Once Upon A...SHOULDA HAPPENED THIS WAY!

[companionenvy]

Also, while it is a nitpick, but even if somehow there were a wish Henry, he shouldn't have been named Henry; that was the name Regina gave him. Presumably, Emma would have chosen something different. 

If we assume that somehow Emma and Nealfire were destined to meet and have a child together - and that somehow, that destiny applied even in an altered timeline with no curse -- one could fanwank scenarios where they still met and had a son. But the writers, of course, didn't feel the need to put any thought into the issue, so we can only fanwank. And even if we do, we're still left with the most insulting and nonsensical part of the episode, which is Snowing raising Emma to be a nitwit. 

[Shanna Marie]

7 hours ago, companionenvy said:

Also, while it is a nitpick, but even if somehow there were a wish Henry, he shouldn't have been named Henry; that was the name Regina gave him. Presumably, Emma would have chosen something different. 

True, given that Regina named him after her father, and Emma would have had no reason to choose that name.

7 hours ago, companionenvy said:

If we assume that somehow Emma and Nealfire were destined to meet and have a child together - and that somehow, that destiny applied even in an altered timeline with no curse -- one could fanwank scenarios where they still met and had a son. But the writers, of course, didn't feel the need to put any thought into the issue, so we can only fanwank.

It really would have taken some work to create that scenario, given that Bae/Neal's primary character trait was that he wanted nothing to do with anything that might take him anywhere near his father. They would have needed to come up with a reason for him to have ended up in the Enchanted Forest rather than the World Without Magic and why the curse not being cast made any difference in that. To me, it kind of feels like fate that Emma and Neal met the way they did, since he was running from anything to do with his father or his father's world and Emma's life had been so shaped by his father's intervention. But if the curse was never cast, I feel like they lost that thread of fate that would tie them together. If Rumple isn't interfering in Emma's life, there's no real connection. Without Neal being a thief on the streets at the same time Emma was alone on the streets and starting to get into crime, would they have had anything at all in common?

Though I think a lot depends on when/how, exactly, Emma was prevented from being the Savior, since that was the specific wish. In season 7, they said that the Charmings took Regina's powers away, and that's why the curse wasn't cast. But we don't know if Rumple still took the True Love DNA from the Charmings and wove it into a curse that never got used. And in season 6 it sounded like being the Savior was entirely unrelated to any of this, maybe being a True Love baby (or not, since, seriously, we're to believe that Malcolm and Fiona were True Love), so Emma being in a world where she wasn't a Savior had nothing to do with the curse.

I think my Wishverse would be one where they went back to the drawing board with season 6 and took it in a different direction (well, actually, I'd go back at least to season 4 if I could). It's a fun mental exercise to rewrite and eliminate the Robin/Regina/Marian nonsense and all the Author stuff and see how the ripple effect spreads into the rest of the series.

[companionenvy]

8 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said:

True, given that Regina named him after her father, and Emma would have had no reason to choose that name.

It really would have taken some work to create that scenario, given that Bae/Neal's primary character trait was that he wanted nothing to do with anything that might take him anywhere near his father. They would have needed to come up with a reason for him to have ended up in the Enchanted Forest rather than the World Without Magic and why the curse not being cast made any difference in that. To me, it kind of feels like fate that Emma and Neal met the way they did, since he was running from anything to do with his father or his father's world and Emma's life had been so shaped by his father's intervention. But if the curse was never cast, I feel like they lost that thread of fate that would tie them together. If Rumple isn't interfering in Emma's life, there's no real connection. Without Neal being a thief on the streets at the same time Emma was alone on the streets and starting to get into crime, would they have had anything at all in common?

Though I think a lot depends on when/how, exactly, Emma was prevented from being the Savior, since that was the specific wish. In season 7, they said that the Charmings took Regina's powers away, and that's why the curse wasn't cast. But we don't know if Rumple still took the True Love DNA from the Charmings and wove it into a curse that never got used. And in season 6 it sounded like being the Savior was entirely unrelated to any of this, maybe being a True Love baby (or not, since, seriously, we're to believe that Malcolm and Fiona were True Love), so Emma being in a world where she wasn't a Savior had nothing to do with the curse.

I think my Wishverse would be one where they went back to the drawing board with season 6 and took it in a different direction (well, actually, I'd go back at least to season 4 if I could). It's a fun mental exercise to rewrite and eliminate the Robin/Regina/Marian nonsense and all the Author stuff and see how the ripple effect spreads into the rest of the series.

I guess with Bae, if the writers wanted him to still have a child with Emma, there could have been a scenario in which Rumple found a different way of getting his son back from the LWOM against his will (as many have pointed out, there were plenty of ways of crossing realms). Adult Bae could have gone off to help Snowing defeat Rumple, which would have brought him into contact with Emma. While he wouldn't have been a good match for a Princess, she (or at least a non-ninny version of wish Emma) could have still gotten involved with him as an act of teenage rebellion - possibly, with unplanned out of wedlock pregnancy included. In the EF, this probably would have resulted in a hasty marriage. 

[Camera One]

Maybe Neal accidentally went through a portal, ended up back in the Enchanted Forest, and heard his father was locked up in prison.  He lived in the forest, and he met Emma picking flowers.  It was love at first sight and they married.   After all, this is a fairytale realm where medieval customs would prevail.

Edited March 3, 2019 by Camera One

[Shanna Marie]

22 hours ago, companionenvy said:

While he wouldn't have been a good match for a Princess, she (or at least a non-ninny version of wish Emma) could have still gotten involved with him as an act of teenage rebellion - possibly, with unplanned out of wedlock pregnancy included. In the EF, this probably would have resulted in a hasty marriage. 

I was just reading something that suggests that a hasty marriage might not have been as likely as you'd think. One of the daughters of George III had an out-of-wedlock baby, but instead of her quickly marrying the father, she was sent to the coast "for her health." She got very "sick" with a "bad stomachache" one day, then was very tired but felt much better the next day. The baby was fostered out to a wet nurse, and when he was no longer nursing, he was "adopted" by the father, who was a military man working at court (George wasn't letting his daughters marry, so apparently there were hijinks with the various young military men at court). So, with that kind of scenario, we might really have had a case of fate playing out -- teen Emma gets knocked up by Nealfire when she's off in a fit of youthful rebellion, she gets sent to a resort for her "health," the baby gets fostered out and she returns to court, then exiled Regina comes across an available baby and adopts him.

