Dani-Ellie

I completely agree that they were backed into a corner. The pieces of Emma's past all fell into place and as we were watching, I totally knew that this was going to be how Emma ended up having Henry in jail. But as with most things on this show, As for Neal not being the one to actually make the call, I'm not sure that's any better. Neal and August planned this, regardless of who actually tipped off the police. Neal had to have at least given up Emma's location, because August didn't know where they were meeting. Who made the call was irrelevant to me. They both suck, and they both could have maybe spent more than five minutes thinking of a way to put Emma back on the proper path without destroying her in the process. If "Neal didn't make the call!" was the writers' only defense of Neal's actions, here, that should tell them something.

Even if he didn't call the cops, he was still complicit in the plan, meaning he knowingly sent his 17-year-old girlfriend to jail. Even if his intention was to get her to forget about him, I think there were better and less damaging ways to handle it than sending her to prison and then essentially dropping her like a hot potato.

On any other show, yes. With this one, which has its head so far up Regina's ass that it can't see the forest for the trees, who knows?

Don't even get me started! I get that Snow was hurt and emotionally reeling from Charming's secret, but did she ever maybe stop to think that Emma could possibly be hurt and emotionally reeling from the secrets she heard? And that maybe some compassion was in order and throwing supposedly inherited family traits in Emma's face might just be a tad insensitive considering that up until a couple months prior, as far as Emma was concerned, she had no family to inherit things from?

They totally could have, they just chose not to. I mean, look, I get that real life happens, but one would think TV writers would be able to adapt to real life changes better than this. So, okay, write the Echo Cave. Great, please write the Echo Cave, because it's a real issue that makes sense in the progression of the Charming family's issues while also setting the stage for Snow's pregnancy in response to real-life circumstances. The only thing is, I don't think the Echo Cave should have been the plot setup check-box it played out as. They needed to freakin' deal with it. Write the conversations that need to happen in the wake of the Echo Cave. Write Snow talking to Emma afterward, make Emma part of the Charmings' thought processes re: Neverland. Have Emma bring up the fact that she can't exactly not feel like an orphan if her parents stay in a realm she can't visit. Borrow a minute here from the Neal/Hook/Emma stuff and a minute there from the Rumple/Regina stuff and deal with it. Either that or don't write the Echo Cave and come up with another way of introducing the idea of a Snowing baby instead. If they had no desire to actually deal with the Charming family, maybe they could have come up with another way that didn't create as many problems in the first place. It would mean a shuffling of story priorities, sure, but I don't think real life is an excuse to drop story threads that were previously set up and then just continue on as if they never happened to the extent that these have been.

Thank you. I block out the diner scene because it makes me bonkers for so very many reasons (minus the sweet bit with Emma trying to appeal to Hook).

Exactly. This very debate is actually my main issue with the story. The writing is so slanted in favor of the villains that one of the heroes defending herself and her family is this hugely terrible thing. I buy Snow feeling guilty about it, because no matter whose life it was, she still took a human life. I imagine that takes some time to come to terms with. That said, it's been a while since I've watched the back half of season 2, but if I remember correctly, the story didn't allow for anyone to stand up for Snow's decision. There was no one telling her, "You did what you had to do." There was no one telling her, "What choice did you have?" There was no one telling her, "You saved our lives." If there was, please tell me where, because I've completely forgotten about it. :) What we did get was Regina taking potshots at her ("blackened sole"), as if the two of them were on some kind of even -- or more even -- footing. Which is bullshit. Snow took Cora's life, yes, but Cora was going to take Snow's. Like was said above, it's not like Cora and Regina were at home baking cookies and Snow ambushed them. Cora and Regina were trying to kill Snow and her family. If Snow killing Cora puts her on child-murdering and village-massacring Regina's level, well, then no one might as well even bother fighting back if they're attacked to preserve their pure hearts or whatever. It's a terrible message, is what I'm saying. By not allowing the other side of the story into the narrative, it results in some really f-ed up morality. The story is cheering the villains and blaming the heroes for having the audacity and gall to fight back. I thought this was supposed to be a fairy tale, y'know, where good defeats evil? How can good defeat evil if they're supposed to just roll over and take whatever evil is dishing out? This is why I'm very worried about the upcoming Marian issue, by the way. Very, very worried. I hope to hell it doesn't get this treatment and Emma doesn't end up vilified for saving a woman's life.

