Dani-Ellie

A lot of what makes me feel cheated are the things done for the sake of plot that ended up being meaningless. Expanding on Camera One's point about Emma, Snow and Charming in 3x12 insist that Emma and Henry's best chance was in New York except oops, in 3x19 they need Emma to defeat Zelena, so screw what Emma and Henry have going on in New York, Emma's up for Savior Duty again. So Snow and Charming cast the Dark Curse to find Emma (which I may not have hated so much if they'd done it for better reasons). Which, okay, fine, but omg you guys have just turned Snow White and Prince Charming into complete and total hypocrites. (This is where some mention of Emma in the missing year stuff would not have gone amiss ... so it didn't look like they only wanted to get back to her when they needed her.) So Hook shatters Emma's happy life and drags her back to the nuttiness. She builds her magic to the point that Emma Swan is actually having fun with something, you guys, and then the story takes it from her. And the story takes it from her just so Regina can pull light magic out of her ass. There are a dozen ways I could think of rewriting the showdown scene where Regina could still come through in the clutch but the narrative doesn't destroy a part of Emma to do so. Have Zelena magically freeze Emma or knock her unconscious, for crying out loud. That way the good guys' Plan A falls apart and Regina can still pull white magic out of her ass to save the day, but there's no tearing down of one character to build up the other. To tie this all together, they never even needed to get Emma from New York, then, if she wasn't ever really needed for the fight at all. So what the hell, show? Why piss me off to the extent that 3x19 did if it wasn't even freakin' necessary? (And I fully understand here that Snow and Charming were operating under the assumption that they needed Emma ... I'm not arguing against that. I'm arguing against the narrative itself making their actions superfluous because of the plotting that came afterward. I just think it would have been better plotting for Regina to be a surprise Plan B than it was for Emma to be an ultimately unnecessary Plan A.)

Oh, sweet Jesus, I had to back the hell out of Supernatural fandom very early on. I like actually discussing things that happen on a given show, not wading through "Dean is the best and Sam sucks"/"No, SAM is the best and DEAN sucks" and the Wincest and the fanon and omg. I thought I could intense about my fandom things, but hoo boy, were they intense. When my brother did a catch-up via Netflix last summer, I said to him, "I will gladly talk about anything Supernatural you want to talk about, just don't go on the internet. I don't know what it's like now, but back in the show's early days, they were too intense for me." He kinda blinked at me and said, "...wow." (My sister and I did go to the Supernatural con they held in Cambridge a few summers back, though, because we'd always wanted to go to one and like, this one was within a 20-minute drive from us. We couldn't not go.. ;))

I find myself saying that a lot when I venture into the fandom at large. I much prefer this sane little bubble here. :)

And this is the exact problem I see with hiding "we want our ship" behind representation and diversity rhetoric. Do I have any doubt that some of the Swan Queen fans really would like to see more representation? Of course not. But those who just want Swan Queen and are couching it under "give us Swan Queen or you're homophobic asshats" I don't think really care about diversity and representation in this instance. They just want their ship on screen, and I'm sorry, but I don't see what they're doing as the way to get it. At some point, those particular fans are going to have to accept that the show is just not going to do certain things the way they want, because you know what? That's life. I've certainly had to deal with the fact that this show has completely and totally dropped the ball on the Charming Family (in my opinion). This show is not going to do their story the way I wished they would, which leaves me with two options: suck it up and deal with it by writing fic and discussing woulda coulda shouldas on the boards, or stop watching. Since I'm still here, it's obvious what I've chosen :), but I am not going to harass the writers and actors over it. A well-mannered tweet with "I wish we could have seen Plot Development X" is of course okay, but at a certain point, I had to accept that my vision doesn't match theirs and yeah it sucks for me, but I don't have to stick with if I really don't like it.

Oh my goodness, Rumsy, you just reminded me! One of my favorite things about the first half of 2B is how you can totally tell that Barbara Hershey is just having an absolute freakin' blast playing Cora. She's having such fun with the whole nine yards that I grin like an idiot.

I don't know if I buy that. Even if they had resurrected Daniel back then, it still would have been with another person's heart, so Zombie!Daniel would have still resulted. Her dream would have been shattered anyway, and with her already on the cusp, I can still see her flipping over into full Evil Queen when she realizes she can't get her Daniel back.

