Dani-Ellie

This is part of what makes the whole thing so frustrating for me. Many of my problems with the story would be so easy to fix. All it would take is a tiny bit of attention in the writers' room to the fact that all of the characters' emotional reactions matter. It's not like I'm asking for a seasons' worth of Charming Family boding (though I would not at all complain if we got that!). I'm just saying, give us something. What we "should" know is much, much different than what we're being shown. The way to tell an emotionally satisfying story is not to skip over the meat of it and say, "Here you go, they're a family now!" A large part of the satisfaction for me comes from witnessing the entire emotional journey -- everyone's emotional journey, not just one character's or another's. Just as someone could argue that we should know Snow and Charming love Emma, so why do we need to see it, I could argue that we also should know by now that Regina loves Henry (as the show has spent two years telling us), so why do we need to see that? Why does Regina's pain and grief at losing Henry get the story attention while Snow's and Charming's pain and grief at losing Emma for the second time get literally no mention whatsoever? Why are some main characters footnotes while others are the entire article?

It's not just you. I don't get it, either. I completely understand that it's a consequence of writing not forcing the issue, but at the same time, do the writers not understand how this looks? That here you have a character who grew up ignored, unloved, and unwanted, a character who's been second or third or twenty-fifth in everyone's eyes her entire life. She's spent her life searching for her family, people to call hers and people who want to call her theirs. Snow and Charming have an opportunity to change that. They have an opportunity to make her feel loved and wanted but they can't do that from Neverland. They can't do that if they're in a place they can't see her or talk to her or touch her. And one would think, as her parents, they would want that for her. They would want her to feel loved and wanted. They wouldn't want her to go through her life feeling like a lost little girl who doesn't matter and doesn't think she ever will. And yet there's no discussion onscreen about any of it. It's maddening because I don't at all believe that Snow and Charming don't give her a second thought, but at the same time, there is no televised evidence to support this belief. I shouldn't have to maybe if I squint find televised evidence that Emma's parents want to be with her. There should have been some mention of her in the Neverland discussion ... even if it was just a line of, "But what about Emma?" or "How do we tell Emma?" Four or five words, writers, come on. There should have been some mention of her during the missing year flashbacks prior to the meeting with Glinda, even if all it was was Snow fingering something of Emma's she'd managed to tuck into a pocket or a drawing Neal made of her for them or something. If we'd seen even one televised piece of evidence that they missed her, it would have felt less to me like they only cared about finding her when they needed her to save her unborn sibling. It's like the writing can't connect its own dots. They're the ones who created the situation but they completely ignore the logical consequences of the situation they created (which happens a lot with this show). And because of that, we're left with parents of an admittedly grown but highly emotionally damaged woman who make her promises they don't keep. Kids push parents away ... learning to deal with that is part of being a parent. And maybe they did feel like "We're not reaching her, so welp, nothing we can do," but eventually Emma was going to come around -- as she did -- and eventually she would want her family -- as she did -- and if they had stayed in Neverland like they planned to before their daughter was like, "WTF, guys?", they would have missed the opportunity entirely. Being there and being a support system for your kid is not something that goes away, whether the kid is five or fifty-five. I know I'd said this on TWoP a lot but parenthood is so much more than ABCs and 123s. Emma may not need a mommy and a daddy, but she still needs her mother and father.

Emma couldn't see August's wooden leg even though it was real because she didn't believe in it. The wording of the question (could Emma stumble upon her magic) and the subsequent response to me doesn't indicate that she couldn't do magic without believing in it but only that she wouldn't recognize it as magic if she did anything with it. Basically, memory-whammied Emma couldn't accidentally use her magic and go, "Holy shit, I just did magic!" She'd attribute it to a natural, albeit odd, occurrence, like lights flickering because of old wiring or whatnot.

If that is it, I take back my crack about them making things needlessly complicated, heh.

From the Villains thread: Geez, these guys needlessly complicate things. Why not just say no, she wouldn't be practicing, because she didn't remember she had magic? Even if she did something without realizing it, a la the lights, if she has no idea she has magic, she wouldn't necessarily think she did it.

Replying in the Magic thread.

I fully agree that there's no proof of the extent of Emma's magic or whether or not she'd be able to unconsciously create her little Mario platform if she was ever on a crumbling suspension bridge in the real world. On the other hand, the fact that she did unconsciously create her little Mario platform when all Regina expected her to do was retie the rope means there's something there that Regina wasn't expecting. We don't know what the extent of that something is, but the implication is that it's something Regina hasn't seen before, anyway. The original question was whether Emma was inherently magical, and I do think there's enough evidence to say that she's different from everything Regina knows, at least. She's used some kind of power without realizing it in a land where she shouldn't be able to. Her heart can't be taken, which is something that Cora, she who takes hearts like it's her job, had never seen before. She threw together something to raise herself up out of a gorge without even thinking about it. Maybe all she'll ever be able to do in the Land Without Magic is futz with the electricity but I don't think that necessarily means she's not innately magical.