Which I think is such utter horseshit, by the way. (The show's stance, not your point ... I agree with you.) I saw it as the Charmings being in a kill or be killed situation, as I think it was fairly obvious that Regina and Cora weren't going to stop until the Charmings were dead. Most people don't just roll over and let themselves be killed. If Cora and Regina couldn't deal with the ramifications their victims possibly reacting in self-defense, they shouldn't have freakin' gone after them. But no, it's all Snow's fault, because apparently she should have just let these two women kill her and her entire family.

Y'know, it had been my expectation that the reason Regina and Robin fell into it so easily in Storybrooke was because they'd had some sort of romance going on during the missing year, and their feelings for each other were like muscle memory, the same way David and Mary Margaret couldn't seem to stay away from each other during the first curse. And I'm not necessarily equating Outlaw Queen with Snowing because no ... there are too many problems inherent in OQ for me to consider them Snowing-level True Love as of now. I'm just saying, the precedent was there and I think it would have made Outlaw Queen seem less out of the blue and more based on an actual connection rather than "you are my fated soulmate so I might as well" than it does right now.

I don't know if it's necessarily not a strength of theirs, but they clearly have no real interest in it. When the show does slow down for five seconds and lets the emotion take center stage, I do feel like it does it well. It just happens so few and far between. They'd rather rush the plot along, zooming from plot point to plot point, leaving no time for the characters to work out how they feel about any of it. As such, the audience ends up with no real connection to any of it, because we have no idea where the characters' heads are. The actors try to inject emotion into it, but there's only so much actors can do with material that doesn't let the emotion come to the surface. I actually think this entire cast does extremely well bringing emotion out of relatively emotionless material. I shudder to think how much of a hot mess this show would be in the hands of a less capable cast. That's another reason the breakneck speed of the plot frustrates me, by the way. This cast is so good. They work wonderfully together and I think it's clear from behind-the-scenes stuff that they have a blast together. That's not something that happens a lot in this business, and I really wish the writers would realize what they have in their cast. I wish the writing would play to everyone's talents on a more consistent basis. To use a cheesy pun, this show could be magical, if the writing would allow it.

I understood it less that Emma and Neal had the same definition of home and more that Neal gave her that definition and she believed him because, as you said, she had no definition of her own. And once that definition was in her head, it kind of became a self-fulfilling prophecy. When the very definition of something means she has to leave it to figure out what she had, Emma's running away was inevitable. It was a necessary step because Neal told her that she wouldn't know what she had until it was gone. After coming back to Storybrooke, the peace she had found with Henry was shattered. All she saw in Storybrooke was a place she didn't belong full of people she didn't have anything in common with, and she longed for the place where she felt she was happiest, where she and Henry were a family and they were doing all right and had time to just hang out together. She finally had somewhere she missed. Now, I do think that had the story allowed her to go back to New York, she would have found she missed Storybrooke more and thus found home in Storybrooke anyway. It's just that Emma's definition of home was flawed because she had no frame of reference for it and the guy who gave her that definition was pretty much as screwed up as she was. If someone had told her that home was wherever you could be with the ones you love, maybe she wouldn't have had to run away to find it.

It's definitely the show I thought I was signing up for: Emma's own fairy tale. I expected good to triumph over evil and I expected Emma to find and come to terms with her family, which would mean we'd actually get to see the emotional development behind it all, and maybe, just maybe, find her own True Love and live happily ever after. I did not at all sign up for The Tale of the Evil Queen, but I care too much about what happens to Emma to give up. So I just remain hoodwinked.

Ahh, my mistake. I misread the original question. Never mind!

I don't think they would disappear from existence. The only reason Emma (and Marty!) were in danger of ceasing to exist was because their parents hadn't met/fallen in love. Without mommies and daddies loving each other very much, there are no babies to be had. ;) If you follow BTTF time travel physics, two versions of the same time traveler can indeed exist in the same time period at the same time, because Marty does it at the end of Part II. First Movie Marty is still in 1955 playing "Johnny B. Goode" onstage while Second Movie Marty is trying to steal the book back from Biff. Haha, I hear you! I always hated when Charmed did time travel because it made even less sense than this, and it was just a big giant headache.

But then you get a paradox. If they stop themselves from time-traveling, they then can't come back to the future early to tell themselves not to time-travel. The portal only reopened because Emma magicked it open with the wand, which fell from her hand and was left in Rumple's vault. Once they were back in Storybrooke, there was no way to reopen the portal, short of recasting Zelena's spell.

Honest to your-choice-of-deity, I fully expected the Cora/Regina/Charmings thing to end with Regina having to choose between Cora and Henry. (And choosing Henry, obvs.) It would have been a really nice, logical way for the plotline to play out while furthering Regina's redemption arc in a natural way. And yet, we ended up with what we ended up with.

