Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
Ok, Question 4. How does OUAT portray masculinity(ies)? What are the different messages being conveyed? Considering that the show is also a visual text, can we think about both writing and aesthetics? (I suck at analyzing cinematography, but if someone has a knack for it, please pitch in).
[adrotate group="5"]Hey! This turned into an interesting discussion! Yay! Ok, I finally have a minute, so I’ll tackle my own questions, though much of what I would have said was already covered by you folks. I’ll focus on women in this post, and then I’ll add another question about men.
1) Is OUAT, at its core, a reflection on gender? I’m asking because there are obviously other things going on in it, but insofar as a show usually explores some kind of core social or moral quandary, is this one of OUAT’s primary foci?*
I think that this is where OUAT started — insofar as a specific gender ideology is prevalent in fairytales, Season 1 (so, what I think was the ‘core’ of the show, with all the fresh ideas and well-worked out cosmology) was tackling them head-on. I also remember that it positioned itself explicitly as a feminist show, about strong female characters. Emma and Regina you guys have tackled perfectly. @Keb, I fully agree with you that there were different versions of feminine strength that were possible. Most of the female characters early on were also incredibly complex, 3-dimensional, and different from each other.
2) Does OUAT have a specific gender ideology? Are there systematic themes to the way in which it represents women? Men? What about romantic relationships? Kinship? Parenthood?
One thing that hasn’t been mentioned I think, and a source of “trouble” on OUAT from the start, was the portrayal of female sexuality. That, I think, has been very very consistently, shall we say, “anxious.” Sexually (or just sensually) aggressive women tend to be portrayed on OUAT as villains (or temporarily villainous, like Dark One Emma). This isn’t to say that women are completely denied sexual agency, but that I think there is a sense that a more “passive” role is more appropriate. Certainly, the seductress is consistently vilified, and actually very often any “seduction” actually takes the form of rape. This is Regina/Graham and Zelena/Robin dynamics — remove the magic, and what you’d see is seduction. Add the magic, and you get rape. The “trope” of course is extremely old: many many cultures (and religious traditions) tend to think of female sexuality as “polluting” or “dangerous” to men, such that there are all sorts of taboos on intimacy before big events, like say, a hunt. It’s all over the anthropological record. The reason I bring this up is that we can’t talk about this without talking about gender and power.
Similarly, there is a lot that can be said about an implied “male gaze” in relation to the cinematography and costumes. Consider, for example, Regina’s collection of EQ dresses. In fact, as Regina becomes less evil, she begins to dress more and more demurely. Even the more edgy suit is replaced by the much more conservative business attire, scarves, and an overcoat.
Belle is a bit of an exception in this. Belle’s outfits tend towards the “sexy librarian” trope, and that’s actually very consistent, but I think this is in context of Rumbelle and Gold’s “Wall street” look. A small digression, if I may: I have a lot of problems with how Rumbelle is written lately that pertains directly to gender. But the aesthetics of Rumbelle have been extremely consistent throughout the show, in a way that other couples haven’t been, and it’s the “businessman/secretary” trope. The only thing that has saved Rumbelle from coming off as sleazy (see my post about power differentials in relationships) is that Belle is, consistently, the more forward one. I don’t know if it’s the script, RC’s interpretation of Rumple, or something the directors were explicitly suggesting, but Rumple’s “bumbling fool” metamorphosis every time Belle (or back in the day Lacey) is around, especially in the earlier seasons, saved Rumbelle from deteriorating into an offensive cliche about Powerful Men and their submissive Interns.
3) Is it sometimes written in a way that is purposefully polarizing? Can we think of the “ship wars” in the fandom as actually “culture wars” over gender roles and representations of relationships?
I’ve already talked about Emma/Hook elsewhere, but one thing that might be brought up here is @Slurpeez ‘s comment about Emma’s “Martha Stuart” dress. This makes me think that the show runners aren’t stupid, and are doing some of this consciously. Emma is essentially donning a dress that isn’t her at all. Neither Savior!Emma nor DO!Emma would be caught dead in that housewife outfit. And she’s calling Hook out on it too — she’s asking, not in so many words, whether he’s feeling less threatened by her when she adopts this more demure, traditional look. And sure enough, he’s now willing, albeit grumpily, to talk to her. In retrospect, I read that scene as Emma seeing that she is compromising who she is, and still doing it, but with a heck of a lot of resentment.