But if you really think through what likely would have happened if the curse hadn't been cast, it wouldn't have ended up looking anything like the Wishverse we saw. For instance, Emma probably should have had siblings close to her age. Snow got pregnant on her honeymoon, then was pregnant again within months of being reunited with David after the curse, so it seems she was pretty fertile. In a world without birth control, that probably would have meant a lot of kids. Without the curse years, Emma was only a couple of years older than Snowflake, so Princess Emma probably would have had a sibling a couple of years younger, and then several more stairstepped in age. There should have been a whole posse of adult siblings ready to go after Regina when she arrived and posed a threat -- and if they're being at all true to character, all the kids would have been trained in swordfighting, riding, and archery, and Emma wouldn't have been a ninny. If their line of succession gives males priority, then even if Henry existed, he wouldn't have been heir to the throne. It would have been Prince Not-Neal, Emma's brother. A 30-year-old Emma likely would have already been married to a prince or king in some neighboring kingdom (without the timeline issues from the curse, maybe she'd have ended up with Abigail and Frederick's kid, or depending on when they broke the sleeping curse, Aurora and Philip's kid) and probably would have had a couple of kids under eight. Since all the kingdoms are in easy walking distance, she still could have been visiting her parents when Regina popped by.

That scenario really would have increased the emotional trauma for our Emma, if she'd been given false memories of that scenario -- remembering growing up as a princess with loving parents, a marriage to a man who may not even exist in her universe, and children she "remembers" giving birth to. But they never explored the emotional impact of all the various memories of false lives Emma was given throughout the series.

Really, about the only thing in the Wishverse that rings true based on the idea of what would have happened without the curse may be drunk old Hook. I can see him crawling into a bottle of rum when he lost hope of getting his revenge and when he never met Emma to inspire him to consider turning his life around (and then he did end up turning his life around when he did meet Emma).

[companionenvy]

I can’t see Snowing forcing Emma to give up her child if she didn’t want to, but they could have done something where Bae still left Emma “for her own good” (maybe he hadn’t realized she was a princess) and she made the decision to quietly give the baby up for adoption. A Bae who had been forcibly brought back to the EF by Rumple and then run away from him might even have become a small-time crook a la Neal Cassidy – and a rebellious Princess Emma could have met him during a brief stint as a runaway. You could have even had a sort of flip on the Lily-Emma situation, where Emma is the one who lies about her background to the point where Bae sees her as a kindred spirit, and then feels betrayed when he finds out she’s actually a princess with loving parents, leading him to split before he knows she’s pregnant.

I will even acknowledge that it is possible that Snowing would have been overprotective of Emma because of how close they came to losing her – and, as a result, that they wouldn’t have raised her as a badass. But the episode is still insulting, because a) if you care about these characters, you should be invested in explaining how they got to the place they did and b) even if they had been overprotective, Emma should still have possessed enough of her core personality – and enough of Snowing’s values – to be very different from the Wish!Emma we met. That the episode basically turns the entire family into a joke shows how little respect they have for characters whose names don’t begin with an “R.”

I agree with you that Hook could plausibly have wound up a drunk in a world without the curse – until season 7, where, while I generally like the WHook-Alice plot a lot, I don’t believe that Whook would have become a useless drunk while he still had a daughter to fight for. If he thought Alice was dead, sure, but he wouldn’t have given up after Gothel cursed them.

Comparing this whole episode to Buffy’s “The Wish,” its most direct influence, just shows how inferior Once is. In that episode, the writers take obvious care to come up with a plausible and interesting version of how this reality might look if Buffy hadn’t moved to Sunnydale. Buffy is still acting as the slayer (albeit elsewhere), but she’s harder and colder without her friends, which in the end makes her less effective. Giles is still fighting, and even has a version of the Scooby gang, although it is mostly comprised of different people (which is interesting in itself – one very minor character who isn’t in the know about the supernatural in Sunnydale prime apparently had the potential to have been part of the gang if things had gone differently). Xander and Willow are evil, but not just because it would be fun to make them evil, but because they’ve been turned into vampires; Angel still turned good and tried to atone for his past through helping the slayer, but failed without her, and is now nearly (but not quite) broken after extended torture. In other words, it isn’t simply Bizarro-world, but a thoughtful extrapolation of where these people would be if a crucial event hadn’t occurred.

[Shanna Marie]

3 hours ago, companionenvy said:

I can’t see Snowing forcing Emma to give up her child if she didn’t want to, but they could have done something where Bae still left Emma “for her own good” (maybe he hadn’t realized she was a princess) and she made the decision to quietly give the baby up for adoption. A Bae who had been forcibly brought back to the EF by Rumple and then run away from him might even have become a small-time crook a la Neal Cassidy – and a rebellious Princess Emma could have met him during a brief stint as a runaway. You could have even had a sort of flip on the Lily-Emma situation, where Emma is the one who lies about her background to the point where Bae sees her as a kindred spirit, and then feels betrayed when he finds out she’s actually a princess with loving parents, leading him to split before he knows she’s pregnant.

Yeah ... Princess Emma sneaks out (like Regina did as queen), meets Bae, pretends not to be a princess. They plan to run away together. Pinocchio finds Bae and tells him who Emma is, Bae decides to give her up for her own good. Emma shows up at the planned place/time, but Bae doesn't. Emma goes home. Then she finds out she's pregnant. Not wanting to upset her parents, she suggests going off on a grand tour or to a spa, where she has the baby in secret, gives it up for adoption, and comes back home.

3 hours ago, companionenvy said:

I will even acknowledge that it is possible that Snowing would have been overprotective of Emma because of how close they came to losing her – and, as a result, that they wouldn’t have raised her as a badass. But the episode is still insulting, because a) if you care about these characters, you should be invested in explaining how they got to the place they did and b) even if they had been overprotective, Emma should still have possessed enough of her core personality – and enough of Snowing’s values – to be very different from the Wish!Emma we met.

I would think that if they were overprotective, they would have taught her to take care of herself. Snow was brought up pretty sheltered, but she had the kind of gumption that allowed her to stand up and be strong for her people when her mother died or that allowed her to go out and face down bandits on her own. Since there weren't any other siblings in their scenario, Emma would have been trained to be a queen, so it's ridiculous that she was such a useless ninny. A somewhat wimpier Emma would have made a lot more sense in the more realistic scenario I outlined, where she had a lot of other siblings and was married to a neighboring prince and had young children. Not that she would have been weak, but she would have had less reason to be really bold and might have been focused on her kids. There was no reason for only child Emma who had apparently lost a husband and raised a teenager to be such a wimp.

3 hours ago, companionenvy said:

I agree with you that Hook could plausibly have wound up a drunk in a world without the curse – until season 7, where, while I generally like the WHook-Alice plot a lot, I don’t believe that Whook would have become a useless drunk while he still had a daughter to fight for. If he thought Alice was dead, sure, but he wouldn’t have given up after Gothel cursed them.

