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I’m not so sure this has anything to do with masculinity. The women are very strong on the show. Rumple we know is strong with magic, Charming has his sword fighting abilities, heck even Robin has his bow and arrow. And we’ve seen Belle kick some butt too. But Neal has no fighting skills. And that’s fine. Not all men need to be tough, but I just feel in a world with magic, it would be hard for him to survive because literally everyone other than maybe Henry have some sort of strength they can use. If you were ok with Neal sitting back in the background like an Archie character or a dwarf then fine. But the main players are all very strong. Neal is a strong person in his own way. But the ability to defend and fight I feel he was lacking. For me, he felt out of place in a land with magic in storybrooke.
While having fighting ability might be what popular culture superficially portrays as being strong, the two are not synonymous. Take, for instance, the stereotype of a beefy jock, who though very athletic, doesn’t have very much going on upstairs; his only primary motivation tends to showing how big and powerful he is. By contrast, when I write about strong characters, I mean characters who have complex motivations, rich histories with other characters, and a strong sense of agency. Therefore, a character might be physically weak but end up developing a cunning intellect (e.g. think Tyrion on GoT whose mind is his weapon). Thus, when people like @nevermore bemoan the fact that most of OUAT’s characters (both male and female) are cardboard, what they mean is that the characters have become very flat. Instead of their wishes shaping their environment in ways that are unique to them, the plot controls them. This goes back to @Keb’s earlier point that the characters often seem to act OOC now as they react in ways which previously seemed unfathomable and unrealistic, given previously establish facets of their earlier personalities (which in seasons one through three were much more in tact and intricate). This essay really addresses the issue in a good way, and I think it applies not just to female characters, but also to male ones.
[adrotate group="5"]"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
This isn’t Game of Thrones, though. We were told and promised that this was a story about hope and family, and for a lot of us, Neal was the lynchpin that helped make this show about family.
This is the real crux of the matter. The show had an MO for the first 2.5 seasons of family reconciliation and hope. Neal’s season 3 promotional poster had the message “believe in second chances.” Well, where was Neal’s second chance? Neal told Mulan and Robin Hood that his son and Emma were his second chance. On a show that was originally about hope of second chances and family finding each other (e.g. Henry finding Emma, Charming finding Snow, Emma finding her parents, Rumple and Emma finding Baelfire) finding Neal again and his integrating back into the town of SB with his family was where things were clearly headed before the reset button was hit.
What @Keb said. Isn’t the argument that a character no longer does something for the plot and hence must be eliminated a bit spurious? I think it has more to do with worldbuilding and fresh ideas than it does with any given character.
Yes, exactly. While the writers claimed they had told everything there was to tell about Neal, I think it’s more that they were forced to wrap up his arc in a rushed way and to compromise their original plan to hit the reset button. (All one needs to do is look at the dynamic between Will and Anastasia on OUAT in WL to see what the writers probably intended for Emma and Neal).
"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
From TVLine’s month-old blind item:
As for the on-screen ramifications of the long-gone character’s reappearance, one should expect more than a little drama. His/her timing… could be better, yeah.
I’m not quite sure how to take this. On the one hand, there will surely be drama amongst fans, but this quotation specifically said “on-screen ramifications” … which again, I’m not sure how to interpret it, especially since MRJ’s only appears to have filmed the one scene for 5×12.
"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
Henry getting to talk to his dad again would be just about the only tolerable option for me. Henry and Neal need closure, since it’s absurd that Neal died whilst Henry had no memory of ever having met his father.
"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
double post
"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
I really hope the writers don’t go the same route with this “Cleo Fox” (assuming that is what character’s name is), as they did with the Snow Queen by wiping all of Emma’s memories of her to account for why Emma had no recollection of her.
"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
nervermind
"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
So, essentially you’re all saying: instead of subverting existing gender stereotypes, as it promised to do, OUAT inverted them, giving the habitual female stereotype to men, and the habitual male stereotype to women, but doing nothing to challenge the underlying power dynamics. ? So as @RG is saying — it’s like the MRA’s pastiche of feminism that claims that feminists just hate men and think women are better (rather than, say, advocate for equal rights and access).
