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Don’t worry, it’s not you, it’s just that the writers don’t care about making their characters consistent.
That’s it exactly.
I think what they meant to suggest is that because Hook has spent X amount of years hating and trying to kill Dark!Rumple (and presumably the DO more abstractly, though as some here have pointed out, he didn’t like Rumple when he was a normal guy either), now that he finds himself to be the thing he hates most (the DO) he’s transferring all that self-loathing onto a familiar object.
Another way to explain it is that back in the day, Hook enjoyed trolling Weak!Rumple. Then Rumple turned DO, and bullied Hook right back. Now that Hook is DO and Rumple is human,Hook’s just going right back to the thing that made him feel good before. And if that’s not satisfying character development, it’s because it’s essentially middle school play yard politics. I’d like to say I expected better from the writers, but I really don’t anymore, so *shrug* That’s where we’re at.
[adrotate group="5"]One of the things that makes Hook so horribly wrong for Emma is that he’s suffering from the typical immortal character syndrome. He’s like straight out of bad vampire paranormal romance: i.e. it’s a character who isn’t at all affected by his pathologically long life. Hence he’s acting like an impulsive teenager with no regard for anyone but himself (so, everything both @WickedRegal and @PriceofMagic said) — because that’s exactly what he is. In the 200+ years he’s been running around being a pirate, his motivations, worldview, and attitude to life apparently haven’t changed until Suddenly! Emma. The fact that he doesn’t have an inkling as to how to deal with someone who already had/has a family speaks to this (and arguably, he doesn’t want a family — he wants a girlfriend.) Hence “Emma Emma Emma.” Essentially, Hook is just another Lost Boy.
So that’s where CS goes off the deep end. It might be appealing character development if we’re talking about two 16 year olds falling in love (Romeo+Juliette / Tristan&Isolde etc) — as part of a first crush kind of story. That type of story is about two people with a very limited experience of life, and hence the feelings feel revolutionary.
But OUAT explicitly brought everyone’s baggage to the table. Arguably, S1, and the very premise of the show, was about everyone’s baggage — sometimes hidden, sometimes in plain view. So grafting this YA vampire bad boy cliche onto a show about complicated family ties, past mistakes, and second chances/new beginnings feels completely artificial. It’s simply the wrong love story. Essentially, Emma is a woman in her early 30s, with an actual past — including a teenage son, a good dose of loss and grief, and great deal of hard earned competence and skills — who is being paired with someone who, as a character, has the emotional and intellectual development of a 19 year old.
So at this point, the writers have two choices: either explicitly address this (i.e. Emma becomes a mother figure to Hook); or de-age Emma and make her as impulsive, selfish, and emotionally incompetent as Hook is, thus reversing all her gains as a character since S1.
Which is what they did.
I mean, the entire premise of OUAT drastically changed after Season 1. It all started out with the concept of a cursed town, where its residents live seemingly normal lives not recalling their past Fairy Tale identities. There was also more of a real world/Fairy Tale Land contrast, because there was no magic in Storybrooke.
Didn’t Lost also suffer from similar issues by the end (McGiffin bloat, some retconning)?
The only thing I’d amend is that OUAT S2A with Tamara and Greg were actually a fairly organic extension of S1 — the question of what happens if the outside world gets wind of a place with magic etc. It would have been interesting if they had continued in that direction, but then they did the Neverland arc and the magic realm jumping ballooned from there.
^^ Won’t touch another K&H production with a ten foot pole. Especially when more and more excellent series are available on streaming TV, there’s just no reason to put up with the mediocrity the ABC/K&H pairing seem to produce these days.
*shrug*
^^ Just a quick note on the really interesting analysis @Josephine posted
Has anyone been around toddlers much (other than WR of course!)? This might be better formulated by someone who has a background in early childhood development, or who’s had much more experience with kids than I have, but I’ve noticed that when toddlers/young kids learn story telling, they tend towards two strategies for dealing with plot roadblocks:
– they either change the stated rules of the game (“the reason the kitten was able to get out of [whatever pickle they’re in] was because the kitten was really a rainbow unicorn who was also a magic dragon [and hence stated pickle doesn’t apply to it]”) or
– they introduce deus ex machina McGuffins “(and then the kittens were rescued by a magic dragon that was also a rocket ship”). I’m guessing this is because they already have a sense of what a narrative structure ought to look like, but don’t yet have the reasoning skills to work our more subtle explanations consistent with the narrative they have so far built.
Reminds you for anyone/anything? Yes, I’m essentially saying that A&E are toddlers. 😛
It’s unhealthy and seriously raises questions on what the writers think constitutes love. Even OQ is more morally sound than CS and that’s saying something.
Yes, OQ — despite all the soap suds — is actually doing pretty well this season. Sure, they’re not infallible, but all in all they seem to have a pretty good dynamic going. But OQ is also not being shoved down our throats as the Romance to End All Romances. It’s just, you know, two people trying to make it work in a difficult situation. Which, despite the over the top ridiculousness of the Zelena baby mama thing, is actually sort of relatable and sweet.
Are the writers actually being clever and doing CS because ABC told them to but showing it for how unhealthy it is, or do they actually believe that CS is this all singing all dancing undying love?
I know that’s Slurpeez ‘s theory as well, right? I’ve been going back and forth, but I think the writers are just not clever – or, rather, not careful – enough to pull off that sort of doublespeak. Hook is just your standard, boiler plate rogue “redeemed by the love of a righteous woman”. As RG said, he’s written just as the rest of his TV trope compadres are written, with no efforts to subvert or question the stereotype. The problem is that OUAT’s audience is, by and large, pretty smart. So we’re all sitting here trying to make sense out of something that makes none.