WHook makes sense in this one episode, but when we get to the season 7 revelations about his daughter, it makes less sense because they entirely forgot the main thing about his character, that he's obsessive and doesn't give up when he loves someone. This is the guy who spent more than a century trying to get revenge for the woman he loved. I can't believe he'd have given up on his daughter so easily, especially since they were able to be somewhat around each other. He could have been near her enough to stay in touch.

[Shanna Marie]

I've been thinking about how to fix the 4B arc, aside from scrapping the whole mess and starting over. Is there a way to make it at all palatable and still more or less follow the same story?

I don't know that there's any saving the Robin/Marian-Zelena plot. To fix that, you'd have to go back to 4A and totally change the way Marian was handled. I think her having a lot more righteous anger at Regina and not being so self-sacrificing about letting Robin be with the woman he really loved would have helped. The real Marian would have had every reason to be outraged about her husband taking up with her torturer and would-be executioner, so that wouldn't have been an obvious giveaway about Zelena, but it would have still made sense with the revelation that it was Zelena. But if you did that, it might have been more tolerable, even though the whole soulmates and Robin being okay with the woman who took Marian away from him things were still horrible.

Then people would have had to react a lot more realistically to Regina's author plan. Maybe Henry's not sure about it but is humoring her because he's afraid she'll turn evil again. Emma protests because she doesn't believe in fate. The Charmings say you write your own happy ending. But Regina works on it in secret.

Scrap the eggbaby mess. It doesn't end up going anywhere. Emma's potential for darkness never really amounts to anything, nor does the fact that she has all her darkness removed. In fact, remove Malificent from this story line. She has enough material for an arc of her own without needing the eggbaby stuff. If Rumple is plotting to turn Emma dark, I like the suggestion raised in one of the episode threads back when the season first aired that killing Hook would be the way to do it. A loved one being killed seems to be the main motivator for people going dark, though I suppose Emma would have actually had to react to seeing Hook on the verge of being killed by Rumple for him to get the idea and know it would work. A Rumple who's not sure he's going to get superpowers might not want to kill Hook himself, since he wouldn't want a dark Savior coming after him, but it wouldn't take much to manipulate David into going after Hook. He's willing to believe the worst about Hook at least once a season. Impersonate Hook and do something bad where David can see him, then David comes after Hook. Of course, David wouldn't actually kill Hook and Emma wouldn't actually go dark, but that would start a rift with her parents if Emma got mad about them assuming the worst about Hook when they know Rumple's in town and enjoys impersonating him.

I guess if we're leaving out Lily and the eggbaby, they'd need another way to get dark Savior blood, but that particular detail is utterly awful and really stupid, so I guess we'd need another reason Rumple needs Emma to go dark.

But then there's also the problem about the Author being given powers he's not supposed to use, and the purpose behind the Author, which was never explained.

You know, I don't think we can salvage this arc. If you remove the dumb stuff like the very idea of getting the Author to write a happy ending, the Marian/Zelena switch, the Author's powers, the eggnapping, the idea of the Queens of Darkness, there's not much left. I like Ursula and Cruella and their backstories, but you could pull that out of this arc and drop it into almost any other story line. Maleficent had potential, but they didn't use any of it in this arc. There was potential in the library team of Hook and Belle, but that was dropped after one episode.

[Camera One]

30 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said:

I don't know that there's any saving the Robin/Marian-Zelena plot. 

The only thing I can think of is maybe Zelena "wakes up" when she crosses the town line, or in New York when Robin Hood gives her some elixir that Rumple tells him to get.  Maybe when Zelena merged with Marian, something went wrong and Zelena's consciousness was asleep.

Quote

Then people would have had to react a lot more realistically to Regina's author plan. Maybe Henry's not sure about it but is humoring her because he's afraid she'll turn evil again. Emma protests because she doesn't believe in fate. The Charmings say you write your own happy ending. But Regina works on it in secret.

Maybe Regina could be looking for The Author mainly to get an explanation for Page 23, and not to get a happy ending.  She wants to know what happened, if something different happened but her memory was erased or something.  Maybe we find out the Rumple (perhaps aided by the Queens of Darkness) had something to do with it.  

Quote

Scrap the eggbaby mess. It doesn't end up going anywhere.

From A&E's perspective, I think this would be a big no no.  The Eggbaby arc was a huge unexpected "twist" and showed us how Snowing weren't always heroes in an arc where the theme was "Who was a hero and who was a villain and who deserves a happy ending?"  It showed how grey the sanctimonious heroes were.  It showed how Regina wasn't alone in separating a child from her parent for 28 years - Snowing did the exact same thing and yet we call them "heroes" and they got a happy ending.  How is that fair?

Quote

I guess if we're leaving out Lily 

Again, this would be a big no-no.  I think an A&E fan club might say that Lily was one of the best planned setups in Season 4.  She was introduced in 4A as a seemingly ordinary friend of Emma's who made bad decisions.  But then we found out in 4B that her story was so much more complex.  Emma was tempted by her own darkness but rejected her years ago.  Now, she finds out her parents ruined that girl's life and Lily's mother was Maleficent, a supposed villain who was victimized by supposed heroes, and Emma & Lily can now be BFF's again, or at least allow Emma to learn to cherish her dear friend Gina.  Remember, this show is really about all sorts of love, including deep friendships.

Edited March 16, 2019 by Camera One

[Shanna Marie]

1 hour ago, Camera One said:

From A&E's perspective, I think this would be a big no no. 

I really don't give a damn about their perspective. I'm fixing their mess. They've proven their incompetence. They don't get a say in this.

If they want the eggbaby stuff, then it has to go somewhere. It has to pay off in something and not be completely forgotten. Say, it turns out that the only reason Emma's able to hold on so long as the Dark One is because all of her innate darkness was sucked out of her before birth.

And although I'm not crazy about that plot, having Lily and Maleficent just disappear after this arc and not be even mentioned during all the subsequent stories is not great. You'd think Mal would have popped up while the Evil Queen was in town. Resolving the story about Lily's quest to find her father with an offhand nonsensical remark in the series finale was lame. If they're not going to use any of the stuff they set up, it has to go.

If you can cut it out without changing the series at all, it needs to be cut, and you can cut all the eggbaby stuff without changing anything long-term. Emma's relationship with her parents gets quickly reset. The darkectomy has no effect on Emma. Mal and Lily vanish without resolution.

Or, if they want Lily who has a double dose of darkness, she has to actually be dark. Not just making minor bad choices or having bad luck. She has to be extra super dark, ruling Wall Street or Washington, poisoning and polluting without caring as long as she makes money. She's an insurance executive denying care to sick children so she can make her bonus. She stomps people beneath her designer stilettos without caring what becomes of them. She's not some sad-sack loser. That's not darkness.

[Camera One]

6 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said:

I really don't give a damn about their perspective. I'm fixing their mess. They've proven their incompetence. They don't get a say in this.

