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Done! (did I know you were a Lucifer fan?) (ps: American Gods this weekend. You’re watching, right?!)
Lucifer is probably the only show in forever that somehow snaps me out of either the analytical or the sardonic mode and launches me straight into totally undignified squee. I can’t quite explain it to myself.
And yes, American Gods!!! I can’t wait.
[adrotate group="5"]On a slightly different note–though perhaps not a wildly different one given how much we discuss feminist critique in here–anyone else watching the Handmaid’s Tale? I read the book eons ago and it’s one of those books that probably shaped me more than I realize. I just finished the first three episodes and wow.
I literally decided signed up for Hulu to watch it (well, ok, and because Lucifer). I have the same relationship to the book as your describe. Won’t get to it until the week-end, but if you decide to create a thread for discussion, I’ll jump on board.
I don’t see how a character could so successfully be portrayed as codependent if that isn’t what the writers, the actor, and the wardrobe/make-up departments weren’t aiming for. *sigh* I just dunno anymore.
To me this brings up the topic of interpretative ambiguity in fiction more generally, especially in relation to whether the narrator’s actually reliable or not (Kurosawa’s Rashomon comes to mind).
So I’m deliberately overthinking this, but let’s actually go back to the original premise of OUAT, and see how this might be analyzed. The Author was a concept from the start, right? I’m going to credit Mr. Lindelof with that one, I think A&E are just not that clever. So, OUAT is complicated because its premise is completely meta. It’s a story about telling stories — and about how the narrators of stories are always unreliable, get it wrong, distort, and therefore our fairytales and myths are totally twisted versions of what “actually” happened. So this brings up the question of who is OUAT’s narrator, and is this narrator reliable (can he/she be trusted)? I’ve always thought that OUAT’s unspoken narrator is Henry: first as just narrator (Isaac being the Author in the first few seasons), and then as narrator AND Author. Because he is both participant and Author, the story is told from 3 narrative positions: 1st person limited (as Henry — though we see this less and less), 3rd person limited through head hopping (as the Author), and 3rd person omniscient (as the Author). If so, then the ambiguity of CS could actually be a feature of the very nature of this sort of split personality storytelling. If the storytelling toggles between 3rd person limited, and 3rd person omniscient (which is sort of what the Author figure presupposes, but then it’s mixed in with Henry’s own 1st person limited), then there is no way the narrative is reliable by definition. In 3rd person limited, events take on the quality of the experience of each given character (say, Emma). In 3rd person omniscient, they are described from a point outside the narrative (the one occupied by the audience for example): this is where you would put the wardrobe choices, the make-up, and other aesthetic clues. In other words, if we take OUAT’s premise seriously — that all stories are told by unreliable narrators, including the one being told to us now — then CS is by definition not what it seems. Similarly, the tension between what the show “shows” (3rd person omniscient) and what it tells (3rd person limited) is also not a bug but a feature.
Yeah, Ok I’m totally overthinking this…
(Not that this TV show is reality, but in the story, Emma is supposed to represent the audience, not some fairytale idealized princess that Hook would like her to be).
Ah, yes! This! Thank you, @Slurpeez, that helps me understand why I think my empathy with Emma has eroded — she is no longer the “meta” voice that is simultaneously outside and inside the story.
But I’ve no doubt that it was always meant to be lost girl meets lost boy in the real world, they fall in love, have a baby, and the boy finds them again and they reconcile. That’s it. That was the modern, real-world fairytale they were going for, not some Princess Grace cautionary-fairytale story. *sigh*
I think Emma’s story was about, first of all, healing the rifts of the big kinship tree at the center of OUAT. She was the girl that her parents were forced to abandon, and who herself was forced to abandon her child. Neal was the kid whom his father did not choose, and who was himself unable to choose his son (for different reasons). By healing these generational rifts, this central pivot of the 3 generation structure (Neal/Emma) also would have healed the other generational abandonment traumas — mainly, Regina’s and Rumple’s, the causes behind the Dark Curse that effected the separation in the first place. That was the structure of this story, I think.
I posted this in the CS thread, but Emma’s position has shifted structurally, not just affectively/emotionally. In some ways, Neal was to Rumple what Robin was to Regina — the person who ends up paying for the sins of the villain, simultaneously redeeming them through loss/grief, and depriving them of their happy ending (which villains, as we know, don’t get). From this perspective, when Emma is worried that if she dies she will deprive Hook of his happy ending she is exactly right. This is, now, precisely her status, structurally speaking, to the rest of the narrative and the villains/happy endings mechanics.