These writers, man. They've also confirmed that the lights flickering when Emma gave birth to Henry was a manifestation of her magic. Isn't the sparks coming from the power line when she slams the car door in Storybrooke in the pilot episode another confirmed instance? I thought I read that somewhere. But it's still something she's causing. We've never seen her try to do magic in the Land Without Magic but she does have the ability to affect things around her without realizing she's doing it. That's still some kind of power. I've long held the theory that it's not so much that Emma has magic. She has True Love -- the most powerful magic in all the lands -- coursing through her veins. True Love makes up as much of who she is as her DNA does. Which means, essentially, Emma is magic. How this jives with Zelena removing her power is beyond me, but it's my theory and I'm sticking to it. ;)

I've decided I'm going to call forks "salad tridents" from now on ... even if they have four tines. :P

I thought it was a dragon? I always assumed it was a dragon, anyway.

Same here. I've been writing fanfic a good long time now and I've never had the kind of reader response I've had with the Once readers. Everyone's been so wonderful, from leaving really lovely reviews to trading PMs back and forth.

Rumple's never tried to kill Belle, though, at least not that I can recall. My argument basically boils down to Regina's multiple attempts to kill Emma, including her tiny little newborn incarnation. Swan Queen was taken off the table as even a possibility for me from the pilot episode because I don't want to see the heroine of the story find her Happily Ever After with someone who'd tried to have her killed as she was taking her first breath.

I fully agree that there needs to be more representation and more inclusion, not just on Once but on television in general. That said -- and I'm going to try to word this as inoffensively as I possibly can because I know these issues get sticky and I honestly don't mean any offense -- my problem here is that Regina and Emma are not at all written as lesbians or even bi. Their love interests have all been male. There's no hint that either of them is closeted. Should Emma and/or Regina have been written as lesbian or bi to give representation and inclusion and diversity? Perhaps, but that's a different argument. Canonically, these two women are straight. Not only that, but one of the characters, in the very first episode of this show, tried to have the other one killed when she was a minutes-old newborn baby. That's not the basis of any kind of romantic relationship, in my eyes, whether the two people are both women, both men, or a man and a woman. Am I going to fault people for reading subtext into interactions between them? No, of course not. Subtext is subjective and we see what we want to see. Where I have the issue is that some SQ shippers have built a straw man out of an entire imagined relationship for these two characters and then turn around and berate the writers and actors for the straw man they themselves created not coming to fruition. That's not fair. Subtext is not text, and the text has never once even hinted at a romantic relationship between Emma and Regina. Basically, my feelings boil down to: ship what you want to ship, make your graphics and write your stories, but at the end of the day, the text is the text, whether you agree with it or not. I certainly have plenty of things I disagree with and I certainly have ranted about them at length, here and elsewhere, but the things I disagree with, others don't. When the act of disagreeing becomes abuse in an effort to force the straw man into fruition, that's where I have the problem.

I agree with this. I do think, on some level, the show is trying to do too much. These guys have a lot of good ideas, but they zoom the story from idea to idea so fast that none of the ideas ever get fully realized. I think both Oz and Neverland had enough material that they could have each been their own season. Yes, they would have had to come up with ways of keeping the endless marching around the jungle in Neverland from getting boring, but throw magical obstacle after magical obstacle at them. Have them have to split up for whatever reason, have someone get taken by a magical creature, have the Echo Cave actually work in sowing discord amongst the troops. Maybe have them rescue Henry and then have to spend an episode or two hiding him from Pan on the way to the Jolly Roger to go home. I mean, it's Neverland, for crying out loud. Throw out any whackadoo plot complication you can think of ... if a place is run on belief, the only limit is the imagination. This way, you can have the character moments we all seem to crave because the story's not running from A to B to C to D with no breathing room in between. The flashbacks can actually fill in the information on the new characters and their relationships so we understand how they all fit with each other in present day. We could have had the Hook/Bae stuff, the Hook/Tink stuff, the Bae/Tink stuff ... all the backstory that made Neverland Neverland. It would open the worlds up and make them feel more like real places than "Oh, it's Neverland? Well, we need some mermaids and Skull Rock, otherwise it could just be any other jungle."

