[Slurpeez]

Even if Hyde and Regina are together, I just don’t really feel its needed or necessary for her to be with anyone at all.

I swear to Zeus, if they killed off Robin Hood to pair Regina up romantically with Hyde then I might lose it.

[Slurpeez]

I blame the Hot Topic designers for this.

Maybe, but musn’t Hot Topic have approval from ABC before it can sell merchandise associated with the OUAT brand? Whoever designed that shirt and decided to market that logo needs to be evalutated. The typical customers who shop at Hot Topic are adolescents. Does Hot Topic really consider that to be a healthy message to send teenage girls? Are these companies only interested in making money at the expense of the consumers? *sigh*

"That’s how you know you’ve really got a home. When you leave it, there’s this feeling that you can’t shake. You just miss it." Neal Cassidy

[Slurpeez]

This, so much. I mean, I don’t blame him for being “whiny.” At this point, he’s surrounded by idiots. And Emma seems to focus more on Hook than him.

Agreed. Henry’s character has suffered from poor overall writing, lack of character development, and by Jared Gilmore’s acting. We’ve seen much better young actors on the show (e.g. Bailee Madison as young Snow White).

"That’s how you know you’ve really got a home. When you leave it, there’s this feeling that you can’t shake. You just miss it." Neal Cassidy

[Slurpeez]

On another not, this is apparently an actual thing. Linked for language.

*twitch* Who would even buy a shirt like that? That’s so offensive and so triggering for people who’ve survived any kind of abusive or violent kind of situation. To me, that quotation sums up everything I’ve ever disliked about the pirate’s influence over Emma.

"That’s how you know you’ve really got a home. When you leave it, there’s this feeling that you can’t shake. You just miss it." Neal Cassidy

[Slurpeez]

I wouldn’t have had any problem with Henry being important to the overall story. It was kind of foreshadowed that Henry would be important as early as season two when the prophesy said the boy would be Rumple’s undoing. I guess what was about Pan, but it could have been about Henry. Also, Henry’s parents being who they were and having shared true love also meant Henry was important by birth as was Emma. I don’t think Emma’s role would have been in any way reduced by letting her son also be important. However, I agree with @RG’s point. The writing just stunk too much and the writers couldn’t follow through in any convincing way. Henry became annoying, sadly.

You know what would have been great, Milah be Captain Hook, that would be surprising and big, or also, if they wanted Colin so much in the show, why not make him and Regina fall in love, instead of all the stupidity of OQ/zelena and marian, that made no sense, destroyed to many stories and all for nothing, so that they can erase Robin forever.

Also, THIS! I actually really liked the idea of a romance between Regina and Hook a lot in S2 (until Hook left Regina to be tortured by Greg). Regina and Hook are pretty similar and more akin to being each other’s soul mates than Robin Hood/Regina and Emma/Hook ever were.

"That’s how you know you’ve really got a home. When you leave it, there’s this feeling that you can’t shake. You just miss it." Neal Cassidy

[Slurpeez]

Also, instead of giving us half-season villains who get defeated easily, give us the entire series-long villain in the form of the Blue Fairy. Let her have been playing a very long con, but make her motivations very complicated and utilitarian. Let it be that she tricked Bae into coming to ALWM, setting off a whole slew of events. Let it be the case that Blue wanted Rumple to transport everyone to ALWM because of the EF was under threat.  Let there be some sort of existential threat that only Henry being the truest believer and author can fix. The BF could have been the one who foresaw Henry being the truest believer centuries before he was born. She was the one who engineered Emma and Neal meeting because she knew Henry being the product their true-love union would make him the next Chosen One. Making Henry both the author and the truest believer was a great twist, but it’s meaningless without there being a greater threat that spans the entire series. There needs to be some end goal and overarching tension which drives the story towards its ultimate climax. Otherwise, where is the real tension and what is the goal?

"That’s how you know you’ve really got a home. When you leave it, there’s this feeling that you can’t shake. You just miss it." Neal Cassidy

[Slurpeez]

This is the thing, though. The entire premise of the show, as S1 was set up, was about theorizing and speculating — outside of the Charmings, Regina, and Emma, who the other characters were and what their past had really been about was this exciting process of discovery. And then it turned out that many of the characters were actually combinations of fairytale characters (such as Rumple). So much of this show was based on being given the pieces, but not knowing how they fit together. At some point after S3, though, it stopped being that. Rather, new pieces were added, seemingly at random, and mostly through the kinship diagram from hell method which quickly got very very old.

Adam and Eddy originally sold their show as being mostly a character-mystery show. When Emma broke the dark curse at the end of season one, it was magical, beautiful and moving. Thematically, it was the perfect way to end the season after her parents shared a TLK at the start of the season. In hindsight, however, it might have happened too soon. The lack of mystery (outside of Dr. Whale, GOAT, and Neal Cassidy), going forward meant something was lost.

I think one way they could have gone, and that would have been so much more compelling, is to go the same avenue they did with Rumple (where he was also the Beast, and the Crocodile), but expand this to other characters. This would have given the main crew an opportunity to explore new aspects of their characters, and not overburden the show with random and ultimately irrelevant plotlines. It might have given them some space to work with characters they had exhausted by adding new dimensions/story elements (Robin comes to mind).

