Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26159109-20160201202653/@comment-26159109-20160207163142

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. I completely disagree. Emma and Neal had something that Emma and Hook didn't have and that is a shared history, history that affected both characters and created a genuine conflict, or at least a better conflict than lips curse and keeping secrets all the time, a history that clearly had more to it than what that was actually shown (does anybody even remembers the money?!). Moreover, the characters wouldn't have acted completely OOC cause they liked Neal better than Hook, which is another aspect of the decline in the writing.