This is my problem. Yes, I have criticisms of the way the show is handling things. I would love more focus on this storyline or that storyline and I've made my angry forums posts and angry blog reactions, but at the end of the day, my issues with the story are my issues with the story. Would I love to ask Adam and Eddy what the hell they're thinking sometimes? Absolutely. Would I ever take to Twitter to berate them into answering me? Hell no. Would I ever take to Twitter to berate the actors for a direction the story is not taking? Hell no. I understand that subtext is completely subjective, so some of the SQ shippers do truly believe the subtext is there, and I get that it's disappointing when something you really, really want to see happen never comes to fruition. But the people who write the story and the people who play out the story are people, too. They're just people just doing their job and they don't owe us anything. Yes, criticism is going to happen, because that's what happens you present yourself and your work for public scrutiny, but there's a big difference between constructive criticism and ... this. I don't so much have a problem with the criticism as the way the criticism is being delivered. It smacks of a sense of entitlement that is vastly out of proportion with what is deserved.

Okay, that's different, then. I still maintain, however, that the criticism from the readers was misplaced because it's very difficult to be treated horribly by writers when it's not being written, period. I'm all for subtext, man, but as my Casey/Olivia adventure proved, any subtext that can be found could very well in fact be unintentional. Word. The problem I have with a relationship between these two is not that they're both women but that I see no semblance of a romantic relationship between two people when one has tried to kill the other -- multiple times -- simply for existing. I have a friend who's active in the femslash community (though she's not a OUAT watcher, and let me tell you, I've had to clarify many, many things for her because the story she knows from what she sees is that distorted from canon) and she told me that the argument she sees a lot is that if one of them were male, they would be written as being in love. Of course my response was let's pretend for a hot minute that Regina was Reginald. Is there any way, shape, or form that a man who attempted to poison the leading lady, ended up poisoning their kid instead, and spent literally the entire back half of a season plotting to kill the leading lady and her entire family would be considered leading man material? Because I certainly don't think so. As a matter of fact, the backlash from that kind of story would have been off the freakin' charts. But because Regina is Regina (and it seems to me that a vast majority of the Swan Queen shippers are Regina fans) her actual crimes against Emma are downplayed, whereas the Emma fan in me is going, "No way in hell, please and thank you." Word.

Crossing my fingers for you, @Souris!

Oh ffs. I'm so tired of this bullshit, and all I do is read about it. I can't even imagine being on the receiving end of it. Swan Queen is not going to happen. There, I said it. Ship if you want to ship, but there has been no indication inshow whatsoever that Swan Queen is going to happen. In point of fact, I believe everyone involved has said that Swan Queen isn't going to happen. Swan Queen is the very definition of a non-canon ship. And non-canon ships can indeed be fun but the thing to remember is that the ship, by very nature of its non-canon-ness, is not happening on the show. I have no idea how Swan Queen can win any kind of pairing poll about being treated horribly by its writers because it's not being written at all. I was a Casey/Olivia shipper with SVU so talk about squeezing subtext out of pretty much nothing. (And it was even better when years later, Diane Neal got herself a Twitter and was very very amused that there even had been the notion of Casey/Olivia. She was gracious about it but assured us that any and all subtext we saw was purely unintentional on everyone's part.) And it was fun looking for subtext and Casey/Olivia was like fanfic crack, but it wasn't real and we all knew it. These two characters were not being written as being in a romantic relationship, and neither are Emma and Regina. This is so ridiculous, to the point that I wish I could tweet everyone and be all, "We're not all like this, we promise!" Ugh.

I didn't see one, which bummed me out. Target has the DVD sets for $29.99. (Bought mine at lunch!)

I hear ya. Upon everyone's return to the Enchanted Forest, we had four parents who had lost children, supposedly forever: Regina, Snow, Charming, and Neal. Only one of those parents was written as grieving. Only one of those parents had two episodes in which her fairyback centered upon her grief at losing her child. The other three parents didn't get as much as a five-second onscreen bout of tears. And one of those parents was written as having to buck up the one parent who was grieving when she herself had lost her child twice, the first time at the grieving parent's hand! Like seriously, F you, show. That's a major, major problem to me. Not allowing the other three parents to grieve completely obliterates the emotional impact the story was supposed to have. Focusing all the attention on Regina and Regina's pain gives us ... this, where we can point to pieces of televised evidence where Snow and Charming don't give their baby girl -- whom they'd lost twice -- a second thought. We're left wondering where their heads are at, and yes, logically, they should miss her and be pissed at the injustice, but we don't see that. And it only fuels the criticism that the writers think Regina's story is the only one that matters, because taking what we've seen onscreen, it is.

Y'know, I don't have a problem with how Snow and Charming sent Emma off in "Going Home." I understand the impulse of the parent to be strong in front of the child. Where I have the issue is the lack of follow-through. Their stoicism in "Going Home" would have had much more of an impact if they'd fallen apart somewhere along the line in "New York City Serenade."

