#ellen729

Rules: Tag 9 people you want to know better and answer the questions.

Name: Grace 

Gender: Female

Birthday: July 6, 1995, so I’m 23 years old going on 24 now. It feels like my generation is getting old so fast! Like, I can’t believe that Hilary Duff, Zac Efron,Taylor Swift, Vanessa Hudgens, Drake Bell, Josh Peck, Emmy Rossum, Lea Michele, Ashley Tisdale Dianna Agron, and Amanda Bynes are already in their early thirties! I can’t believe Miley Cyrus, Dylan and Cole Sprouse, Selena Gomez, Emma Roberts, Taylor Lautner, Kristen Stewart, Justin Bieber, Demi Lovato, Victoria Justice, Sophie Turner, Ariana Grande,  Emma Watson, Jennifer Lawrence, Freddie Highmore, Joe Jonas, Miranda Cosgrove, Anna Sophia Robb, Debbie Ryan, Jaimie Lynn Spears, and Dakota Fanning are all around the same age as me! I can’t believe we’re already in our mid twenties to early thirties! It feels like our childhoods were not that long ago, even though they were over ten years ago! It still feels like I didn’t watch Hannah Montana, The Amanda Show, Sonny with a Chance, The Wizards of Waverley Place, Drake and Josh, Zoey 101, iCarly, Because of Winn Dixie, Hairspray (2007), The Bridge to Terabethia, The Suite Life of Zac and Cody, Jessie, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), Glee, the High School Musical films, Victorious, Unfabulous, Sharkboy and LavaGirl, The Lizzie McGuire series, The Phantom of the Opera, The Twilight Saga, and the Harry Potter movies on TV and in movie theaters when I was a kid growing up with these guys that long ago! I still remember singing You Belong With Me, Teardrops on My Guitar, Love Story, Picture to Burn, Boyfriend, Our Song, Baby, Never Say Never, One Less Lonely Girl, and buying my friend in high school a Justin Bieber album for her birthday because she was obsessed with him back in 2012! I remember being a stupid kid in middle school and high school who thought she was so smart because she managed to read all four of the trashy Twilight novels by Stephanie Meyer in less than a year!!! I remember how fucking stupid I was as a kid for idolizing Edward Cullen’s and Bella Swan’s romance!!! I’ve matured so much since then, we all have, but it still feels like our childhoods/teenage years weren’t that long ago! We’re still relatively young adults! A lot of people older who are over thirty five, would still call us kids, but it feels like we’ve grown/are growing up so damn fast!!! It still feels like we should be babies!!! I think a great thing about those of us in our generation though is just how young most of us still look in our twenties to early thirties for our age!!! Like, I still look the same as I did seven years ago when I was sixteen at nearly twenty-four! Selena Gomez, Dylan and Cole Sprouse, Demi Lovato, Ariana Grande, Victoria Justice,Taylor Swift, Kristen Stewart, Justin Bieber, Vanessa Hudgens, Zac Efron, Emma Watson, Emmy Rossum, and Freddie Highmore still mostly look the same as they did over ten years ago! We’re the generation that seems to age well and/or barely age at all, so long as we take care of ourselves! We’re the age of vampires!! Relationship Status: Single, in the romantic sense, but I have my parents, my brothers, my grandparents, my aunt and my little cousins, and a cat for family.

Favorite Color(s): Any shade of pink, red, or blue

Top 3 Ships:

1). Rumbelle (Rumplestiltskin x Belle) from ABC’s Once Upon A Time, but with conditions. I love how much they love each other, and would do anything for each other when they are both in-character. I’m also a sucker for the whole “love redeems” and BATB tropes in fiction, but they also tend to be the ones that the writers love to fuck up deliberately for shits ad giggles at some point on TV shows when they get bored or lazy. That’s why I only accept their individual characters or relationship together when they are both written in-character, so mostly from S1-3A of canon OUAT and in various canon-divergent/AU scenarios thereafter. However, I feel like the same thing can be said about every other remaining main character/ ship in canon OUAT post 3A. There was a serious nosedive in characterization, consistency, and storytelling integrity after Neal got killed off in canon OUAT, and while there were moments where Rumple, Belle, Emma, and everyone else seemed to be like the characters and relationships I originally fell in love with in canon from 3B-S7, I still feel like the show truly ended most organically and satisfyingly with “Going Home” (3x11), and there were serious problems with the writing starting to show with plot versus character driven writing, rape culture, abuse apology, broken rules of magic, plotholes, and character favoritism, even before 3B in S2. But after Neal got killed off, Hook became the main lead, and they started resurrecting the dead with magic when it suited the plot, they clearly didn’t know what the fuck they were doing anymore, and weren’t trying to tell any sort of story at all by undoing everyone’s original characterizations for plot back-and-forth.Everyone was ruined by illogically ooc, inconsistent, and toxic character destroying plot driven inexcusably bad writing that made absolutely no sense, which made them all unsympathetic and unrecognizable from 3B-S7 at one point or another, including Emma, Belle, the Charmings, and Henry, the “good guys,” so I try to pretend it never happened, and quit watching regularly after S5 to preserve my sanity.