Ooh, ooh, I'll play! Emma Swan. She is on the cusp of edging out Prue Halliwell as my favorite TV character ever (partly by longevity ... Prue was dead by this point in Charmed's run :P). I want her to have all the happiness she never did. I love that she took that painful, lonely childhood of hers and turned it into empathy. I love that once she decides you're hers, she will fight for you tooth and nail. I love her sass, I love her endless "WTF" reactions, I love her sarcasm. I just love her. Daddy Charming. One can never have enough Daddy Charming. He's got dad jokes and he's got life lessons and he listens without judging and if I could make him some kind of honorary adopted dad for myself, I would. I also love that they didn't go the Love at First Sight route with Hook/Emma. The writing was on the wall in "Tallahassee" but it wasn't until 3x01 that I fully picked up what they were putting down. It would have been so easy and so cliche (since this is a fairy tale with Love at First Sight is kind of a big deal) for them to go all, "Hot pirate, no-nonsense princess, cue the Tchaikovsky" but they didn't, and I appreciated it.

This is my problem. Subtext is not text. I don't care how much subtext someone thinks they see, everyone with eyes who actually watches this show saw Hook and Emma share a sweet and tender kiss in the finale. Viewers may like it or they may not, but at this point, Hook and Emma are canon, period, full stop. It is not "ignoring" a fanon pairing to post things regarding a canon one; fanon does not supersede canon. And if Jen truly is posting her pics as she's working with people, of course a good majority of them are going to have to do with Colin/Hook because I'm betting a good majority of Emma's upcoming material will have to do with Captain Swan. (And truthfully, her pictures haven't struck me as overly Captain Swan-y in the first place; I think it's simply a case of "even one is way too many" for some of these people.) After the abuse that's been hurled her way, I have no idea why these same fans then expect her to go out of her way to make nice with them. There's a reason the saying "you catch more flies with honey" exists, and at this point, I'm hoping she's blocked the more intense offenders. A little bit of the Golden Rule would not go amiss here, either. Being loud and obnoxious and abusive is going to get them ignored; they then don't have a right to whine that they're being ignored, because frankly, would they want to respond to abuse like that?

Maybe, but it feels like a piling on, and the fact that it's coming from the Huffington Post, regardless of which content side it's on, lends it at least the air of legitimacy. Tumblr posts can at least be recognized right away as a Tumblr rant, because, well, Tumblr. Given how many people continually fall for The Onion and recirculate their material as fact and not as the satire it is, I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility that someone not deeply involved in the situation sees an article on the Huffington Post and treats it as fact rather than recognizing it as, basically, a Tumblr rant. It's just ... at what point is enough enough? And I'm sorry, but when someone uses their press credentials to upload something that should have been on a personal blog to the Huffington Post, I think that person deserves to be called on the carpet. This isn't Watergate, this isn't cutting-edge journalism, and this isn't whistle-blowing. It's fandom whining, plain and simple, and I feel like the author of the article used the Huffington Post's URL to give her personal-blog-fandom-whine credence. And to completely misrepresent Jen's tweeting of Captain Swan things as because it's a male/female pairing and not because it's the pairing her character is actually involved with on the show was just low.

There were no words for how thrilled I was when I saw that tweet come through. I think it's fairly obvious that at this point, nothing is going to make that particular subset of fans happy. They've decided she's the enemy and that's how they're going to see her unless she caves to their pressure. (And, just like with a toddler needing to learn boundaries, caving to the pressure simply encourages the bad behavior because it shows them that if they scream and whine and harass enough, they'll get what they want.). Good for her. But yes, I am definitely at the enough is enough point. I posted both that Tumblr post from earlier (giving props) and the HuffPo piece (saying WTF?) on my Twitter account, and a few of my friends who aren't in the fandom were horrified. In what world does that kind of treatment of any person become okay? And to have that kind of harassment happening over something as ridiculous as a fan-created relationship for two television characters is absurd. Yes, television is a medium that can bring about social change and the representation argument has merit, but at the end of the day, this is just a TV show and Jennifer Morrison is just doing her job on said TV show. It's certainly not worth bullying another human being over.

Haha! Well, okay, I am, too (seriously, a good many of my favorite episodes of things are the ones where the characters are all stuck together due to Random Plot Contrivance and have nothing to do but make the best of it), but I totally get how that's not always feasible. ;) So I would be more than willing to compromise and just spread the fluff out amongst the eps.

