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Well then, my unpopular opinion is that I only want her to be shady in regards to the way she runs Fairyville. I don't agree with her decisions about Nova or Tink and I think there's possibly something up with her defeat of the Black Fairy. I absolutely think she was right to give Bae that bean and I don't find anything shady about her subsequent conversation with Rumple. I think her lack of knowledge or ability in Storybrooke is solely due to plot-related reasons. They cannot have a magical power that's equal to Rumple or greater than Regina in Storybrooke because then the heroes would not have to constantly bargain with the villains. To be fair, better authors than OUaT's have solved this problem by having their Gandalf or Obi Wan disappear in the middle of the first act or their Dumbledore only show up to fight one confrontation with the Big Bad and people call those things plot contrivance too. Then again, people thought (and were kind of proven right) that Dumbledore was shady too.

The "Hook just wants to sleep with Emma" read has always been off to me, because you know what's probably the best way to get Emma to sleep with him? Never talking about deep feelings in her presence. At all. Like ever. What does Hook do? Talk about feelings, like a lot. And mostly hers instead of his. In 3B, he mostly talks about feelings that don't even have to do with how she feels about him (it's Emma that usually makes it about him). If he's trying to get her to sleep with him and that's all he cares about then he's going about it the wrong way. We've seen "two ships passing in the night" Past!Hook try to get Emma to sleep with him, and while it was endearing that he still wanted to know her name and I completely believe our Hook when he says he would have gone after her, it's worth noting that Past!Hook didn't try to pretend there was something more there. Also, there's nothing wrong with two consenting adults passing together in the night, even if one is a villain who admits to being a villain. In fact, the Past!Hook/Emma liaison probably has more in common with Emma's sexual history over the past 12 years (minus the Year of the Monkey) than the kind of relationship current Hook is offering her. Had he been a real villain who only wanted to get into Emma's pants, he would have taken Pan's offer, put Emma on the Jolly Roger, and lied about the fate of all the other characters. It's my opinion that the Echo Cave confession actually harmed Hook's case with Emma, and if he was just trying to seduce her than he made a big error there, but of course he wasn't, he was trying to save Bae. And as Souris said, he didn't ask Regina, "You ever wonder if this constant pursuit for revenge is the reason we have no one who will sleep with us?" He said, "the reason we have no one who cares for us?" 2.22 made it clear that he came back because of Bae and because of his previous epiphany about the emptiness of revenge, not out of some desire to have sex with Emma.

Emma will save Regina and then all the characters will line up to thank Regina for allowing Emma to save her. I kid. Emma is her father's daughter, and Charming's sacrificed himself like three times now, so I could see Emma doing something similar to save someone she loves or just the town in general.

I don't know if this will really fit with your content, but I like these two quotes from the book, "Never is an Awfully Long Time" and "Never Say Goodbye" from the longer quote, "Never say goodbye because saying good-bye means going away and going away means forgetting.” Or "Going Round and Round" from the quote, “They were going round and round the island, but they did not meet because all were going at the same rate."

I don't think she's shady or meant to be seen as shady. I just want her to be, because it would IMO be an awesome twist (although not if it somehow absolves Rumple, then I will hate it), so that's why I joke about it so much.

My guess, going by Charming's "Almost 30 years" since Emma's birth (which was in October 1983) is that it's around September or October 2013 in show time, so Frozen hasn't come out yet. That's assuming the show has actually been paying attention to the passage of time since the Curse broke. The snow in "A Curious Thing" would have been a little early, but late Fall snow showers are not unheard of in Maine. If it's supposed to be nearing Winter, I wonder how the characters are going to know that there's anything out of the ordinary going on. The snow in Frozen was so problematic because it happened in the middle of the summer so the kingdom was unprepared. Of course, magical ice storms are probably not desired in any season. Or they just run into Elsa freezing things and it won't matter.

Maybe there's a time jump after the premiere? But probably not, not because of Captain Swan or even Elsa, but because you know they'll want to show us every one of Regina's tears over her week-long relationship.