This is kind of my problem with Swan Queen in general. For the most part, I feel like the appeal is seeing the savior save the Evil Queen. Coming at a shipping perspective as an Emma fan, though, I want to see someone save the savior. I want Emma to get just as much out of the relationship as the other person, and I'm sorry, but I don't see her finding that with the woman who's tried to kill her multiple times for simply existing. Yeah, I still don't and never will understand why Emma saving an innocent woman's life was such a horrible, awful decision. It may have resulted in some heartbreak but it also resulted in a husband reuniting with the wife who was stolen from him and a little boy reuniting with the mother he thought he'd lost. Roland asking, "Mama?" and Marian gathering him in her arms will always be a wonderful, wonderful thing, in my eyes. I don't really care that Regina's feelings were hurt; if she hadn't imprisoned Marian or if she'd gone into the tavern when Tink told her to, none of this would have happened. I don't think the consequences of Regina's decisions should be on Emma, nor do I think saving a life should be seen as less moral than accidentally potentially breaking up a week-long relationship. This is as much a fault of the show as anything else, though. The show didn't allow anyone to pat Emma on the back for reuniting a family before the Oh Poor Regina took hold. Regina was allowed the last word, and Emma was made to feel guilty for saving a woman's life. That's some pretty jacked-up morality there, and it's the show's bias.

The issue with changing the past is that you have no idea what could greatly alter the future. In Back to the Future, Marty shoves his father out of the way of an oncoming car and ends up threatening his own existence because his father was supposed to get hit by that car. Even in the storyline the finale presented, Hook and Emma were trying to be as unobtrusive as they possibly could, and all it took was the snap of a branch to interrupt the moment Emma's parents met. Then they had to run around and fix things so that the present they returned to would be as close as possible to the one they left. Killing Rumple at that point in time could have had even more disastrous effects on the timeline than letting things stand the way they were. Since Snow and Charming hadn't met, there was no True Love for Rumple to have weaved into the curse. There was no safety valve. If Rumple had died and Regina had somehow found a way to finish his work and cast the Dark Curse without him, it's entirely possible that the curse would have unbreakable. Hook and Emma could have arrived back in the Storybrooke we started the show with, where no one knew who they were and families were separated and Henry was unhappy and Regina played with her puppets all day long. Emma even references this when she tells Rumple he has to forget everything she told him about Bae. Attempting to fix the future could end up making it worse. You just don't know, and since they don't have a DeLorean sitting in their backyard, it's not like they could go back to the point where everything went wrong and keep trying to fix it. I'd said before that The Butterfly Effect is kind of a terrible movie, because it is, but it also illustrates this very idea. Ashton Kutcher's character keeps going back and trying to fix what he thinks is where everything went wrong, and the timelines that result from the "fixes" are increasingly worse than the ones before. As for Emma saving Marian, I'm sorry that Regina's past is coming back to bite her in the ass, but them's the breaks when you imprison people and sentence them to death. Saving a woman from certain death is not wrong (just like it wasn't wrong for Marty to push his father out of the way of an oncoming car), and Emma mitigated the damage Marian could have done to the timeline by bringing her forward with them. Instead of Marian actually dying, she was just given up for dead. Reuniting a family in the present is also not wrong, and if Regina weren't involved with Robin, I still maintain that Robin, Roland, and Marian finding each other again would have been cause for celebration. (Hell, from my perspective, it still is cause for celebration.) The fallout from bringing Marian forward is Emma's and Regina's to share, because it's not like Emma freed Marian from some random dungeon. She freed her from Regina's. If Regina hadn't imprisoned Marian in the first place, which kept her from returning to her family, Robin wouldn't have even been available.

Thank you both for the recs! And for understanding. :) Sometimes it's hard being a non-AU person in a very heavy AU fandom.

I prefer the stuff I read to mostly follow canon. Canon divergence is okay to a point, depending on what the plotline is. Mostly, I prefer the stuff that reads like it's just something we didn't get to see, stuff that can be plugged in between scenes or episodes and not change too much of anything on the actual show from that point forward. For example, a little bit of deeper conversation amongst everyone following the Echo Cave is great for me, because it would be filling in holes. Emma declaring her love for Hook after the Echo Cave is not, because that would change too much of everything after the Echo Cave for my comfort. I typically find the long hiatuses more inspiring because I can work on my own family/Captain Swan bonding pieces without having to worry that canon is going to screw it over in like, a week. There've been ideas I've actually held just to make sure canon wasn't going to screw them over! When canon screws it over after the fact, that's just the nature of the beast, but I do try to write as canon-compliant as I can. (I realize I'm very picky. It's just that I read this stuff for the further adventures of the characters as they are. I don't really have an interest in reading different versions of these characters, especially considering there's so many emotional beats that the show has skipped over, which leaves so much to play with and still be canon-compliant. And some AUs are just so AU that they might as well be original fiction at that point.)

