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@DSB – Can I just quote your whole post? I know you don’t want to start a blog, but I’m so tempted to start a fan blog for YOU so I can have one single place where all your brilliant posts are stored (and I can just read them over and over and over… that’s not weird at all…).
Also, speaking of friends and things, yesterday a friend of mine posted on Facebook that she’s started watching Once for the first time. She went in with low expectations, but said she was pleasantly surprised. I wanted to jump in and say “Nooooo! Save yourself the heartache and run away while you still can!” She also originally called Bobby “Peter Carlyle”. lol
[adrotate group="5"]Co-Mayor of Sad Town | Twin of Co-Mayor of Sad Town | #HopeforRogueBison
I was writing a meta the other day about why I can’t just make a clean break from OUAT, and then it turned into something that was almost funny, but then turned long and weird. Oops. Posting the long form here. May try to edit it down for Tumblr, but I’m not really sure what to do with it at this point. Sorry!
Breaking up is hard to do:
Let me tell you a story about a show that I thought was the love of my life.
I first heard about Once Upon a Time (let’s call it OUAT for simplicity’s sake) the summer before it came to town. Friends and other trusted sources had told me all sorts of things about OUAT and by the time it finally rolled into town in the fall of 2011 I couldn’t wait to meet them. First impressions gave off this feeling of hope and adventure that I hadn’t felt in years, so I thought, sure, OUAT and I can be friends. For all of the 2011-2012 season we had a weekly date and everything was cool.
OUAT and I had been friends for a year when everything started to change. We’d always been pretty close, possibly even considered best friends, but by that fall OUAT started showing me new parts of their personality, things that I couldn’t determine right away if they were good or bad, but just different. It’s hard to say if the things I saw as changes were actually new, or if they were just parts of their personality that they didn’t feel comfortable showing me until we had been friends for awhile. Sometimes they were sloppy and distracted by somewhat pointless tangents, but at their core they were still the OUAT I loved, so I stuck with them through good and bad.
By the winter of 2013 everything shifted again. Something that I’d seen back in the fall, but didn’t know what to make of it, came back in a big and dramatic way. For me it was an affirmation of purpose and destiny, and that OUAT had had a plan the entire time we had known each other, but only now were they willing to share with me this secret, this important moment filled with the emotion that I hadn’t really seen from them in awhile. What had started out as a casual friendship became bigger as we spent more and more time together, and I wanted to tell the world about our new love and the deepness of their soul.
OUAT had been making promises to me almost the entire time we had known each other. For that first year they were fairly consistent at following through, but in that second year they became more and more lax. At that point the story they spun to me was so beautiful and so deep, and I was so helplessly in love that I just clung to them, assuring myself that they would never lie to me like that. I just had to have hope and everything would turn out fine.
OUAT was the relationship I was deeply in love with, had committed myself to, and was willing to follow to the ends of the earth. Slowly, without realizing it fully, the relationship began to change around me, until one day my beau called it quits, “Sorry babe, this just isn’t working out. I’d like to see other shippers now. Hope we can stay friends.” I didn’t want to leave the relationship, I was never given a choice. Maybe things had been a rocky for a little bit, but I believed my OUAT loved me, and everything looked like it was promising me a happy ending if I just had faith and held on long enough, but then something changed, something outside of my control that has nothing to do with me, but I’m always going to wonder what I could have done to have made my OUAT stay.
My beloved OUAT broke up with me in 315, but I, like the hopelessly in love fool that I am stuck around (more or less) until the end of the season, hoping that maybe my love would change their mind, would realize how perfect we were together, and would apologize and come back to me. I waited and hoped, but instead I was heartbroken to see my OUAT and their new beau making out in front of me, as if I had never existed. Some of OUAT’s other friends (including their new beau) keep trying to tell me that OUAT never loved me, and I saw promises where there were none, but I will always believe we had a connection, which in part makes moving on so hard.
I’m still in the process of figuring out what my life is like without OUAT. I didn’t ask for this break up, so I was not prepared for it emotionally. Seeing that they’ve moved on already makes everything more real and more painful, and kind of makes me feel like I never really mattered to them in the first place. The hardest part is that OUAT introduced me to so many new things and people; art, fiction, communities of people whom I love very much. I don’t want to lose these things from my life, but in doing so it means I have to keep OUAT in my life in some form. While other people may be able to make clean breaks, I have too much love for the things OUAT has brought to my life, outside of the heartbreak. I’m already trying to cope with the emptiness of losing this special part of my life, I don’t know that I’m ready to walk away from everything completely. This hole already hurts too much, I don’t know that I can deal with the crater of losing everything else too. I don’t want to lose these wonderful friends, or this community, but what kind of relationship do I have to keep with OUAT in order to do so?
