Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
Yeah, I’ve seen this, I recommend as well. Needed a bit more action for my liking but still good and gosh Tom Hiddleston! Why is this man not considered an illegal drug.
A question I too like to ponder 😛
What have these writers DONE to their beautiful show, what??
Honestly, at this point my sense of OUAT is something like this:
Seriously. It’s like the former-loved-one-turned-zombie that against all common reason you keep around. So you lock it in the shed, where it shambles aimlessly, occasionally makes weird groaning noises, and keeps trying to eat your brains whenever you come by to feed it.
Here’s what the SF thread is in this analogy–
You share the duties of caring for the ZombOUAT (ZOUAT?) with a bunch of others who still feel an emotional attachment to the original entity. There’s a bunch of people who’ve since moved on – moved out of the house, if you will — but still come by to bring cookies, booze, and offer moral support. You take turns feeding ZOUAT chicken brains, but mostly hang out, talk about the nature of zombiehood, whether you think there’s a cure, and whether the original personality is till “in there.” And about the various vagaries of its decomposition process.
Hoping against all hope that maybe you’ll wake up one day and the thing in the shed will have snapped out of it. But really, we all know that we’re just binding time until it finally expires.
All along you also know that no cure is coming, and it’d be a mercy to you and to it to just put the damned thing down.
Happy Sunday. 😛
[adrotate group="5"]@NEVERMORE What are their similarities?
Superficially, there are many structural … maybe not similarities, but parallels that appear to be consciously used to contrast and compare Hook and Rumple (and their respective arcs/relationships) on OUAT. Both have strong father abandonment issues, with mom entierely out of the picture. Both are “villains” with a low sense of self-worth, both have been in love with the same woman (Milah). Both have a physical handicap which is at once a source of self-identification, and a justification for various (negative) actions. Both are part of structurally unequal romantic pairings, where the sheer temporal and hence experiential “advantage” that the guy has on the woman makes for a relationship that’s potentially severely off-balance. Arguably — an ironically — Belle has been better at “standing her ground” than Emma has, or at least has been more aware of Rumple’s problematic nature. Both are struggling with [presumably inherently] evil or negative (or weak) character traits.
With Neal out of the picture, Rumple and Hook become ever more fungible. This is because Rumple’s character without the relationship with his son is an older, less “glamorous” version of Hook, essentially. While Neal was still at the core of Rumple’s character, this wasn’t an issue. Hook is the resentful man-child archetype. If you want to get Freudian, he is, almost literally, Oedipus. Rumple wasn’t just that — he was also the flawed father archetype himself, which made him so compelling: he was both father and son, and this was an absolute stroke of genius in rethinking the mythologies with which OUAT was playing. 3B completed his story perfectly because it resolves both of those plot threads.
I think for many folks writing here, this aspect of Rumple is still important, and colors how we interpret the character — but it doesn’t seem like that’s the case across the board. And it looks like A&E would have us forget this as quickly as we can.
However, as Neal recedes ever further towards OUAT’s amnesiac horizon, Rumple is increasingly crammed into the “man-child” (egotistic sociopath) mold himself, without the adolescent charm. The problem is that Bobby still keeps infusing the character with other dimensions, which are probably not even there in the script, or in the show writers’ intent. To recycle what I think is Lily Sparks’ comment, he’s just too subtle an actor for what this show has become. But from the writing perspective, OUAT has now saddled itself with two extremely similar characters, so they’re either stuck in the position of having to go the simplistic route of “this one GOOD, this one BAD”, or to have redundant storylines.
Sadly, the writing team no longer seems to have the creativity to write themselves out of this otherwise idiotic impasse. But I think the reception from the fandom of these two different characters is quite telling. I am sometimes utterly floored with the leeway that Hook gets from the fandom (including, sometimes, from some of the main participants of the podcast here). I sincerely don’t understand how Hook can be “heroified” while Rumple is “vilified” to the degree that they are, by both the show and the fandom. My point is simply that, at this point in the show, they are largely redundant from a writer’s perspective. If OUAT were a novel, and someone approached me to beta-read it, I’d say something like “But you already have a woobiefied bad boy. Why d’you need another, more simplistic one?” Point is, abstract yourself from the physicalities of the actors, and you have the same “species” of character.
