Parallels

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storyteller wrote:

Why do villains get the love? Gee that’s a toughie. Maybe because society has conditioned us to love the heroes already? Nah that can’t be it.

Well sure. But this is my own personal thesis on the subject: with the villains, for us, it’s a move from sympathy to empathy. I can feel sorry for Snow and Charming but it’s like I understand Rumple. Which is bizarre given that I’m not an immortal dark one, right?

Good points, RG and storyteller. I’ve pondered the same question myself. My two favorite characters are Rumple and Regina. In reading about them, I often hear other fans say “I’ve always loved the villains.”  I’m an exception – in general, I DON’T identify with the villains in most other stories. Normally, I find it easier to get emotionally invested in the ideal character types like Snow and Charming; I’m not bored by the “good guys”. Even in such wonderful performances as Humphrey Bogart in The Petrified Forest or James Cagney in Angels With Dirty Faces, I have difficulty having as much sympathy for their  tortured, villainous characters as some do even though I love these movies and the amazing performances the actors bring to these characters. But Once is different. Here, the writers have managed to evoke in me much more sympathy for Rumple and Regina than for the other, “nicer” characters through the drama of their stories  (although I love ALL the characters.) For me personally, it may be a reversal of what RG described – I feel empathy for Snow, Charming, and Henry while I feel sympathy for Rumple and Regina, but it is a powerful sympathy.  It is probably more powerful than the empathy I feel with the “good” characters.

 

Perhaps this wonderful construction of Rumple and Regina is the reason that some fans get so caught up in them that, as someone pointed out earlier (sorry I can’t recall who), they react with anger when a victim has the audacity to say something rude to Regina after Regina has tried to kill them!  (It reminds me of a satirical  comment someone once made that in World War II, the US should have apologized to Hirohito for any damage we inflicted on his planes at Pearl Harbor.) I don’t think any of us actually consider rudeness an excessive response to murder, but we are so caught up in the character of Regina or Rumple that when someone says something hurtful to them, we feel the pain of that remark, even if it was justified.

 

As I may have mentioned earlier, the scene where Neal abandoned Rumple is a perfect example of this for me.  I empathize with Neal and understand why he did it – he thought he was doing what he had to do to protect Henry (whether it was logically the best choice is a different question;  it was the only choice Neal’s emotional experiences could drive him to. We’ve seen Neal is willing to risk his own life for Rumple but he’s not willing to risk Henry’s life.) At the same time I understand Neal’s action, my heart broke for Rumple because I knew that Rumple was sincere in his resolve to save Henry (Of course, I now fear that resolve has begun to weaken).

 

The writers did the same thing with Regina when the other characters didn’t invite her to dinner at the end of “Queen of Hearts”. I felt so sad for Regina in that scene, even though I knew it was unreasonable to expect one act of help at the well to make Snow extend an invitation to someone who has murdered most of her family and tried to kill her repeatedly. Despite that knowledge, the good writing and Lana’s amazing performance in that scene made my heart break for Regina, just as it did for Rumple in last week’s episode. That ability to balance opposing emotions is why I like this show so much.

[PriceofMagic]

That Rumple and Bae video was so full of feels. Seriously it was really good.

Just saw Screwball’s essay

http://screwballninja.tumblr.com/post/65078069931/why-do-the-ouat-villains-get-all-the-love-essay

and it makes so much sense. We care about Rumple so much that when Neal does that to him, we feel more for Rumple than we do Neal.

I also find it interesting that people like young Bae yet don’t seem to care for Neal even though they are the same character. It could be that in our minds, we are subconsciously seeing them as separate characters. When we were first introduced to Neal, as Screwball said, it was when he kind of screwed Emma over. First impressions are important and Neal didn’t make a good first impression. Also the fact he gives Rumple a hard time, when Rumple is so well loved makes the fandom, doesn’t improve the potential dislike for Neal.

I wonder if Hook would be so well liked if our first proper introduction to him was when he smacked Belle across the face in 209.

All magic comes with a price!

