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So… I just gotta say, yay for the PCAs nom! So well deserved. And, that’s gotta include GA, our teeny tiny sliver of a fanbase is not enough to make that happen.
[adrotate group="5"]Cause this story needs some mending & a better happy ending...
Wish I had been there with you guys. Glad you had fun.
As for hope, I wouldn’t mind waiting till the end for your HEA if other parts of the show weren’t unraveling and horrid. It isn’t just Neal and SF that has me turned off: Snowing, Rumple, Regina, the Frozen arc, Bo Peep (yes, DSB, it wasn’t fake). I can handle ships I don’t like if the writing and plotting is good, and it just isn’t anymore. That’s from where my disillusionment stems.
Bo Peep, LOLOLLLLLLL!!!
(Seriously, I thought it was a fake spoiler!)
We missed you, Jo! Next time!!!
I totally get what you mean about the rest of the show. I mean, I’ve said I could potentially even deal with CS *if* it were well-written. But it’s not. They not only decimated SF, they messed with Snowing (seriously… how do you retcon Snow Falls?) and messed up OQ and the price of magic and Henry and I don’t even know with regards to the whispers I’ve heard about tonight. It doesn’t sound promising. So I totally feel you. I’m almost like, okay, if the whole show is going to suck then all I ask for is my ship back, please. I’d really like my show back, but if I can’t have that, at least my ship. (Irony is the loss of one IMO stems from the loss of the other, since it’s the framework around which the show was formed… but I digress.)
I haven’t written any fanfic in a long time. If I could write evil, I’d do my take on Bae coming back into Baevil and the final storyline being everyone working together to overcome the evil and bring Bae back. Usually everything I write turns into fluff, but the plot bunny is there.
Write iiiiitttt…
Look, there’s even Baevil version swings. (This is special for Ranisha, lol.)
Cause this story needs some mending & a better happy ending...
“We just need to wait for it to be 40*.”
So, Heather and I met up at a local theme park yesterday. It was freaking FREEZING, but the weather ended up actually lending us a new catchphrase. It’s a long story that serves as an extended metaphor so bear with me… I promise it worked better in person 😉
We went into one of the restaurants to warm up, and we ended up having a loooong discussion about the A&E interview, a few points we found interesting, etc. A solid portion of the discussion was about the points outlined above, and my infernal eternal optimism. (For the record, I’m not a fan of my optimism and would prefer to be where RG is! It’s not a voluntary thing, it’s just how I see it!)
Because the weather was so cold, when I got to the park, a number of the rides weren’t running. At first it was just the flat rides, then shortly after the park opened they started running their wooden coasters… but anything with steel track was down. There were two rides Heather and I really wanted to ride, both newer additions to the park, but they were both steel and therefore not operating. We looped the park a few times, and on one of the loops – shortly after the discussion on why I’m not convinced we’re out of the game here – we noticed some activity on the loading platform of the coaster. “Hey, are those people on the platform?” I asked, and Heather laughed and said, “Yeah, but I think it’s just the workers.” I shrugged and said, “It’s still a good sign,” and then we laughed about how apparently my optimism carries over to things other than the show. For the record, at this point I had long given up riding either coaster as a lost cause, as I’d been at the park since the morning, and it was now late afternoon, with nary a sign of life at them except for the odd employee on the platform.
A little bit later, we noticed that the other coaster had a train sitting on its lift hill – not cycling, just sitting there – but it’s not a normal spot for a train to be stored so we took it as “another good sign” that the coasters might open. At some point, we theorized that maybe there was a “magic number” they were waiting for the temperature to hit before they could run the coasters. (If the coasters get too cold, they run more slowly, which means they risk not having enough momentum to finish the course and valleying out near the end, says the coaster nerd in me.)
A bit after THAT, we noticed that both coasters had begun cycling empty trains. “Maybe this optimism might actually pay off!” we said, “SEE!”
In the end, both coasters did open and we were able to ride both. When we got in the line for the first one, there was a monitor that had the temperature on it – 40*F. And so, we hypothesized, they had just needed to wait for it to be 40* to run them, and all of our searching for signs that the coasters WOULD open were not quite so insane after all… because they did.
It worked as an extended metaphor in that moment, and so we decided that “waiting for 40*” would be a perfect thing to adopt. If SF is endgame, what we’re looking at now are the signs of life on the platform – they might be a nothing, they might just be the staff that was scheduled on the clock anyways so they’re sitting there just in case. Or they might be a something, they might be waiting for it to be 40* so that they can run the darned thing and it’s a matter of waiting out the inclimate weather until that desired event happens. (The irony with the Frozen arc didn’t hit us until later – and I truly don’t think he’ll be back immediately after this arc, I think we’re playing the long game here – so it wasn’t really intended, but it IS funny.)
So, then, the question we have to ask is… is it 40* yet?
Cause this story needs some mending & a better happy ending...
