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I keep going back and forth. Sometimes I have moments of, “They really, seriously, legit killed him, didn’t they.” Then I have moments of, “But it just makes SO LITTLE sense, so they MUST be planning to bring him back.” They anchored their story in fricking PHOENIX of all places. The Phoenix can’t be extinguished, even when it looks like it is, it always comes back to life, that’s just how it works, and a TL like that is most definitely fitting for a character with Emma’s biology and magic. I firmly believe that SF was their original endgame plan, and I find it SO hard to believe that they’d do such an ABRUPT 180. I just got done listening to the Once Upon A Fans podast, and both hosts are of the opinion that they’re not accepting that Neal’s really gone unless and until we see the season finale and no one else has died, and that’s the mindset I keep coming back to as well.
[adrotate group="5"]I’m sorry Angie, it sucks and it’s sad, it’s making me sad as well to see people angry and/or giving up, it feels like a family is being torn apart, but I completely understand why they feel the way they do. Trying to explain an alternate way of viewing it really will achieve nothing, because this isn’t simply a case of different interpretations of a scene. This is something that people have taken personally, because they see themselves in Neal, and seeing him get screwed out of a happy ending affects people on a personal level, and it has a flow on effect of how people view the whole message the show is sending. Perhaps some will be less hurt by it, given some time, and perhaps some won’t, but trying to convince people of a different perspective on this one just ain’t gonna work.
Boy, named after Charming’s father, which is how they’ll segue into revealing who he was, (I do hope he’s connected to Camelot, but dunno about him being Arthur).
OMG that hurt! It was perfect, but it hurt! It makes so much sense, but OMG it HURT!
Honestly, as much as I ADORE Rumple, and have done so since the very first moment I saw him, and as much as I want Rumbelle to have their happy ending, the way your fanfic played out, it would have been so true to character for Rumple, and that death would make sense.
It would fit with his acceptance in 311 that his son could have a happy ending, just not with him.
It would fit with his acceptance of responsibility that he had in 311.astrawoid, what you say about how completely OOC it was for Neal is so spot on. It was so ridiculous the way they assassinated his character.
KFC, good to see you posting, sad that you won’t be posting much any more, but I totally understand your reasons. *HUGS*
It’s really quite surprising to me that they’d go there again, given the response they got about Regina and Graham. I know Adam’s tried to explain it away, but he knows that whatever he may have said, many people found that aspect of the story highly offensive, so it’d be bizarre if they went there again.
Up until a few days ago, I’d been thinking they might keep Zelena around into S4 and give her a redemption arc, but between her role in Neal’s demise, and now making out with Rumple, it seems they just want the fandom to be all, “KILL HER ASAP.”
I posted this in another thread somewhere, but there are only 3 people who could have told Hook about what happened: Zelena, Belle, Lumiere.
Lumiere: We don’t know where he ended up, but as an inanimate object, he wasn’t running around in such a way that you’d expect Hook to run into him, especially if Hook was headed for where the water is, and Lumiere is landlocked.
Belle: We’ve been led to believe, by Hook’s own admission, that the last time he saw all of them was when he left them in 312. Also, given Belle’s distaste for Hook in 315, I find it hard to believe that she’d have confided anything in him if she’d encountered him in FTL.
Zelena: I know there’s been speculation about her being the one to have sent him with the potion, but that doesn’t make sense to me that she’d send Walsh to keep Emma away, and then send Hook to bring her back, so I don’t really think Hook and Zelena interacted back in FTL.
The other option of course is that Hook was hiding in the trees and watching what happened. We don’t know how much time had passed by the time Belle and Neal got to Rumple’s castle, and we don’t know FTL geography to know if that clearing in the woods would have been on Hook’s path if he was still headed towards the coast to find his ship at that time.
There was no evidence this was pre-planned whatsoever. In fact the evidence point the opposite direction: Emma went home to NYC, Neal’s home, woke up at 8:15 to “Charley’s Girl” and ended up in Neal’s home city because of a “fire” as in Baelfire.
And they were even discussing that right before he died, that Emma and Henry ended up living in his old town. It’s like that conversation was the writers saying, “See all the beautiful connections this pair have, don’t they fit together so perfectly, look how happy and familiar they are with each other.” Then NOPE.