So in other words, I don’t think it’s just Hook who is polarizing, although he is (as is Rumple), and maybe we can tackle masculinity in a different post. I think the relationships depicted are written in polarizing ways. And I think it’s achieved through a combination of several different ‘messages’: for example, there’s the writing, there’s the acting, and then there’s the cinematography and aesthetics. For example, we have interesting tensions. If you take into account that costumes are a HUGE part of OUAT’s budget, and that a lot of information is being conveyed through them, I think it’s interesting that Hook’s costume hasn’t changed at all. I don’t think that’s entirely accidental, and not just because there’s a Hook™ being sold by ABC. After all, most other characters have at least 2 costume-personas, and some of these evolve over time, like Regina’s, Emma’s, and even Snow’s (not for the better, I might add). So while the CS text is being written as one thing, it’s aesthetics are potentially problematizing that text.
Yes, this seems like a topic worthy of its own thread, since it would require us to analyze not just Emma, but really most of the primary and even secondary characters. A quick search didn’t really reveal a thread already dedicated to this topic, so it seems like a good idea. Wanna start one?
Sure! I won’t get to it until the evening though (work work work), especially to actually formulate a coherent topic prompt — but if someone has a longer lunch break or is in a timezone where evening comes earlier, I’ll definitely pitch in at the end of the day. 🙂
you know what Colin said about the dress thing, in a interview, that Emma needed Hook to appear in her life so that she could become finally a real Woman by using a feminin dress
*shakes head in utter consternation* I can’t even.
You know, this is a bit out of let field, but it occurs to me that a lot of the conversations we’re having lately — not just in this thread, but across the more “lively” parts of this forum, all really boil down to gender. I mean, yes, we talk about it through characters, PR, actors and writers’ interviews, plot etc, but there’s this underlying theme that seems incredibly stable across all these discussions.
So I guess the logical question is whether OUAT is actually a show about representations of gender? Like, at its core? Because that’s what we’re always coming back to. And this is also the fracture along which the “culture wars” in the fandom seem to be happening. I mean, we tend to talk about them as “ship wars,” but aren’t they also, to some extent, fundamental disagreements about gender roles, about what a desirable relationship looks like, about what constitutes acceptable and unacceptable behavior, about what constitutes “family” etc (I’m thinking about @WickerRegal’s recent comment about Regina/adoption/motherhood in another thread)?
And I don’t think I’m focusing on this because I’m some sort of pitchfork wielding, dyed-in-the-wool feminist who sees gender inequality pouncing at me from every dark alley. 😉 I watch plenty of sci-fi and fantasy shows that are clearly about something else (say, colonialism, or ecological devastation), and where I’m frankly not at all fussed about their gender politics because other things are capturing my attention. But gender and class seem to keep nagging me with OUAT, such that I just can’t put it down. :-/
So here’s my question, and maybe it should be booted into its own thread, I don’t know: but is OUAT written in such a way as to be purposefully be polarizing in its representations of gender? Does it have an identifiable gender politics?
Question the third: If you believe that Emma is NOT a strong character anymore and that she has either not progressed or regressed, what can the show do–if anything–to make Emma more palatable.
I think one place to start with Emma would be to make her journey — from the “darkness (abandonment, isolation) into the “light” (community, light magic, love), with the detour through the DO course — Emma’s legacy again. And in this sense, by making Rumple into the DO again, however flat-footedly and awfully, the show leaves open that possibility. In fact, it leaves open the possibility that both Rumple and Emma might finally have the opportunity to actively confront and work through their issues, and eventually overcome the central cosmic antagonist of the OUAT-verse (the DO curse), which is essentially, the dark part of one’s personality (magically enhanced to blow up all existing insecurities). No more “Hat-us” Ex Machina. No more unexplainably clueless DarkOne boyfriends who act like the textbook version of a gaslighting sociopath. And no more Groundhog Day-style failure at character development for Emma.
I have this tiny hope that the trip to the Underworld to retrieve Hook might get us back on track — back to the question of what it might mean for Emma (the presumed stand-in for the audience) to potentially “wield both dark and light magic,” or, in other words, if we translate the symbolism, to accept her own flaws with lucidity and compassion in a way that turns them into a strength. I haven’t seen anything on this show to suggest that the writers are capable of getting us to that place by focusing on Emma’s relationship with Hook. If they actually manage to pull it off, the more power to them, but I’m not going to hold my breath. However, I think the material is still there, in the worldbuilding and characters of the show, to enable them to do it, if they restore Emma — and her many other significant relationships — to the center of the story.
Why is it bad to take control and be the “agent.” Maybe he thought she wouldn’t be able to direct her own story and still not succumb to the darkness.
Ok, I’m just going to jump in for a second here — there are two aspects to this conversation. Going back to @RG’s original query, I think the discussion started with narrative and questions of representation, rather than with in-story character motivations. RG, correct me if I misread you.