I wish some ABC executive took that tone with A&E.  Surely some of them were actually watching the show.  Could they *all* seriously have drunk the Kool-Aid?

[Camera One]

8 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said:

And although I'm not crazy about that plot, having Lily and Maleficent just disappear after this arc and not be even mentioned during all the subsequent stories is not great. You'd think Mal would have popped up while the Evil Queen was in town. Resolving the story about Lily's quest to find her father with an offhand nonsensical remark in the series finale was lame. If they're not going to use any of the stuff they set up, it has to go.

It seems like they really wanted to come back to Lily.  Maybe the actress wasn't available in Season 5?  Enough for them to think it was a huge deal they gave a Lily shoutout in the Season 6 finale.

It's sort of like how they think the biggest problem with 2B was the taser.

[KingOfHearts]

4 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

the idea of the Queens of Darkness, there's not much left. I like Ursula and Cruella and their backstories, but you could pull that out of this arc and drop it into almost any other story line.

If it were literally just Ursula, Cruella, and Maleficent coming to Storybrooke, it probably would've been a better arc. It would be unoriginal, mostly pointless, and just another Big Bad scenario, but it still would've been so much more palatable than Author/Eggbaby/Lily/Zarian.

[KAOS Agent]

11 hours ago, Camera One said:

Maybe the actress wasn't available in Season 5?

I think the actress was pregnant somewhere in there, but they weren't going back to that story anyway. She wouldn't have fit in Camelot in 5A or in the Underworld in 5B. Maybe they could've gone back there in S6. They threw everything at the wall in S6; what's to stop them from adding in a dragon daddy hunt? I think they needed to not have Lily specifically mention sticking around to look for her father if they didn't definitively plan to have that be a part of S6. Why not have her say she was leaving to search for her father and that would explain her absence and still leave the door open for the search to involve the Storybrooke crew somehow later on.

[KingOfHearts]

7 hours ago, KAOS Agent said:

I think the actress was pregnant somewhere in there, but they weren't going back to that story anyway. She wouldn't have fit in Camelot in 5A or in the Underworld in 5B. Maybe they could've gone back there in S6. They threw everything at the wall in S6; what's to stop them from adding in a dragon daddy hunt? I think they needed to not have Lily specifically mention sticking around to look for her father if they didn't definitively plan to have that be a part of S6. Why not have her say she was leaving to search for her father and that would explain her absence and still leave the door open for the search to involve the Storybrooke crew somehow later on.

Spoiler

It's funny because the Dragon said in S6 that he had lost his daughter. I thought he was going to be Lily's father, but A&E said it wasn't. I'm assuming they were laying the groundwork for a possible Mulan backstory. Yet, it's funny that we had a dragon man separated from his daughter and A&E went with Zorro instead. Why?

[Shanna Marie]

9 hours ago, KAOS Agent said:

I think the actress was pregnant somewhere in there, but they weren't going back to that story anyway. She wouldn't have fit in Camelot in 5A or in the Underworld in 5B. Maybe they could've gone back there in S6. They threw everything at the wall in S6; what's to stop them from adding in a dragon daddy hunt? I think they needed to not have Lily specifically mention sticking around to look for her father if they didn't definitively plan to have that be a part of S6. Why not have her say she was leaving to search for her father and that would explain her absence and still leave the door open for the search to involve the Storybrooke crew somehow later on.

Surely they were already planning the Dark Emma plot by that point, given that they'd been teasing Emma's darkness through the whole arc and they'd introduced Rumple's charcoal heart, so they should have known they wouldn't be getting back to the Lily story. But, you know, the person who was given all of Emma's innate darkness might have been interesting to have around while Emma was the Dark One. If they weren't going to follow up on the Lily story, they could have framed the question about her father in such a way that it didn't come across like the setup for a storyline. Just have Maleficent say something like, "Your father was the dragon from the next mountain over. We liked each other in dragon form, but it turns out we didn't have much in common otherwise. But I'm sure he'd love to meet you." And they could have made an offhand mention that Mal and Lily went through one of those sorcerer doors back to their world. The problem was that they handled it like there was going to be a big story in there, but dropped it entirely before resolving it with one line in the series finale.

You know, they could have populated the Land of Untold Stories with all the plot lines they dropped on this show.

[Camera One]

I wonder if maybe they intended to bring Lily to Camelot, and have her father be Merlin or something.  

[companionenvy]

Most of 4B is, IMO, utterly unsalvageable. But if you wanted to preserve the germ of the Author/Storybook idea, the plot should have been, not Regina trying to get the author to write a happy ending for her, but Regina trying to get the author to undo her own evil actions (she would presumably first have to have some reason to believe that a version of Henry would or could be guaranteed to exist in this altered reality). This would genuinely show the extent to which she has changed.

Henry would be on board with the plan, improving his relationship with Regina -- but, ironically ,acknowledging at the same time how compromised that relationship has been, as Henry cheerfully accepts the possibility of a change that will be for Regina the ultimate sacrifice. 

Emma would be appalled; as grim as her life has been, she doesn't want to change the person that life has made her. She would also be highly skeptical of the idea of some external power impinging upon her free will. Hook would fervently agree on both counts. But as, theoretically, Regina's plan is one that will have the effect of saving countless lives, this means that, in this scenario, Emma is really being the selfish one, creating a thorny moral issue far more credible and complex than the tacked-on darkness scenario. The townspeople at large catch wind of the plan, and those of them who lost the most under Regina's reign are furious with their former savior Emma for refusing to sacrifice her present life for the lives of their loved ones, especially as Emma's life would also improve in this scenario.

Snowing would hedge - they'd be on Emma's side, for the most part, but it would come out that the reason that they don't want to change the past is because of their fear of losing Snowflake to the altered timeline; if not for him, they'd be Team Regina because of their remaining guilt and grief over missing Emma's childhood. This throws into relief the complexities of Charming family dynamics, and forces the adult Charmings to work through these complications.

The AU world Isaac and Regina wind up creating should legitimately be, in many respects, a better world. Emma prime should be the one who has to go over and set things right, but this brings her into conflict with Wish!Emma, a strong woman who is every bit as willing to fight for this world as our Emma is to fight for hers. Ultimately, our Emma, though still reluctant to trade her life even for this objectively better one, concedes that this is the world that should live on. But wish Henry -- not knowing that he is the next Author -- tells Emma prime that he'll preserve her reality as a story. Because he is the author of this world, just as much as Isaac is (currently) in Earth prime, this generates two equally valid planes of reality, pre-emptively solving the problem of the ontological status of the wish-verse; by the end of the arc, both realities exist in parallel timestreams. 