I'm torn. The CS fan in me is really happy that apparently there's no time jump, but the continuity fan in me is like please stop with the breakneck plot pace. Slow down a little.

When it rains good fic it pours good fic. Walking on Water has been updated. Also, An Awfully Big Adventure is now complete. I'm going to miss that fic.

I actually think he's one of the smarter characters, although like most of them have at some point or other, he's behaved with less intelligence for the sake of the plot. That's actually the main thing I like about the character, "eye candy" being probably last on the list of the reasons I think Hook is still around. It certainly couldn't have been easy to get the bean and go to New York, one of the most populous metropolitan centers in our world and probably much more populated than any village in the Enchanted Forest. Twice he's made his way there and found the people he was looking for. He managed to convince Emma Swan that fairytales were real in a day when it took Henry around seven months and a poisoned turnover. Hook is one of the only characters who has no cursed knowledge of our world, yet except for his wardrobe and some things that get lost in translation, he's done remarkably well at adapting to this new world he's found himself in. He also managed to trick both Cora and Rumple at various points and they're the characters who usually do the manipulating, not the other way around. I don't give him points for tricking Regina, because I feel like even Pongo could do that. I think he adds plenty to the show because he's one of the few characters that haven't drank the Regina and Rumple Koolaid and this show needs more of those characters. Mostly I like him for consistently being Team Emma Swan is Awesome, even when it had nothing to do with his romantic feelings towards her and he actually risked losing her friendship by being so honest.

If it was just the first season before they got the anti-adoption backlash, I could understand their whitewash, I wouldn't like it, but I'd understand it. But as late as the end of last season, Regina was still abusing Henry. She told him she was going to kill the rest of his family and then erased his memory when he dared to protest and then still went ahead with her plans to destroy the town. That is abuse. Not mentioning any of these issues isn't going to make them go away. Any parent, be it adoptive or bio parent or an aunt or grandparent, whether there were other relatives waiting in the wings to take care of the child or not, would have had social services called on them in a real world equivalent situation.

There's a con there this weekend, I think it's called the Fairytales Convention. There's supposed to be a "Swan Queen: Dream or Reality?" debate there on Sunday. Not sure if the actors will be present for the debate or not. I rather hope they aren't.

Yum, I love the neatly-trimmed beard on Dallas. He's looking very nice.

I've seen quite a few actors from other shows have sidebands. The men from Desperate Housewives come to mind.

I can't really figure out the reasoning behind the clothing for each character. Regina and Charming are both in the outfits they were wearing when the curse was cast, yet Snow is not in her nightgown. I'd say this was done in an effort to hide her real life pregnancy, but post-delivery Snow was in a loose-fitting nightgown, so that doesn't really make sense. Neal obviously would have issues if he got stuck in Baelfire's old clothes. Belle is in the gold dress she wore on her first chronological appearance, not in the prison dress she would have been in when the curse struck, unless Regina dressed her up beforehand because Regina is just that messed up, so maybe (she did make Emma change into a peasant dress for her prison stay). Hook was also not wearing the red vest when he went into the Coradome, he had on the black velvet vest. I believe the last chronological appearance of the red vest before the first curse was in his scene with Tink in Neverland. Then everyone except Hook, Regina, and Neal ended up getting new outfits offscreen, IIRC. I remember discussing this at length (remember how excited most of us were that they were back in the Enchanted Forest? I think we came up with numerous scenarios that probably would have been way better than the wasted missing year turned out to be) on the old spoiler thread and I believe the general consensus was that they were all in their most memorable outfits.

The Arya/Brienne meeting and Brienne/Hound fight was the best kind of fanservice and probably my favorite part of the episode. Since I subscribe to the theory that Brienne and the Clegane brothers (and Hodor of course) are all descended from Dunk, that added another element to the fight for me. I do think the fight would have gone differently if the Hound hadn't been wounded, but damn Brienne kicked ass. I'm not sure how I feel about Jojen's death. It's always been a pretty sure thing both in the show and the book that he wouldn't make it out of the North, but this does feel like a reverse book spoiler. I did like that they went from Meera performing a mercy kill on him to Arya refusing to do so for the Hound.