Right! (And actually, I think that scene they described IS rather adorable, thanks very much.) We're not saying, "Give us an entire episode of people sitting around and doing nothing but being cute!" but giving us the cute would allow time for some, gee I dunno, actual character development and actual conversation so it wouldn't be crisis, crisis, crisis, omgcrisis all the time. There's plenty of drama to be had in simple conversation if the writing would allow for it.

I saw your comment and liked it. So far no one's commented to me, and I so very badly want them to because I am so ready to open up a can of verbal whoop-ass on anyone who dares, heh. I'm fuming right now. Shit like that does not help and as much as the author can argue "I'm not telling anyone to harass her!" she shouldn't have singled her out in the first place. ETA: Huh, odd. I just logged out of Facebook and now I can't see my comment anymore. Innn-teresting.

Holy fucking shit. I just made a comment that will either get me lots of hate or lots of likes. We shall see, heh.

For the first time, I wish I had a Tumblr, just so I could give the poster props.

I could make snarky jokes about Chris Gorham's characters and ill-fated weddings, but ... ;) But yeah. As much as I liked the idea of Walsh, I think it would have been less headache-inducing if he'd just been some random guy whom Emma had met and fallen in love with. You still could have had the whole "Emma's happiness is taken away by Savior Duty" thing, even if it wasn't "you were never safe." Because it kind of feels like they just threw the "you were never safe" in there so her "I miss my life in New York" refrain wouldn't hold as much water since it was literally all an illusion.

I think it's ignored because in my estimation a vast majority of Swan Queen shippers are Regina fans first and foremost. Emma is incidental and is mainly a tool for Regina's happily ever after, which means Regina's treatment of Emma doesn't matter because Regina's happiness is the only one that matters for them. (You'd be surprised how much Swan Queen fic I've clicked into breaks up the Charming Family so Emma is "free" to go to Regina.) Unfortunately, I have issues conceiving of a happily ever after in which both parties aren't getting something out of it, and I'm sorry, but I do not in any way, shape, or form believe Emma should find her happiness with the woman who's spent a good season and a half of this show trying to kill her. (Which yes, Lana, has happened. No matter how delicate the language used to describe it, it doesn't change the fact that Regina has tried to kill Emma multiple times over the show's run.) Nor do I believe Regina should find her happiness with someone who'd threatened to kill her, too, like KingOfHearts pointed out.

Ugh, this one in particular goes up my ass sideways. I was a child of divorce, and I fully believe that one of the best things my parents ever did for us was get divorced. There was never any abuse on any side of it, but my parents weren't happy. The tension was so thick in the house that you could cut it with a knife, and as such, we kids were walking on eggshells every single minute both my parents were home at the same time. We were all miserable. And I completely get that this is my experience and that not all experiences are like mine, but not all experiences with co-parents are orange juice and sunshine, either. An emotionally healthy family is a happy one, and if one parent has been deeply hurt by another, those feelings aren't always going to be assuaged just because they share a child.

Completely agree. Doing things like whining over a blend of tea makes me wonder how much of it is actual concern for Problematic Social Issue and how much of it using Problematic Social Issue to force their own vision into the narrative. "Well, if we make them think they're playing into Problematic Social Issue, they'll have to change their minds!" Because I'm willing to bet a vast majority of these people would not like an actual in-depth look into domestic violence and abuse as depicted on the show because their Golden Child of a favorite character has perpetrated a good amount of it herself. (Or do Regina's gaslighting of her son and her attempts to kill his entire family to keep him all to herself not count because she's Regina?)

I also feel like attaching a social justice type importance to something as benign as a blend of tea makes the real dialogue that much harder. Because c'mon, it's a blend of tea, for crying out loud, but then the dialogue becomes domestic violence this and homophobia that, and it's impossible to argue against that without becoming labeled as homophobic or pro-domestic violence (and believe me, I am neither, but I am not touching that debate with those in the middle of it with a ten-foot-pole, because I know how it would go). Hiding behind a social injustice is simply a way of confusing the issue, which is its own logical fallacy. And if we want to talk domestic violence, I have plenty of issues with Swan Queen being a healthy romantic relationship due to Regina's, gee I don't know, attempts to murder Emma. Like, she has literally said, "As long as you're alive, Henry will never be mine" (emphasis mine) right to Emma's face and said "Looks like getting rid of a baby just made my to-do list" (emphasis also mine) in reference to Emma's birth. From my perspective, if the thinking here is Hook is an example of domestic violence, so is Regina, so could that maybe enter the dialogue, too?