There is this interesting line in the movie The Intern in which the protagonist, a successful female entrepreneur, wonders if little girls being taken to work by their parents in the 80s and 90s made little boys feel left behind, which is why there seem to be so many men with Peter Pan syndrome (a real thing). I think she was suggesting that maybe women have been empowered too much so that men feel threatened. Yet, that dynamic raises the issue of why would promoting a strong sense of womanhood seem to threaten manhood somehow? It seems the world is full of heroic male characters, but not as many female ones. That is why OUAT in S1 felt like a breath of fresh air.
There is the example of Charming being the sword and Snow being the brains (although only until S2, after which Snow made some bad decisions). I actually don’t have any problem in the case where both parties are satisfied with that set up. There’s no “rule” that men have to have just as much, if not more, education or “power” than a woman. In fact, it might just work best for that couple. If Charming simply is not comfortable being a military strategist, because he grew up on a farm, then no big deal. That is why leaders have a general and a chief of staff. If Charming wants to let Snow make most of the political and diplomatic decisions because she was raised to be queen, then that totally works. I think it’s about finding that balance of power that works specifically for the couple in question. For example, one doesn’t have to go to college to be a good police officer; Charming is still rather capable of helping Emma be co-sheriff of the town of SB.
I think the main issue with the show now isn’t that women have more power than men on the show, since it’s totally great if women want to have authority (e.g. as sheriff, mayor or queen). I think the main issue now is the terrible writing. With the possible exception of Rumple, who was shown to have complex motivation in the first three seasons, I think the men (and even the women now) all suffer from just being boring with irrelevant backstories — which seem like filler episodes. That wouldn’t be so bad if their episodes actually developed their characters in interesting, complex ways that didn’t contradict previously established events, rather than served no real purpose except take up time and create discontinuity. The same goes for most of the female characters’ backstories now, which just recycle things we already knew about them. Snow, Regina, and even Emma’s stories have all been told, and the writers keep changing and retconning what has already been told (hello baby-snatching 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
I’m not openly accusing the writers of anything at this point, just spitballing ideas. Are they scared of how the fandom/internet would take two men being close, like the show does often portray women to varying degrees of success? And what does that say about their own gender politics?
While I’m not dismissing the possibility, I think there is a straightfoward and obvious reason why there aren’t more male relationships or bromances portrayed on the show; it’s because the show isn’t as focused around men as it is women. With the exception of Rumple (who is arguably the most complex of the male characters and whose quest to find his son used to drive the plot of the entire show), I think Robin, Hook and Charming are pretty much just the arm candy of the women with whom they’re involved. That is largely due in part to the women of the show being much more interesting, multifaceted and layered by comparison.
When this show was conceived of, it was intended to be primarily about women and their relationships with each other. Though Snow’s S1 arc did focus heavily on finding Charming, it was also about being a step-daughter, a mother and a best friend to Ruby. To think the writers even thought about killing off Charming in the pilot! It was only thanks to the ABC’s intervention that kept Charming around, citing the reason that Snow’s happy ending would have been forfeit before the show had even started! That does give a window onto where A&E’s heads were at back when they were conceiving the show; they really considered Charming expendable to the main story. Now Charming pretty much just exists as Snow’s love interest and Emma’s dad.
Of all the male characters’ episodes, only Rumple’s episodes have really ever captivated me. And what drove those early episodes like Desperate Souls was really Robert Carlyle’s acting ability. But, looking back, I don’t think I really have enjoyed any of the backstory episodes that were just about Charming, Hook or Robin Hood. While the actors who portray them are alright enough, they aren’t method actors like Robert Carlyle and their characters are very flat and mostly irrelevant to the main plot, despite the writers’ attempts to make them relevant. (Warlord Bo Peep *twitch*)
"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
