Speakeasy

I finished The Originals recently and a few things made me think of OUAT season 7 Some spoilers but I'm trying to be vague First- it's set in New Orleans' picturesque French Quarter, though it's filmed in Georgia, and that made me think of how OUAT used a story set in New Orleans and essentially ignored any idea of using the place as inspiration (budget is a problem here, clearly) Second- The series is a spin-off of 'the Vampire Diaries', using the world, characters and concepts from that series. I've never seen it but I was able to follow the show perfectly well, which contrasts with how confusing OUAT S7 was to long term viewers. Third-protag morals, yo! Klaus Mikaelson makes Regina Mills look like a sweet little choir girl, but I think, at least in the first 3 seasons, the writing is pretty clear on the fact that he and his family are protagonists, not heroes, and people react to him coming into a room more or less the same way they would to a grenade with the pin pulled out. Fourth-despite playing one of the (in my view) few genuinely good and well intentioned characters on the show, Yusuf Gatewood (Vincent) would have made a good live action Dr Facilier: he looks the part a lot more than the OUAT actor and I think he could have played an occult swindler beautifully while being very distinct from the cartoon version. And Also-edit-a season 2 villain borrows from a number of fairy tales, at one point she's described as inspiring 'the witches of Grimm lore', but the most obvious link is probably Mother Gothel (/the witch from Rapunzel).

There were also the Camelot people, they certainly didn't seem too familiar with the modern world, but it impossible to tell whether they got a curse download or not because besides that one party we didn't really see how they were coping with life in Storybrooke. OUAT always, well after season 1, seemed to take the attitude that really examining the difference between fairy/fictionland and the real world would be too distracting. There's never really any examination or discussion of the fact that they're fictional characters and what that means-not in a way that makes much sense anyway.

I would have had the Land of Untold Stories actually dumped into Storybrooke. They get back to town and there's just this island full of fictional refugees a mile offshore from them and they've got to deal with that. The arc for the season could be emotional rather than a normal villain fight, with them learning how they're going to make their society work and who they all want to be now that they have all moved well beyond their iconic roles-or something.

You'd be fine with the rambling Author Plot, with Rumple's banishment meaning nothing, with the whole Zarion nonsense, True Love's Kiss being cheapened to the point where you can give it without speaking to the recipient or while lying through your teeth to them at the time, Bloody Season 6 and the 'watch the cups, which cup is the real villain under?' bullshit and waste of a perfectly good Jaime Murray, and innumerable Tense Action Scenes between epic magical heroes and villains consisting entirely of people standing in the woods glowering at each other, so long as you saw a couple of good looking men talking about sailing? That's extremely generous of you 😋

Oh come on; 'Je ne regrette rien, bitch!'-heartcrush!- was a badass moment. Maybe not her best in the series, she was at her best in season 1, but am I really the only person who saw her heartcrush Peter Pan in mid gloat and cackle with delight?

Starfleet has a long, long history of hanging defenceless planets out to dry after saying the magic words 'prime directive' so it was jolly nice of them to send that massive fleet of state of the art ships, crewed by tens of thousands of Starfleet personnel, to bail out a planet that they'd never staked any claim on, risking not only that fleet but all out war with the Romulans, all to protect a tiny village of people whose legal status as people is probably still a bit of a grey area in the Federation and who were actively trying to murder them all at the time. It is in fact so nice as to seem a little out of character, if you ask me.