[Shanna Marie]

The problem with the concept of an Author who had any kind of powers (and, while we're at it, the concept of the "realms of story") is that contradicts what they said in the first season about how these weren't just stories, they were real -- they were real events with real people, and they didn't happen the way you've always heard. Back then, they kind of treated Henry's ideals about heroes, villains, and happy endings like the naive ideas of a kid. Villains could sometimes win. Heroes didn't always prevail. Things didn't always work out. Maybe eventually in the long run, but that's the difference between real life and stories. So, Regina won for a long time. At any point in more than 30 years, it would have looked like the villain was winning.

But then they started writing as though this world was governed by story rules. No one challenged Henry's "heroes don't kill people" in season 2. And then this Author mess started. True, the books had to come from somewhere, but they were recordings of events. The book had nothing to do with the outcome, aside from maybe showing up when someone needed it as a reminder that there could be happy endings. It seemed to go from "these are real people in a different world, and their stories are different because of that, since they aren't bound by storybook rules" to "there's an Author guiding things in realms of story."

Exploring a world where villains could win might have been interesting, except the villains have done pretty well here. The world where villains won and got their happy endings wouldn't have looked any different from their world while Regina was in power or Storybrooke during the curse.

The writers didn't seem able to decide if their world really was a world of story where they were bound by the storybook rules about heroes always winning and getting their happy endings while villains were doomed or if it was a world where the fairytale stories played out without the kind of rules that would have existed in a storybook. They tried to have it both ways and this arc was where it all came crashing down.

[Camera One]

In some ways, the problem started right from the title card for the pilot: "One day they found themselves trapped in a place where all their happy endings were stolen.  Our World."

That implied that in the Enchanted Forest, the "good guys" got their happy endings.  But very quickly, we realized that wasn't the case for redshirts like Gepetto's parents, or Ruby's first boyfriend, Cinderella, or Snow's father, or Graham, etc.  

By 4B, that made the whole "Villains never get happy endings", "The cards are stacked against us", etc. message all the more galling.  

Edited March 17, 2019 by Camera One

[Shanna Marie]

3 hours ago, Camera One said:

In some ways, the problem started right from the title card for the pilot: "One day they found themselves trapped in a place where all their happy endings were stolen.  Our World."

That implied that in the Enchanted Forest, the "good guys" got their happy endings.  But very quickly, we realized that wasn't the case for redshirts like Gepetto's parents, or Ruby's first boyfriend, Cinderella, or Snow's father, or Graham, etc.  

The emphasis on "happy endings" really doesn't work in the context of an ongoing TV series or when you're pretending that these are real people and not just stories. We don't know what happens after the "happy ending" of the fairy tales. I guess the fairy tale Snow White may have had a chance at a happy ending since her evil queen was killed, but otherwise, you never know what happened after "happily ever after." Life goes on and has ups and downs. You can't judge whether someone has a happy ending until you're seeing them at the end of their life. In this show, Snow and Charming were married, but there was a cloud hanging over them from the day of their wedding with Regina's threat. Cinderella got her prince, but then he was cursed. Aurora was still under the sleeping curse when the curse hit.

So, who, exactly, had a happy ending at the time of the curse to be ripped away by the curse? The whole kingdom had been under threat for nine months.

It's like the talk in season 7 of how everyone in Storybrooke got their happy endings and Archie didn't even need to do counseling anymore, just because the Black Fairy was defeated -- even though she'd only just shown up in town and had nothing to do with any of the other problems they'd had. More likely, it was because Rumple had left town. He was either the cause or linked to most of their problems.

The series would have been more interesting if it had questioned and explored the concept of happy endings (sort of like Act 2 of Into the Woods) instead of taking it seriously and acting like it was a real thing that it was possible to achieve definitively before death.

[KingOfHearts]

I got so sick and tired of people complaining that Regina cant get her happy ending. Like, do y'all want her to never have any problems ever again? She got Robin, Henry, and the love of the Charmings. What more do they want? I couldn't believe we were still treading the same ground in the S5 finale with Regina again complaining about how life is unfair. 

[Camera One]

12 minutes ago, KingOfHearts said:

I got so sick and tired of people complaining that Regina cant get her happy ending. Like, do y'all want her to never have any problems ever again? She got Robin, Henry, and the love of the Charmings. What more do they want? 

Hello fans,

This is A&E and we would like to answer the ultimate question - What is needed for someone to get their "happy ending" (though if you learned the lesson from our show, you would know it's actually a "happy beginning"!).

To be completely happy, you need:

- The love and respect and validation of EVERYONE including people you treated like crap
- Ultimate power over everyone and everything... you can literally do things no one else can do and you rule over all the realms that ever existed

Hope that helps.  You can see our show is full of HOPE because good luck ever reaching this level of happiness!

A&E

[KingOfHearts]

I love how A&E said in interviews before every new arc that they'd be exploring, "What is a happy ending?" in upcoming episodes. It happened every single season and nothing ever came of it.

[Shanna Marie]

Inspired by the discussion in the All Seasons thread ...

I really wish they'd kept Emma as just the Savior for the curse, but she still had whatever power came with that and decided for herself to keep trying to help people.

I'm kind of over the Destined, Chosen One With Magical Specialness plot. But with this, they could have done a fun twist on it by getting the thing she was destined to do out of the way in season one, and then the rest of the series was her figuring out what to do now that she'd fulfilled her destiny. It's more interesting if her magic was only discovered after she fulfilled her destiny and turned out to have been an unintentional byproduct of what was done to make her the chosen one, so now she has to figure out what it means and what to do with it. It's also more interesting if she's choosing to do heroic things and help and save people just because it's the right thing to do, not because she's the Savior and she doesn't get days off, and she can't separate herself from her destiny, even if it dooms her.

[Camera One]

Now that all is said and done, I really think A&E should have ripped off "Lost"'s Season 6 (as bad as it was) and done flashsideways all season.

In the Season 5 finale, the Wish in the fountain could have seemingly created a "might have been" scenario in the Enchanted Forest that we would see throughout Season 6, as we wonder if the Wish "worked" or not.  We would revisit some of the fairytale stories from the past, and we would see all the characters in a different life (eg. if Snow had never married Charming, Jiminy had never befriended Gepetto, etc.)..

Meanwhile, in the present-day, the flood of refugees from The Land of Untold Stories could result in some storylines and somewhere along the way, Fiona could be the leader that Hyde/Jekyll was reporting to, and she gradually tries to take over Storybrooke and poison the residents against Snowing and Emma, but they gain some allies like Aladdin, Jasmine, Nemo, etc and help from some returning friends like Ariel, Cinderella, etc.  Meanwhile, Regina has to make amends to some of her past victims.  Rumple works to prove to Belle that he has actually changed.  