Also, everything @WickedRegal said. That. Right. There.
Can I just say that I love you all here in SF? I mean, I love how I can come to this thread and have a conversation about Tolstoy or Jane Austen, while also b***-ing about OUAT’s epic fails, and getting delightful MRJ gifsets. Yay SF! Y’all rock.
By making Bella so blank, the young female reader would subconsciously insert themselves into that role and thus would care about Bella that much more and be invested in the success of that relationship.
Oh, that’s absolutely right. I suppose I was trying to point out why, exactly, the particular species of Twilight love story is so problematic. In a sense, I think it’d be problematic even if Edward were a decent guy. The problem is that a) the “oompf” of Twilight relies on the eroticization of an egregious power differential (i.e. it’s a form of statutory rape) and b) Bella is simply ancillary / an accessory to the only relationship of the books that matters, which is the one between Jacob and Edward. But it’s all packaged as if it were about Bella. So as young audiences absorb the message, what sediments is a very particular idea about gender norms, which elevates Bella’s passivity and lack of perceivable agency to a virtue of character, and a desirable trait in a romantic partner. With very few exceptions, most of the paranormal romance fiction (books or movies) share this trope. Except for Jim Jarmousch’s Only Lovers Left Alive, which , if you’re a fan of Tom Hiddleston or Tilda Swinton, and haven’t seen it, consider watching it. (Do it. Do it now!)
I disagree. I think that as long as a guy is hot, people will still ship him with somebody. Even if he is an absolute arsehole, the female protagonist will be shipped with him because he’s misunderstood, he can change for the better with love, he just needs someone to care about him, etc etc.
*sigh* You may be right. But I also think “hotness” is itself a carefully constructed project, and part of a show’s overall message about any given character. Many talented actors are versatile and can pull off any range of things, from heartthrob to repulsive degenerate. Think, I don’t know, Johnny Depp, who has done anything from straight up romance roles to utterly bizarre whacko ones. Or Charlize Theron. I mean, we don’t even have to look too far – if you look at Bobby’s career, there have been roles where he played an attractive character, and others where he played an utterly repulsive psychopath, equally convincingly.
All this to say, Hook is absolutely being “Fabio-ized” on OUAT, in a way that should be getting a good chortle out of anyone who’s at all familiar with these romance tropes. I mean, down to the costume. But that’s the point — this is a conscious project on the part of the show makers, not just an inherent feature of the actor. Might Colin look differently if he were in a different role? Absolutely. If he can land something that doesn’t typecast him as the pretty boy, I’ve no doubt he’ll rise to the occasion. That’s what these actors/actresses are trained to do — it’s their job.
Which is to say, “hotness” is itself a message. It’s — look, this character is hot, you (as the audience) will respond to him/her in a certain way. And this is where, going to @Slurpeez ‘ earlier comment about War and Peace (sorry I’m not direct-quoting), there is always a meta-message. What are we to make of this hotness? With Anna and Vronsky, or Natasha and Anatole — the meta message for Tolstoy is something like “beware of the facile, physical infatuation” (Tolstoy of course was a deeply religious man, even if his particular interpretation of Christianity was a bit peculiar by the standards of his time and society). Point is, he was preoccupied with things like desire, sin, and consequence. But OUAT, for all its “borrowing” from Christian mythology (in its unique pot pourri approach), actually has a whole range of double standards at play which essentially say what’s good for the goose, is not necessarily good for the gander. The particularly outrageous part about these distinctions is that they run along race, gender, class, age, and physical attractiveness lines. (Hence, for example, the strikingly different treatment of Hook and Rumple, for all their similarities).
@The Watcher — the gif is quite possible the best thing ever. Seriously.
Some disparate thoughts:
I don’t think I’ve seen Hook since I was a kid, but for some weird reason I always misremember Hook as being played by Alan Rickman. Like, I know it’s Dustin Hoffman, but for some reason I keep thinking Rickman. Probably because of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves came out around the same year.