I recall the writers let Lana Parrilla play the Evil Queen impersonating Ursula in 3×6 and let Peter Pan also be the Pied Piper in 3×4. Beyond that, the writers probably missed a trick. Indeed, let Robin Hood be both the Prince of Thieves and the just and rightful ruler of Camelot! Introduce Merlin as having been in hiding as one of Robin Hood’s merry men. Then give Merlin a much bigger role rather than let him be killed pointlessly by the pirate. Stop trying to turn beloved childhood figures like Peter Pan and King Arthur into baddies (those were just dumb “twists”). Give us more Bae as Peter Pan and give us complex interactions Captain Hook. Let that relationship be complicated by the fact that Hook loved Bae’s mother! Let Baelfire have been a likable, lovable Peter Pan who left Neverland to grow up and find love. Don’t make Pan evil and don’t try to turn Hook into Captain Sparrow 2.0. Let Rumple and Hook have a complicated relationship that develops beyond the original feud. Let Rumple realize the hard way that Hook was the one who got to be the father figure in Bae’s life all those years in Neverland. Let their mutual fatherly ties to Baelfire gradually create a mutual understanding between them. *head desk*

"That’s how you know you’ve really got a home. When you leave it, there’s this feeling that you can’t shake. You just miss it." Neal Cassidy

[Slurpeez]

Slurpeez wrote: It is such a shame when writers feel the need to distort everything they’ve worked towards just because the cleverest of the fans might have read the clues correctly. That is what good foreshadowing is all about.

Right. Do they not want us to theorize or speculate? Do they just want us to sit back, numbly, and not think too hard about the show and plot and characters and just be TV-watching sheep??

I’m pretty sure A&E just wish the audience were simple-minded sheep. Hence, Rumple’s very meta line: “Your questions are pointless.” I have this image of A&E reading fan questions and concerns on social media. They’re sitting there and yelling, “Stop asking us questions! Just stop! Your questions are utterly pointless because we stopped caring over 2.5 seasons ago about plot consistency or characters behaving in character! We gave you what we thought you wanted with CS kisses every other episode. Just leave us alone!”

"That’s how you know you’ve really got a home. When you leave it, there’s this feeling that you can’t shake. You just miss it." Neal Cassidy

[Slurpeez]

I think everyone would be better off if Adam and Eddy get a time out from social media for a while — it seems that part of their problem is that they are in this echo chamber of audience response, and have completely lost any sense of personal creative vision. Which goes back to the comparison that @Slurpeez made with GoT a few pages back — where audience response has never shaped either Martin’s work, or the GoT creators’ way of televising the story.

This! George R.R. Martin has spoken openly of the temptation to change his books that he, a great author, has had to avoid when some very clever fans correctly theorized about the ending of his book series. Source (warning: spoilers for books and TV show):

GRRM: “I want to surprise and delight my reader and take them in directions they didn’t see coming. But I can’t change the plans… So many readers were reading the books with so much attention that they were throwing up some theories and while some of those theories were amusing bs and creative, some of the theories are right. At least one or two readers had put together the extremely subtle and obscure clues that I’d planted in the books and came to the right solution… So what do I do then? Do I change it?! I wrestled with that issue and I came to the conclusion that changing it would be a disaster, because the clues were there. You can’t do that, so I’m just going to go ahead. Some of my readers who don’t read the [online fan] boards, which thankfully there are hundreds of thousands of them, will still be surprised and other readers will say: ‘See, I said that four years ago, I’m smarter than you guys’.”

Thankfully, he correctly assessed that to change the books after laying the necessary groundwork would would have ruined the entire series.

"That’s how you know you’ve really got a home. When you leave it, there’s this feeling that you can’t shake. You just miss it." Neal Cassidy

[Slurpeez]

Yeah, as far as i am concerned the writers are not writing their story anymore. They are writing some fanon/ABC story that is no where close to where they intended it to go originally. That is why it doesn’t make sense. That is why they can’t keep the details straight. They had this original intention and it fell apart because of ABC possibly pushing certain things and the producers reacting to the audience figuring things out by changing their original intention. It is like the characters are no longer their characters. With the removal of Bae it completely changed both Rumpel and Emma as characters. That has then effected the family and plot as a whole. Created this disconnect. It is a complete mess.

It is such a shame when writers feel the need to distort everything they’ve worked towards just because the cleverest of the fans might have read the clues correctly. That is what good foreshadowing is all about. Many fans correctly guessed that Neal was Baelfire and that Baelfire was the father of Henry. I’m glad that the writers of OUAT didn’t change that fact since it had been built into the narrative since season one. I remember they discussed being tempted to change that reveal at the time, but fortunately, they didn’t try to change the story to be just some random dude who got Emma Swan pregnant and then disappeared. At the time, I held A&E in high esteem for being creative and true to their original plan. They’d laid so much groundwork since the pilot, and JMo and Robert Carlyle both knew the real identity of Henry’s father and portrayed their respective characters with that foreknowledge. To have gone back and tried to change it would have been an utter disaster. Too bad the writers of OUAT later felt compelled due to pressure from Hook fans to kill off Baelfire. That is when I lost total confidence in their ability to be true to their original conception since they overtly changed it. They hit a major ‘reset button’ with the strong implication being they were going to go in a totally different direction that diverged radically from where the show had been previously headed the first 3.5 seasons.

"That’s how you know you’ve really got a home. When you leave it, there’s this feeling that you can’t shake. You just miss it." Neal Cassidy

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