I did like the visual of the ocean portal swallowing the Jolly Roger whole and then flattening out to calm, serene ocean when it disappeared, but yeah, in terms of "Holy shit, how the hell am I going to wait till September to find out what happens next?!" it was nowhere near as satisfying as 1x22.

Then it's a definite bait and switch because she certainly was in season one. I didn't sign up for The Regina Show. I signed up for Emma Swan, Heir to the Fairy Tale Throne. And now I'm invested and I want to see where Emma's story goes, but it's maddening when her story is given token attention and that's it, especially when once considers how they writers are choosing to use the time they have. They need a better balance, not just with Emma but with all of the characters. I think there'd be a lot less frustration if everyone felt their favorite characters were getting their due. Whether or not Emma is the heroine of the story is kind of beside the point, though. Like @regularlyleaded said, it's criminal that we are now heading into season four of this show and know so little about one of its main characters.

Word. I really don't give two shits anymore about anyone who's ever accidentally looked at Regina funny. Can we please have some details about the heroine of the story, for crying out loud? Like I said in the "Lost Girl" thread, Emma is an original character, here. We can't rely on previous versions of the character to give ourselves an idea of where she's coming from. That is up to the show, and the show is utterly failing at it. The idea of a child growing up with no love whatsoever is so utterly tragic that this shit should really write itself. This is a real-world problem. This isn't "my dad was a knight and was killed trying to slay a dragon and my mom was a princess but her throne got usurped." This is a little girl who grew up here, who slipped through the cracks and flew under the radar, a little girl who was utterly failed by the system that was supposed to protect her. This is a little girl who, at three years old, was returned to the system by the only family she'd ever known. How come we haven't seen a flash of a confused little blonde three-year-old, wondering why "Mommy" and "Daddy" were giving her to strangers? Do they not comprehend how much more sympathy and understanding viewers would have if we could see that? Or do they just not care? Emma's story is the kind of thing happens all the damn time. It's real-world, human drama, and it really shouldn't be hard to put the audience on Emma's wavelength. I mean, just look how many of us want to hug Emma just from little we do know. How many more people would understand why she is the way she is if the show actually showed us? But in order to do so, they need to put even the tiniest attention on her and her past, and they absolutely refuse to do it. I don't get it.

Exactly. When the episode aired, I remember actually liking the parallel between Emma in the present and Snow in the flashbacks, but mostly because I like when they parallel Emma's journey with her parents' in the first place. It was only after the new-episode, Snow/Emma feels died down that I was like, "Hey, wait a second ..." I don't know why they're so allergic to showing us how Emma came to be the way she is. I mean, yeah, we can speculate that it's because it would reflect too poorly on the villains they have on redemption tracks, but honestly, show, give us something. We've spent countless episodes on how and why the Evil Queen became the Evil Queen, we've spent a few episodes on Rumple and the Dark One, but nothing on how Emma got to be the way she is? I mean, even when they show us a legitimate reason for her walls (Neal), they backtrack on it. What the hell, show? Because Emma is, essentially, a blank slate, there should be far more story attention on her. Everyone else (minus Henry and Neal) on this show already existed in some form or another in the fairy tales the show is based on. And yes, I get that the show subverts these stories and puts its own twist on them, but that doesn't change the fact that, say, Snow White is an already established character. Emma is not. Emma didn't exist prior to this show. As such, the audience has zero idea what her life was like, so we have to rely on the show to give us this information. We have a couple of offhand sentences from Emma and a few story implications. (And if you're more than a casual viewer and read interviews, you have Jennifer Morrison's headcanon, which feeds into how she plays Emma.) But that's it. We have no idea, for example, why Emma ran away from the system at 15. (This is only story implication: in "Tallahassee," August said he'd been looking for 17-year-old Emma for two years. A child ages out of the foster system at 18.) I have guesses but they're only guesses. We have no idea why Emma never connected with any of the families she lived with growing up. We have no idea how many of her years were spent in actual homes or how many we spent in group homes. This was the perfect episode so show us even a tiny fraction of Emma's backstory. We talk a lot about how much sympathy Regina gets from the fandom at large, but one of the big reasons she gets it is because the story focuses on her backstory. We've seen every little slight in Regina's past, real or imagined. With Emma, we've gotten nothing. Just think how much more understanding some of those fans would be if we'd seen a similar scene to Cora magically binding Regina and Regina promising to be good, only with a blonde teenager in Regina's position. It wouldn't even have to be as graphic as that. Show a little girl sitting alone on a bed, hugging a baby blanket. Show a little girl sitting by herself at recess because she's in yet another new school. Basically, make the viewers understand where Emma's coming from instead of giving us Round 34646 of Regina vs. Snow.