Whoop Whoop

I agree...sometimes we lose things about a character when they grow. There are ways to do it, however. If you take Rumple, for example (since his muted form is bothering me the most), he has already grown in the sense that he has learned that loss of family is far more painful than loss of power, so he has learned to make personal sacrifices. The other parts of his core though, I suppose from all his years of being The Dark One, include lots of wisdom, lots of powerful sorcery, lots of wit and lots of cunning. This Zelena arc so far has stripped him of aaaall of that. I think it is necessary to take characters out of their realm and put them in new situations as well, and this Zelena-Storybrooke of Season 3.5 is an example of that, but the circumstances have stripped most of the key players' essence for too long of a time now, in my opinion. An episode or two of seeing a character's...well...character be turned upside down is fine and makes for repeat watching since we wanna see the character return to their normal self, but this is taking way too long. We are going into what, episode 5 right now, and each week it's Zelena being bat**** crazy, taunting and annoying, and all of our key characters basically acting as though their core has been ripped from them. Emma with her incessant "I am not part of you guys, I wanna go back to being a bail bonds person!" (When she seemed to finally be making some progress in the last half season); Regina with her "I'm skurred, Rump said my crazy sister is mightier than I am!", Snow just being all " I'm pregnant and I don't make any sense or have any self preservation skills!" (the same lady who lived as a fugitive when Regina was hunting her down...shot arrows that didn't miss and jacked up Charming when they first met); Henry, the true believer being amnesia Henry so he doesn't believe anything, and on and on and on. The only one who remotely resembles himself is Charming. I'm also gonna take the opportunity to say how much I miss Red's character. Take that cloak off of her on a nice full moon, point her at some flying monkeys and watch the fun.

So that's pretty much all three, yes? Rumple (brain, as she said at the end of Quiet Minds), Charming (courage) and Regina (heart...if she ever snatches on to it). What would be interesting is if the lesson parallels the lesson in the movie...that they've had those qualities all along, making the symbols of these things just as Regina said about Charming's sword being just a symbol of his courage. ...Then again, her being after Regina's heart is quite literal, but I have wondered when they will delve more into the mythology of The Dark One, as one of the creators pretty recently said they would do; and will that mythology include a loop hole for not necessarily needing the dagger.

I also think that Emma pretty much keeps her emotions so guarded that, according to Rumple's schooling, it interferes with her being able to access her magic. When it comes to over powering emotion such as say, watching Bae die, then she's able to do things like separate Bae from Rumple. I agree with all here who also point out that she just needs to embrace who she is...but she needs to get over this bland "I'm the saviour" bit and get on more with "I am one of you/You are my family." So far, as her character grows, she has only developed that with Henry for obvious reasons.

Hi all, brand spanking new here since I had just discovered TWoP a week before they shut down. I'm always late to the party! I just wanted to I troduce myself and throw my own two cents in regarding this half of season three. Ya know, I didn't expect to love this villain mainly because I was never big on The Wizard of Oz personally, but I love OUAT, so I figured I would get passed that. What I cannot get passed though is Zelena. She's menacing but in a super annoying way! Pan was someone I thought was fearsome. Same with Regina back in her day, but this chick is just straight up annoying...and the nonsense about her being the most challenging villain doesn't seem to ring true for me. My main problem though is that this villain has basically *muted* the characteristics of all of my favourite characters. Rump is powerless...that is too unlike him. I get showing some vulnerability in a character, but this has gone on too long to take a powerful character like that out of his element for this long. Same with Regina. She's been made even more insecure than before, the witch pretty much set up Bae's death which made Emma more infuriatingly guarded and walled in than before, Hook isn't even himself...surely he won't be fun, flippant Hook in the wake of Bae's death but even before then he's just so muted - it's the best word I can think of to describe it. We have barely seen the dwarves, so obviously I'm missing Grump's loud mouth, and Snow is NOT the badass they were prepping her to be in either Seasons 1, 2 or even the first half of 3. I just feel like this half of season 3 just changed too many things in the characters; and granted if they come through this, they'll be the better for it, but right now the gang is taking a lot of hits but they're losing the essence of the characters while doing so. Pan scared the hell out of most of them, but they didn't lose this much of what we, or maybe just I, love about them.