Why Hook Is Better for Emma than Neal Ever Was: A Comparison
Disclaimer: This is a really REALLY long, gif heavy meta that is Pro Captain Swan, and Anti Swanfire. Therefore, if you like Neal and Swanfire/Swanthief, I would advise against reading this.
Let me start off by saying I don’t hate Neal Cassidy. This mostly has to do with the fact that I’ve known him as Baelfire through Rumplestiltskin’s back-story. Baelfire was a boy who grew up in a broken family. To his knowledge, his mother died, and his father was the town coward. Then after a series of unfortunate events, Rumple became The Dark One, and Baelfire got sucked through a portal. He was left to fend for himself in a land without magic, with nobody to call family. Now, who can’t sympathize with an abandoned teenage boy?
The thing is, Baelfire grew up, and ultimately became Neal Cassidy. In the time it took for him to go from a lost boy to an adult, his personality and character had changed.
Cue episode Tallahassee.
Meeting Emma
Neal: When Neal and Emma first meet, Emma is a young girl who recently ran away from her foster home. Neal is arguably older than her (although it is never explicitly stated exactly how old he is, I assume he should be in his early 20s). Let’s bring back the issue of Emma’s age. She is 17 years old - I’ll refresh that in a new (visual) perspective; The actress Abby Ross (who played young Emma in Snow Drifts) is currently 16 years old. That makes her just one year shy of what Emma is supposed to look like when Neal and Emma first meet:
With that in mind, 17 year old Emma is engaging in (possibly unprotected) sexual activity (I’m not going to get into statutory rape or anything like that because Neal’s age is never confirmed, and that isn’t even the point of this section anyway) which leads to her pregnancy. Straight off the bat, their timing couldn’t be worse.
It doesn’t get better. While neither party know that Emma is pregnant, they decide to follow up on a (serious) crime that Neal committed a few years prior. That’s when August steps in and interferes with their budding (and quite frankly, reckless) romance. He convinces Neal to leave Emma. In the process, Neal let’s Emma take the fall for his crime, and leaves her in prison for 11 months.
Therefore in Emma’s eyes, she is left to rot in jail by the first person she ever fell in love with. She is forced to give up her child (Henry) because she doesn’t believe that she is enough for him. Through these events, Emma becomes permanently damaged. It goes on to affect the way she looks at herself, the way she looks at love, and the way she looks at trust.
Hook: 11 years later, Emma finds herself in the Enchanted Forest, trying to find her way home (Tallahassee). The show already begins to associate Emma and Hook as a romantic pairing because of its direct parallel to the Neal story-line. As a stark contrast to Emma and Neal, Hook meets Emma when she is 28 years old. She is now a mature adult, who is a lot less impressionable/vulnerable, and a lot more set in her ways.
Hook and Emma have to team up to acquire the compass, and they have their first adventure together up a beanstalk. With Neal’s betrayal (keep in mind that at this point in time, Emma still doesn’t know the truth about Neal), Emma has her walls sky high. Regardless of this, Hook sees her for who she really is (more on that later in the section: Understanding Emma). They end up working splendidly as a team, and they are ultimately successful in getting the compass.
Then their relationship [temporarily] takes a turn for the worse; Emma does to Hook what Neal did to her, and abandons him. This is because she is afraid to trust him. Why? There is something about him that makes her feel as if they could form a meaningful connection. But because the last meaningful connection she formed ended terribly, Emma expects Hook to do what Neal did and leave her - so she does it first. Later on - to Emma’s surprise - Hook tells her that he wouldn’t have done what she did:
Now look at Emma’s immediate reaction to this:
She feels shocked and guilty at the same time. Emma is incredibly taken aback that it is possible someone wouldn’t just abandon her right away (like her parents, and like Neal). There’s a lot more to extract from this, but I’ll stop here because the point is this; During their introductions, Hook is contrasted to Neal in a positive light - given the choice, he would have stayed.
Understanding Emma
Neal: There has been little evidence over the series showing if Neal truly understands Emma. Despite both having been abandoned, they are not very alike. Even in terms of abandonment, they are different. To her knowledge for most of her life, Emma was left at the side of the road right after birth. She never knew if her parents loved her, or wanted her. At times, she even doubted if they existed at all. Neal on the other hand, unknowingly (and indirectly) caused the events that led to Rumple choosing magic over him. This happens when he is already a teenager and has already been raised lovingly by Rumple up until then.
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