I always saw that whole thing as dramatic irony in that Reggie was learning that A) she was really making a mess of this whole Queen thing and B) Snow White would still have agreed to kiss and make up, except we knew she'd murdered a village, and Snow didn't. So at the end of the episode it was like 'see you could have worked things out with a mutually agreeable compromise if you'd just not tried, again, to murder your problems, how well has that been working for you up to this point, incidentally? but you did, so you can't' I also see 'the Queen is dead, long live the Evil Queen' as along the lines of that line in MacBeth, 'I am in blood steeped so far that should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o'er' She's accepted she's done a lot of bad shit, she's never going to make up for that in the eyes of the world and they're never going to see her as good or just so fuck it; let's break out the manskin boots and the skull goblets, we're doing this.-now for it to work properly in this way it should probably have come in season 1, and I think it definitely should have come before that flashback where Snow pardons her(if that plot should have been kept at all which it shouldn't)because her rejection and it's Shakespearean outcomes are rendered kind of worthless if we already know that she'll be forgiven anyway, but hey-ho. Ok also, at the risk of outing myself as some kind of black hearted monster... How damning was it for a medieval ruler and/or military leader to kill civilians like that, does anyone know? This sounds unbelievably horribly callous, but context is important if they live in the kind of world where other nobles would basically just shrug at the idea of chopping up disobedient peasants.

That could have been a lot of fun but I think it would run the risk of looking gloating-look how much better/smarter/more interesting our version of this character is than this old fashioned loser. The same could easily happen if you had any of the characters run into their Disney counterparts. I get the impression this would happen because that was the impression I was left with from the Camelot arc. Their take on King Arthur was interesting and he was actually a nuanced villain with an interesting backstory that dealt with the themes of the series from a worthy and different angle: here is how the idea of a hero can ruin a good person. But the story constantly veered about in ways that seemed to say 'hey, look what a bunch of useless losers the Camelot characters are next to our guys' I've been to Vancouver twice in my life and remember the landscape around the city being absolutely breathtaking. How is it that it ends up looking so generic on all these shows where it's used as a shooting location? Am I just not appreciating it or is there something about the way it's shot? How much do you think that could have been improved within their budget? The fact they did Agrabah and the LoUS shows it was at least possible, but I'm not sure how often they could have showcased something different.

It was a big waste, and it really just seemed to be a rationalisation to go back to the better known fairy tales for their new cast. A lineup of the Snow Whites of All Worlds could have been amazing because there are so many ways you can twist the story around. Stylistically there wasn't even much difference between the enchanted and disenchanted forests except the budget was clearly lower and there was a swamp in the Disenchanted Forest.

Wasn't the last thing she said in Leaving Storybrooke something like 'I can't wait to see what happens next,'-I imagine them going straight from that to some kind of government meeting with all the kings and queens and whathaveyous of the realms of fiction sitting in their new council chamber shouting incoherebtly at each other because no one knows where the borders are and the clashing weather systems are causing spontaneous hurricanes every couple of days.

Wow I did not remember it being that close together. Going by that picture it's a leisurely stroll from that castle in the foreground over to Storybrooke and onto Castle Knifington, and at most it's a day's hiking to make it all the way to the Emerald City. Do you think those hills in the background are meant to be Maine or more story world? Maybe the curse brought all the castles and landmarks close to Storybrooke to form a kind of downtown area then shunted all the countryside off to the periphery.

I think that the unfairness isn't a problem (see below)... Maybe the imagery which was very Christian Heaven and Hell-y could have been switched out for something a bit more ambiguous. This is where I get in trouble possiy just by overthinking it-because it seems like people talk about 'redemption' as like-this character is in the Bad Guy Column but after X amount of time being nice, feeling sad and/or getting punched in the face they can officially move back to the Good Guy Column. This person is now Officially Good and you're a prick if you hold their past misdeeds against them. And I just overthink it and don't know what the values are for balancing out someone's bad karma. 1 murder=how many hours sadness/what kind of good deeds/how many punches to the face? I don't know! See to me the afterlife doesn't necessarily have to be fair-in fact a big feature of this arc was that Hades had corrupted the afterlife and it wasn't working the way it should. Being shoved into Hell or melted into soul goo seems like it was a hazard more than any kind of moral judgement. This being the case it seems that the people who get to walk into the light don't have to necessarily be worthier, it's essentially like any other storyline where some people make it out and some don't and the people who make it out aren't necessarily who you'd think of as the most deserving but you can still feel good they escaped.