2). Jane Eyre x Mr. Edward-Fairfax Rochester from Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte-Again, I’m a sucker for the whole “love redeems” trope in fiction, and I appreciate how Edward is portrayed as the “dark” one, while Jane is the “virtuous” one, but neither one of them are without their flaws that go unaddressed, which is a big problem with a lot of “love redeems” couples. Their conflicts become hypocritically one-sided. 

3). Anne Shirley x Gilbert Blythe from the Anne of Green Gables series by Lucy Maud Montgomery-These two started out as frenemies, then became best friends in childhood and adolescence, and then eventually got married. The perfect love story!

Last Song I Listened To: I watched and listened to the Hairspay (2007) musical-comedy film adaptation on Netflix with Nikki Blonsky, Amanda Bynes, John Travolta, Zac Efron, Queen Latifah, Christopher Walken, Michelle Pfeiffer, Brittany Snow, James Marsden, Elijah Kelley, and Allison Janney, and have been jamming out to Miss Baltimore Crabs, The Ladies’ Choice, Good Morning Baltimore, I Can Hear the Bells, You Can’t Stop the Beat,  Welcome to the ‘60s, Run and Tell That, Big, Blonde and Beautiful, and Without Love a lot since remembering the music again. Does that count?

Last Movie I Watched: The Silence of the Lambs (1991) with Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins on Netflix.

This episode made me sad, too.

I think being sad about this episode is mostly a good litmus test of whether or not you have a working heart in your chest. Poor Lizard : (

And... yeah, I cannot imagine that to be much fun. I salute you for all you have suffered for your art.

Oh, I’m not blaming the guards. I am blaming whoever (which, you’re right, is probably Cora) made the decision that “oh, she is so obviously dangerous that nobody would ever try to free her”, because that just shows an incredibly poor understanding of human nature. Like... even if the current generation of Wonderlanders is too afraid of the thing to even think about going near that tower, what about in... oh, let’s say 50 years? Sure, that might not be their problem anymore, but... actually, I think I’ve talked myself through to a reasonable explanation. Back to the “human nature” thing, even.

All that aside, I am absolutely fascinated by this character, and the longer she’s around, the better. (I am going to regret saying that, and I just know it, but that’s a problem for future!me *g*)

ellen729 reblogged your post and added:

Found it at the library when I was 11. Bought a...

The thing about the Jabberwock is that we manage...

The fact that she eats fear to survive also takes away a lot of her monstrousness, weirdly enough. I might be terrified of getting eaten by a lion, but I don’t think the lion is evil for trying to eat me in the first place. As for the sword... maybe she was just genuinely afraid of leaving it behind and then one day, some feckless “hero” would show up and pin her to a damn tree. Maybe when you’re immortal, a couple of extra weeks to be safe rather than sorry isn’t that big of a deal.

Honestly, I would have liked to see a redemption arc for Amara. Just not in the time the show had left to work with. As it stands, I think giving her a really solid motivation and a heroic death was a good pick. And I’m really not sure that dying was her Plan A, because she could have done that at any time. We saw that in the finale. The bottles of Cyrus’s brothers were nowhere near her (and definitely not in her possession) when she turned back into water and they were still freed. If she’d know about that, I don’t think she would have let her sons be stuck in that lamp for so long. (Bit of a dick move on Nyx’s part, though)

And yeah, Jafar killing the Sultan... I mean, I have a hard time feeling very sorry for the old guy, because he didn’t get much characterisation beyond “shitty father” and “a lot of regrets”, but the act was so unquestionably (and, I’d say, unnecessarily) cruel that it threw me for a loop. I mean, I knew the Sultan was a dead man walking, but I did not see that particular turn coming. (And Jafar’s actor really was bringing his best in that scene. You could see the last remains of the young boy die in his eyes just before he killed the Sultan. Good stuff, there.)