If it’s indeed about narrative — i.e., is the show representing Emma Swan as a strong woman? — there are certain conventions for how strong characters are represented in stories. It’s sort of like with painting — if you’re trying to represent a 3D object in 2D, you’re going to use specific techniques to convey volume (say, gradually darker hue for shadows, lighter hues for highlights). Similarly, with a story, there are specific techniques to convey what type of fictional character you’re dealing with. “Agency” — in the sense of one’s capacity to influence the fictional world, but also one’s “proactiveness” is one such convention. Generally, the more agentive the character, the more the audience is willing to identify with them.
Now, the other question you’re raising is about in-story motivation. I think you’re asking “Well, what if someone’s temporarily made vulnerable and finds themselves in a bad spot. Can’t their loved one take over for a bit, and see them safely to the other side?”
Yes, they can. Absolutely. That’s what a good relationship is, right? But that “taking over” — the loved one temporarily adopting the role of the benevolent dictator, if you will — is meaningful in the broader context of the relationship. Hook and Emma’s relationship is not one where Hook is systematically nurturing — he’s simply not that sort of character. (If you want, here’s a really thoughtful recent article on the difference between “rape culture” and “nurturance culture,” written by a guy as a matter of fact, and it’s really insightful). Rather, it’s one that’s been very systematically establishing a gendered power differential between Emma and Hook (with Emma being made “weaker” in order for the appeal of that love story to work). There’s a famous feminist statement, I think by Catherine MacKinnon, which I will PG for the sake of this forum. It goes like this “Man takes woman.” Subject verb object.
Simply put, we have this long-standing convention in our (lets call it Euro-American) culture that goes something like this: “man = strong, manly, and dangerous / woman = weak, pliable, and gentle / man active (RARRGH!), woman passive (*swooon*)”
Sorry if I’m making it sound ridiculous, but that’s the standard romance trope. This isn’t where CS started, but it is, in my opinion, where CS is going, and nowhere more than in 4A. Insofar as Emma/Hook are taking on those attributes, and CS is a variation of this romance trope, then we’re back to the original issue: it’s not that it’s bad to be or not be the agent. It’s that, going back to Emma’s character analysis, this sort of gender configuration depends, structurally, on Emma being weaker than the show was originally trying to sell to us.
Will you be disappointed with actors, that you have high opinion on them, if they extend their contract and continue to do the show after this season?
Nah – they got bills to pay and kiddos to feed, like everyone else. With the exception of Robert Carlyle, who’s more of a character actor, I don’t think most of the crew have the portfolio or the oomph to just breeze into a new role. Looking for a new gig is always stressful, so if there’s a modicum of predictability and security in renewing for another season, I definitely won’t blame them.
I’m going to take stab at this, but I think RG already covered a lot of what I was thinking
So, regarding the question of what makes a strong female character — Emma’s an interesting one. The show starts with Emma embodying the standard 1980-early 90s stereotype of the “strong female:” lets call it the Sarah Connor (Terminator) / Ellen Ripley (Aliens franchise) type. She’s physically strong, she’s a bit masculine, she is outwardly unemotional, she is primarily defined by her relationship with a child, she is single and not looking. Then what we got throughout the first seasons is a commentary on this stereotype. The show is asking — is this strength? Is this enough? What might be missing?
It turns out what’s missing is a community, a family (broadly defined), a place to belong. This doesn’t take away (yet) from Emma’s competence and independence, but it’s an interesting way of subverting the “rugged individual” trope — isolation doesn’t necessarily make you strong, or if it does, it’s a brittle strength. We see this in Regina too. In fact, for all of S1, the show is about these atomized, isolated characters yearning for connection, yet resisting it like crazy. Emma’s connections aren’t about romance at this time. Romance is part of them (Graham, Neal), but not the center — that’s Emma and Henry, and Emma and her parents.
More broadly, I think a “strong character” in fiction — whatever their sex/gender configuration might be — is simply someone whose existence and actions drive the narrative. It’s not about what they do in life — they could be the intergalactic president or a stay at home mom, they could be a mature business woman or a 14-year old social “dropout” — it really doesn’t matter, I think. What matters is that their actions, thoughts, emotions etc are presented as generative. This doesn’t mean that they have to be active all the time — they could be not acting. In fact, they could be sitting on a hill meditating, but as long as the story presents this as itself an expression of their agency, then we have a strong character.
Simply put, Emma’s no longer being presented as a strong female character because she is no longer given much agency. In 4A her entire arc has been a series of try-fail cycles that almost all, inevitably, ended in failure. She has been almost entirely reactive — the whole arc is about her attempt to save Hook, but with every action she’s digging the hole a little deeper. Before that, as the Ailing! Dark One, she is passive — lost in her head, physically weak, unable to cope. Any respite is through Hook’s intervention. And that‘s the problem. It isn’t that it’s unthinkable that Emma might find herself challenged beyond her current capacity — that’s what the DO curse should have done to her as part of what RG calls the hero journey. And it’s not inconceivable that her current romantic partner would lend her support. But the show has isolated Emma, backgrounding all her other relations in favor of her relationship with Hook. And then, the challenge to Emma herself, the thing that should have allowed her to grow as a character (the growth that augments her initial individual self-suficiency by allowing a tapestry of connections to lift her up) is then taken away from her in order to tell Hook’s story. The symbolic camera is no longer on her — it’s on Hook. The stakes of this are only about Hook. For the (projected) audience of the show, Emma no longer matters outside of her romantic entanglement. No other character matters — not Snowing, not Regina, not Henry, not anyone else.