Eventually, we find out Fiona is actually The Black Fairy and the origin of the Fairies is revealed, with the Song in Emma's Heart being the weapon that ultimately defeats The Black Fairy in the Season 6 finale.  The Song also neutralizes the Wish Realm (flashsideways), which was created by The Black Fairy to be an eternal prison for everyone in Storybrooke.  We could end Season 6 with Emma and Hook's wedding, but no Gideon, Evil Queen, Savior shaky hands, Shears, retcons, extended naptimes, etc.

Edited March 19, 2019 by Camera One

[Shanna Marie]

20 hours ago, Camera One said:

Eventually, we find out Fiona is actually The Black Fairy and the origin of the Fairies is revealed, with the Song in Emma's Heart being the weapon that ultimately defeats The Black Fairy in the Season 6 finale. 

I'm assuming that the Black Fairy would actually be a fairy who went dark (or maybe always was dark), not Rumple's mother who turned herself into a fairy and then went dark during her obsession with stopping her son from having the Savior's fate.

[Camera One]

24 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said:

I'm assuming that the Black Fairy would actually be a fairy who went dark (or maybe always was dark), not Rumple's mother who turned herself into a fairy and then went dark during her obsession with stopping her son from having the Savior's fate.

Yes.  But I'm thinking that it might be very difficult for A&E to create a brand new villain for the final season which is not based on an existing villain that they hadn't used yet.  Maybe it would have been easier if they used a Disney villain like a human version of Scar (for example).  

But there would be more meaningful to have a fairy who went dark in terms of the mythology of the show.  They could have come up with a better backstory for how the Dark Curse was created in the first place.  Maybe the Black Fairy's original Dark Curse was much worse, creating a world where her enemies would be eternally tortured.  Maybe we find out that Blue decided to give up a lot of the Fairies' powers to de-toxify The Dark Curse and that was one of the reasons why the fairies were so useless.  Another question would be where The Black Fairy was all this time and why she was awaken.  Because of the Season 5 finale, The Land of Untold Stories would be the easiest place she came from.  The Black Fairy could also have recruited some of the remaining villains we hadn't seen yet to cause minor problems of the week.  Or maybe in Season 6, the main characters decide to build a permanent portal between Storybrooke and The Enchanted Forest and unbeknownst to them, The Black Fairy was summoning an army there.  Could The Black Fairy have been Rumple's mentor instead of his mother?  

There's also the perennial suggestion to have Mary Poppins as a villain and Rumple's mother.  That could have worked as well, if she cast the first Dark Curse to go to The World Without Magic to brainwash children.  In any case, I think Gideon should definitely be excised from Season 6.  He added nothing.

[KingOfHearts]

Wasn't there speculation at one point that Maleficent was the Black Fairy, since she was a dark fairy in her original story? Of course, if that were the case, Rumple would've just called it "Maleficent's wand".

[Camera One]

4 minutes ago, KingOfHearts said:

Wasn't there speculation at one point that Maleficent was the Black Fairy, since she was a dark fairy in her original story? Of course, if that were the case, Rumple would've just called it "Maleficent's wand".

Maleficent was a fairy so that would have made the most sense.  But I suppose the Black Fairy's wand was first mentioned at the end of 3A, and by that time, as you said, Blue and Rumple would have called it Maleficent's wand.  Blue said at one point she had no idea how The Black Fairy became dark (I think she even said it in Season 6, which suggests the Writers hadn't even planned their story out enough for them to know Blue would have known).

Edited March 20, 2019 by Camera One

[Shanna Marie]

18 minutes ago, Camera One said:

Blue said at one point she had no idea how The Black Fairy became dark

I bet a child told a secret.

There's some story potential there if the Black Fairy went dark for some reason that Blue and the others didn't know -- one of the fairies just turned on them. Of course, knowing this show, she would have had a perfectly valid reason and her going dark (if she even actually went dark at the time -- really, she went dark because her friends banished her) saved them all, so they've been unfairly judging her all this time, and she was unfairly punished when she was banished.

31 minutes ago, Camera One said:

Could The Black Fairy have been Rumple's mentor instead of his mother?  

Or maybe we could do something wild and crazy and not link her to either Rumple or Regina. Linking her just to the fairies sets up a good vs. evil showdown that will affect everyone, and Blue's worried that the good fairies can't win, not in Storybrooke where they don't have their full powers because of being turned human by the curse, so they need Emma and Regina (I guess, if we have to) to join them for the fight. It turns out that Blue's spell to hide the song in Emma's heart is what gives them the edge.

[daxx]

It would have been more interesting if Blue was the Black fairy in disguise and had taken her place centuries prior and was pulling the strings behind the scenes. She gave the first bean to Baelfire after all. She could have even given a bean to the spinsters for Rumple all those years before. Perhaps she saw Rumple interfering with her plans.

The real Blue fairy could have shown up after escaping in the nick of time and given Emma some advice that helps her defeat the Black fairy. Perhaps she was in the land of untold stories or in the wish realm.

[Camera One]

That's an interesting idea.  I've always liked the concept of The Blue Fairy being good but doing what she needed to (eg. trying to get Baelfire to send her father down a portal with the bean) to rid the realms of what she considered to be evil, so I sort of still want that to be Original Blue.

Maybe Blue defeated her "evil" twin sister.  We saw a double dose of Regina/The Evil Queen in Season 6, so a double dose of Blue Fairy/Black Fairy couldn't have been any worse. 

But then, we couldn't have Regina come to her big realizations and loving herself with The Evil Queen getting a happy ending with Wish Robin.

Edited March 20, 2019 by Camera One

[andromeda331]

7 hours ago, Camera One said:

That's an interesting idea.  I've always liked the concept of The Blue Fairy being good but doing what she needed to (eg. trying to get Baelfire to send her father down a portal with the bean) to rid the realms of what she considered to be evil, so I sort of still want that to be Original Blue.

Maybe Blue defeated her "evil" twin sister.  We saw a double dose of Regina/The Evil Queen in Season 6, so a double dose of Blue Fairy/Black Fairy couldn't have been any worse. 

But then, we couldn't have Regina come to her big realizations and loving herself with The Evil Queen getting a happy ending with Wish Robin.

I always liked that idea too. She did try to get rid of The Dark One that way and getting mad at Tinkerbelle for not letting Regina fall to her death. I always thought one of the reasons it took Rumple so long to get the Curse cast was because the Blue Fairy was hiding/destroying so many magical items and ingredients needed for the Curse to try and prevent or put off the casting as long as possible. Which is another reason why he hates her. 

[Shanna Marie]

5 hours ago, andromeda331 said:

She did try to get rid of The Dark One that way and getting mad at Tinkerbelle for not letting Regina fall to her death.