As for your closing points:

1) same, but like I said: I guess they did what they could with the time they had (and keeping momentum going really is important after your main villain is out of the picture)

2) Maybe her main motivation really was “I do not want this unstable stranger in my home” and once it turned out that Alice might have been unstable, it was because she was grieving and not because she was delusional. Ergo: propblem solved, on with the happy face.

3) ...I don’t think there was a single traditional thing about that wedding. They probably sorted out the legalities in private and had the "real” ceremony without local custom or politics meddling in their affairs.

Just want to highlight some problems with the...

So, I’m in a bit of a dilemma here, because while I agree with you in general and I have no horse at all in the CS-defence race, I do have a bone to pick with point 1) so if you’ll allow me...

The inscription (which is hilariously in modern Greek) says: “Only a heart filled with true [blank] is able pass” in exactly this appaling grammar, because they probably couldn’t fit the “NA” in there.   I’m also pretty sure they misspelled “true”, but this language has five “e” sounds< I am not going to give anyone shit over that.

Anyway, the first letter of that frustrating blank is an A, so it’s safe to assume the word is supposed to be “ΑΓΑΠΗ”. Thing is: while yes, Greek does have all those nifty extra words for different kinds of love, “αγάπη” is still the umbrella term. Telling someone “σε αγαπώ“ is almost exactly the same as “I love you” (as in, you tell that to your close friends, your family, and your romantic partner all the same, and context provides the kind of love you mean--or not, if you’re in act 2 of a friends-to-lovers romcom) There’s also this whole bit how True Love by its definition always includes αγάπη, which is what is tested here. You can be pretty sure of when you feel έρως, but αγάπη is a lot harder to pinpoint. Hence the test, I assume. (I also think that’s why the door only opened after Emma chose to save Hook over herself. The show leaves it a bit ambiguous if they are capiital-T-capital-L True Love, but they do make it clear that they have the potential.

...that got longer than I meant it to. I do want to add that while the crocodile-lion-monster would have been pretty awesome, it’s probably for the best they didn’t mix up mythologies any more than they already did. (Eurydice got out of the Underworld? When did that happen?)

I do love point 2 a whole lot, and I honestly hadn’t thought about it that way. But you’re right -- the scales only weigh Emma’s love, and we don’t even know which. Could be that for Henry. Or for her parents. Could be for Hook, but it’s definitely ambiguous, especially after the spectacular heart-sharing fail earlier.

Yep, you got it.A lot of us also noticed that this...

Eh. I think it would have been better with Baelfire--because of his intensely personal connection to the Dark One curse. I don’t think it would have been good, the way it’s written now. I feel like a broken record, but this twist was not foreshadowed even a little, and swapping Hook for a more interesting choice wouldn’t have helped with that. (Then again, I’m probably more mad about the lack of clues than other people, so I won’t pretend to speak for everyone there.)

The insomnia headcanon works pretty well, though. And now I have this image of the curse taking various forms to get through to Hook and him just going “oh, shut up or I’ll throw a boot after you again”.

As for your last point... yeah. I will admit that I don’t much care about what happens to Hook’s characterisation, but I can’t imagine that his fans were overly thrilled with those implications. I mean, he wasn’t a great person to begin with, but "he got possessed by a force of evil and nobody noticed the difference” still seems like a stretch.

They ruined Marian and they brought Zelena back...

To be fair, Robin was trying to hold on to the only place to stay he had for his family and himself. (Nobody really expected Rumple ever needing that apartment...) Guess he could have offered to go halves and put up a guest bed in the kitchen, but somehow I don’t imagine that suggestion going over well ::cough:: (Mind you, that may have been darkly hilarious to watch. “No offense, Robin, but I would rather die than spend another minute in the same room as your wife. Did rather die, in fact.”)

And I think everyone can agree that if they’d sat down and made a list of “worst ways to bring back Zelena" and picked the winner, it still couldn’t have been worse than what they did. (I may be exaggerating, but not by much <.<)

I hadn’t thought of it, but you’re right, David...

See, Will trying to talk Belle into going for a platonic drink, because he refuses to be miserable alone and them ending up with a pizza and some wine and trying to awkwardly talk about the couple of things they actually have in common would have been fun. Still works with the “someone to make you laugh” reason she gave and, if you absolutely need that sort of thing, could still be misconstrued as a romantic relationship by an across-the-street Rumple.

Just saying. Belle and Will as friends is something I probably wouldn’t just “not have minded”, I would have liked it. (Also, Belle’s friends keep disappearing; she needs new ones)