Do you think that the writers planned to have Hook be the one to end up with Emma right from the beginning when they introduced him? Or do you think they saw how much the fans liked him and switched the story to kill off Neal and begin Hook’s transformation into a better person so he can be worthy of Emma? Do you think they killed off Neal bc they felt they couldn’t really give Hook the full spotlight as Emma’s true love if Neal was still around? And if that’s true, do you really think they felt it was worth it to basically reset Rumple’s character by killing him off just so Hook could take center stage?
Interesting question DOD — I think it’s been raised before somewhere else on this forum, but a few years ago — so in retrospect while 3 years ago I would have squarely laid the blame for Neal’s death at CS’s feet, I’m not so sure anymore — mainly based on the way Robin was handled. Honestly, I don’t think authorial intent means anything here, though, because the brains behind the show and the original idea have changed over time. I think the writing on OUAT has, after S1, been emergent and reactive — this is largely written by what you might call “pantsers” (rather than “plotters”).
Anyway, was CS intended from the start? I think the only evidence we can reliably say we have is a kind of structural analysis of OUAT — the story is very deliberately structural, in the way that most fairytales and myths actually are. So, from that perspective, no CS was not intended from the start. At the core of OUAT is the crazy kinship chart that ties all the characters together. If you actually plot it out, you can see how the characters who belong to the same kinship generation/strata have their story run parallel — I have an analysis of Rumbelle vs Snowing kicking around somewhere on this forum that speaks to this. Anyway, Neal and Emma were originally plotted as structural parallels/foils. Hook was later retrofitted to have more parallels with Emma, but structurally, it doesn’t quite work. Here’s the deal: Hook belongs to a different structural “strata” than Emma — he is on the same kinship diagram level as Rumple, being Neal’s de-facto step-father. Lets imagine that Milah survived, but stayed with Hook, and Neal survived, and stayed with Emma. That would make Hook Emma’s step-father-in-law. Now, yes, none of this happened, but again, this is a structural analysis. In modern Western culture, we have a strong kinship preference for marrying within one’s generational strata. I.e. we don’t like to marry our classificatory uncle. There’s also generally a kinship taboo against marrying up the affine tree — you can marry laterally with not too may eyebrows raised, but not up or down. There’s in fact a whole genre of fictional tragiromances that explore this (for example, Damage with Juliette Binoche and Jeremy Irons comes to mind). Do you see what I’m driving at? I think if CS were intended from the start as a love triangle with Emma, and with CS being endgame, they would have placed Hook in the classificatory “brother” category to Neal, not step-father/ classificatory uncle. The reason I’m saying this is that this matters enormously for most myths and fairytales, and in matters enormously for how OUAT was originally designed around a very structurally symmetrical kinship diagram. What I think happened is that they saw the chemistry and audience response, and thought – eh, what the heck, lets do this.
Now, did CS effectively kill Neal? No, I don’t think so. I think Neal was killed for the same reason Robin was killed: 1) because the writers aren’t interested in writing a “good” male character without some deep flaw that must be overcome over the course of the story (David doesn’t count, since David is part of the two headed/one hearted entity that is Snowing). And 2) because this show has a lot about one character paying for the sins of another: Robin died sort of “exculpating” Regina and Neal died sort of “exculpating” Rumple (which is to say, they died because of a kind of intractable karmic law that means that villains don’t get happy endings). If they were consistent with this rule, I would not be entirely surprised if, in the end, Emma dies — she is now in that classificatory category to Hook as Robin was to Regina and Neal was to Rumple (the villain always loses the thing he/she loves most).
I’m at the point with this show where I would gladly suffer CS and those horrible morals/tropes I see if it just meant I had Nealfire back. Like give me Neal, Rumple, Henry as a little unit trying to heal all the abandonment issues and CS can go do whatever they want because that’s how bad I feel Emma’s character has gotten over the past few years.
Actually, this right here is how I feel about the whole thing. And maybe that’s because I got into the show first because of Rumple and Regina, and then because of Neal. I think there’s maybe subtle differences in how one feels about the current state of affairs based on whether one came to SF as a Neal fan or as an Emma fan. Because I have a lot of trouble recognizing anything about Emma that I used to like or identify with as the character is written now, I don’t feel particularly strongly about CS. If the show were to randomly bring Neal back (not that it’d ever happen of course), I’m not convinced I’d be on the SF train still, just because I think that Neal could do better.
Maybe Fiona got the prophecy that “the boy will be her undoing”? Little did she know that it’s standard issue prophecy and for the more precise version, she needed to upgrade to the Gold membership.