Blue was shady, but she was ruthlessly pragmatic when it came to dealing with evil (and meanwhile the heroes wrung their hands over being mean to villains). Having seen what the actress could do over on The Magicians, I feel like there was a lot of fun potential with this character and I wish we'd seen more of her along the way, digging into some of her more interesting decisions. What, exactly, was the role of the fairies supposed to be? Sometimes she intervened in big ways, but then she kept counseling the other fairies to stay out of events. If they'd developed her more over the years, then the Black Fairy being her nemesis without any other connection to other characters might have worked. Maybe the other characters realize how much Blue was trying to shield them over the years and what she sacrificed to do so, so they step up and pay it back. She seemed useless a lot of the time, but she was also always doing little things behind the scenes -- was she under some kind of restriction? Did she answer to some higher power?

13 hours ago, Camera One said:

But then, we couldn't have Regina come to her big realizations and loving herself with The Evil Queen getting a happy ending with Wish Robin.

I am willing to sacrifice that. It would be sad, but I think I could cope. I mean, if I look really hard at the rest of the series, I might be able to scrape together enough instances of Regina putting herself first to satisfy me that she was okay with herself.

[Shanna Marie]

I had a weirdly vivid dream last night that was a scene that really needed to have been in the show. Hook and Henry (the teen version) were together in an Enchanted Forest-like land and were attacked by some kind of creature (they were calling it an ogre, but it was human-sized, not like the way they've shown ogres on the show). Hook told Henry to run and then started fighting the creature. He was mostly just trying to fend it off, buying time, but when he looked to see if Henry had made it safely away, Henry was still there. He kept telling Henry to go, but Henry refused to leave. Hook finally gave up, got out a weapon and killed the creature, then he yelled at Henry, asking why he hadn't run when Hook told him to. Henry said that a hero doesn't abandon his companions. Hook told him that he wasn't sure he could have got both of them away at the same time, and that's why he wanted Henry to run. Once Henry was safe, he could have disabled the creature enough that he could get away. Henry staying had done Hook no good and had just resulted in an innocent creature being killed. Henry said that it was a villain, but Hook said it was just a creature defending its territory. It wasn't good or evil. Then he told Henry that he should just focus on doing what's smart and what's right and let other people decide if he's a hero rather than living his life by a bunch of rules out of a storybook so that he can make himself a hero.

I could totally see Henry acting that way. It seems like something you'd think Hook would have said, though he never did. I'd imagine he'd have a more pragmatic attitude about what made a hero and would have been less concerned about the labels (I think mostly because he'd assume the label of "hero" wouldn't really apply to him, so the best he could do was do his best to do what's right and then others could call him what they felt was appropriate). The show's fixation on the characters wanting to be heroes was rather juvenile.

[daxx]

1 hour ago, Shanna Marie said:

The show's fixation on the characters wanting to be heroes was rather juvenile.

I can’t help but roll my eyes when these characters proclaim themselves heroes. It’s like humility, if you have to proclaim yourself humble you aren’t.

[Camera One]

1 hour ago, Shanna Marie said:

The show's fixation on the characters wanting to be heroes was rather juvenile.

At the same time as everyone wanting to be a hero, they push the concept that heroes are hypocrites and ruin lives.

[Shanna Marie]

2 hours ago, Camera One said:

At the same time as everyone wanting to be a hero, they push the concept that heroes are hypocrites and ruin lives.

Hmm, maybe they were doing the thing about people wanting to be heroes on purpose, then, and it was meant to be a negative thing, since wanting to be a hero means you're a hypocrite who ruins lives.

2 hours ago, daxx said:

I can’t help but roll my eyes when these characters proclaim themselves heroes. It’s like humility, if you have to proclaim yourself humble you aren’t.

On just about any other show, the people wanting to be heroes would be criticized and told that all you could do was do the right thing and leave it to history to decide whether you're a hero. Or there are all the war movies in which the grizzled veteran sergeant tells the eager young recruit not to be a hero because heroes get people killed. If your goal is to be a hero, then you're just out for glory for yourself.

[MadMan]

What the fuck mother fuckers!!! I still somewhat hold onto my ancient chant. IF SARA WON’T GO OUT WITH YOU, DESTROY THE WORLD!!! Ah, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!!!!

[Shanna Marie]

Inspired by the discussion in the "other fairy tales" thread about character moments and conversations we should have seen, I thought I'd move that over here (since it's about this show, not other fairy tales). What scenes or conversations should we have seen? This includes scenes we know happened but that we didn't see because we saw the start before a commercial break or because the characters had that information. Or scenes that may or may not have happened offscreen and we don't have any strong indication either way. Or scenes we know didn't happen but that should have happened.

So, some of mine:

Regina confessing to murdering Graham. Given this show, Emma would probably not care and be all "but you've changed," but it's impossible to consider their "friendship" to be at all real if Regina knows this information and has never confessed, especially while she's still playing the victim.

The reunion between Hook and Liam. I'm still irked that this happened during a commercial break. There was so much stuff going on there -- Hook idolized his brother and thought he was a wonderful, truly good person, so wouldn't he have had a lot of shame and fear in facing his brother again, after what he'd done with his life after Liam's death? That should have been a really emotional, dramatic scene, but we just got Liam at the door, and then cut to after the conversation. Grrrr.

Emma telling her parents (and Henry) what Neal did to her. I'm guessing she didn't tell them before Snowflake was born because I can't imagine them naming their kid after the person who sent their daughter to prison as a teenager, and I guess afterward he was a great hero and they'd decided he had no choice, and he saved them all by sending Emma to jail and ensuring that she was the Savior (grrrr). But normal people would have been upset, and they needed to know. Maybe she didn't say anything before they named the baby because she was trying to take the high road, and then he died, so it didn't really matter, and then it would have been awkward after they named the baby, but then Henry started being a jerk to Hook about not being his dad, and then Emma might have just blurted it all out to Henry with her parents present, that Neal wasn't exactly a saint, and Henry can't expect her to put her life on hold in his memory. Meanwhile, her parents cringe in the background because they realize what a goof they made. (Yeah, I know, this is pure fantasy, but it's closer to the way real people would act.)

[Camera One]

I have mixed feelings since if the show is going to go with the usual handwave, then it might be more damaging.  The Graham thing was just so horrific that I can't see how Emma could still want to be Regina's BFF.  

[Shanna Marie]

3 minutes ago, Camera One said:

I have mixed feelings since if the show is going to go with the usual handwave, then it might be more damaging.  The Graham thing was just so horrific that I can't see how Emma could still want to be Regina's BFF.  