And she was a popular character-quite possibly the most popular- and the series lasted 7 years-so I think it's fair to say they got That Kind of Audience 😉

That and the thrice-hourly news updates indicating we are in fact living through the last days of human civilisation.

I think Cora's redemption isn't that much of a problem because I thought Barbara Hershey sold the idea she was just ready to move on and honestly didn't know if she was going to Heaven or Hell-she looks really frightened when she's going toward the door. If you take it as saying it's all good in the hood because she was nice and honest with her own children for three minutes after 70 years of neglect and abuse that's pretty bizarre. But if you take the system of the afterlife as being more based around your own state of mind-like you are at peace with your life and prepared to accept whatever happens next even if that means pain or annihilation, and that is what let's you move on-than about balancing out some invisible karmic calculator I don't think it's so bad. I mean without wanting to get too into this (too late)-people use the term 'redemption' a lot when they're talking about silly TV shows and I'm just not sure exactly how you're supposed to measure or quantify it. You can measure when someone's reformed but redeemed? What does that mean? Because it doesn't seem to be in the traditional Christian sense which, to my understanding, is about having a genuine change of heart (plus, you know, Jesus, who we are leery of mentioning on network tv...) But hearing people talk about how character X, Y or Z is or isn't redeemed or redeemable there definitely seems to be a general consensus that the sinner needs to suffer as well. Is it more important they suffer to balance the scales of justice or that they do something good to balance out the scales of karma? Or do they need to apologise, do good and go through pain, and how much?

Now springtime is starting I have been walking dog in the park while staying at least 3 metres from all other humans and I've had time to look at all the trees... Stupid as this is as something to think about... Can anyone actually recall another series where tree nymphs were an important part of the plot at any point? In 'The Witcher' there's a group called 'dryads' in one episode but it isn't explained what they are. And in the original 'Charmed' I think there was an episode with nymphs. That's all I can remember. I like trees and I like mythical tree spirits. It's a little sad to me there can be 101 shows about witches and/or vampires and dryads and all regional variants (Leshy for instance is an unusual Russian one) don't seem to get a look in.

'Regina hates herself the most!' was so fucking trite as a plot point, I twitch every time I see 'character X really hates... Themself!' on TV. It's played out pop psychology and it's never properly explored. It's particularly bad in this case because it's actually (in my view) a really interesting approach to her character. If all her hatred for Snow White is her looking to punish her younger self by proxy; punish her for underestimating her mother, for believing her mother, for not listening to her mother (she told me she told me 'love is weakness' she said), for thinking she could be happy without being strong-and she hates Snow even more because Snow-as-young-Regina doesn't break under the pressure. It also reminds me of 'The Killing Joke' where So I see Regina kind of like that. She needs to break this other her, but every time she kicks Snow White she gets back up. Snow White is meant to be all her flaws to burn in effigy, but she isn't. Even when Regina has every conceivable advantage, when she inflicts every injury she can think of, she still loses and Snow still gets her handsome prince and her loyal friends and her Happy Fucking Ending. So what does that say about Regina? If Snow White is her, gone down a different path, that makes Regina the bad version. Not just bad, the inferior version, the defective version. It means she messed up her life and Snow is living the life she should with the attitude and the mind and heart she should have and that makes her furious. Now if she can step back from the 'Snow is the young stupid me who needs to be punished for her/my stupidity'-then Snow is still a pampered young Muggle princess who manages not only to survive the worst Regina can throw at her, but to rally, to regroup and to beat her. Self hatred is always unhealthy but I think anyone would be at least disappointed in themselves if, with years of planning, an entire army and vast magical powers, they managed to be consistently beaten by a girl they forced to live in the forests. And that she's happy-Snow being happy or even anything but consumed by rage and resentment just throws Gina's own mindset into sharp relief. It would actually make perfect sense that she's focussing all this hatred outward so that it doesn't eat her alive and screaming. In show this 'revelation' was about 3 or 4 years too late for that though and it had no real follow through. So.... Eh.