@RG — “Twilight effect” – that’s brilliant 🙂 I can see how this has 2 aspects that are particularly nefarious, at least from a feminist standpoint. First, it’s a story that masquerades as having a female character at its center, but is really about the male love interest’s manpain. In this sense, it’s insidious — Bella offers a blank slate on which the audience can project itself, but then one is boxed in through the story’s bait and switch tactics. Namely, that the male character is actually a villain, but since he’s the real “hero” of the narrative, the morality of the tale is twisted to accommodate his viewpoint.
Jessica Jones offers a conscious metacommentary on this. You can see Killgrave constantly attempt this re-centering — the ‘what about me and my pain’ — only to have Jessica systematically shoot these attempts down.
Re- actor’s hotness. What’s funny about this is that I think there are other components in the mix here. For example, with something like 50 Shades of Gray, even if the male lead weren’t actually attractive, the story would still have its fans (say, if Christian Gray were played by James Spader). However, if he weren’t super wealthy, it would be immediately denounced as abusive and creepy. Imagine Christian Gray as an unsuccessful bum living in his mother’s basement. I suspect the story would lose much of its alleged hotness factor, and get a whole lot of ewwws!
With OUAT and Colin, the hot honorable pirate trope is of course nothing new. Actually, it’s a classic — think Rafael Sabatini’s Captain Blood series (for which I admittedly have a very soft spot). I mean, that was written in the 1920s, if I’m not mistaken. But as others have mentioned here already, that sort of “pirate with a heart of gold” is not in fact how Hook is written. He’s every bit not the thing he claims to be, yet all the other characters seem to be taking his self-centering activities and efforts at face value. To reprise the Jessica Jones analogy, he’s a Killgrave type who is successful at spinning his view of the story.
–Wickham would be the hero. He has a lot of manpain.
*shudders in horror*
To be fair — and this is a totally vacuous comparison to Jane Austen’s fantastic and complex work — but wasn’t Bridget Jones’s Diary really a kind of modern musing (or, really, an AU fanfic) of P&P? As such, I think it has absolutely modern day sensibilities, and I don’t think most people shipped Bridget with Daniel Cleaver (the stand-in for Wickham). So maybe there’s hope for us yet (though, granted, it’s a over a decade old now, things might have changed).
CSF couldn’t decide if it wanted to be 1 or 2 so the results were out of sync with expectations on what should’ve happened. In 1, Hook was obviously the bad suitor compared to Neal’s good suitor
There is I think a 3rd scenario for the archetypical love triangle, and that’s the “bad” / “worse” version — for example, the spouse is “myeh”, but the suitor is worse. From the classics, it’s Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, the Red and the Black, and Wuthering Heights and I’m sure a million variations since. The interesting thing about these examples at least is that they’re all about how the mythos of romantic love — passionate, starcrossed love as the ultimate justification for everything — is often a dangerous illusion, if not downright immoral or destructive. Anna K would have been better off if she’d never met Vronsky — she was tepidly, though not altogether unhappily married, and she was crazy about her kid. All that, of course, is torn apart once Vronsky begins his relentless pursuit — and the more I think about it, the more I think CS is so so similar to that story. Of course Tolstoy’s novel ends tragically.
I think that this 3rd type of tragic love triangle story is something we’re all familiar with, same as the two examples you give. The trouble is that some stories just shouldn’t be Disneyfied. By inserting an Anna Karenina-esque love triangle (CS) into OUAT, and then essentially making it into a happy ending AU, the writers aren’t just making the whole story absurd, they’ve kind of ventured into morally suspect territory. And in so many ways, Hook’s “origin story” with Milah and Rumple is yet another version of this type of love triangle. So by making the second variation of the same story into a successful love story it’s rewarding a character that has quite negative consequences for others.
The point is that you shouldn’t ship Anna and Vronsky, or Healthcliff and Catherine — they’re a terrible idea! So why doesn’t this come across for the CS portion of the fandom? Are they just very young viewers raised on Twilight, but not yet exposed to these more complex moral tales?
(Also, seriously, what’s next for A&E? Disney Lolita?)
5A is the most sloppily written arc in all of OUaT. No doubt. I myself was asking those very same questions. There is a name for what they were doing.
To be fair, there are different writing styles — the whole plotter vs pantser debate (for example, Agatha Christie was allegedly a “pantser,” and didn’t actually know who the murderer would be until the last chapter of the detective story she was writing). I think these are different types of authorial styles, and one isn’t inherently worse than the other.