I will always love my OUAT. We had such a wonderful time together, even if it was shorter than I expected, and those happy memories are important to me. Maybe over time we can learn to be friends again, but right now everything is too fresh and painful to really know where we will stand again in the fall when they roll back into town. Maybe I’ll never know if OUAT really loved me, but I loved them, and despite myself I still do, no matter what anyone else says or interprets from my anger and bitterness over the last little while. I’m just going through a bad break up. I’ll let you know when I’m on the rebound.
Co-Mayor of Sad Town | Twin of Co-Mayor of Sad Town | #HopeforRogueBison
@DSB – I want you to know that I’ve missed you the last few days. Can I give you all the hugs? I’m going to give you all the hugs (even though you probably don’t really want them because feelings, but I don’t care, you get them anyway).
Your analysis of Emma makes so much sense, and it makes Neal’s death even more painful and pointless. I’ve always identified closer to Neal, but somewhere in between him and Emma, so I’ve had trouble really understanding her lack of any real attempt to save him, but this makes everything a lot clearer.
Co-Mayor of Sad Town | Twin of Co-Mayor of Sad Town | #HopeforRogueBison
@Onyx – As always Sad Twin, thank you for finding words to describe much of my own anger. *hug*
Co-Mayor of Sad Town | Twin of Co-Mayor of Sad Town | #HopeforRogueBison
That seems to be a pretty accurate description for what probably went on with Once and ABC. They probably thought to themselves that ratings for S2 were well below S1, and thought the solution would be to push Hook, whom Eddy Kitsis has said is “obviously eye candy” at the expense of their original character Neal. Some of the female executives at ABC were probably putting pressure on the writers anyway to give Hook more screen time and to make him the leading man. Then ABC marketed the hell out of it.
With that in mind it’s also curious that they killed off Neal so early in the half season, rather than waiting until Sweeps to make the most of the death of a series regular. You’d think there would have been more for them to work with, could have made it a bigger deal if it had happened around Sweeps. It would have also given them a lot more time to lead up to the death, rather than it have it shoehorned in so uncomfortably. All that helps build on the Conspiracy Train theory that there HAS to be more than just “bold storytelling” behind the decision.
Co-Mayor of Sad Town | Twin of Co-Mayor of Sad Town | #HopeforRogueBison
I’m trying to revisit some of my earlier meta ideas that I couldn’t fully explore until the season was over, but they require rewatching 3B, and right now I just can’t. Just the idea of rewatching 315 hurts too much still, and I never did watch 317 or 320. 3 Months ago I never would have believed you if you told me there would be episodes I would have never seen. I just want to write things, but I can’t without backing up my opinions with facts. I never ever would have thought this is where I would be at the end of the season. Never. 🙁
Co-Mayor of Sad Town | Twin of Co-Mayor of Sad Town | #HopeforRogueBison
Saw a tumblr post that said Emma had the swan pendant attached to Graham’s shoelace in the FTL stuff. I had a closer look, and it’s definitely there, but it’s not attached to the shoelace, she’s got both her necklaces wrapped around her wrist when she changes into the peasant clothes. Proof that she was wearing it at the start of the episode in SB. Proof that she still wears a reminder of Neal. (You can see it dangling down in the top screencap, and it’s on the inside of her wrist in the bottom screencap.)
While I’m really glad that Emma’s still wearing it, is it wrong of me that I don’t like her not wearing it as a necklace anymore? Since the Graham shoelace was a thing JMo chose, can we therefore assume that the costume department had removed the necklace from Emma’s wardrobe, but JMo chose to keep it around Emma’s wrist? Does any of that make any sense? It kind of says to me that they’re having her move on more substantially now, if she’s wearing the pendant in a much less visible place now. That’s not wrong, but I still wish they had addressed what impact Neal’s death had on her. Le sigh.
Co-Mayor of Sad Town | Twin of Co-Mayor of Sad Town | #HopeforRogueBison
oh and i couldn’t resist this… LOL
Brilliant Lauren! It took me a moment, but as soon as I saw it I died! XD
Co-Mayor of Sad Town | Twin of Co-Mayor of Sad Town | #HopeforRogueBison
No no no, don’t be silly Sad Twin. That Baysmoke guy, remember, he appeared in that alternate reality. The one where everyone was worse off for knowing him.
Oh yeah! It was that one episode called “Everybody Hates Nial”? He ruined everyone’s lived because he was made of plague or something. He also bathed. Emma couldn’t stand that.
Co-Mayor of Sad Town | Twin of Co-Mayor of Sad Town | #HopeforRogueBison
You know what we haven’t seen yet? Rumple going to his son’s grave. Is there a reason why they show decided to skip that.
Son? What son?
Oh you know. that one guy. Nick? Baysmoke?
I thought that was the name of the new Princling? Are you implying that Gold is really the father of the new royal? LE GASP! For shame!
Co-Mayor of Sad Town | Twin of Co-Mayor of Sad Town | #HopeforRogueBison
