KAOS Agent
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Posts posted by KAOS Agent
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The hat was introduced in S1 and could get you to this world too, but the point of the Dark Curse was that Rumpel wanted to get to this world and have magic to go back. This explanation works for rejecting some of the various methods of transport, but not others. And considering Bae was in Neverland, an easily reached magical realm, for at least a century and Rumpel had a crystal ball that could have showed him exactly where Bae was, the whole thing falls apart. I did enjoy Zelena taunting him with the silver slippers. All he needed to do was ask and she would have given them to him.
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11 hours ago, Jynnan tonnix said:
It just strikes me, and I have, obviously, no idea of what is going to happen, but if a True Love's Kiss can break any curse, might not cursing a kiss prove counterproductive? Or is that too logical for this show?
This show and logic do not coexist. In this case, the show has a problem where too many characters have all powerful magic and they need to create random illogical reasons why they can't use their power. Rumpel should be able to kick everyone's ass, but is either apathetic or motivated to not help/actively work for the other side. Regina's magic is now rated below Zelena's because reasons. And we have Emma, who is supposed to have super powerful True Love white magic, but can't because then the story would be over immediately. Logically, if Zelena had just gone about her business, she could have done what she wanted no problems, but there's no story there either. Instead we have all knowing Zelena planning to remove Emma's magic via kiss curse with no explanation of why, if she has this power, she doesn't just roofie Emma's water or something. It's stupid and only used to add drama to Captain Swan.
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That scene is one that demonstrates at least one writer understood how friendships work although maybe it was a fluke given other friendships in the episode. Hook is supportive of Emma, doesn't push her for information she doesn't want to share, asks for permission to look through her mementos and never once makes a snarky comment or makes it about himself. Removing the romantic elements from their relationship and you still have a very strong, supportive friendship. It's exactly the kind of thing Emma needed. It's horrific that we see Emma begging Regina to be her friend and feeling like she was to blame and a horrible person for cutting Lily out of her life (and since we see Lily do a lot worse later on, it's doubly awful) in the same episode as we see such a healthy depiction of friendship for Emma.
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On 6/22/2020 at 10:10 AM, Camera One said:
I suspect they just wanted to burn off a Snow episode early on because the character was boring to write for. Heck, if that final conversation with Emma was originally written for Hook instead of Snow, there would have been ZERO correlation between the flashback and the current plot. It really makes you question these writers and their decisions.
I think they were trying to squeeze in all the Snow centrics in early 3A due to Ginny Goodwin's pregnancy, but it was ridiculous to have the Lost Girl flashback be about anyone other than Emma. There were so many options to take this story and that they initially wanted Emma's realization to come about with Hook and not her mother is demonstrative of how little they cared about Emma/Snow, which is just mind blowing considering that was one of the best parts of S1.
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Because I've been bored, I was trying to come up with my favorite moment for each main character on the show. But something I've realized in thinking about moments I loved is that I can't really come up with many anymore. The later seasons of the show soured me even on the things I used to love. That said, here are some of my favorites:
Snow - Using the candle and Regina to kill Cora. Harder paths be damned, this was by far the best Snow White moment (S2)
David - Sword fighting the guards with Baby Emma in his arms (S1)
Rumpel - Killing himself and Pan with the dagger (S3)
Belle - That time she actually kicked Rumpel to the curb and forced him out of town (S4)
Zelena - That time she picked apart all of Regina's woe is me complaints and told her "enough with the martyr complex". (S3)
Hook - The entirety of the S3 finale. (S3)
Emma - Her entire role in Hat Trick. It's one of the few times where Emma is allowed to show her street smarts and she gets the win without it being taken away. (S1)
Regina - That time she apologized to everyone and admitted she was wrong. Oh wait... I liked her when she and Rumpel were screwing with each other (but not when they were screwing each other).
Henry - When he was totally indifferent to everything because he was a normal kid with happy childhood memories (S3)
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They film the entire season at once, they only split the episodes for release. Tom Ellis had an initial agreement to go forward, which means availability was not an issue. I don't see anyone quibbling about scheduling/availability at the moment because no one knows anything about filming going forward. If anything, availability would be more flexible because everything is up in the air at the moment. Projects that were filming and then shutdown will likely be finished once they figure out how to go back to work, but anything beyond that is totally unknown.
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On 3/24/2020 at 10:50 AM, KingOfHearts said:
With few exceptions, A&E were allergic to setup and payoff. You know how many dropped plots they had? How many teases came up and went nowhere?
