[Because everything in Mozzie's life experiences has taught him that this is the way the world works.]

Yeah. And by the time canon rolls around, he's been routinely cutting off all chance to see that it might not be, because he takes you-can't-fire-me-I-quit to an art form.

While still being very, very loyal to Neal and being hurt when Neal doesn't trust him (telling him the stash was in Portland, etc) and planning for their retirement together on a tropical island and not seeing the contradiction in this at all.

[(This is the backstory of that first job with Wilkes that they talk about in Front Man, which will get finished someday.)]

Ooh. I eagerly await more of that. Especially when it deals with facing the fact that there are very few true victimless crimes, and even if you do have a strong moral core going into it, things aren't always so cut-and-dried. (Moral dilemmas! Shades of grey! These are the best things.)

[He's been refusing to go along with what Mozzie thinks is the sensible course of action ever since the first job, when he decides to give up his chance to steal billions of dollars from Adler to spend the evening on a park bench with Kate. [...] But this sudden inability to stand up to Mozzie and say 'this is not what I want' makes no sense.]

I'm not sure how sudden it is, really. Going back to what's probably the relevant conversation in the Adler arc between Neal and Mozzie, Neal doesn't really seem all that inclined to stand up to him:

Mozzie: Adler makes the transfer on Friday. And you still haven't gotten the password yet.
Neal: I said I'll get it. I'll get it.

Mozzie: Oh, good, because i thought you were having second thoughts about abanonding your new town-and-country lifestyle. Don't kid yourself. Kate doesn't even know your real name. None of them do.

Neal: They care about me, okay? She cares about me.

Mozzie: Uh, no, She cares about Nick Halden. And he doesn't exist. I hear the suit's been asking around about you. He has a sketch.

Neal: Where did he get a sketch?

Mozzie: Oh, they always have a sketch or a print or something. Look, it's time to finish this job and move on.

(Neal nods, looking less than fully at ease with this.)

seems to imply that at that point he's already having reservations, but he doesn't come out and say No, I'm not doing this. He doesn't commit to one course of action. It's after that conversation that he asks Adler for the password, and after he gets the password that he's persuaded to stay with Kate, and after he misses the meeting by staying with Kate that he goes back and either lies to Mozzie or just lets him assume that he didn't get the password, saying "You said it yourself. This is a long con." By the time Adler disappears, Mozzie seems to still think Neal is working the con. If he'd intended to stand up to Mozzie and back out of the con, he wouldn't have gotten the password, and he wouldn't have let Mozzie believe he couldn't get it.

...which, you know, may be contorting the character to fit the script. Forging Bonds is not even an episode I particularly like, because it felt like the writers were trying really too hard to make everything and everyone and every scrap of backstory they'd hinted at fit an arbitrary plot to set up the season villain, and it gave me headache upon headache when I was trying to work out timelines. (I eventually decided that Neal got on a greyhound in St. Louis heading toward NYC and a series of increasingly improbable events delayed their arrival for five years. And also that Diana was a Time Lady.) The episode just seemed poorly-written, to me.

Which is always one of the interesting problems with canon: sometimes things ring true as character motivations, and sometimes you have to say "...no. Bad writers," and pull an I-reject-your-canon-and-substitute-my-own. And those spots will tend to vary wildly from viewer to viewer. :P

[He was willing to say goodbye to Mozzie at the end of S1. And Mozzie certainly doesn't approve of Neal running around trying to shoot people, and Neal isn't discouraged in the slightest.]

Though I feel like at that point, there wasn't really anything Mozzie could argue against. Neal was off to live a life of adventure, having been part of what could be read as a fantastically successful inside con on the FBI, with his government-sponsored disappearing act. He might not approve of Neal plotting out a whole future with Kate, replete with the assumptions of stability and domesticity, but he can't argue with Neal grabbing his freedom to pursue a life which just doesn't include him as a major fixture. Mozzie has, after all, been the one training it into Neal's head that people leave you, and stability and family isn't something Guys Like Them get, in the end. He hasn't left himself an avenue to put up a fight.

But when it comes to the choice between disappearing from under the FBI's nose and fleeing with the score of a lifetime vs. staying with the FBI on a two-mile leash and burrowing deeper into this illusion of domestic bliss, he has no problem pushing Neal and pushing hard, the way he did with the Adler con, because he sees Neal as someone who clearly needs instruction on this point.

