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Robin did pick up that something was off with “Marian” when she told him to let Gold die in Heart of Gold. […] Regina’s actions in 4A do not add up with what Robin is accusing her of. Robin just comes across as an idiot.
Yup. I think you write in another thread that he is constantly flip-flopping on both his code, and on the apparent internal logic of his actions. This is what I was trying to point out — the way Robin is currently written is that he is either oblivious (bad enough), or has a kind of “wants to have the cake and eat it too” mentality, whereby he wants to, essentially, have an affair on the side, but doesn’t want to commit and break up his “marriage.” In fact, this is really a common daytime TV trope, isn’t it? Just as the guy is about to walk out, the wife gets pregnant. Sure, we have the additional twist of the wife not being the wife, but if the pregnancy is real, then the moral quandary stands.
I agree but after 4 years of reading A and E’s understanding of the more hot button issues on their show (ie: Regina didn’t rape Graham because we never saw them have sex on screen….) I could totally see them doing this (erasing the baby through magically altered timelines) and saying that it was not “aborted” it was just “written out of existence when the villains do “a thing.””
[rant]
OUAT is actually kind of all over the place with its moral scandals, which is I think why the fanbase ends up being so divided — people seem to interpret cues for moral outrage differently. And normally, this division would be just fine, and make for interesting debates. But it doesn’t help that the same exact issue or scenario is, in one case, at the center of the narrative, and discussed, and in other cases treated either in a cavalier way, or simply backgrounded. This applies to various scenarios where consent is an issue, whether in the case of statutory rape as with Graham, the Zelerian debacle, or the various instances of heart removal, child disposal, or magical transfer of this or that. Depending on who the character is, and I think how A&E feel about them, some of these consent issues are explored, merit screen and script time, and are otherwise at the forefront of the conversation – cue audience outrage (say, the Zelena problem, Rumple/Hook heart stuff, Snowing and Lily), while others seem to simply be treated with a shrugging non-issue attitude (Regina/Graham, Regina/Belle heart removal… We’ll see if Zelena’s baby, if real, gets redacted).
As a side note, someone — I think @PriceofMagic — brought up the question of the ship that has sunk for most of the fandom but keeps sailing on the show, vs I guess the ship that sinks on the show for no other reason than the plot demands it. To me, it feels like A&E have increasingly become tone-deaf to this distinction. I wonder what will be OQ’s fate in this department. I think OQ will eventually happen, but sadly at the expense of wringing all logic or likability out of Robin’s character in order to fulfill “bold” and “exciting” plot twists. There are other ways of portraying relationship drama. But, consistently, rather than explore the complicated but subtle problems of unequal relationships — which actually is an important theme in fairy tales, and was there in S1 — the writers now consistently go for the loud (and somewhat lazy) soap plots. I don’t know, maybe this is a question of taste and what audience they think they’re reaching — has OUAT’s viewer demographic shifted this much over the years?
[/rant]
[adrotate group="5"]Third time’s the charm and she’s again gonna be a mother to a child she’s not the biological mother of, but this time she knows where the baby came from from the getgo (no parentage surprises like with Henry). And she can make the choice to love the child despite having it thrust upon her by deeds committed by one of her evil family members (like how she ended up as a mother to Snow).
If they go with this, it actually also can compensate for Zelena’s own abandonment by Cora, and sort of continues with the theme of the firstborn being either abandoned or taken away and ending up with a different set of parents (Emma, Lily, Zelena, Bae, … am I missing anyone?)
How did he never see that 6 leaf clover pendant? Wouldn’t that thing likely have to be on a person in order for the spell to work on them? Making a baby typically involves getting all the way naked, which kinda makes a necklace pretty evident. Robin knows what that pendant is because he’s owned and used one himself.
This! Unless the pendant cleverly cloaks itself too? But really, if Robin wasn’t able to pick up on the fact that something is seriously off with “Marian”, then can we really expect him to pay attention to something as trivial as a measly pendant? Clearly, he was too busy making babies. Who can blame him.
Ugh. #somanyheaddesks
The thing with RUmple’s heart won’t kill him though, at least not whilst he’s in Storybrooke or a land of magic he can access. His heart going completely black would mean he’d be unable to feel love which he likens to a kind of death rather than it being actual death.
I think that’s right, but then what’s the relationship between the heart’s carbonization and Rumple’s “non-physical” heart attack in Heart of Gold? Is it that, as in a magical context he is losing his capacity to love, this process manifests as some kind of coronary heart disease in the Land without magic? If viewed by a regular doctor in a NYC hospital, would his heart simply look diseased in the traditional sense, whereas the cause is in fact spiritual, which then becomes apparent in a magical realm?
If so, then should Rumple leave SB once the process is complete, then he would presumably either collapse dead, or wink out of existence like Chernobog, because ironically he will have completely transformed into a (purely) magical creature.
Did he drink the Elixir (did Zelena give it to him), or did she hold on to it as insurance (I assume the latter)? Isn’t there essentially two solutions to his heart problems, i.e. the serum, or elixir or the… what, “darkness transplant”?
I assume that any Rumbelle will eventually have to relate back to these heart issues.
What I was confused about is the Sorcerer saying Lily and Emma were fated even before the curse. So what exactly do we think the Author did? Just stacked the deck against Lily a little more?
Oooh! Good point. Unless this isn’t about the Author, but about the other favorite theme of OUAT, i.e. how everyone is related!
And in the spirit OUAT soap… Who wants to speculate about who Lily’s biological father is? *eyes Charming suspiciously*
Kidding kidding. I think…
Actually, I wouldn’t put it past them to have it be Charming’s twin brother (how, I have no idea, but we can’t underestimate the creative power of retconning with this show). Wouldn’t it make sense that Lily and Emma are cousins? ;-P
Maybe the potential seeps from Lily to Emma every time they interact? Hence “things are brighter” for Lily when they’re together, but the opposite for Emma.