Alternatively, maybe they had the Dark!Swan season more planned out than we think, and that originally Neal was meant to be in Hook’s shoes — as others have suggested on this thread. And then A&E out-clevered themselves and killed off Neal, which probably threw the rest of the writing team for a bit of a loop. I don’t know how this works in the TV industry, but I know from personal experience that, in a pinch, folks who write for a living recycle old text — whether for the ideas, for the language, for the plot — whatever. Because crafting new stuff takes time, intellectual effort, and a lot of wordsmithing, which you can’t always pull off. So we are seeing snippets of a much more well thought-out plot line interspersed with bizarre shortcuts and “shake and bake” character development, like Hook’s Suddenly, Dark One.
But now that he has his memories back and knows that Emma turned him into a Dark One, he suddenly feels the need to go and challenge Not A Dark One! Cripple! Rumple to a fight (to the death!!!!!–probably) even though in 504 it was all “I was villain in that story!”
*Watches promo. #headdesks*
Hook admittedly killed someone for drinking wine. (To paraphrase Lily Sparks’ review). He’s probably just going down the list of the people who ever slighted him. Emma, being the current DO, is too big a chunk to bite off, but Cripple!Rumple will do nicely.
Except for Emma, the revenge thing seems to be a big part of the DO characterization, and is a big theme this season. Nimue was/is very much revenge-driven. Rumple was somewhat more casually vengeful (*whoosh -> slug -> squish*) — but the core of his character was the search for his son.
But Hook was already driven by revenge when he was human. As a DO, it figures that he’d be vengeful ^2.
I admit that’s the fear he’s been dealing with this season–he knows he’ll go back to the dark side without his savior raft
Right. I think if Hook is to ever grow as a character, he will need to stop projecting onto others his own sense of self-worth (or lack thereof). In some ways, he’s written similarly to Rumple — he has a tendency to blame (and seek revenge on) others for his troubles, and also attributes to others (Emma) the ability to save him/absolve him. The one big difference from the Rumbelle dynamic that I can spot is that I don’t think that Rumple ever framed his feelings for Belle as conditional, or suggested that he’s “conditionally” a good guy as long as his love interest loves him. Anyway, no wonder Hook hates Rumple so much — the two characters are “aspects” of the same archetype, especially now that Bae is out of the picture.
This is a problem, of course, from a narrative perspective. If you’re going to have essentially two of the same kind of character, you’re going to need to address this similarity. I think the writers are aware of this, but don’t quite know how to productively exploit the parallels. I think this is because they wrote themselves into a bit of a corner with Hook by making him a good guy/central love interest for Emma: the problem is that what comes across as Rumple’s character flaws are, in Hook’s case, spun, often unconvincingly, as “positive”, “vulnerable” or “romantic” — mostly through the acting, cinematography, and Emma’s reactions. But that doesn’t mask the underlying relationship structure.
Oops, sorry, that was more verbiage on this topic than I originally intended. #Hookrelatedwalloftext O_o
Including not needing to sleep. If Hook’s a Dark One, he shouldn’t have been needing to sleep, so I guess he’s just not noticed that he’s awake 24/7 without getting sleepy ever?
LOL This!!! Especially after the big deal the characters, Hook most of all, made out of Emma not sleeping and making dreamcatchers.
You’d think he would have been like “ooh, look, I haven’t slept in 78 hours, and I feel fine. You know who else never sleeps? Hrmmmm…”
We’ve been told and shown that the Darkness is like a parasite that causes the host to have actual symptoms. Emma was treated like a patient with a terminal illness in Camelot. The voices, the fear, the random bouts of magic, all of those things were symptomatic of having the Darkness inside her.
Don’t get me started. For the last 4 seasons, the show has been drawing parallels between the DO curse and addiction (Rumple’s arc), and the DO and mental illness (Emma’s arc in this season). Now we are being told that if the person isn’t “aware” that they are “dark,” they would act, by and large, as usual.
Essentially — “What do you mean you have a mental illness? SNAP OUT OF IT!” or “What do you mean you have a chemical dependency that has rearranged your neural chemistry? YOUR WILL IS WEAK!”
Thanks, OUAT, once again, for so sensitively handling complex psychosocial issues.
Yippee ki-yay.
I was more upset that the first thing she did after escaping was Revenge and not going to the girl whom she had just gave birth.
Giving birth to a child doesn’t actually mean one is going to be automatically “into” motherhood. But yes, we are given the impression that Zelena really wants / cares for this kid — so it was rather OOC.
ok guys – who else is ticked off by Zelena prancing about in a tight mini dress and high heels with her girlish figure back in tack 5 minutes after having natural childbirth — wtf?? Plot or not – this is insulting to mothers everywhere.
That dress had magical postpartum belly support woven into it. Made out of 100% recycled MacGuffins 😛
I actually agree, it was kind of offensive. It’s another reminder that this show is about women written (mostly) by men. Does anyone remember those weird “mommy to be” dolls — I think from the early 90s? I remember they were around when I was a kid. Essentially, the belly opens, the baby comes out, and then there’s a plastic “flap” that snaps back and the belly is flat again. I’m going to assume that somehow this is still the writers’ understanding of childbirth in humans. I wish they’d skip to the chase, and just reintroduce storks.
