Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26159109-20160201202653/@comment-26159109-20160208042308

Shadows Vale wrote: Eskaver wrote: Shadows Vale wrote: Eskaver wrote: ItachiIshtar wrote: Eskaver wrote: CoolDudeAl wrote: Eskaver wrote: I will rather not go into story dilemmas as I don't like shipping wars.

Simple noite: Emma is with Hook and that simply needs to accepted. I don't even like Hook, but even the stedfast Neal lover should know that whatever poor writing that affected Hook and Emma would come back around and still  affect Neal and Emma. Neal and Emma might have your favorite potential, but you do have to remeber the writers are still the same. Changing a character won;t make any bad situation into an awesome one without changing the writing. It wouldn't be exactly the same though, as Neal and Hook have different personalities, and their relationship with Emma is different (first love and father of Henry VS hot rouge met in FTL). Those things alone would change how things played out somewhat. Of course, but Neal being with Emma wouldn't be a saving grace for the show and it would only hurt more since a better character only can fall down harder. As you see with totally fine characters as Snow and David and even Rumple, how they all fell into poor writing spots (or stayed there). Making it Neal wouldn't make things amazing, but only slightly more sound, until they break characters as they like to do these days. Not to mention, Neal did have a large amount of hate, and not just from CS or SQ shippers. The character got plenty of criticism for the whole leaving Emma to go to jail thing (whether it was for "the greater good" or not), the whole Tamara love triangle, for many he did not genuinely feel like the grown up version of Baelfire (there are quite a few people who liked young Baelfire perfectly fine, but couldn't stand Neal), and many found him bland and poorly written in general. Can't say I entirely disagree with some of those reasons. A lot of the so called writing problems on the show have existed prior to Season 3, and believe me Season 2 had its share of critics. It just took Neal dying for some to start noticing these issues. Correct, but the gist is that every character has hate and love, so none of that matters primarily to the story being told. The main point I'm trying to push across is no matter who ended up with Emma, it wouldn't be significantly better than any other with the same writing skills left in tack. That isn't necessarily true. Had they left Neal with Emma, then the writers wouldn't have to try so hard to make us believe that him and Emma love each other. We could already see they did and had seen their history to help support and build on that. But ever since they decided on Hook, the writing has declined faster than it already was.....to the point they ruined the entire Dark Swan arc by making it all about them. (and the Underworld arc is looking to be the same.) They are trying to force feed us the idea that these two are supposed "true love" and some of us just aren't buying it.

There is also the perspective that even if Hook was the one to end up with Emma, it would have been more organic and less force fed if Neal had been around for Emma to contemplate on. After a while of being conflicted on which guy she wants, she could have found that you can't hold on to the past and need to move forward in live to find your own happiness. Then when she got with Hook, we could feel like it was the right choice and that they really have a connection between them because we would have actually seen the bond form, rather than just being force fed the idea without any solid foundation. It is simple. They would have torn down Neal (like they did to Snow and David) an d make something worse of him. The best idea they had for CS was slow burn and I commend them on that because fastburn Oq shows things look a mess really quickly. Yeah, it would be more organic, but it doesn't mean that the writing suddenly dramtaically improves as they'll work the'r way o degradce Neal as a hero and make him have "un"reasonable skeletons in his closet, like Snow and David and then he'd join the rest of the characters in ruination. And the thing about it is Neal would be hurt as much as Hook simply because Emma and Him are a little more organic, but his Rumple and him will become as bad as Rumbelle. There's no real winning.

So:

+ a little more organic relationship with Emma

- Rumple's cyclical evil spurs

Which in the end doesn't net anything that good. Either way the show's writing was gonna tank.....it just would have been slower if they hadn't been trying to force CaptainSwan down our throats so hard, which wouldn't have happened at all had they killed Hook off back then instead of Neal.

EDIT: Oh, and I have a plethora of issues with OutlawQueen too (Depsite it being my favorite ship cuz I love Regina.) I don't think that CS and OQ is the only reason for the show's decline, it mostly is, but don't forget that there is also Regina, Rumple and Hook "Redemption", the rushed plot with the 11 episodes per season, Disnifying everything, overuse of macguffins and plot devices.