[kfchimera]

I was speculating maybe the Black Fairy isn’t a woman–they avoided using pronouns with the character, and although we generally think of fairies as women, they can be men.  In Disney Fairies’s franchise, there are “sparrow men” who  are fairies.    In myths of fey there’s King Oberon of course (Shakespeare used him in Midsummer’s nights Dream).

 

[kfchimera]

I think whoever runs the account doesn’t have much supervision and is a young intern.  Networks are still trying to get their act together on social media.

“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

[kfchimera]

Seriously?  Did they ever follow him?

It seems to me that if they aren’t following him, then there is something fishy about the “story-driven” idea if Neal is the one killed off.  Why not promote the actor at least that little bit if it is a mutually agreed upon thing, like for example Robbie Kay or Barbara Hershey that the character has a short arc and just for a season? Why would there be this suggestion of bad blood between the marketing person (who didn’t tweet his birthday like the other December cast) and MRJ in a personal sense?  I’m just saying it is not professional.  If he’s already not part of the cast at some point would make sense to maybe stop following him, but now? Why?  Now if we’re talking a Shannen Doherty type situation, where MRJ had creative difficulties with the cast/crew and was basically fired, I could see that.  But why would the marketing team want to spill the beans of which character is off the show? 

“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

[kfchimera]

I think the difference between Hook and Regina and Rumple is –he’s not touched directly by the corrupting influence of dark magic.  Everything he’s done, has been purely his own choices far as we can see in response to circumstances.   Moreover, he feels those actions are completely justified!

That’s the problem as to why he’s neither hero or villain but pirate.  He’s not actually right that he’s been honorable.  Revenge is a problematic goal even if sympathetic at times, but not (as Mulan and Charming point out) to be confused with justice.   Hook went so far over the line in pursuit of his revenge that he didn’t care that he actively supported the cause of Cora, even after she killed an entire village.  He became a pirate to avoid serving a king who would use a deadly poison and here he’s fallen to partnering with anyone who would help him, no matter how evil and destructive they were.   I don’t consider it honorable.  Of course we talk about his actions with Emma, then Belle, and again, I don’t see honor in what he did.  He does, but more importantly, he thinks Emma did.

I think she expressed outright that she didn’t approve with her facial expression and tone of voice.  She sounded upset he hurt Belle, not understanding and happy he’d done “quality damage” to his foe.  Yes, she has some sympathy for him because she can see his desire to hurt others comes from having lost and suffered.  She identifies with loss and suffering and it is part of what makes her sympathetic at times to Regina.    Emma gets that feeling of being against the world but she’s not really been shown to be the kind of person who so feels cheated by society she lost all hope of following its conventions and moral codes.

In other words, while Emma might not be as turned off by a Pirate as Charming thinks she should be, she also isn’t going to be as impressed by a so-called man of honor as Hook thinks he is.  Emma doesn’t see the world that way.  She called Regina a sociopath in season 1.  Not evil, a sociopath.  She thinks of Hook as a criminal of limited danger compared to the other problems but honorable or not, the question I think on her mind is what sort of guy is this?  Can she trust him to do right by her and her family, especially when she isn’t looking?

I think Hook’s made strides to change but he’s written so ambiguously sometimes.   What deals did he make with Pan? I think maybe his “last job” as he said to Tamara was the last job to kill Rumple.  If he didn’t trust Pan, thought him a demon, had failed to do his job for him, why would he make a deal for him? Why trust that Pan would play fair?  It’s a soft-ball thing and then there’s telling them about Neal.  Yes, your friend and a potential rival but let’s not forget: KNOWS THE WAY OFF THE  ISLAND.  Nothing in it for Hook?  I need that gif of Regina saying “I don’t think so.”

So Hook’s had some pretty odd situations where he does have a lot of self-interest to pursue in what he does, just as Gold was not being kind to help out Charming because he was “invested in his future”.  I’m not saying Gold doing things for Belle or Bae’s sake is selfish its not as selfless as someone helping a complete stranger with no expectation of any reward.  Like Regina on the horse with Snow.  Then you have acts like Ruth, sacrificing her life for her son and his wife.  She loves them, and it’s a bit of her own happiness to see them happy.  There’s a range to heroic/good acts as there is to evil/selfish actions.

I feel Hook ‘s “good” is similar to his “bad” –he’s got an angle he’s working its not for the sake of the pleasure of helping others or hurting others.  It’s about him and how it will or won’t get him what he wants and right now? He wants Emma to feel about him as he does about her.  It would be quite a test of his redemption to see if he would carry on even if he KNEW he’d never have her love.  What would he do? It’s sort of like Gold’s problem with Lacey.  He wasn’t redeemed and good then because he loved her, when she encouraged his evil acts.  Love isn’t itself a heroic thing if it leads to selfishly hurting others for the sake of that love.  Emma doesn’t owe Neal anything so its not so much that Hook’s hurting Neal by also pursuing Emma, but he certainly isn’t being considerate of someone he wants to call a friend, someone he knows he injured in the past by helping his mother to abandon him, oh and traumatizing him by trying to kill his father (even if yes, his father was not innocent either, having killed the mother!).

Gold, Regina and Hook are all complicated and different in the ways they are and have been selfish but Gold and Regina put aside their OWN happiness for others at the end of last season.  Hook didn’t really quite do that, he sort of seemed like he was going to but seemed like he changed his mind.  Far as SF though, I’ve never felt it was that Hook couldn’t grow and change to be someone Emma would love–its that I felt he hadn’t yet taken the steps, and to the extent he had, it still didn’t matter as Emma loves Neal.  I don’t think Emma just sees pain and loss with Neal as some think.