Keeper of Felix

[RumplesGirl]

I also find it interesting that people like young Bae yet don’t seem to care for Neal even though they are the same character. It could be that in our minds, we are subconsciously seeing them as separate characters

KFC is you should see this, you had some insights into the way Neal was presented to the audience that conditioned us to be wary, outside of the “Tallahassee incident” (somewhere in the SF thread if we need to hunt them down)

First impressions are important and Neal didn’t make a good first impression

Not to mention that his first off screen introduction was Emma telling Snow that Henry’s father was a story better left untold because of what happened. We were conditioned to think Neal wasn’t going to be good, and then they let us in on the fact that was Bae, an incredibly kind and brave boy.

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

[kfchimera]

Yes, RG, I’ll summarize it here. So besides being conditioned to “hate” Henry’s father for breaking her heart, Emma also made many comments on bad relationships in general. This sort of implied to some that all her relationships were bad in terms of the dynamics.

Then when we meet Neal with Emma, they chose to style him in a way that taps into a very negative cultural stereotype of a bad guy. He is dressed in street thug clothes, the tank top (what I’ve seen discussed as the “wife beater top”), the hoodie (“all criminals wear hoddies”! as Geraldo Rivera points out…). He looks very scruffy overall. Then it was a deliberate choice on the writers/directors to have him speak in the dialect he does, rather than in the more delicate way Bae does.

So even before we get to the ambiguity in the story designed to explain Emma’s reluctance to trust him, people are predisposed to tune out all signs that he isn’t a jerk and bad guy to her. Some people forget that our actual first impression of adult Neal is when we saw him lost and lonely in the first episode of that season, wearing a rather dapper 3pc suit, wandering around a decent part of NY and going home to an actual apartment, staring in confusion at a postcard that said “Broken”. So that bit of information got disconnected and dismissed for some in forming their first impression of him, because to them, his first appearance was in the episode where Emma thinks he screwed her over.

This is particularly true for those who use Tumblr/Twitter, because exchanging interpretations about the show, rather than going back to the actual show, sort of can have that “telephone /rumor effect”. Have you ever played that children’s game where one person whispers to the next, and by the time it comes out the other side of the chain of people, the words are not even close to the original ? On Tumblr, there are gifsets made where people sometimes change the dialog around for various scenes, leaving out key pieces of a sentence and the like. This isn’t something I’m saying is some sort of deliberate thing against only Neal, because I’ve seen people who are PRO-Neal, thinking he was with Tamara for many years. That’s impossible as we know he met her right before August came to SB, which in the timeline wasn’t barely a full year in SB time. The fact is, the story is complicated, told in fits and starts, and even people that want to like Neal because he is Bae, get confused.

Then I’ve seen spillover from Neal to Bae, as well, with people now blaming a 14 year old Bae for being angry with Rumple and Hook, dismissing Bae’s concerns as “teenage rebellion” or even the other way, that he should have grown up fast and had an adult’s emotional maturity at those points to see how much his rejection would hurt these men who only wanted to care for him. The fact that Bae was at heart a moral kid, who objected to their methods of showing “care” and had actual reasons to be wary and distrustful are not as often mentioned, unless counter-opinions are presented like on these types of forums. Tumblr/twitter though do not lend themselves to that kind of conversation. If anything, Tumblr gives you the ability from what I understand to simply block out any contrary type views (and obviously, one can always self-select to do that, unless you’re like RG and having to moderate and read it all!).

Finally, we have to factor in, that Bae /Neal actually has done things that hurt others. Not all of it was intentional (especially to the extent people transfer any hate about Tamara to Neal). He hasn’t been a total sweetheart, never hurting a fly. Not that it would matter, because, there is Henry-hate, Belle hate too. Yet the way people discuss what his actions say about his character, there is a continued suggestion that he is “just like his father” without recognition of some very real differences between the two, as well as comparisons to Milah, in terms of negative things–usually without recognition that he actually has and displays various positive traits from them as well.

“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

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Thanks for posting the screwballninja quote, RG! It was fascinating. While I enjoy the complex villains on the show, I never understood how fans could identify so strongly with the villains that they develop the “blame the victim” attitude toward some of the other characters. After reading the essay, I think I have better insight into that.

PriceofMagic wrote: First impressions are important and Neal didn’t make a good first impression

Not to mention that his first off screen introduction was Emma telling Snow that Henry’s father was a story better left untold because of what happened. We were conditioned to think Neal wasn’t going to be good, and then they let us in on the fact that was Bae, an incredibly kind and brave boy.

