Dani-Ellie

I would love a blowout where Emma just unloads. I have this headcanon where Emma just buries all these slights -- big and small, unintentional or not -- but the thing with burying like that is it all festers. So every single new slight just adds to the festering pile and eventually, it's going to need to be released. However, I also believe we put much more thought into character motivation than the writers do so I've given up hope that we'll ever see that blowout. To them, everything's peachy keen and there are no more unresolved issues because a hug and a "please don't change" and a "we don't fear your magic, Emma" was all that was needed to heal those wounds. (Even though Snow's second line about how Emma's magic was what was going to allow her to fight the Snow Queen and win completely and totally played into every single thing Ingrid was digging into her about ... "how many times have you felt more like a savior than their daughter?") That's not how people work, though. Issues as deep and far-reaching as Emma's don't go away with a hug. Emma's other issues were not addressed at all, so in my mind, they're still in there, festering.

I feel the same way about that commercial and any commercial that features an alarm clock going off.

This frustrates me to no end and is why I have far less patience with Snow. Because if she would just reach back into her Mary Margaret memory banks and think about what she did then that made Emma comfortable enough to open up to her, she would have far less trouble now. In Neverland when Snow was upset that she didn't know how to comfort Emma? I appreciated the struggle, in the sense that of course this shouldn't be easy, but at the same time, I was like, "Yes, Snow, you do. You have as Mary Margaret." Snow pushing Neal on Emma? Even if you take into consideration that Snow doesn't know the whole history there, Emma told Mary Margaret that Henry's father was not hero material when she was explaining why she lied to Henry in "True North." Mary Margaret also knew that Emma had Henry in jail. So wouldn't that raise some red flags somewhere in a mother's mind? It just feels like what I loved so much about their relationship in season one was all for naught, since Snow is not using the insight she gained into Emma's personality and history during her time as Mary Margaret as a way to help her connect with her as mother as opposed to friend, and in fact, she's ignoring a lot of it. I really thought that the reason Mary Margaret seemed to be able to connect with Emma relatively easily was because on some unconscious level that even the darkest magic couldn't touch, she recognized Emma as her daughter. 2B through now has proven that instinct of mine completely and totally wrong since Snow seems to have such a tough time connecting with Emma at all.

This. And look, I get it. I've seen the arguments that Snow snapped at her like a mother snaps at a child who's done something wrong. And I know that Snow couldn't have known what Ingrid had said to Emma to get her so worked up in the first place. And I know that the second Emma started to run, Snow softened and tried calling her back. But Snow snapping at her like that was the absolute worst thing she could have done. There's a moment where you can actually see the heartbreak on Emma's face. Her eyes widen and you can see her thinking, "Oh my God, Ingrid was right." And you can see her walls shoot right up around her again as she turns to run.

All right, I think I need some advice. I have a reader who keeps giving me prompts that even a glance at my story list would tell him or her that I have no interest in writing. At first they wanted a future fic about all the canon couples' kids. I replied back and said that I don't like to write AU but if they could come up with a canon-compliant prompt, I'd be happy to work with it. They asked for a Princess Emma raised in the Enchanted Forest story ... which is still AU, so I said no to that one, too, though I did offer to try to find other stories like that. I just got another request from the same reader to do a Henry/Regina story where the Charmings go on vacation so the two of them are left in Storybrooke. I have absolutely no interest in writing Regal Believer (I can't even remember the last time I actually put Regina in one of my stories beyond a mention of her), I can't stand Regina and find writing for her almost prohibitively difficult, and even sending the Charmings on vacation isn't canon-compliant, since, as of right now, no one can leave Storybrooke. So now my question is ... how the hell do I refuse this prompt, too, without sounding like a major bitch who's being difficult since it's now the third freaking one?

It might have been and they just moved studios. All I remember is reading about how they had to recreate it in a completely different space between the two seasons.

And it's not like they haven't done it before; they completely recreated Mary Margaret's apartment in the studio between seasons 1 and 2.

I like Henry, but I do not like season 4 Henry. At all. I have zero idea what they are doing with him beyond putting him in scenes with Regina because (presumably) Disney wanted Regina nowhere near Frozen. However, in so doing, they're utterly destroying what made Henry the miniature badass he was in seasons 1 and 2-ish. Because season 1 Henry would look at season 4 Henry and be completely convinced that Regina had cast some kind of spell on him.

[OT]Leonardo DiCaprio as Jack Dawson on that size screen, however, was perfection. ;) [/OT]

Ugh, what an asshat! I'm glad you were able to track him down. Jerk. Thanks. :) Haha, right?? Then again, I still live here, so. ;)

It's not so much panic as weariness. It's just been relentless. And it's dangerous. The roads are down to one lane in some places because there's nowhere to put the snow because so much of it has come down in such a short time. I almost had an accident going to work this morning because a private plow backed out of a side street unexpectedly. I had to jam on my brakes (going 15 mph, mind you) and fishtailed. Luckily, no one was behind me. Boston has had the third snowiest February on record ... and it's only the 10th. We've broken the record for the most amount of snow in a 30-day period ... and we did it in 17 days. And we're looking at more on Thursday AND Sunday. It's just enough.