Yeah, valid points Phee. The quotes were so strikingly similar I jumped to the conclusion that their endgame/final scene involved Emma and her TL… in all honesty, I expect not just Emma and her TL but also Henry and the entire cast (incl her parents, Regina, Rumbelle etc) as well as some sort of “they all lived happily ever after.” We know how they love their bookends, so I would imagine they’ll want to be bookending the start of the show – “Once Upon a Time” with Charming saving Snow with a TLK.
It seems self-centered to assume that on a show that has a large core cast, the show would finalize centering on one specific love story, BUT again we go back to the fact that this is *Emma’s fairytale.* As such, SHE is the one who needs the fairytale ending. Incidentally, I went and pulled up the original Snow White fairytale, and it begins with her parents and ends with the wedding, banished queen and HEA… so starting the series with Snowing and ending with Emma and her TL would fit right into that mold.
(Incidentally also, Snow is also not awakened by TLK but someone tripping with her coffin and the apple being dislodged from her throat. It wouldn’t surprise me terribly much to see them so something similar with SF – although they need to put a TLK in there somewhere – just because it seems they always do the unexpected. See the entry for “dates, Emma Swan,” whereby Emma has gone on four dates in the show – three to fancy restaurants and one on carnival swings, lol.)
(ETA: Forgot about her self-labeled date with August at the well, so that’s not actually right but there’s probably another Thing there that I don’t have the brainpower to analyze at the moment lol.)
Just for clarity’s sake, my argument with all of this is not that we will definitively “win,” just that I don’t buy that our ship is as out of the running as it seems. Death is… nothing on this show. Snow was dead, Henry twice, Charming’s heart was crushed, Blue, Marian, Rumplestiltskin, etc. “I ship the dead guy” sounds insane but on a show where dead means nothing AND the franchise has already reversed death in order to hand over a HEA (or happily-until-we-need-the-character-on-the-mothership, grrrr!) it’s just not that insane.
I have, like, five different meta things to post but I’m going to break them up into different posts so that it’s not one long wall of text… help me out and talk about stuff here, people :p
Cause this story needs some mending & a better happy ending...
And… yeah.
This from me:
But there is a part of me who wonders if they’ve sketched out a large, overarching story that they’re able to tweak and mess with and add mini-arcs and delete plot points while still staying in the general framework of the story they’d intended to tell. And it’s that pondering that I’ve been playing with in wondering if the SF story is still in the cards…
And this from them:
Do you have your series end game planned?
Kitsis: Yes. We have had our series end game from when we created the series. We have a road map, and we’ve allowed ourselves a lot of freedom, but it was never our intention to say, “Here’s exactly what we’re going to do.” But we know where we’re leading to.
Horowitz: And if you’re asking whether we know what we’d like the last moment of the series to be, yes, we do.Are pretty much saying the exact same thing. IF they are really being legit in that, then I am hard-pressed to find their series endgame being anything other than SF. I think it’s safe to say that SF was the intended story from S1-S3A; we are seeing now that there’s a course change but if they’re intending to bring it back around, then that’s where things will end. IF they’re legit in that their end map is the same as it was when they created the series, it *can’t* be Hook because they didn’t have the concrete ability to have Hook in the picture at that point in time – they didn’t have the rights to that character.
I found that quote striking and interesting, considering the timing. Because it’s precisely what I had asserted as a theory… the endpoint is planned, there are just detours along the way.
Cause this story needs some mending & a better happy ending...
Happy Bison Day!!
(Yeah, they’re actually yak, but they’re the closest things to bison we could find so we’re gonna use willing suspension of disbelief – we do ship a fairytale after all!! – and they’re in front of the SWINGS so I get double bonus points!!)
Cause this story needs some mending & a better happy ending...
Ranisha… your walls poem was epic. I was browsing the board today during class (they were watching a video, shhh,) and I had to stop because I started giggling and it was wildly inappropriate for the moment. LOL!! I read it when I got home and ended up truly laughing out loud.
Cause this story needs some mending & a better happy ending...
Slurpeez, yeah, my personal feelings was that OUATiW stemmed from some sort of rough draft/discarded ideas for Once. There were too many things that fit, but not quite, and it just felt to me like ideas they had but couldn’t use that took on a life of their own. So Will/Ana having SF’s story totally would fit that for me.
You (and everybody else) know that I harbored that same hope for him returning at the end of 3B, and yeah – nope. I took that hard and in all honesty, a lot of a the reasons I thought he’d be back then are the reasons I still think he’ll be back. Shows how quickly I learn. 😉 I took Emma’s betrayal (and I do view it as that) at the portal REALLY hard – though some of that was my own personal issues – and I still haven’t entirely forgiven her character for it. It’s something that I hope will be worked through, but even in my tent of misplaced hope, I don’t actually expect to see it (even if they bring him back in the long run.)
I think your point of watching how things play out with Will and Ana as a SF predictor is wise. Watching how they handle things with them and with the OQ story, I think, are going to be the key things. Will is kind of a giant question-mark mystery to me right now – I loved him over on WL but if I’d never seen him before I would just be puzzled. I’m not really sure what they’re doing there, aside from the fact that he’s clearly a mess.
Cause this story needs some mending & a better happy ending...