 

I agree that’s a big part of it. I think the characters’ back stories are important too. I became a big Rumple fan after seeing “Desperate Souls” and found Storybrooke Regina much more appealing than Enchanted Forest Regina before “The Stable Boy.” They are such good examples of Adam and Eddy’s repeated comment that “Evil isn’t born, it’s made.” Seeing how they suffered made us more sympathetic to them.

 

I suspect I haven’t been as partial to Hook as to Regina and Rumple because we haven’t yet seen as much sympathetic back story for him.

I wonder if  some of those who don’t like Henry would have reacted differently to the character if we had seen Henry’s suffering as he tried to understand whether or not he really was crazy during the years before we met him in the pilot. I ran across a fan fiction story at

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/9119020/1/Growing-Up-in-Storybrooke

that offers one author’s take on that.

 

 

[Slurpeez]

Neal isn’t the only one who mistrusts Rumple. According to a sneak peek for 3×8, no one in Emma’s group trusts Rumple after Neal reveals the prophesy. Everyone, except Neal, is quick to point a weapon at Rumple. Just as Neal put his son first ahead of Rumple, Emma is the one who says Rumple will have to go through them all to get to Henry, because she’s just as protective of his son as Neal is. In the other sneak peek for 3×8, Wendy says, “why should I trust a man who abandoned his own son?” So, clearly, Rumple is the one who has to prove he’s trustworthy, because he is the one who broke his deal with his son and threatened the life of his own grandson. Rumple is going to somehow have to convince everyone that he is a man capable of change, that he can overcome his nasty habit of self-preservation, and that he can act sacrificially for the sake of saving Henry.

For all of the trust issues that Neal and Rumple had in “Nasty Habits” it seems like their relationship could take a positive turn in 3×8. According to a new interview with MRJ and Robert Carlyle, we’re going to see Neal and Rumple confront some of their issues head-on and even find some common ground.

Unlike Rumple’s relationship with Neal, which was tenuous because of Rumple’s quest for power, Malcolm really doesn’t want to have anything to do with his son. “The boy’s a kind of tagalong,” Carlyle explains. “You find him hanging outside the bar waiting for his father to come out.”

But there are still a lot of parallels between the two relationships since the young Bae always hoped to have a closer relationship with his own father, who, despite being preoccupied with dark magic, did love Bae with all his heart. “That’s a moment we can kind of bond over,” Raymond-James says. “‘See, you know what it’s like to have a sh—y father then, too! And it’s hard and maybe I’ve been harder on you than I needed to.’”

Something must happen such that Neal learns more about his dad’s relationship with his granddad Malcolm. Could it be Neal discovers from Rumple that PP is none other than his grandpa? I was so thrilled to read a new interview with Robert Carlyle and MRJ. Bless those two, they’re fantastic and really get inside of their characters’ headspace.

Even though Neal is still wary to about trusting that Rumple has Henry’s (Jared Gilmore) best interests at heart, the realization that Rumple went through a similar childhood may actually bring father and son closer. “Neal is somewhat of an internal optimist,” Raymond-James says. “He was willing to forgive his father before and the stakes have been raised now. Now he feels his son’s life is in danger as a direct result of his father and that’s hard to take. The audience realizes that Rumple’s intentions are pure, but Neal doesn’t. Neal is also somebody who’s looking for a second chance himself with Emma [Jennifer Morrison], the woman he loves, and he’s willing to give his father the 35th chance if conditions eventually work out.”

It’s so true that in order to move forward we must make peace with our pasts. Neal and Rumple learning to understand each other better, and working on their relationship, will bring so much personal growth for Neal. Neal so wants his father to be a good man again, and I think something major will happen in 3×8 to help start Neal and Rumple on the path to forgiveness. If Neal can learn to forgive his dad for what he did to him, then he’s probably dreaming of making it up to Henry for not being there the first 11 years of his son’s life (though he would’ve been had he known about Henry). Also, I love that MRJ brought up Neal’s love for Emma; Neal inwardly longs for Emma to be able to forgive him, just as Rumple longs for Neal to forgive him. Forgiveness of the father leads the hero on his journey to achieving his goals. If we see Neal start to believe in second chances with his dad, he may be all the more inspired to try for a second chance with Emma and Henry.

"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

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