I don’t think Hook understands Emma so much better.  Pan’s map?  That was a trick designed to undermine Emma’s confidence.  So sure, Hook (through overhearing and deduction) realized Emma was an orphan, vulnerable lost girl but seriously, that’s not who she is meant to be.  That’s not her “best self” and I don’t think that was who she felt she was with Neal.  They were a capable team and she had pride in saying he taught her things.  She trusts him to get her back.  Not to go in front of her and protect her, but to get her back.  She’s so confident with him that she takes the lead, and Neal supports her mostly (aside from Tamara but that was complicated).

We’ve yet to see Neal really question her decisions with Henry, other than her first one to keep him out of Henry’s life.  She was wrong there.  Believe it or not, Emma can be wrong.  She apologized to Henry but she never really apologized to Neal either–yet he says she never has to apologize to him, ever for anything.  He knows he’s put her through a lot, but he wants to earn back that trust and I think he was doing it.  Step by step, the same way Henry melted her walls and he just didn’t have enough time with the new fairy-tale obstacle put between them.

I don’t know what the writers have in mind. It feels like maybe they just want to toss all the backstory away and forget and just start this season with new characters who tangentially have the same names as the old ones, except for the one they’re going to kill off.  No idea if they’ll be that bad in the writing but if they pick Neal and change Emma from actually loving him to just having been wounded deeply by him, then that’s what I think it would feel like.

“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

[kfchimera]

Speculation is a game of 2+2 + X -Y = ?   We don’t know X and we don’t know Y–but yet some   are going to start declaring it HAS to be this or that.  They may be right.  We all get lucky sometimes.  They may be partially right.  They may have the right event but the wrong context.   Let’s face it, even for scenes we see in full there are people who read what’s said backwards and upside down to avoid recognizing a few simple things about Emma Swan and Neal Cassidy.  Instead of closeness and support, they focus only on the past pain and heartbreak.  They don’t see Emma’s fierce concern for him and her fears of what it means that fate tangled up their lives so much.  She’s the SAVIOR and she has a job to do.  He left her once because of that job, and while she now knows it wasn’t out of lack of love or malicious intent–this “blessing” from Regina has taken it away.

  Eddy’s quote referred to it as a “benefit” .  Think about that.  Even as they say the reunion wouldn’t necessarily be a happy one with Emma thinking Neal’s that jerk who sent her to jail, we all sort of know Emma’s memories probably get restored.  So it wouldn’t be redundant to show them reuniting now with all that knowledge and her new perspective, and fresh instead of exhausted emotionally from danger, loss and heartbreak.   She was just about to go to lunch with him and let her guard down.   What Emma has to embrace is that she’s strong enough, as her parents were, to enjoy the moment knowing there might be heartbreak ahead.  If those experiences with Neal since Manhattan weren’t all positive things, doubt Eddy would talk about them as being a “benefit” to her perspective in reference to saying a reunion wouldn’t be happy. We can only imagine that with memories, it should be happier. 

I’m not gong to say its impossible that it the death is  Neal.  If its a real -life thing driving it, truly could be any one, and with the way these writers craft their “pods” of stories it feels like anything could happen season to season.  They seemed to downplay certain things so much its like they want to start this next batch with a potion of forgetting for their audience, and off we go and we forget all about the emotional journey we thought we were on.  I hope that’s not true though.  I hope NL was meant to be a disruption on purpose so they could do some things to please fans before returning their characters to their normal selves.  So in that light, Hook and Henry filing together could be that Henry discovers that Hook is up to something.  It could be that Hook as others said realizes he’s not really changed.  It could be that Henry found out what Hook did to Neal! We don’t know enough to even guess.   Maybe that’s not Henry….maybe he’s been Cora’d by the WWW!   Appropriate too don’t you think , considering how Cora and Hook were a nice odd-couple team at one point?  I liked their banter.   

 

“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

[kfchimera]

Sounds fun! Will check it out.  I like the Bioware games with stories .

“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

[kfchimera]

No they shouldn’t have but at least you can comfort yourself its a pattern–there are so many characters with these sort of open ended “endings”.

At least they didn’t kill her off….

“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

[kfchimera]

Golidie was the character Yvette Nichole Brown played in Good Morning Storeybrooke–and she was the voice of Ursula!!

If there is a link, it better be good.  The ‘reveals’ lately have been a candle in a coconut shy of some well plotted adventure.

“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

[kfchimera]

Oh hey welcome back Shmacky!   Like CrownedwithLaurels said….you’ve got some great insights.

I had a theory on the “terrible things would happen” being that Emma’s death broke the curse as we found out in S1.  It was debated a lot because wasn’t Regina trying to kill baby Emma? Some argued she wasn’t, some said she was.  We went all around about it.  Now we know definitively that though Regina WAS trying to kill baby Emma before the course, that must have been a loophole if she did it before the curse activated.

So I think it may have had something to do with that, because if Neal were with Emma maybe someone nasty (Pan?) would find her, want to end the curse to kill Rumple or whatever and no happiness. Maybe he was a walking neon blood magic  sign  that put her in danger, so that is why August insisted he steer clear.  Of course how August knew he was Bae has yet to be explored.  So unless they’re burying it under the rug where so many other things are (hello Milah)….then it might lead into set–up for this new curse.  Maybe WWW wrote the curse originally and wanted it back but to use it again, she needed to break the one deployed first.

 

“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

[kfchimera]

That could be POM.  Regina did a lot.  Some of it to very vengeful types, lots of collateral damage.  Plus there might be a price to seeing Henry, and it might be that seeing him again causes something catastrophic.

“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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