And there are things like... well. Neal didn't want to listen to the black-box recording of Kate's plane with Mozzie; he came around. Neal didn't want to watch Ellen's video with Mozzie; he came around. Neal was committed to going after Fowler with a gun, to the point where he crashed through a con to do so (and seriously, the amount Neal screwed up about all of that – being on surveillance stealing a gun, grabbing the knife to slash the banner securement without gloves, leaving it behind, making the most conspicuous entrance ever, destroying what may or may not have been a valuable museum piece to make a warning shot against Fowler – that was pure, singleminded determination, no flare, no outside concern), and yet he didn't shoot Fowler, and he came around and thanked Mozzie for his part in stopping him. Neal might be very good at doing what he puts his mind to doing, but the impression I always got of him was someone who'd come across as completely intractable in the short term, but who could be talked around or swayed over time. Which is a quality I read both Mozzie and Peter as relying on, each of them trying to bring Neal around to their specific worldview.

[And I've ranted at length about this elsewhere, but I feel like S3 is primarily plot-driven, not character-driven - Neal won't stand up to Mozzie because the plot won't work if he does.]

Hah. I'm reminded of the analysis, I can't remember who made it, that Hamlet spends almost all of his play approaching and backing off from killing his uncle, and there are all sorts of theories on why he does this, like maybe he has some kind of oedipal issue, or maybe this, or maybe that... but that's not the reason he does it; the reason is that there have to bee three acts stuffed in the middle and they've got to come from somewhere. Which is how I feel about a lot of White Collar, sometimes; the logic centers of Neal's brain shut down so he can't figure out the blindingly obvious (there's a map, there's an X in Bordeaux on the map, X marks the spot; or, there's a letter from Kate, they used to communicate with codes in letters, maybe he should look for a code) for half an episode, because they need some dramatic tension from somewhere, right? Or, Kate has to be off in the shadows doing mysterious and vaguely manipulative things for an entire season because they need something out of reach for Neal to obsess over, right? Halp, how do you plot, how does plot arc.

And then we as viewers – who, to be fair, have a lot more time to sit back and pick things apart than the writers likely had to weave them together – have to find some way all of this slightly nonsensical stuff can make sense.

[Neal wants to run off with the treasure because, well, the plot requires him to want it. But we get no other explanation. I don't understand why he wants the treasure. I honestly don't believe he does want it.]

I really don't think he wants it, either.

I think he's much more motivated by not wanting to disappoint Mozzie, in the same way that he doesn't want to disappoint Peter, even though both of those goals end up having him playing parts he's not cut out to be. (Peter wants him to settle down and be a nice young man who isn't tempted by the con; Mozzie wants him to never settle down and stop relying on these transitory interpersonal relationships which are bound to let him down.) And I don't think Neal is lying when he says it's about the people – I feel like he wants to belong with people, he wants to feel like he can have stable relationships with people, he can rely on people, he won't blink and have those people disappear. But he has no idea how one goes about getting that. And the only thing in his life that he's been able to make work is this sort of transaction-based paradigm; he plays a role that gives someone what they want, they respond by giving him the connection which he craves. He stops working the law with Peter, Peter vanishes. He stops working the con with Mozzie, Mozzie vanishes. And when those two goals come in direct conflict, a holding pattern is the best he can do until his hand is forced one way or another.

[(I feel like in S3 and parts of S4 the show veers wildly back and forth between "crime is fun and sexy and exciting and isn't Neal shiny wheeeeeeeeeee!" and anvilicious moralizing along the lines of "Neal is a very bad person who must learn the error of his ways and stealing and lying are bad and wrong and will totally screw up your life" ... with no acknowledgement of any shades of grey in between. This is incredibly frustrating, because the shades of grey in between is where all the interesting stuff is, IMO. *sigh* I keep wanting this show to be more morally complex than it is. But I guess that is what fic is for.)]

Hooo, yeah. ~_~ My pet peeve is more with the fact that Neal is so damn good at what he does that there's almost never any consequence that forces him to confront the complexity of what he's doing, and, I mean, by the end of S3, even Peter is calling him on it. ("Neal breaks the rules, but because he's Neal, there's never any repercussion for it, and he gets a gold star." I'm probably paraphrasing.) As the seasons wear on, more consequence becomes apparent, but it's usually all consequence that falls directly on the Burkes' house and caves in their roof. (Which makes a certain amount of sense – Peter and El, as law-abiding sorts, are tied into a more rigid framework of available options and possible consequence. But it still makes me want to hit the writers with things.) And that sort of "Nothing bad ever comes from what I'm doing!" "NEAL, YOU ARE DOING A BAD THING, LISTEN TO ME AND STOP THE BAD THING YOU ARE DOING." dichotomy doesn't leave a lot of room for anything but glamorization and moralizing.

...there was, in one edition of GURPS, a trait (feat? attribute? other term? I haven't touched GURPS or any other tabletop RP system in years) which stuck in my head, though I don't have all the technical detail down and can only remember the gist of it. It was called Jinx, I believe, and it basically gave your character a boost in skill points or the luck stat or something like that, with a tradeoff that everyone else in your party took a hit to their luck whenever you were nearby. I feel like Neal maxed out his available levels in Jinx.