So… I made another map. You guys can decide where you fall on the spectrum of #nohope. RG and I are holding down either end. 😉
Cause this story needs some mending & a better happy ending...
So I had been thinking about putting together an essay based around why exactly I’m not quite ready to give up on this story. Then I came across this post on tumblr (language) and it inspired me to actually get it done, if only to see what similarities there were in our reasons.
Let me say, for clarity’s sake, I agree completely that “we planned it all from the beginning!” is complete and utter garbage… at least when it comes to the details. But there is a part of me who wonders if they’ve sketched out a large, overarching story that they’re able to tweak and mess with and add mini-arcs and delete plot points while still staying in the general framework of the story they’d intended to tell. And it’s that pondering that I’ve been playing with in wondering if the SF story is still in the cards… and in fact that they may have always planned a period of death for Neal. I’m not sold on it, I’m not married to it, I know I’m going to be told I’m wrong (and I’m okay with that, since I’m not even sure I necessarily disagree) – but I still wonder.
Part of where I come from is that this is Emma’s fairytale. (I’ve seen it listed as both Emma’s and Emma and Henry’s, but for the purposes of this we’ll simplify it and call it hers. Frankly, adding Henry only enriches the tale, since having his parents back together is pretty much the fairytale ending we know Henry was hoping for.) If Emma is the main character of the show, their original character, and the show as a whole is written as her fairytale, then they’re going to want it to be a grand one. They have set up Snowing – incidentally her parents – as “the truest love of all.” But because this is Emma’s story, they are going to want her love story to TRUMP Snowing’s, and that’s going to be a hard thing to measure up to. But true love being strong enough to conquer death… that would go a ways in trumping it. (And certainly, OUATiW proved that A&E have a penchant for love strong enough to conquer death.) And Emma loving him enough to overcome that reaction she had in Echo Cave and realizing it *wouldn’t* be easier to have him dead , having him return somehow, and all of the forgiveness that would need to come with that is certainly a pretty solid argument for a modern-day fairytale ending.
SF is also inherently a Phoenix-based story. It things like “I got you a baby from Phoenix” (paraphrased) and the fact that the Phoenix is a fire bird (like, you know, Swan+fire lol) that bring it home. But in order to have that story, where the Phoenix rises from the ashes, you have to first have the death/ashes. And there WAS that fire/burning imagery at the vault, thereby linked with his death…
There’s also the fact that we know a triangle was planned from the start. Originally it was supposed to be Neal-Emma-August; then it became Neal-Emma-Hook. In both cases, the non-SF guy could have parallels drawn in terms of having done harm to both halves of SF (to provide as a catalyst for breakup) but it’s the SF half that stays consistent. So it seems plausible to me that the plan was always to enact the triangle, kill of Neal, have her date other-half and then realize what she’d had and what she’d lost. I still maintain that CS is not endgame. And it’s so interesting – I was telling my roomie about the conversation a few pages back, where I discussed why I was so certain CS was not endgame. Before I could really get into my arguments, she said to me something to the effect of, “Well, they’re writing them as a right-now, not endgame.” Incidentally that’s exactly what I argued, and she and I had never had that discussion, so it’s an impression we both came up with separately.
If the intent is to utilize Hook as the catalyst for her realizing what she’s lost in not being able to reunite with Neal (and choosing to fight for that… IMO that would be necessary to have a love story that is “greater than” Snowing’s) then it really puts the “cannon fodder” line from last season into perspective. That’s EXACTLY what he would be, both Hook and the CS relationship in general… a sacrificial lamb sent forth to prove the worth of the SF relationship.
This theory could also provide explanation for both the weirdness at Neal’s death – whereby the cast and writers know he’ll be returning, so they underplay the departure, but they don’t want to spoil it, because then where’s the motivation to invest in the interim story? – and the fact that they’re not allowing the character to fade from the audience’s mind. 401 had the gravestone, 403 was Emma’s mention in the street, 404 Henry mentioned his dad (as grrr-inducing as that was) and 405 obviously had the photo. Compare to Graham or Cora or Pan or Zelena – they’re trotted out rarely if ever. Come to think of it… is that the last scene of the last three episodes that have included a mention of him? (ETA: 403 was the second-to-last scene, 404 and 405 it was the final scene. That’s… interesting.)
All in all, there is just this weird unfinished feeling to the story. It’s why – as we’ve talked about – the GA is just waiting for his return. Much like how they could have written CS better, if they’d wanted them to be an endgame ship, they could have written the SF story with more finality. Still NOW I keep waiting for them to write that relationship as defunct, or as less-than, and they just… don’t. Emma isn’t over him – 405 showed that clearly – and there’s been nothing to undermine “I love you and I probably always will.” This is a fairytale, and it’s a fairytale awaiting its ending. I’m not sold beyond a shadow of a doubt that it’s going to get its happy ending, but I actually have a whole lot of hope that it will. And as I wait for that hope to be dashed, it instead is continually bolstered by what I am seeing onscreen. And yeah, I know – I know – hope is a dangerous thing. And so I have it with my eyes wide open, but yet… I have it.
Cause this story needs some mending & a better happy ending...
