Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
I’m curious as to how they can snuff (twitch) out the light, which is really why I asked the big “can darkness exist without light.”
The show seems to be mixing its themes up. It used to be that darkness and light were two sides of the same coin; heroes can go dark and villains can perform feats of heroism. I thought the show was still on track with that when they showed that Excalibur and the Dagger were one and the same. Darkness, light, joined together. But lately the show has been treating darkness as if it was something independent of light and something that can actually be destroyed forever (same with the light). I mean, yes. That’s one fantasy route to take. Destroy the ring and the Big Bad dies and Middle Earth is saved. Huzzah. But darkness and light are far more complicated than that, at least they used to be. I don’t know if the writers actually have a stance: darkness and light coexisting, mixing together to form a grey soup, or Darkness and Light (in all their cosmic glory) being totally independent of each other and capable of wiping the other out.
[adrotate group="5"]"He was a lot of things to me" "The only conclusion was love"Morning all! So, as most of you know I do reviews of OUAT every week. I used to post them here but stopped once some…um…stuff happened. (Getting attacked is always a good time!) I thought about copying and pasting some stuff I wrote up about last night here but frankly, too much effort. Instead I’ll link to the actual post because, as some of you know from Twitter, I spent most of yesterday watching Jessica Jones on Netflix (my god. Watch it). Anyway, the character Kilgrave is actually Captain Hook and his relationship (for wont of a better term) with lead character Jessica is what Captain Swan is supposed to be–toxic, soul crushing, disgusting, and all about the white heterosexual male privilege trying to take what is there. But instead of making it romantic, the show proudly declares that these sort of relationships–in which women are mere objects–are terrible, to put it mildly. This show looks rape culture in the eye and spits at it. I may or may not be totally in love with the show.
Spoilers for Jessica Jones lies ahead, but here ya go…for anyone interested.
"He was a lot of things to me" "The only conclusion was love"First analysis is in for 5×10 “Broken Heart”
and original installments of “Once Upon a Time” (#3: 2.7/ 4)
http://www.spoilertv.com/2015/11/ratings-news-30th-november-2015.html
Demos up in a bit, but most likely…steady as she goes, once more
"He was a lot of things to me" "The only conclusion was love"Emma is his anchor for good, she always has been. She was literally the only thing he could hold onto to resist the dark influence.
But this is incredibly problematic. You shouldn’t need another person to be good. It’s emotional manipulation: “if you leave me, I’ll revert back to being dark/a villain so you have to stay with me because you’re my only hope of being good!” There is nothing wrong with having someone by your side to help you resist dark temptations, but they shouldn’t be your only reason for being good. People leave, people have faults, people die, people make mistakes. By placing the root of his salvation in Emma, he’s setting both of them up for failure and being incredibly unfair to Emma in the process. It’s the same with Rumple and Belle. He has to learn to be a good man on his own for the sake of being good, not because Belle is some sort of magical object that holds the universe’s secrets. When male characters treat woman thusly it’s…oh, gosh it’s problematic. But of course A and E don’t see it that way, they just see “love.”
I’m trying to figure out how much to say on this topic because everyone knows that I’m not exactly Hook’s biggest fan. So, bear with me folks. This might be a bit all over the place.
Hook lays into Emma with some cold hard truths. In many ways, the things he says aren’t actually false. Emma does does destroy her own happiness by refusing to let anyone in and by refusing to believe that she can have happiness. She did it with Henry, with her parents, with the town of Storybrooke, and even with all her various love interests from Neal to Walsh to Hook himself. The pirate calling her on those famous walls (which, honestly, should have been destroyed by now after so many people have been let into Emma’s heart) shows a level of self awareness that I didn’t know he had. Also in the self-aware department are the writers themselves. For a brief moment, during this heated argument, the writers of OUAT seem to actually get and understand that Hook is a problematic character. Let me pause here to say that there is nothing wrong with problematic characters. We need villains in storytelling or how else would we know who the heroes are. We also need anti-heroes because the world is, by and large, not divided into heroes and villains. It’s far more complicated than that; we need characters like Walter White and Don Draper and Tony Soprano to illustrate how gray our world is. Hook falling into the villain or ruthless antihero category is a comfortable place for him and a good, long standing narrative tradition.
