Board Thread:Character Discussion/@comment-28162607-20180101191335/@comment-28162607-20180101235444

Neal Cassidy

Towards Emma, he was able to reconcile his hatred for magic and for brevity's sake, recognize that Emma would be best to move on from him and to find "Tallahassee". From season 2 to season 3, that is the best, uninterrupted or stagnated redemption arc. (Probably not planned, imo)

For me, the issue with Neal's redemption (I am quite wary of calling it a redemption because he wasn't really a villain but he did some stuff that was pretty damn wrong) with regard to his relationship with Emma is that the writers do not seem to realise that they wrote sexual abuse. Obviously this kind of abuse is wrong but the writers (as they do with many issues with consent) do not seem to realise it, so in their minds Neal did not need to be redeemed from this. So it was never addressed that Neal's relationship with a then underage Emma was inappropriate and wrong.

I know that given the nature of the show it wouldn't-and probably shouldn't-have been addressed, but the point is that the writers apparently do not see sexually abusing a minor as something that needs to be redeemed or is wrong.

Does this make sense? My point is my frustration comes from the fact that Neal's relationship with Emma was not shown as wrong because it appears that, at best, the writers did not think the implications of what they wrote, and so Neal did not redeem himself from abusing a teenager,