I’m mourning the loss of a friend (and the show)
It’s like if you’ve been in a relationship with someone for 3 years, and suddenly things start to go wrong, and you have a foreboding sense that it’s gonna be the end, even though that’s not something you want to happen. This isn’t just about being pissed over a fave character dying, it’s the realisation that the entire show isn’t about what you thought it was about, that you’ve been duped, and you feel like a fool for having believed in it. THAT is why this is affecting so many people so deeply and drastically. If the rest of the fandom can’t understand that, then I guess they’ve been watching a different show to the one I have been.
I can only lament at the wasted potential of his character and the many unanswered questions. What happened in the 200 years he spent in Neverland? What happened when he got to land without magic? What happened in between the 10 years he left Emma? There are just full of holes in his story that will probably never be touched on again.
Something I found both weird and infuriating in one of the A&E interviews was that they were asked if we might see Neal again in flashbacks sometime, and they were all, “I’d be disappointed if we didn’t.” But, um, how exactly would they do that? Because the rest of the time he was in FTL in the missing year, he was merged into Rumple’s body, so we won’t be seeing him there. And how would they make any flashbacks to him in the real world relevant, because there wouldn’t be any other present day characters involved in those flashbacks, so it would be incredibly disjointed. I honestly don’t see how they could use him in a flashback of any kind if he wasn’t still alive in present day. He’s not like Graham, who was still with Regina in FTL, so they could work in a believable cameo, and who was in SB with all the others, so it was believable for him to be in those flashbacks.
Also there was little to no resolution to the issues Neal faced. He never made due to his promise to see Henry again. He and Emma never really talked about their relationship or whether or not it was salvageable. He barely reconciled with his father in a mere day or so over the 200+ years of hurt. He and Hook hardly touched on their pseudo father/son relationship and the betrayal.
SO MUCH wasted opportunity. *sigh*
Where was that CaptainFire hug in 3A??? Absolutely rushed and was an ill attempt to make Hook look better before Neal kicked the bucket. And I didn’t buy the CaptainFire scene for a second. Hook makes it seem like his took Bae in as a son but they fail to mention anything about Hook giving Bae away to Pan because god forbid, they actually ACKNOWLEDGE Hook’s wrong doings. It wouldn’t hurt to have Hook say “Betraying you to Pan was a mistake I regretted all my life.” Or something to that effect, would’ve done worlds for Hook’s character and Bae’s resolution. But no it was yet another crime they just brushed over, and in Neal’s death episode no less!
OMG THIS! It’s always infuriated me that many in the fandom brush over that like it was no big thing that Hook handed an innocent child (who Hook had claimed to care about and had lied to in order to use him for info) over to a “demon” (Hook’s own word). And it’s like the writers are totally down with the rotten apples in the fandom, and that just makes me angry and sad. *sigh* Those two have a major betrayal between them, major issues. And while I did like that Hook let him go from the hospital, the sentiment of the scene just felt so lacklustre, now that I’m thinking of it, especially in the same ep as his sarcastic non-apology to Belle. Why couldn’t they have just built up their relationship when they met in NL in S3A instead of having them fighting over Emma? *eye roll* If they’d been building on it then, but things were still frosty, then that scene in the hospital, all of it would have felt fitting and made sense. It would have been the culmination of their reconciliation arc, instead of just some out of the blue scene that felt really random, where Neal was all, “What is this, why are you touching me right now?”
What could potentially salvage this storyline, which should have been deep and emotional but instead just got brushed over, is if over the rest of S3B, Hook comes to realise exactly how much Neal really did mean to Emma, and accepts that she loves him, he’s not just some guy who left her years ago and she doesn’t give a crap. I want to see Hook witnessing some real grief from Emma over losing Neal, some real fire lit inside her to avenge his death, and then maybe Hook will finally get it through his skull how much Emma and Neal loved each other. And maybe seeing Henry without his memories of his father will get to Hook and make him sad, and make him realise that that’s how Bae grew up as well, when his mother wasn’t around and he’d been so young when she left, he probably had no real memory of her. And all of that coming together for Hook could then inspire him to help if they did find that there was a way to bring Neal back, and even though it was dangerous, he’d still do it, for the sake of saving Neal, to make up for having let him down all those years ago. And if that situation resulted in Hook’s death, then THAT would be a death that had reason, made sense, and had allowed a character to grow, which is the total opposite of what Neal’s death was, which was them making him regress to the point of being OOC for the sake of a plot device.