I'd love a Friends-esque secret relationship, but I don't want a dirty little secret secret relationship, if that makes any sense.

Even if Regina somehow never killed Marian (or a Marian lookalike who still had done nothing that deserved a death sentence) in the original timeline, since Emma took Marian out of that timeline, there's really no way to be sure. No one remembers the original timeline. I think she did kill her but Robin never knew the truth. Jiminy Vixen? Cricket Maid?

I agree that Emma won't push Hook away for long, if she pushes him away at all. It just sucks that there's never any emotional payoff except when it comes to something that upsets Regina. The Geppetto wardrobe lie? Barely covered. Graham's murder? Never mentioned. Even Rumple and Neal's reunion, which should have been the meatiest part of 2B, got shortchanged. Emma's boyfriend lied to her for 8 months and she only gets to talk about it twice. But Regina gets a woobie face and she's still allowed to bring it up for episodes afterwards. She's allowed to talk about Snow's horrible murder of her mother (which it really wasn't, but whatever) a full season after the event occurred. She's allowed to snark at Hook about the magic cuff 12 episodes later, while Hook isn't allowed to point out that they both betrayed each other. Now she's going to make Emma feel guilty, because unlike Regina, Emma is a person with a working superego, but I guarantee that Emma won't be allowed to talk about how emotionally devastating it was to watch her mother being burned at the stake while Regina laughed. Or if she is, Regina will throw a snarky comment at her and Emma will never bring it up again.

Alice also didn't age in her Victorian fantasy land. Honestly, I think the only explanation is that all realms were in stasis.

So you're saying Emma and Hook were rocking the boat?

Yeah, there was no cute flirtation between Graham and Regina in that episode or at any other point in their relationship. That's a really weird quote. "Excited to have him back in her life" in a flashback when he'd been constantly in her life since she took his heart and forced him to do her bidding? He was never not in her life after that until she killed him years after the "Welcome to Storybrooke" flashback. I'm hoping Parrilla was just excited to work with Dornan again, and like some internet fans, got a little confused about the difference between actor and character.

Originally, I thought the Wonderland timeline could only work if time in all the realms, including Victorian Fantasyland, was frozen during the curse, because that's the only way to explain Will being in Storybrooke for 28 years and Alice not aging during the same time. But if time was frozen in all the realms, then it makes no sense that the ogres were able to take over the Enchanted Forest. The Cora dome had to have been the only thing preventing time from passing in the Enchanted Forest. Maybe Will wasn't cursed and came to Storybrooke later, but that would be hard to buy, because Emma and later August were the first people to arrive in Storybrooke since Henry's birth, and their arrivals were focused on as a big deal in Season One. Regina would not have allowed Will to just stroll into town and make himself at home in his rather nice apartment. But how was Will able to keep possession of his heart if he was cursed? I would think it would have somehow ended up in either Regina's vault or Gold's shop. Will, being presumably cursed until almost immediately before the rabbit came to collect him (an event which most assume occurred on the night of the wraith attack in 2.01 the very same day Emma broke the Curse) would not have known that his heart was outside of his body. Basically, I'm very confused.

I've seen Lieutenant Duckling fics with Lieutenant Jones and young thief Emma from our world. They usually consist of Emma somehow falling through time and space before she meets Neal. Those are actually my favorite kind of LD fics. VickyVicarious' Storybrook is about young thief Emma and was the first LD fic I ever read and it's still my favorite.

I'm glad you liked it. I enjoy all of msgenevieve's work, her Emma is especially believable to me. Storybrooke PD - A Day in the Life is cute, touching, and funny all at the same time. Lots of Daddy Charming feels with a little Captain Swan thrown in for good measure.