#jo.uat

once upon a time was absolute cheese from the outset but season 4 is really irking me because atp it feels like you don’t respect your audience or, more importantly imo, your characters. characters are having to “learn” the same lessons over and over again because you are relying on the same flaws and shortcomings to be their weaknesses when we just did entire arcs about them supposedly overcoming those flaws to defeat that arc’s peril. you are Telling me why tensions are high and there is danger but i don’t believe you. you need elsa from frozen to be relevant to emma’s personal journey so you say that emma’s powers are out of her control but instead of introducing the concept in little fits and starts 12 episodes ago when you first introduced elsa and letting it build, letting us see how it undermines emma and eats at her over half a season to put her in a place where she would believably lose faith in herself and her family and seek out a way to get rid of her magic, her magic goes haywire all at once, her family immediately turns on her after one incident, she tries almost nothing before jumping to the nuclear option, and THE VERY NEXT EPISODE. after one exchange with elsa who should not have more sway over her than anyone else presently in her life, she just ~embraces~ her magic and has no more issues. its the cheapest possible attempt at a payoff. emma is having this conversation with gold where he is obviously manipulating her into giving up her power for his benefit, and its infuriating because we know emma is smarter than this, and that scene was written and acted well so the truth of it is that gold is appealing to emma’s deep deep need for affirmation—“you’re a hero. you always make the right choice.”—and this arc especially we’ve spent a lot of time looking back at teen emma and just knowing emma we know and understand how deeply threats to her newfound sense of belonging are felt, so it makes *sense* that scared, vulnerable emma is calling the shots in this scene and is falling for such blatant manipulation but the road to Get there was such bullshit!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!