I had to shovel the snow off my car this morning. The snowbank I had to climb over to get to my car was past my knees. I'm really hoping I have a parking space when I get home because the absolute last thing I want to do is shovel out just to go home. To make matters worse, I'm not even having a good day at work, so I'm sitting here all, "I should have just freakin' stayed home today." Local news said that my area in this special little pocket where two fronts are meeting, which is just dumping the snow on us. So the 6-10" that were forecast on Saturday is now 16-24". I'm just so done, haha.

Same here. We've gotten something like four and a half or five feet of snow in like, two weeks. I'm so done with it. I'm sick of brushing/scraping my car whenever I go out, I'm sick of shoveling out my car, I'm sick of driving 20 mph everywhere I go, I'm sick of having to say a silent prayer every time I get to an intersection because seeing past the snowbanks is so difficult. I'm just done. [/grumble grumble grumble]

This makes me sad, because to me, this is by far the most interesting relationship dynamic set out by the show's premise, and statements like that make me realize just how completely and totally the writers are failing to make the most of it. Because the story of how this family comes together, how they all learn to move past the pain and become a family, how Emma deals with not only finding her parents after searching for her entire life but also discovering they're Snow White and Prince Charming, how Snow and Charming deal with missing their daughter's entire life up to this point, how they work through the pain and the anguish and the loss to find the love and the warmth and the comfort ... that's the story I'm interested in.

This just speaks to the complete and total double standard of these fans. Lana does a NOH8 picture and she's a goddess on earth. Sean does a NOH8 picture and he's a liar and a fraud. It's disgusting.

From what little sense I could make of the ranting, they're claiming homophobia masquerading as not. Sample tweet: "@NOH8Campaign @sean_m_maguire @OnceABC LOL He is NOT an ally #howoffensive I am actually physically offended by this lie"

Even worse, the NOH8 campaign was started as a direct response to the passage of Proposition 8 in California ... which was the ban on same-sex marriage (which has since been struck down). So yeah, it's the epitome of ridiculousness and hypocricy. The truly awful thing is, the NOH8 events are amazing. I went to one of their open photo shoots in Boston a few years back (so yes, I have one of those nifty pictures, too :)) and it was an absolutely wonderful experience built on togetherness and support. It's truly a wonderful thing but, as usual, these "fans" have to spread their vitriol.

Thanks, guys! Mari, at this point, I'm seriously wondering if I'm the one who's cursed! Between the neighbors from hell (although now that they've moved, things are so much better) and the fire at work, maybe weird structural bad luck just follows me wherever I go. ;) Souris, it was indeed. All in all, we were very lucky; it could have been much, much worse.

Did she know they were waiting on the other side? (I honestly don't remember.) I remember Rumple and Regina doing their magic-killing-well preparation in secret.

So here's one for the "winter weather is dangerous in ways you don't always expect" file. Last night, a chunk of ice fell off the roof of my work building and broke the gas line, resulting in a small fire on the side of the building. Everyone is fine, the building is fine minus some scorching of the siding, but we have no heat because we have no gas. We've got space heaters all over the place for now and I'm wearing two layers because the news of the heating situation made the rounds last night, but yeah, this is going to be an interesting couple of days. ;)

Well yes, of course, but I'd much rather 11 episodes be a waste of time than have four full seasons of premise be completely overturned. ;)

My whole problem, aside from the completely asinine "wah I don't have my happy ending, so let me find the Author of this book in which I am the only one who won at the end of it and make him give me another one" issue, is: the whole conceit of this show was that these people, while fairy tale characters, are real people. This stuff actually happened to them. They lived it. It may be the stuff of our fantasy but it was their reality. Turning around and making them actually characters in some kind of cosmic story in which their actions and decisions were their actions and decisions because some cosmic Author wrote it that way completely undercuts the whole concept of the damn show. This is why Yadda Yadda's version of how this things plays out is the only way I'll be satisfied with it. They find the Author and he or she tells them that he or she is just recording events and that their happy endings are up to them and no one else can give it to them. Any other option just obliterates the entire premise.

This. This is where the show's tight timeline is so. very. hard because it's been over a year for us since Hook found Emma in New York but for the characters it's been like a month and a half. This is why I wasn't as annoyed with Emma for her "Be patient" as some people were because holy freakin crap, two weeks prior she was dating another guy long enough that he proposed marriage. Regardless of the fact that he was Zelena's plant, that's a big freaking deal for Emma. And regardless of the fact that he was Zelena's plant, she spent the eight months they were together not knowing that, so her heartbreak was real. So yeah, asking for patience? That made sense to me because 1) Emma's entire world had been turned upside down, and 2) she'd just had yet another relationship go south on her. When taken all in total, the kind of progress we've seen Emma make over the past half season, which takes place over, at most, a couple of weeks are steps I could never have imagined the guarded woman who first arrived in Storybrooke making.

I gotta tell ya, if their True Love status gets debunked, I might actually throw something at my television. Because for a show that blows through plots like they're going out of style, the fact that they've been building this thing for at least a season and a half (longer if you consider "Tallahassee" the beginning of Captain Swan) should mean something. I've been really enjoying the slow burn, don't get me wrong, but stringing the two of them along this long only to have it not be True Love -- on a show that's essentially a modern-day fairy tale -- is 1) cruel to the characters, and 2) cruel to the audience to enjoys the relationship/characters involved.

I think that's all part of it along with the color of the cloak. It was such a lovely shade of blue and not a color we normally see Emma in.