Anyway, has this show shown other characters being “intimate”. I know there was Regina/Graham getting out of bed… and Snowing under the covers naked….and RumBelle was seen in bed once….hmm. Show is pretty chaste for an 8’o clock show. Needs to take some lessons from True Blood
Well, OUAT usually does the standard “fade to black” convention: characters kissing => scene transition => next time you see them in the same bed, or puttering around the kitchen in the morning, or getting dressed (this has been the case with RB, OQ, Snowing etc). That’s a fairly standard Hollywood convention for implying physical intimacy. The other convention is, frankly, pregnancy/childbirth — that’s one sure way to show a non-platonic relationship.
ETA: True Blood gave is Billith. Lets not ?
Nice analysis @nevermore. I’ve also noticed that the tactics used by one person in particular are strongly reminiscent of those used in the real world against anyone who questions the status quo. Take feminism as an example. Feminists were, and still are, often branded as “angry” or “bitter”. These labels are used to dismiss them entirely, and also to trivialize and humiliate. Another tactic is to accuse them of being “anti-men”, to associate arguments for equality with “man-hate”. Again, this aggressive counter-attacking is intended to silence and hence, preserve the status quo.
To be fair, it’s only one person, and I suspect they’re either very young or trolling or both — so I just don’t think there is any point in trying to seriously engage that. But, as you said, I don’t see the same tactics from other posters here, and some of the questions are legitimately interesting — like the question about the ambiguities of interpretation that were recently brought up in this thread, and that are regularly discussed elsewhere. And even the question of balance that @DOD is bringing up, considering the actual distribution of different sub-fandoms here and elsewhere and the admitted CS hegemony is good food for thought.
In my professional life I actually work in gender issues and addressing social norms around toxic masculinities. I manage research projects on combatting gender based violence, especially intimate partner violence. These are issues I care deeply about and I personally don’t interpret the CS relationship as a toxic relationship. Of course there are things you can find to be problematic, every ship on the show is problematic. I am not saying that the way you interpret their relationship is wrong, it’s just different from how I interpret it.
I think that’s super interesting. There is some polyvalence to the show — as with most compelling fiction (famously the “Is Hamlet mad or just pretending” dilemma). I think there is room for interpreting CS in different ways, especially in the long duree, and to me, what’s often interesting is what people notice about the language of both the show as a visual text, and of the writing — conjuring different forms of evidence to substantiate their points. You bring up another question — how does one engage this show “light-heartedly”. A lot of the convos here are pretty meta. So to me it feels like maybe the arguments aren’t always about ships, but about the nature of the engagement itself. There’s a core number of posters here who like the meta discussions — myself included — and who probably come back to this forum for this reason, whatever their shipping identification. But I can also see how that’s not what everyone wants or loves to do, and that’s valid, and there should be other spaces for other forms of engagement without mutual invalidation.
You guys preach that everyone is welcome. Well if that’s the motto, then you need to be more open to characters you personally hate. Otherwise, people leave, and the forums become one-sided and extremely bias. And I honestly would be ok with hating on Hook and Emma all the time. If I felt they deserved it. But people on here have become so harsh against them that is becomes unbearable at times.
But that’s just the thing — not everyone here is critical, and not everyone here is critical all the time or in the same way. I see all sorts of engagements with the show and critique takes different forms. I see hardcore SF fans who will give Hook credit where credit is due. I see people who are not primarily here for CS comment on CS, but mostly engage with other characters, or squarely ignore CS altogether. I see people posting hilarious quips that have nothing to do with ships at all. And while you’re totally ignoring these internal differences, you’re also wanting to distinguish yourself as, specifically, an Emma fan. You can’t have both — you can’t generalize about everyone else while demanding to be correctly classified yourself, or to paint all critiques with broad brush strokes as anti-CS while demanding recognition for the exact species of your fandom allegiances.
So my question is this — what does being more open to characters you personally hate look like in practice? Unless, of course, all you want is an echo chamber. If so, infrastructurally we have that: this is what the shipping thread ghettos are for, which is probably the only way to deal with this fandom, and if that’s the chosen mentality, then CSers can get off my porch (the SF thread), and then I’ll get off theirs 😉 Then it becomes a kind of retaliatory logic and a matter of recruiting numbers and lobbing insults across the aisle(s), and this goes toxic fast, which I don’t think most people who have been posting here for years want. Something makes me think that you are in fact interested in a more inclusive dialogue. Either way, it seems to me that if dialogue is what people want, then this forum is welcoming, but it doesn’t function in the same way as other parts of the fandom precisely because it is not an echo-chamber for the hegemonic interpretation of the show. And if you want to make it into that, then I suspect you will get resistance.