There were two reasons for this. One - because they was very little forward planning and a whole lot of shiny toy/wouldn't this be cool? ideas that they quickly tired of or simply didn't know how to resolve and so they got dropped. Two - because they couldn't handle the idea of fans figuring things out. No clues could actually be given because fans might be smart enough to connect the dots and that was not okay with the showrunners.
These idiots considered changing Bae/Neal from being Henry's father because fans were speculating that might be the case. Now I personally wouldn't have minded Henry's father being a non-fairy tale related character, but changing an entire plot because fans had pegged it right is just stupid. If they can't handle fans speculating correctly, then they definitely aren't going to drop fun clues for the audience, so all you get is random twists that come out of nowhere. More disturbing though, is that the Neal/Henry/Emma connection could be considered to be easily dismissed by the writers since that was a huge part of the season 2 plot for several of their main characters.
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It definitely helps the audience believe something when an established character trait conveniently aids the villain or the heroes. We don't know how often Dru has visions because we are only going to see the ones that are relevant to the story, but the implication is that she has them more than just when the Scoobies are planning something. She's had them for centuries. It could also explain why she managed to be so long lived even though she's fragile and not entirely there mentally.
Once never managed to explain the omniscience of its characters and it frequently removed me from the story due to the implausibility of it all.
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7 hours ago, LuvMyShows said:
Was Goose being blackmailed, like they thought speech-giving-man was when they thought he was skimming money from the foundation and that the foundation-running woman was helping? Was anyone skimming money from the foundation, and if so, why did they pass the IRS audit?
The foundation guy was the father and was using a foundation account to funnel the payments to the kid's mother. The murderer was aware of all of this and killed the kid to protect the foundation. The IRS didn't discover that the account was fraudulent in their investigation, but if had Ray come forward, everything would have fallen apart.
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From showrunner Joe Henderson
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Lana Parrilla was reported to be in a pilot for a FOX show that I believe has been picked up, but she is not listed in the cast now. She is in some movie with Shia LeBeouf, but nobody is really clear about when it's coming out and they completed filming summer 2018.
I do think there is some level of playing to the room about Regina. The people who are at those kind of things are superfans who paid big bucks for the chance to reminisce about a character on a show that's been off the air for well over a year. Not that she isn't totally in love with the character herself, just that it's also what the audience wants.
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2 hours ago, Camera One said:
Even though I cheered on Emma, the actress who played Regina (and Rumple) really did a great job in the sense that I could still feel for them and even felt sympathy for them despite knowing the horrible deeds they committed.
The thing is that in S1, they largely contained Regina's villainy to revenge on Snow. It was in S2 where she started massacring villages and then later had her crushing the hearts of randoms just because she was sad. They had her claim that all of her victims were collateral damage in her battle against Snow, but that does not work when they have her killing a groom on his wedding day or murdering a jester because he's annoying or taking extreme pleasure in the death and destruction she wrought. She was much more redeemable in S1 having never crossed any of the several moral event horizons she crossed later in the series.
Mayor Regina also wasn't overpowered. While she had a huge advantage information-wise, she was on the same level as Emma and everyone else. It made her more relatable and sympathetic as a single woman struggling to keep her adoptive son when his birth mother shows up in town.
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I suspect that the Cinderella story was supposed to play out across the full season with the other threads being woven in as the season went on. They had to course correct early in the season when their new main storyline was not well received. With ratings falling even further they knew they didn't need to set up for a S8 and jumped to a poorly thought out new big bad. You'll notice that they quit caring about the Henry/Jacinda/Lucy stuff. The originals (Regina, Rumpel and Hook) got more focus, they brought back Zelena and gave Alice, one of the few new characters to enjoy popularity, a larger role in the story.
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9 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:
But I think my point about how she could have been returning all those hearts during the Missing Year still stands. I guess maybe she did and It Happened Offscreen, since I don't recall seeing random hearts in the vault after that, but if you show a character taking hearts and then you redeem that character, you'd think it would be a good idea to mention the fact that she's returned them all or given proper burials to those she can't return so that she no longer has a heart collection.
Funny story, there's an answer to this. Here's a fun dialogue between Regina and Wish!Robin from 6.12:
QuoteRegina: I didn't bring you here for that. We need to talk. Were you really going to kill Nottingham?
Robin: Wait, you're not judging me for that, are you? You told me it was your curse that created this place. I mean bloody hell, look around. I mean, wh-what's in these?
