Board Thread:Spoilers!/@comment-26644233-20150711060847/@comment-24950802-20150716003553

August will probably not even be featured much, if at all, in season 5, especially considering how Eion Bailey has just joined the cast of another show (OUaT actors are really good at landing jobs elsewhere, this show seems to be a good platform for a lot of them). So he's gonna be given the Ruby treatment, basically, which is nonsensical to me: Ruby and August are two characters I would expect to tag along with the Scooby Gang, helping to fix the impending problems. And yet they just... don't. They used to, they don't anymore. Why is that? If August is back to being an adult and Ruby is presumably still around, working at Granny's, why don't they help the heroes like they used to? Know what I mean? Behind the scenes, we know the reason. Story-wise, it doesn't make much sense. The writers like to keep their options open, so they don't really get rid of characters like them in case they want to/can use them later on, but then what we get is a sense of incompletion, characters who have never really gone anywhere, both physically and developmentally.

As for Belle, when Snow hugged her after Neal died in 3.15 I was o.o... It was so sweet and I loved it, but at the same time it was like, have they ever even exchanged words before? All through season 2 and the first half of season 3 Belle felt like such an outsider, constantly and consistently being benched. She actually feels like a part of the main group these days, like a true main character (even if she is still wasted). I don't know if it was an organic, gradual process though. It seems like, one episode she doesn't talk to anyone, the next she's rushing into Granny's to tell Emma that Zelena wants to travel back in time and she's all of a sudden a bona fide Scooby Gang member.

Sorry for getting off the Hook-centric topic again. I like Hook and Colin's portrayal. It just feels like most of the characters on the show are very superficial and I can't put my finger on why, like they're just pawns to deal with a half-season crisis. They have such a rich history and yet they still feel so shallow. I can't explain it, but they do. That's true for Hook, Belle, the Charmings, just about anyone (especially the supporting Storybrookers). I think a lot of that stems from the fact that the characters are always explicitly telling us what is going on but what we actually see convinces us otherwise. We are told Regina and Robin are in love, for realz, but I see no chemistry between them and their touching, romantic moments are scarce. We are told Belle is super smart, but all I see is a dumbass on display. We are convinced that Regina is a very good, noble person right now but she's porking a married man and yelling at other people's children. This show sends so many mixed messages and yet they like to constantly send a message across about how "not everything is black and white, everything is complicated, just like in real life..." The only complicated thing about OUaT is its messy writing. What has happened to this show? When Snow had Cora killed, it was a noteworthy moral dilemma that made sense and got you thinking. But Snow and Charming kidnapping a baby because their own baby has a 50% chance of growing up to be evil (as does everyone else) does not make them complex, layered and therefore more human characters. It makes them retarded.

Sorry for the rant. :/ Overthinking about this show (that I love unconditionally, btw) sometimes gets me angry. :P