The problem lies not in his villainy but in the fact that the writers never let him stay there and actually explore that self-same villainy and vile nature because the writers spend more time turning him into a “love sick puppy dog” (show’s quote, not mine!) This version of Hook–this man who calls Emma an anchor and nothing more than a pretty blond distraction, who declares that he’s happy so long as he gets what he wants and who point blank tells Emma that he wants to hurt her like she hurt him–is a fascinating character. If the writers stayed in this territory, highlighting Hook-is-a-monster nature and how much of a sociopath he is–and not going down the boring and troubling romantic lead route–then the writers could actually manage to say something of value about male privilege, rape culture, and the power of victims to rise above the crimes perpetrated on them by not falling into the “we’re inevitable” trap when the abuser uses love (or in the case, darkness) as an excuse.
Okay, that’s all I got. (Actually I have a lot more but….I’ll just wander away at this point)
"He was a lot of things to me" "The only conclusion was love"Actually, I think there’s a chance that we’ll see him and /or the Lady of the Lake in next week’s Mid-Season finale. Lancelot was sent to find his mother as an ally, and that very well might play a role. For one, she’s the Lady of the Lake, and the portal of the Underworld just happened to be shown in a lake in the very same episode. Maybe the Lady of the Lake can transport between realms via water like mermaids can? Just seems like a deus ex machina type plot device that they would do.
That’s actually fairly logical, so it works for me.
Merlin’s dead and a few other people have touched on the PoC problem that once again has cropped into this narrative. I don’t want to be soapboxy so I’ll just state my case and move on.
I have been predicting for sometime that Merlin was dead and that somehow there was a loophole so that wasn’t shocking. But the sad fact is that the perpetrator of the murder wasn’t shocking either. That isn’t a slam against Hook (though, he’s killed before as demonstrated by his many baubles) but rather that I am not surprised that the Person of Color was killed to further a white character’s story. When the various Arthurian members were cast for season 5A, I was actually very pleasantly surprised that the writers had cast a Latina Guinevere and an African Merlin. Sure, it was clearly because the writers were aware of the (well deserved) criticism that OUAT has a serious race problem, but at least they were trying to course correct and appease instead of letting it slide. Little did I know what they had in store for these two new PoC’s. Let’s take inventory, shall we? Guinevere was enslaved by her white husband and then turned into a rape object, also by her white husband, because of his man pain over her kissing a black character. That same black character, by the way, was spotted tonight before he was sent packing to his mommy because heaven forbid that Lancelot play any sort of active role in his own mythology. Merlin, the show’s most powerful sorcerer, was also enslaved by a white character (Arthur) and then was killed by another white character only to fuel that white character’s storyline. This show has such a major racial problem but the egregious issue is not that it has a race problem and is trying to actively make a commentary on race in fiction or in our reality, but that it’s an unintentional racial problem. In other words, the writers don’t actually realize that the plot they write for the people of color are always the same and always racist–they appear and then are summarily dismissed (either killed or written off) once they have served their purpose. You know, there’s an actual trope called the magical negro; their main purpose is to come to the aid of the white characters and once they have fulfilled their role as a helpmate, they either die or simply vanish from the narrative. Sound familiar?
"He was a lot of things to me" "The only conclusion was love"Ummmm…I’m confused….How did Emma’s family fail her??????!!!! Not to mention that Emma told them in the season premiere that they had to pay for doing what they did to her? Was there an issue in the writing room, were they undecided on what occurred in Camelot, because if you watch the earlier part of the season, you’d think the family had burned Hook at the stake how Emma was acting all “Dark One and you must suffer”.
Yeah I’m confused on this as well. I don’t get how everyone–but Henry–failed her.
"He was a lot of things to me" "The only conclusion was love"It’s coming sooner than you think … like this week!
Umm. Did I miss something?
If you did, then I did as well.
"He was a lot of things to me" "The only conclusion was love"Well, I don’t think Belle is being controlled because no one else knew that Belle and Rumple had set up this “Affair to Remember” type of meeting.
The factor that does have to be taken into consideration here is EdR’s very real pregnancy.
"He was a lot of things to me" "The only conclusion was love"The problem has been fixed. Thank for everyone’s patience.
"He was a lot of things to me" "The only conclusion was love"