Interesting. There’s definitely something afoot when those two are together. But then there’s 2 elements of whatever Lily’s curse is. There’s the propensity for bad decisions, and then there’s this hovering cloud of bad luck, and I’m not sure I understand the supposed relationship between the two. It’s like A&E are trying to peddle the idea of instant karma, which really doesn’t work. Bad things happen to good people, and good things happen to bad people in our world. Is the “darkness” that allegedly got transferred out of Emma responsible for the bad decisions, or the bad luck, or both?
On a different note, if Lily and Emma are connected, as they appear to be from all the cosmic light show happening when they fought, they also have to be, in some senses, symmetrical. Presumably, any random child couldn’t be the “Anti-Savior” otherwise. So what makes Lily and Emma similar? Is Lily is also the product of TL and hence magical?
Gosh, I really hope not! If they kill off Rumple again this season then I feel like I may be done with this show because it means the writing is getting really lazy and redundant, and Rumple is the main reason I stick to OUAT in the first place.
Amen to that.
Just to make him darker and suffer more than ever before, and then just kill him off again?
I think the theory is that they will complete the character assassination, then redeem him for all of 30 seconds in a heart-wrenching scene before his final demise, thus moving on to season 5 which will likely be the last one, and as such A&E don’t have to be too concerned with viewership. Would this count as lazy writing? Yep. What a surprise.
I hope I’m wrong, but I tend to agree with some of the folks on this forum, that by this point they dug a hole so deep for Rumple’s character that getting him out of it isn’t going to be possible. Egh. I hate how this show with its love of shiny plot ends up turning a section of its audience into embattled cynics. Wasn’t it supposed to be about hope? *sigh*
Sweets wrote: I didn’t read his reaction that way at all. He seemed pretty shocked. And all he said was he couldn’t leave Zelena in NYC, not that he was staying with her.
I went back to re-watch to pinpoint why it rubbed me the wrong way. It’s their choice of words, “I’m sorry, I can’t leave her here.” He’s just found out that the woman who killed his wife has been raping him to make a baby, and the way they worded it “I can’t leave her” just has the wrong connotation IMO.
I agree, I think the phrasing is off, and gives the impression that Robin has developed some kind of relationship with Zelena. On the other hand, if he is, indeed, utterly shocked, then in some senses it’s no better (or rather, it’s worse in its own way), because it sends a potentially really problematic message.
Essentially, and now that we know they’ve been intimate, the idea is that Robin is unable to see the differences past Marian’s physical body, and her physical body is the only reality of her identity, that trumps all others (and any alarm bells that might be going off). This is a kind of gender-normative representation of how men supposedly approach relationships, which I think is troubling.
One might argue that there’s no way anyone could come to the conclusion that “wait, this is a body snatcher!” But is the trick of magically emulating someone else so unheard of in EF that Robin wouldn’t even dream of thinking that something like that might be happening to “Marian”? Now, I can’t remember for sure, but hasn’t Cora pulled off a similar trick at some point (someone who has a better memory of the show might correct me here?)
In other words, if you don’t have a concept of, say, plastic surgery, then if you see a friend’s suddenly radically altered nose, you wouldn’t think “Hmm, looks like they got some work done,” but you just might if you know plastic surgery exists, even if you’ve never had direct experience with it. Same applies here.
If the pregnancy is fake, then what was Zelena’s end game here? She might be powerful but not even Zelena can cause a baby to spring forth from her baby, Zeus style! Nine months from now, even Robin might notice if there is no baby….
Hmpf, I wouldn’t bet on it until, say, the blanket bundle that Zelena keeps carrying around is due to start walking >:-D
Seriously, though, wouldn’t the endgame be to get back to SB? Outside of SB presumably Zelena doesn’t have any magic except for her cloaking pendant. In SB the situation would presumably be different, though just how much magic she has isn’t clear. A really good reason to leave her in NYC, if you ask me — maybe she can use her pendant and become mayor 😉
I just can’t trust in our Beauty and the Beast ending anymore. Gone are the days of, “Oh, they’re Beauty and the Beast. Disney won’t let them break them up.” I just don’t trust the writers to do justice to it. “Skin Deep” was essentially a masterpiece. The reality is that after that episode Rumbelle characterization has been subpar in comparison. We get scraps and breadcrumbs. They tease and bait fans to keep them interested. But it’s at the point that Fanon is so much better at it than the show will give us.
I agree. I think A&E didn’t quite know what to do with Rumbelle (Skin Deep worked almost too well, and I suspect the show writers didn’t expect its success), and so kept shelving it or giving it perfunctory dialogue and screen time, perhaps with the thought “we’ll get back to it.” In the end, I think the show “aged” at a different pace than the ship did, and so by now A&E are long since disinvested from this particular pairing, and so are awkwardly axing it, sort of as an afterthought.
Then, of course, there’s the problem of methodical character assassination, but I won’t get into that here…
I also have a suspicion that she’s lying. The sheer level of wrong that seems to come with the alternative is just a bit too much. What I don’t, fundamentally, get is Robin’s reaction. There is a fine line between acting honorable and being inexplicably not revolted at having been taken advantage of in this way. He just seemed almost fond of her, for crying out loud — and not for a second did he seem to question the veracity of the claim. I mean, she just lied to him about who she is, impersonating his wife, whom she had killed. Wouldn’t the expected reaction be “Prove it?” Or, in the fine tradition of trashy talk shows into which this episode of OUAT is apparently morphing, shouldn’t Robin be asking for a paternity test? ;-P