Emma's darkness is ok as a theme-I guess, though personally my eyes rolled back inside my head and I had to have them surgically realigned* when Rumpy said 'ah, you see EMMA actually has the greatest potential for darkness dundundun!' it's so obvious and so nonsensical at this point-but I really think that it needed a better working knowledge of what 'darkness' actually is in this context. Because when you're talking about dark ones and dark magic you can just assume dark=bad but if you introduce the idea if prenatal darkness transplants you need a decent idea of what is being transplanted and how it's going to impact the patients. Like with Lily it seemed that her having extra darkness seemed to make her angry and dissatisfied, ok, we can work with that... But if that's the case and Emma has NO darkness shouldn't she be a supremely self confident go-with-the-flow type? She seems like she's got a bit of frustration. Seriously what is darkness? Does everyone have darkness? Is it just the normal impulse toward fear, doubt, frustration, anger etc or is it something extra that makes you extra bad? Is the implication here that unless you had an extra darkness infusion-like Lily- you'd never be dissatisfied in what is generally agreed to be a pleasant situation? What is Darkness when it's at home? I mean the whole 'steal a baby dragon to do a prenatal darkness transplant' plotline was cringeworthy anyway and bizarre since you'd really think it would have come up at some earlier point-but IF you're going that way... *Not really

I loved the idea which was posted somewhere on here, that all magic comes with a price, but that the price is paid by the person who wants the magic done-in effect meaning all spells follow the same rules as genie wishes with an ironic karmic reaction. The suggestion there was that Rumplestiltskin was always going around making deals specifically so he could do magic cost free, since by the laws of magic he wasn't technically the spellcaster. I filled up a few notebooks trying to work out how this might work but what I came up with looked nothing like the kind of magic in OUAT-you wouldn't survive the pushback from throwing around fireballs or snapping people's necks with telekinesis.

That's a really good idea-it would certainly jive better with my concept of who she was as a character-that she still had all that rage and paranoia just churning away under the surface even if she was on Team Hero, and that she was arrogant and just could not let things go (see 'Blondie's going back to Boston, good-but what if she comes back? What if my baby goes out to find her? What if she tracks down that kid I orphaned back in the 80s and they team up and come back and kill me? Dance me to death in red iron shoes! I bet the people of this town would love that! Ingrates! I gave them indoor toilets and that's how they repay me! NO! EMMA SWAN MUST DIE!') so you're right that it would work a lot better if she was forced to take a look at what she was doing for reasons of pragmatism which eventually lead to empathy or something similar. Just looking at the character as established it doesn't seem likely she would become genuinely trustworthy if she had the option to use magical violence to get her way. It'd be a good way to use magic as well. I always thought from S2 on that OUAT had a good idea about dark magic-its not addictive because it's literally a drug but because it gives you power and makes things easy-for people like Rumps, Ginny and Cora (and Zelena I guess but I thought her backstory was a mess) who have gone their whole lives acutely aware of their own physical and social weakness and vulnerability it's especially seductive. It doesn't make you bad because it rewires your brain to be evil or lets demons influence you or anything, it makes you bad because you've got to LET THE HATE FLOW THROUGH YOU for it to work. And you just get used to feeling angry and wanting to hurt people all the time. If you limited her magic you could do an interesting twist on the usual trope of 'super-person needs to avoid getting stressed so they don't break things with their superpowers'-Regina has to avoid getting too angry because then her impulse is to channel that rage into superpowers and if she does she's going to RUN OUT OF SUPERPOWERS. This is genius! The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, can the road to redemption be paved with self interest and paranoia? I wish you the best of luck with writing it, it's a great concept!

I tried watching 'Aladdin and the King of Thieves'-the second feature length sequel-a few months ago and couldn't get past the first 10 minutes. I don't remember 'Thr Return of Jafar' being very impressive either..so maybe this is a good idea. Disney could do worse than digging up some storylines from the 90s Aladdin cartoon series, there was some good stuff in there. Mozenrath! Mirage! (?-the cat lady), That Guy with the animal mecha-Greatest of the Great Greek Geniuses!