The truly awful thing here is, Jen, Adam, and Colin were trying to give an attaboy/attagirl to some creative fans, and this is what it's turned into. It's like, this stuff is supposed to be fun, you know? I don't understand the need to piss in everyone else's Corn Flakes.

I think there's a difference between saying, "Let's all play nice, here" in a friendly way on social media and answering a question about what's actually happening on the show in an interview presumably about what's happening on the show, though. (I have no idea which interview this was, so if I'm talking out of turn, please let me know.) Because no matter what ship any one particular person ships, Captain Swan is canon (like, they've-shared-smoochies-canon), so of course Jen is going to be promoting Captain Swan in interviews. I don't think it's entirely fair to expect the actors to not answer questions about the development of a particular canon relationship just because it might annoy some fans who ship one character or another in a non-canon ship. Regardless of the ship (and also, the word "ship" has now lost all meaning for me, haha), I don't think anyone should be subjected to hate because they shared something on Twitter that amused them.

Ugh. I hate that the actors can't even respond to cute things the fans are doing for canon couples without other fans flipping the hell out. Like, seriously, people, come on.

That's true, however Cora is the one who actually killed Daniel, not Snow. If Cora hadn't been, well, Cora, Snow's telling of that secret could have ended much differently, and I'm sorry, but that's on Cora. The question at the heart of this is why Regina spent so much time and energy hating Snow and swearing vengeance on her when Cora was the one who actually took Daniel from her. I'll agree that the relationship between Cora and Regina is complicated because Cora is her mother. At the same time, though, there's been no recognition on Regina's part that Snow was just as much a victim of Cora's machinations as Regina was herself. She knows that Cora set up the rescue that brought Regina into Snow's and Leopold's lives (she knew that in "The Stable Boy" even if Cora refused to acknowledge it), she knows that Cora killed Eva so that the king would be a widower, and she knows that her mother is a master manipulator and so it shouldn't be hard to see how it was possible (and, frankly, so very easy) to play a recently motherless preteen girl like a fiddle. Hell, Regina herself is physically, what, thirty-something (and chronologically sixty-something!) and she still got taken in by Cora in 2B. Regina never told Wee Snow that Cora was dangerous and not to be trusted. She never impressed upon her why she shouldn't tell the secret. What resulted is a small child who was dragged into very adult business and who was in the middle of a she said/she said situation. (I also don't believe for one second that Cora didn't know about Daniel, even if only in a vague sense, but that's headcanon based on the scene where Cora plays Wee Snow like a fiddle ... I think she knew something was up and just used Snow to get the wheres and whens.) When Cora played it as all, "Oh, I don't know why she's pulling away from me," there was no reason for (and I can't repeat this enough, here) a small child to think, "Well, gee, maybe if she knew how Regina feels, it could be better for both of them." And yet Regina hates and rages at Snow for telling Cora where she and Daniel would be but not the person who actually took Daniel's heart out of his chest and crushed it into dust in front of her. So I'll also agree that there's something else there, some reason why all of that rage and hatred and anger shifted to this one little girl who was not trying to be malicious and was actually trying to reconnect a family and make Regina happy.

Thank you very much. In my head a lot of the time is trying to "fix" Snow and Emma for myself, because I just cannot stand what the show has done to them. Like, honestly, I cannot reconcile how Mary Margaret, who was absolutely wonderful both with and for Emma, has become Snow, who is oftentimes so dismissive of Emma that I want to jump through my TV, pull Emma into a crushing hug, and scream obscenities at Snow. And I could understand if they were using some kind of "we are both" mingling of Snow and Mary Margaret and using that to make her flounder, but where Mary Margaret was so good with her previously, it feels to me like Snow is either consciously or unconsciously ignoring all the parts of Mary Margaret that could help her with Emma. Somewhere inside her, she does know how to connect with Emma because she's done it before. And I just want to shake her by the shoulders all, "Look what you're doing to your baby girl. She needs to understand that you're different than all the people who've come before you, and she won't understand that unless you show her."