Regina: Uh The hearts of my enemies, but, I...
Robin: Oh. And this? This looks nasty enough.
Regina: Oh, no, don't touch it! It's powerful. Yes, I know I sound like a hypocrite. But I have changed.
She's changed, y'all! I mean all those poor people are wandering around heartless not being able to fully feel emotion, but why bother to give them back? They're Regina's enemies. They obviously don't deserve them. It's not like half of her perceived enemies have been shown to be innocent people.
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I believe Graham was originally intended to be Sherlock Holmes.
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Did we know at that point that she had the vault full of hearts or did that happen later after we got the Cora backstory? I suspect the vault in Storybrooke was something they came up with once they made Cora the Queen of Hearts and even though it was part of an actual plan (Hershey voiced the queen in Hat Trick) that was something they were keeping under wraps until S2.
I also think the heart thing wasn't fully thought out at that point. They showed her control Graham with the heart in S2, but I'm not sure they planned for the control thing to work in S1. She could kill him, but maybe not use the magic in magic-less Storybrooke. Otherwise, why wouldn't she just use Graham's heart to order him around in S1? She didn't want him hiring Emma, so why not just grab the heart and stop him? She was freaked that he was remembering. How hard would it have been to order him to forget everything? It's really easy to pull the story apart given what they showed us happened later, but looking at S1 in a bubble, I think you have to assume that there was no magic in Storybrooke and she had no magic ability. That's why she had to use Daniel's magical picture to get the poisoned apple.
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2 hours ago, Camera One said:
They only seem to identify a few goalpost "twists", that only stretch to half a season, if that. I don't know if they're overconfident procrastinators, or they enjoy switching gears every few episodes, or what.
They are ideas guys. Everything is wouldn't it be cool if... with them. I think that there were some fantastic ideas that the show put out there, but without anyone supervising the follow through, they often ended up falling flat. When there's a pattern of no payoff, the idea of getting invested isn't appealing.
It's telling that the most cohesive stories were the ones that had outside management. They may not have been everyone's cup of tea, but they usually made some sense. In S1, you had both the network and outside advisors like Damon Lindelof providing some guidance. In S3, the network stepped in again after the ratings disaster of S2. For S4A they literally had Disney's Chief Creative Officer on set to make sure they didn't damage the billion dollar Frozen franchise. After that I think the network quit caring. The quality from 4B on is pretty dismal. Things can get a bit echo chamber-y on this forum, so I found it interesting that the posters on Once's subreddit were also in agreement on this same topic.
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8 hours ago, Camera One said:
I suppose it might be explained by the corruptible influence of magic, but even other villains didn't go to those extremes.
Which is where Regina's long term actions become less understandable. Rumpelstiltskin was the Dark One. He was the living embodiment of evil and even he was taken aback by some of Regina's actions. When the Dark One is questioning your life choices, it might be time to reassess.
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I don't think many would argue that Regina's irrational response makes sense in a twisted way. It was an interesting way to make Snow pretty blameless and still fully responsible in Regina's mind. I looked at the TWoP archive from this episode, which gave the immediate episode reaction, and most agree with your sentiments.
The issue is that the responses in this thread are all from at least two years after the episode aired, such that her backstory has been much more fleshed out and all of Regina's actions after this event occurred are being evaluated based on this inciting event.
That said, there are still a lot of evil actions that had been depicted in S1 to evaluate and question how the Young!Regina pictured here turned to full fledged psychopathy. Irrational hatred and need for vengeance on Snow make sense, but we've seen her send little children to their deaths, murder her own father, gleefully enslave, rape and murder Graham, arrange to have her friend Kathryn murdered, and curse an entire kingdom. And yet she feels not a twinge of guilt. She shows little emotion at all except when she's hurting people. Then she's reveling in it. The murder of Daniel does not explain her utter joy at torturing people not related in any way to Snow. If she were simply coldly going about getting the ingredients for her vengeance, I could see it - especially when combined with other events in the story. But she just flat out gets off on hurting others and that isn't something that would come out of Daniel's death.
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6 minutes ago, Speakeasy said:
Hang on, how did she react to Rumpelstiltskin claiming to be her fairy godfather back in season 1? Was she all 'but there's no such thing as fairies and magic!' back then?
Nope. For someone who didn't believe magic existed a couple of hours earlier, she has zero reaction to the magical things in front of her. And she knows exactly what the wand is.
From 1.04:
Cinderella: Who are you?