Thank you! :)

Regina imprisoned Marian before Hook and Emma even arrived in the Enchanted Forest, Hook and Emma stayed hidden during the scene in the village when Regina paraded Marian around as an example of what defying the Queen looks like, and Marian was already on Enchanted Forest Death Row in the Queen's dungeon when Emma was taken prisoner. I fail to see how it was clear that Regina was not responsible for Marian's death prior to Emma changing the timeline.

For cryin' out loud, is anyone writing canon-based fic anymore?? Like, AUs are great if you like that kind of thing (which I really, really don't), but there's nothing wrong with a fic taking off from the end of the finale and speculating plotlines to come (which I really, really like). Or missing scenes fic (which goodness knows, this show has more than enough opportunities for those!) or post-eps or something that's not AU. If anyone knows of some of those, preferably Charming Family and/or Captain Swan oriented, please send them my way. :)

Part of the reason I like my fantasy based in reality is because there's less suspension of disbelief. I mean, there's obviously some, but if the world is constructed properly, it gives off this sense of "maybe it could all really happen." Like with Amerilla's example of Supernatural, the show's world is constructed in a way that all this crazy, terrifying stuff is happening all the time, but thanks to hunters like Sam and Dean, most of the world will never know about it. There's this underground network of people who've been touched by real evil, and they're going around trying to combat the evil before it can harm anyone else. This notion is why I like Storybrooke. It's this little town in Maine that no one can get to that houses all this fantastical stuff, and there's a sense that if you just looked hard enough, you might be able to find it. I'm not a huge fan of high fantasy but I really like that stuff. For example, my favorite book of all time is Time Windows by Kathryn Reiss. It's part enchanted object story, part ghost story, and part mystery. It's a complete story told, sort of like Once, through a couple different time periods, with the two past stories impacting and informing the present story. I read it for the first time when I was 13, and there's just something magical about the story for me. It wasn't until I was older that I realized what that something was: it was the exact kind of adventure I always wanted to have as a kid. I didn't need to fall through a wardrobe into a magical land; all I needed was a little bit of magic right in my own backyard. That's what speaks to me, and that's what I miss about the balancing of the two halves of Once. I feel like we're losing the reality in favor of the fantasy, and at this point, I'm invested in these characters, but at the same time, I miss the character opportunities the reality afforded them.

Lemme guess ... you were at "Abandon All Hope"? :) I know this is the big reason I found season one so much more balanced. The fantasy of the fairy tale flashbacks was balanced out by the (admittedly, heightened) reality of Storybrooke. And I know that technically, Storybrooke wasn't really reality, but for the characters, it was. The Evil Queen couldn't just walk down the street and magically conjure up whatever she wanted. When she wanted to go on the offensive/get even, she had to play by this world's rules. Rumple couldn't just turn someone into a snail if they were trying to back out of a deal; he had to figure out other ways to make the deal binding. There was relationship drama and family drama and real-world conflict that couldn't just be resolved with a couple of magical flings and a spell or two. I prefer my fantasy grounded in the real world. Things like season one of this show or Charmed or Supernatural, where all this crazy stuff is happening under 95% of the population's noses. Once is very quickly losing this grounding. The only real-world perspective we have now is Emma (and Henry, but Henry finds all the fantasy stuff awesome, which is funny in its own way). Emma reacts to this shit the way I would react to this shit. I adore when she's got this look on her face all, "My life has gotten so damn weird." Because it totally has, and it's totally okay for the show to acknowledge that. It's totally okay to poke fun at the absurdity. I mean, some really absurd shit has happened on Supernatural but they totally play it for laughs. ("Why am I here?" "For tea parties!") And then when things do eventually get serious, it's something more human that ends up being the real threat, so that we can connect with the material. As more and more of this stuff becomes commonplace to Emma, the show is going to lose that real-world grounding and its real-world ties. Mostly, I miss the real-world conflict of Storybrooke before the curse broke, when the characters had time to actually have conversations. I don't know why Adam and Eddy are so afraid to slow the hell down and let the characters breathe, because it's totally possible. As you've pointed out, Supernatural manages quite well. Moving things along at such a breakneck speed ends up with what we've got: jumping from plot point to plot point with no real emotional connection to any of it.