In response to @KingOfHearts suggestions 1-I think would weaken the series, I thought that her evil flashbacks got silly later on (justice for Outdoor Wedding Boy!😉) but in S1 she was compelling and menacing, I think trying to soften her in the past you'd lose something and I'd never ever want to lose her killing her father to cast the curse; the idea that she wasn't pure evil but was capable of love and CHOSE to give it up for revenge and spite was very powerful. I would consider going with a slightly different take on this and maybe show that even if she was that bad, that she wasn't JUST that bad. She could be a bad person but an effective ruler. You could show she had supporters and allies for legitimate reasons. Maybe she was out there dealing with the witches and trolls, keeping the ogres at bay, putting the other kingdoms in their places and Making Misthaven Great Again and her black Knights were, at least partly, people who really thought she was doing a good job. 2-Sorry to say I think this is the worst possible solution-what exactly do you do with her if it turns out the most significant events involving the character were actually someone else? 3-This would have been interesting but you'd need to change A LOT for it to work-if she was just a corrupt small town beaurecrat then she'd need to be oblivious to Storybrooke's weirdness which changes a lot of S1. 4-A possibility but she was at the heart of the show, she and Emma were always the two most important characters and I can't help thinking it would be weird to remove her completely. (That being said there was a suggestion here somewhere she should sacrifice herself heroically and her last words are, with a sad smile; 'My gift to you is this happy day,' which I think would have made a great scene) 5-Not a fan of this one, you'd essentially be losing one of your central characters and keeping the actress around as someone else would be weird. 6-there was a suggestion here somewhere that from S4 onward (or something) Storybrooke' should get access to all the World Doors through the Sorceror's House and become the Deep Space Nine of Fiction-if Storybrooke' is Deep Space Nine that makes our Ginny Gul Dukat, and that's a comparison I'd endorse all day long! The heroes have got to work with her for family or political reasons but she knows and they know and we know this is not a relationship that can end any way but with one side dead. This is probably my favourite. 7-this would be a definite possibility, but you'd need some reason for her to actually be involved with the story without her magic-maybe that she still knows magic even if she can't do it, and maybe you could have some new villain who doesn't know she's been mugglised making waves and they'd get her all dressed up in her full Evil Queen suit to try and scare them off without giving the game away. 8-i don't think this is workable unless you radically rewrote the show, she's so involved with the rest of the main cast that if you edited out her evilness they'd all be different people and at that point you have a different program altogether.

So I just finished watching this on Netflix, I generally liked it despite its flaws but season 5 really was a letdown. As someone who hasn't seen or read 'The Vampire Diaries' or any related stuff... Can anyone explain what happened? It seemed a very confused season; weak villains, meandering plots and the last 3 episodes spent entirely on mawkish Mikaelson martyrdom (which is in character but annoying... Freya you better take this girl on the honeymoon to end all honeymoons for putting up with your bullshit...)-did they try to compress too many books into a short season or have to do an edited version of a plot from the books for some reason? Also they kept talking about the Dark Magic like it was this abstract force, I thought it was actually the spirit of an evil witch. With intentions and the ability to plan and manipulate people. Was she still there? And I distinctly remember them saying in S4 that if they killed the host she'd just move on to another one. If memory serves that was the point of splitting her into four immortal hosts; so that she couldn't get back to Hope if they died of old age or gangrene or some other plebby mortal problem.

That seems like a logical solution. The thing about Regina is she has 3 qualities: A) she's powerful enough to be crucial in any invasion or crisis they face, or to be a huge threat of she goes full on bad again. B) she's fragile enough that she'll turn on them if she thinks they don't like her but C) She's invested enough in her family to reliably stick by them if she thinks they do like her. So it makes sense to be nice to her to keep her on side. Unlike Rumplestiltskin who will stab you in the back as soon as it's more convenient for him to do so, whether he thinks you like him or not. So no one bothers being nice to him.

Not sure when it's back on where I am but don't worry! There are lots of spoilers in this thread, it's a bit much to expect everything to be covered in spoiler tags.