Snow wasn’t trying to say goodbye and wasn’t under the illusion that there was no hope to save Charming. She kissed him because she knew it would work; she knew that TLK would achieve her goal of waking up Charming. Otherwise, your theory works perfectly well.

Damn it! Well, more fodder for my conviction that E&A don’t really care about careful worldbuilding, but are typically content with the writing equivalent of throwing spaghetti at the wall, and telling their audience it’s a rorschach test.

[RumplesGirl]

In a pinch I think the writers would go with what you’re saying–and they may actually go with it this season in order explain why a CS or a Henry/Emma kiss didn’t save Emma Swan–but they shot themselves in the foot back in S2 with the Snowing kiss. They are just hoping we don’t remember.

But, as I often say, I do not have amnesia.

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

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