On this show, I could see her somewhat forgiving the actual murder since Regina was evil then and she's supposedly changed since then. But, depending on when the confession happened, the real issue for the friendship would be Regina not telling. It was Hook trying to hide what he did to her grandfather that she was mad about, not the actual murder (though in that case, it was long before he knew her and it wasn't aimed at hurting her the way Graham's murder was). So the real friendship betrayal would be that even after Regina was supposedly good, she never confessed and she spent all that time berating Emma about saving Marian and ruining her life while knowing that she'd murdered Graham in order to keep him away from Emma.

If, say, Regina confessed it during Neverland, as soon as Regina switched sides, then maybe Emma could have got past it, especially after the Missing Year and Regina giving up Henry to Emma. But if she hasn't told by the time she's whining at Emma about ruining her life by saving Marian, then that's a huge betrayal and their so-called friendship is based on a foundation of lies.

[Camera One]

With the case of Graham, it was something that Emma and Henry would probably have thought about (unlike Hook's secret, which could very well have stayed buried for eternity).  I mean, Henry outright believed that Regina killed Graham in Season 1 and Emma knew full well that Regina had a vault of hearts.  I suppose Emma could have gone back and forth about whether Regina killed Graham or whether it was just a heart attack, but she never felt comfortable enough to ask Regina what really happened?  

[Shanna Marie]

4 minutes ago, Camera One said:

I suppose Emma could have gone back and forth about whether Regina killed Graham or whether it was just a heart attack, but she never felt comfortable enough to ask Regina what really happened?  

You do have to wonder why it never came up, when Henry was so convinced previously.

Of course, knowing this show, if Regina had confessed, she would have been given credit for confessing, no matter how late in the game it happened. It would only have really altered events if Emma had found out some other way than Regina just telling her, and then Emma could have felt betrayed. I don't know what Henry's deal was, other than the lobotomy he got during season three. Maybe when Regina erased his memory of her plotting to kill his whole family when he shockingly wasn't on board with it, she also erased his belief that she killed Graham. I don't know why Emma never put two and two together when she learned Henry was right about Regina being the evil queen and after she learned that heart ripping and crushing was a real thing.

I guess some of the "should have happened but never did" scenes would have altered the series rather than just fleshing it out, if the characters were allowed to act like people. If Emma had learned about Graham, it really should have changed things because she wouldn't have wanted to be friends with Regina and wouldn't have taken such strides to help her. Other scenes we should have seen might have just made the show make more sense. Like, if we'd seen Regina admitting to Snow that Cora was the one to blame for Daniel's death and Regina was done seeking revenge, that would have made their relationship make so much more sense rather than Snow happily hanging out with someone who'd never said she was done trying to get revenge on her.

I don't know that Emma telling her parents and Henry about Neal would have changed anything. It just might have added some nuance to the relationship.

[Camera One]

Now I'm aching for a Season 9 scene where guest star Emma comes back and sits in a rocking chair with Lucy, Jacinda, Henry, her child, etc. sitting on a circle around her, as she tells the story of Cleo and how she got her red leather jacket.

Edited April 26, 2019 by Camera One

[ronanb027]

On 5/19/2018 at 10:48 PM, Daisy said:

the Struggle to Believe 
vs the Struggle of Reality

:like: 

Still, I love how they made the fairy tale and reality mixed.

[Shanna Marie]

Adding to my list of scenes we should have seen:

We really should have seen at least some of Henry and Hook looking at houses in the classified ads and choosing the house for Emma. For one thing, I wonder when it happened, since Hook had been sticking close to Emma and Henry had been hanging out with Violet. Was this what was going on while Merida was kidnapping Belle, after the jailbreak? Then it would have been after Violet friendzoned Henry, so was part of this Hook attempting to console/distract Henry? It would have also been an opportunity for culture clash fun, with a modern American teen and a storybook pirate trying to choose a house (talk about an episode of House Hunters!). And it might have given us some insight into how they each saw Emma, since they were picking what they thought Emma would want. Henry grew up in a mansion and then spent a year living in a New York apartment, so how would that affect the kind of house he'd want? And then Hook doesn't seem to have lived in a house since he was a small child (if then). He's spent almost all of his very long life living on ships, so not only is he clueless about houses in our world, he doesn't have any real experience with homes of any kind. He'd hardly know what to look for. The conversation could have been a lot of fun to see.

Of course, actually seeing the process would have made Henry look even worse in season 6 when suddenly he resents Hook moving into the house they picked out together for them all to live in.

[KingOfHearts]

13 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

Of course, actually seeing the process would have made Henry look even worse in season 6 when suddenly he resents Hook moving into the house they picked out together for them all to live in.

Henry's relationship with Hook has always been weird. He thought Regina dating Robin was "cool", but Emma dating Hook was ew. Heck, he even approved of Emma dating Walsh. Is it just the hero complex saying a hero shouldn't date a "dirty pirate", or just inconsistent writing? Even though Robin was a "hero", I would think in that stage of the game Henry would be very possessive of Regina. If anything, he'd care less about Emma's love life. Regina was the mom he clung to.

[Shanna Marie]

4 hours ago, KingOfHearts said:

Henry's relationship with Hook has always been weird.

And most of it seems to have happened offscreen.

I may have to revisit this when we get to that point in the rewatch, but the one time he seemed truly negative about Hook (other than during Shattered Sight or the weird offhand mention of not being okay with Emma going on a date with Hook even while practically forcing her to ask him out) was in that season six episode right after Hook moved in and Henry was acting all resentful, even though he and Hook had picked out the house together for them to all live in, with features that specifically appealed to Hook (like the view of the ocean). My sense of things at that time was that it was less about Hook himself and more about resenting the interloper. But, as you said, he seems far closer to Regina as a "mom" while Emma is more of a friend he visits sometimes and hangs out with, so why was he totally okay with Regina's relationship with Robin and upset about someone moving in with Emma? It's possible, given the snarl about Hook not being his father, that it has something to do with replacing Neal. Regina was always a single parent, so a new boyfriend there doesn't replace Henry's father, but Henry's father was at one time paired with Henry's biological mother, so Emma being with someone else "replaces" Neal, even though Neal's dead. True, he didn't get upset about her being with Walsh, but that was a Henry who'd never met Neal, who knew of him only as the guy who got his mom pregnant and then abandoned her. This Henry thinks of Neal as a great hero, so maybe he thinks Emma is dishonoring Neal's memory by moving on (even if she'd never have ended up back with Neal even if Neal had lived).

But it really would have worked better if we'd seen any of those offscreen scenes between Hook and Henry. Did he enjoy the sailing lessons or did he pout through the whole thing because he resented being forced to spend time with Hook, and he was determined not to like him? He referred to Hook as being a great teacher in the AU, so he didn't seem to have resented it, but without seeing even a second of those scenes, we can't tell.

Seeing the house hunting process might also have shed some light. Were they looking together for things they both liked, or was there conflict over the features Hook wanted, and they had to compromise on the house they felt Emma would like most?