And that, right there, is character assassination, because the show has denied Emma what should’ve been her character’s “birthright” and hard earned truth — her hero journey to the realization that “it takes a village,” as they say, not just to raise a child, but to live life, period. DO!Emma should have been the moment the village came through — all of them, from Regina to Henry, from Snowing to Rumple, this should have been that moment where OUAT looped back to S1 and said “remember those themes we were exploring? Remember those isolated, self-absorbed, brittle characters — well, here they are again, and here’s where they come through, because that’s what family does, that’s what community is.”
Instead, Emma’s isolated again, reduced to one relationship that takes precedence over everything else (including her son, whom she is now literally dragging to Hell to save her love interest), and even those moments where she is claiming agency — “I’m doing it for love” or whatever that line was — seem both irritatingly melodramatic and flat.
I suppose my point is simply that by rebooting the show, and by denying Emma her “organic” growth, OUAT has ripped the rug from under its own feet, and is now spectacularly falling on its face. That’s why we’re getting “bad plot/horrible writing”.
One last caveat. This isn’t a complaint about Hook. In all fairness, Hook the character is not really to be blamed for this. That relationship, with all its flaws, could have been written in a way that’s intelligent, mature and compelling. But that would have involved not burying it in marshmallow, but giving it a real sober look. It raises important questions. What happens when you have social commitments (a child), but want romantic love? What happens when your partner crosses a line that can’t be uncrossed (DO!Hook talking smack to Emma). What happens when your early stage romantic infatuation isolates you from your other, non-sexual significant others? Perhaps these questions are too mature for the audience OUAT’s trying to appeal to, I don’t know. But either way, Emma’s journey shouldn’t have been recast at the expense of the show’s original premise: the idea of hope mediated through this extremely broad concept of love and community that didn’t fixate of one single manifestation of it. Instead, OUAT reduced Emma’s multiple connections to one very narrow, extremely ethnocentric, extremely ageist version of romantic love.
And I’m sorry to say, but that particular vision of love simply doesn’t leave room for a strong female character, because a strong female character would flatten out the power differential, and that is what’s being romanticized/eroticized in 4A.
<p style=”text-align: left;”>I should amend that in the third scenario, if Rumple ends up with Belle this is explicitly framed as NOT “getting the girl in the end” where Belle is not some price for being good, but a thinking human being making her own decisions and moral compromises.</p>
I think for me the show needs to decide what it’s about, and then maybe Rumple’s story can unfold more organically. So if
Option 1. “Redemptive morality”: anyone can be redeemed (through the power of forgiveness, whether “social” or “cosmic”) then Rumple’s story could be about a second chance with Belle and/or hypothetical baby and/or Nealfire. I personally think the idea of returning a young Bae could be really powerful — and also remind us that this is a fairytale and that most of us don’t get a second chance with our kids. So better get it right the first time.
Option 2. “An eye for an eye”: Not everyone can be redeemed and some people just need culling. Then Rumple’s going to remain a villain and then likely die/be sacrificed/sacrifice himself at the end of the arc. He might live on in his child I suppose, another Stiltskin growing up without his father. Heroes win, villains get their comeuppance, classic fairytale denouement. I personally think it’s not what the show was about and by now it’s problematized its heroes and whitewashed its villaims so much that I don’t find Rumple any better or worse than the lot of them with the exception of Henry who is the only truly positive character left since he hasn’t had a chance to screw it all up yet.
Option 3. “Karma”: Rumple goes back to being Chaotic Neutral. The show finally aligns its stated ideology with its moral universe. Characters mature enough to move beyond the hero/villain dichotomy. As a result, abstaining from not slaughtering people no longer gets you a hero biscuit (ex: Hook in 4A). Conversely, not jumping into the fray to save everyone no longer gets you labeled a villain. Rumple is NOT given a second chance with Nealfire, but does get the opportunity to say goodbye and grieve. Belle and Rumple come to some sort of understanding where Belle is OK with Rumple not being a hero, and Rumple comes to terms that she accepts him as long as he isn’t harming others. The two of them realize that no one in SB gives a damn about either of them, except when they need something, and leave them all to their own thing. Rumple doesn’t get to “start over” with Belle, because his past actions have consequences and the void left by Neal can never be filled, but they get to move on with their lives.