Godmother: I’m your fairy godmother. And I’m here to change your life, Cinderella.
Cinderella: But, my stepmother told me that I couldn’t go. She forbade me to leave.
Godmother: Your stepmother doesn’t have this. This wand has the power to take you to your ball, to your prince, and to- (The fairy godmother suddenly disintegrates, dropping her wand. Rumpelstiltskin appears and picks it up.)
Cinderella: What… What did you do?
Rumpelstiltskin: Now, now. I got what I wanted. There’s no need to be frightened.
Cinderella: No need? You just killed my fairy godmother. She was trying to help me.
Rumpelstiltskin: Was she? Do you know what this is? (Rumpelstiltskin holds up the wand.)
Cinderella: Pure magic.
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Regina stormed into Snow's wedding and made a very public demonstration of magic and a proclamation of future plans. That entire throne room was full of people including, one would assume, people from other kingdoms. It's not a secret at all. The Evil Queen's threat would have reverberated throughout the lands. Cinderella's ball occurred after that wedding. It's ridiculous to have Cinderella say that magic does not exist.
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11 hours ago, Camera One said:
Did regular people believe on wishes on a star or fairy godmothers? If so, people would be more hopeful, but usually Enchanted Forest characters suffered horrible fates and no one came to help them.
Wasn't there an episode where Cinderella was totally disbelieving in magic? And by that time we knew that her kingdom and Snow's were really close (Snow & David attended that ball the same day she commented how magic didn't exist), so how could she have missed the crazy magic wielding Evil Queen in the kingdom next door? At the very least, her kingdom should have been flooded with refugees fleeing the carnage and everyone should have been fearful about Regina getting ideas and invading their lands as well. None of it works if you put even the slightest thought into it.
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There was an excellent fan fic that detailed the lives of the random citizens in Storybrooke that took into account the details we were given about society on the show. One of the recurring characters (each chapter was about a different person) was Regina's assistant in the mayor's office and her reactions to in story events were always enjoyable.
The show did introduce numerous storylines about civic responsibility. There was the sheriff's election in S1. Regina had city council meetings and there was something about Henry's castle being torn down as part of her mayoral push for something better (remember guys, Regina is the best. mother. ever.) There was some kind of attempt to show a melding of the two worlds in 2.02, but they never really took it any further than that. Snow took over the mayor role and held listening sessions or something. Then Snow was hauled out of her home days after giving birth to fix the electric plant because somehow that's the mayor's job - maternity leave be damned. They did make the running of Storybrooke a part of the show when it suited them.
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I was watching "Broken" last night and it reminded of how badly this show always fell down the real emotional consequences of things. Emma was absolutely right when she told her mother that they sent her away to save everyone. What was done was not necessarily in Emma's best interests. Yes, she would have been murdered then, so by that point it was necessary, but Snowing had plenty of other options that they never explored because they could always fall back on Emma being the Saviour.
That they doubled down on this in "Awake" and explicitly had Snowing slam the door on their daughter while acknowledging that they were sacrificing her happiness for others burns me up. At least in "Broken" Emma was allowed to have feelings about it. By the time S6 rolled around, Emma was expected to not even have a reaction. They wrote a story that should have been extremely emotionally charged and then just shrugged it all off like it meant nothing. How boring.
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A Thread for All Seasons: This Story Is Over, But Still Goes On.
in Once Upon A Time
· Edited by KAOS Agent
I think the only one that ever made sense to me being a constant presence was Emma and her WALLS™; as tedious as it got that they seemingly could not manage to actually let her have feelings about events that should have driven the conflict and the building of said walls. Emma was psychologically traumatized as a young child and as a teen - all of it based on her lack of love and self worth. That's not something she would ever truly get over no matter how much therapy she attended and how much love was showered on her by her family. But the show generally had her family distrusting her/sacrificing her happiness/screwing her over time and again, and then presented Emma having any negative reaction to that as wrong. They almost never showed the good side of the Charming family bonding, mostly all we saw were all kinds of triggers for Emma in her parents' various reactions and their distrust and lying and outright choosing everyone else over her. It doesn't really matter to me that half the time they had Emma just accepting things, it wasn't realistic. Or if I go with her accepting things, then I see it as a reflection of her still believing she has no value, which is horrible for someone who should be gaining confidence in herself and her self-worth. Hell, Emma's big Saviour moment at the end of the show was to literally just stand there and let someone kill her. Her entire role in life was to do nothing and die. She has no value except in death. The whole thing is just gross.