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Honestly I think it’s highly probable that JMo has always known the direction her love story was going. Jennifer, through the course of the show, has worked with just about everyone and she always has wonderful chemistry with them. I feel each of those relationships tangibly. I’m never really left questioning Emma’s overall feelings for any of the people she interacts with.
That said, I think part of the reason I was never really a ‘shipper as a Once viewer was that I never really felt she had a strong romantic connection with any of the men on the show. Gremma, while cute, (and absolutely vital to the momentum of the show) seemed rushed and almost off, to me. While I understood why Emma mourned him, I never really saw a deep connection between then, just a bit of friendly flirting. (I’ve always thought Graham was killed off so early in part to make it very obvious that he was not a potential True Love)Then August was introduced, and continued with the flirty banter and the coy looks and I tried to see the two of them as couple-y and just couldn’t. He always seemed like he had too much at stake for himself to really delve into WHY Emma didn’t want the burden of breaking the curse, didn’t feel like she could, even if she tried.
The only time I ever momentarily ‘shipped, it was Mad Swan (crackship, I’ll admit, but a fun one) and honestly I think that was mostly incidental, JMo and Sebastian had awesome chemistry.
Here’s the thing. JMo is very deliberate in the way she creates chemistry between Emma and others. You can see her simultaneous dislike of and gratefulness to Regina for the way she gets her way, and raising Henry, respectively. You can see the bond between Mary Margaret and Emma, the friendship and the way Emma sometimes defers to her against her better judgement. You can see the painful awkwardness of the only kind of friendly feelings between Emma and David, and so on. Jennifer is wonderful at creating these connections for the viewer without ever saying them.
So when Hook and Emma met, that first time, I suddenly payed a whole lot of attention to this Killian Jones person, because DEAR GOD if I thought she and Jefferson had chemistry, watching Emma and Hook interact was a damn epiphany. I’d actually begun to wonder, at this point, if the writers would ever introduce a love interest, and suddenly there’s a hunky pirate with a ridiculous accent and Emma is totally not in the mood to let him think he’s fooling anyone with his ‘poor blacksmith’ routine and, yep, they just made a hand jokeSo, yeah, there was some potential there that I hadn’t witnessed before on the show. By the time they’d made it to the beanstalk, Hook finally coming fully out of the ruse, (“Don’t be afraid to get really into it.” “I was hoping it’d be you.”) I was pretty much sold on the chemistry. But it wasn’t until the end of Tallahassee that I really started to ‘ship CS, when Emma hesitates after the giant tells her to leave and pretty much saves Hook from eventually being discovered and torn limb from limb. There’s a moment, after Emma claps him in irons, where she looks down and then back up and you can see every heartbreaking regret in her eyes as she backs away from him. Emma wanted to trust him. She felt the connection deep down in her bones and despite knowing exactly what he is and what his motivations are she still wanted to trust the man who could read her like an open book.
And JMo showed all of this. There was a connection there on the screen that I had never witnessed before with Emma, and it was amazing and beautiful and its only gotten better with time.But my long winded point is that Jennifer has made these acting choices from the beginning of the series. These choices to make Emma reserved and closed off, hard to read. There have been potential love interests before and I’ve never really felt the connection because it was never shown to me, and I quite honestly feel like it’s in part because JMo has always known, to some extent, that these men were not the right ones for Emma.