That said, it doesn’t take away from your point, which is that OUAT plotting has gotten horribly, insultingly lazy. I’d imagine a pantser would need to do a lot of editing work for plot holes, loose threads, and so forth, which in OUAT’s case isn’t done at all. So with each season, we’re getting sloppier and sloppier first drafts.
Which makes me wonder — clearly, ABC doesn’t care too much about the quality of this show, because the downward spiral has only gotten steeper with each season since S3. But don’t A&E care? I mean, it is their career. I don’t know if I quite understand how the shobiz industry works, but I’m assuming that eventually they’re going to move to a next project. Won’t a downtrend on a show and pretty forceful criticism from both the fans and the professional critics not hurt their chances at future funding? Or is OUAT still considered successful by the industry’s standards because, simply put, it still makes money?
Does Belle make a habit of sneaking into other people’s houses to have sex with Rumple?
Oh wow, this is fanfic worthy xD
Fifty Shades of Gold… Lol
You know… this has potential (well, Ok, maybe not in terms of a fanfic. Although…). Anyway, as this article suggests (in a few more words), Fifty Shades is essentially about the fantasy of having sex with capitalism.
In this vein, Rumple’s Gold persona is a kind of parvenu magnate (he’s sort of all the negative capitalist stereotypes — pawn broker, lawn shark, landlord — rolled into one.) There is also the sense that Gold’s fortune (just like Rumple’s magic) are not legitimately acquired, and hence are empty in the end. (As to why that is, see my occasional rants about OUAT’s feudal ideology of privilege). So from this perspective, it’s interesting that Belle has a tendency to shun Rumple when he’s closest to his “original” persona, but comes back when he’s more “Gold”-like or “DO”-like.
(Also, I leave for a week, and this is what SF is talking about?) XD Trolololo
@The Watcher — Hmmm. If they’re planning to write in Emily’s pregnancy, wouldn’t they have to suggest that a pregnant Belle would willingly give up her life for Hook? There are already three women who are, more or less, willing to put themselves at risk for Captain Wish-fulfillment Character, whether directly or indirectly (i.e Emma obviously, Regina and Snow by proxy). And willing to leave their children either without parents, or put them directly in danger.
Come to think of it… you know what this sounds like? A cult. Seriously, doesn’t that sound like a bunch of cultists?
Seriously. OUAT as a secret Hook cult with progressive brainwashing? Totally makes sense to me.
I don’t want a season six. But I also don’t want to lose these forums.
So sad, but so true. Raise your hand if you’re sticking with the show because of this forum instead of sticking with this forum because of the show.
*raises hand*
Actually, do y’all have an evacuation plan? I’m serious. It’d be sad to see the community go after this show disintegrates to the point where even the diehards can’t put themselves through it.
Screwball did a really interesting essay on Emma’s plan to go to the underworld to get Hook. http://screwballninja.tumblr.com/post/135321215006/my-problem-with-emmas-underworld-vacation-the
It’s a nice essay. But I also think it points to the “elephant in the room:” why does Emma, arguably the central figure of the show, still have the emotional complexity of pasta salad 5 seasons later? Sure, time moves differently in the OUAT verse, but for the audience that’s 5 whole years. I mean, from the writers’ perspective, wouldn’t you think to yourself “Hmm, 5 years is a long time in my own life — hey, look at all this stuff that’s happened! I’m a different person now than when I started working on this show! *cue the Eureka moment* I know! Maybe I should incorporate this sense of progression into my characters’ fictional lives!”
Instead, most of OUAT’s characters are either static, or reset to 0 with enviable regularity. Even Regina, arguably the character who has had the most progress since S1, has largely ‘fossilized,’ beyond a mild back-and-forth around Zelena and the baby. She’s still fun and interesting to watch, but only because Lana Perilla kills it. But there’s hardly any progression at all for any of them, really. Actually, since S3, the only character that’s really “progressed” if you can call it that, is Hook. And that would be fine, except that it seems to have been happening at the expense of all the other characters, which at this point seem to be there only to accommodate his arc.
Needs to be related to Rumpel — even not counting the usual reason — because of the name.
Good call. And in that case, also Ruby.
