Dani-Ellie

Yeah, same here. "A Curious Thing" makes me pissed off at both Snow and Charming and "Kansas" was giving the shining moment to a character simply because they could in a way that make absolutely no sense and has not been referenced since. That whole trifecta of 3x18, 3x19, and 3x20 pings my rage-o-meter like nothing on this show has ever done before. That said, I found 3x21 and 3x22 flippin' fun that I squeal like a teenager at a Justin Bieber concert just thinking about them. There is not enough love in the world for those two episodes, as far as I'm concerned.

And the worst part is, the angst was right there in the story! I mean, right freakin' there! Regina is the woman who took Marian from him in the first place! There didn't need to be some manufactured drama with Robin and Marian and Regina because the fallout from Marian coming to the future and telling her husband that Regina was the one who'd imprisoned her was all that was needed. You want a struggle for Robin? How about finding out that his new love is responsible for the imprisonment of his wife? So how does he reconcile what he feels for Regina with what he knows she's done? You want a struggle for Marian? Her husband is now with the woman who was going to put her to death. How does she reconcile her husband understandably moving on with his life with the woman he'd moved on with? You want a struggle for Regina? Her past actually comes back to bite her in the ass. How does she reconcile what she did then with the person she is now? But no, instead of actually letting the story play out in some kind of real, logical way, they just throw more magic at it and heap a freezing curse on Marian. So now the story is "must save Marian but she needs me to love her but I can't because I love you!" Which did Robin and Regina no favors whatsoever, at least in my book, because I found it nigh on impossible to cheer for the adultery and the crypt sex and the Robin confessing he loves Regina over his wife's frozen body.

So far, the prompts I've been given have been very, very vague, which helps a lot because then I'm free to interpret it however I want. For instance, my "Aftermath" came about because a reader asked me to do a Daddy Charming piece following "White Out." Those were the only specifics she asked for, so it allowed me a lot of freedom to decide how I wanted to write it up.

[OT]I've long found judging upcoming things based upon spoilers to be very iffy. I can't tell you how many times when I was watching Charmed that my spoilered friends would angrily flip their shit over some spoiler or another only to be all, "Oh, that wasn't nearly as rage-inducing as the spoilers made it seem" when the episode aired. Things get changed from script to screen and from takes to final product, and especially in Adam and Eddy's interviews, they'll say things that make a plot point seem like a big honkin' deal only to have it actually be a couple of lines. So, yeah, I don't even look for spoilers, mostly because I like not knowing what's going to happen but also because it seems like they're all pretty much grains of salt.[/OT] I'm also looking forward to the return of the show. I'm definitely at the "omg I need new material now plzkthx" part of hiatus. I miss Captain Swan and the Charmings.

One of the things I've vowed never to do is not finish a piece, because I know I how frustrating that is as a reader. I'm usually at least a couple chapters ahead of myself, so if I get stuck, I can still release something on some kind of schedule. I tend to write fairly quickly once I get the idea (it helps that I'll have more than one idea at once but can only actively work on one story at a time, so I'll have at least a vague notion of what I want to do before I even start writing), and I try to warn my readers if I have things coming up that may interfere with my writing schedule. I mostly feel bad for my prompters because I can only write one thing at a time, so it may take me a couple months to get to it, depending on what I'm working on when the request comes in. That's also something I tend to tell them when they ask, though.

Even barring Snow and Charming not knowing the whole Emma/Neal history, what the hell parents name their baby after the guy who knocked up their teenage daughter and left her alone enough that she felt she had to give the baby up for adoption? Those aren't private between-Emma-and-Neal details. Those are facts they would know simply from knowing Emma and Henry. For crying out loud, show.

Also here for Emma, Hook, and Charming (but primarily Emma). And because despite my intense frustrations, when this show does something I like, it's not just "Hey, this is fun." It's "OMG this is amazing and I love it and I'm going to rewatch the relevant bits a thousand times on YouTube."

I'd vote for gone entirely. Mostly for how disgusting it is for Snow White to be telling the stepmother who tried multiple times to kill her that adultery is okay by comparing it to what she'd done when she was under a curse the stepmother cast but also because it once again made Snow look if not uncaring at least uninterested in what was going on with her own daughter because it was more important to stop in the search for Emma before she destroyed a part of herself and cheer Regina on for sleeping with the husband of a dying woman, who, might I add, ended up in Regina's dungeon because she protected Snow. Gah.

Oh, ffs. I thought the video made it quite clear that the only time she's actually there is at the end. There were cuts of her there and then him alone in the same freakin' scene, for crying out loud. Maybe they just don't watch a lot of ghost movies, but cuts like that are used for a reason.

That quote wasn't from the Once staff, but from an article Souris posted in the Media thread about social media connecting production teams and fans. A few of us want to tattoo it across the Once staff's forehead, though. ;) I really, really enjoyed all the Frozen/Snow Queen/Emma stuff, but the rest of it? Meh. I rewatched "Smash the Mirror" last night and ended up fast-forwarding anything that wasn't A-plot-related (so, all the Outlaw Queen/Echo Chamber of Lunacy/Snow telling Regina adultery is okay nonsense) because I did not have the patience for it. It could very well have been my mood because I usually don't fast-forward, but still. (Also, look at what all the fast-forwarding had in common, heh.)

This. Some people may hate it (there again is the not pleasing everyone thing) but I think Supernatural has done really, really well with the fan service thing. They created a reason for Sam and Dean to occasionally break the fourth wall (their lives were written by a prophet in a series of books that had a small but loyal cult following, *wink wink nudge nudge*) and every so often, they'll do a comedic fan service episode. It ends up being fun (at least in my opinion) but while that aspect of the show is now canon and exists, it's not a constant thing that changed the very fabric of Supernatural. 4x05 made fan service canon is one of the worst ways imaginable. They twisted the characters to fit this mold in a particularly egregious way because neither Regina nor Emma was herself. As far as I'm concerned, Regina destroyed Emma's childhood and to see Emma begging her to be her friend disgusted me. I'd always thought Regina had at least a tiny bit of begrudging respect for Emma, at least enough that she doesn't lump her in with "the idiots," but Regina in 4x05 had no respect for Emma whatsoever. It was entirely possible to build a friendship for Regina and Emma that didn't ... do that. SVU used to manage to throw the Alex/Olivia shippers little bones every so often without completely changing what made them Alex and Olivia. Why not just keep Regina and Emma how they were in 3B? I actually found the scenes when they were working together kind of sweet. But now that 4x05 happened, I've completely soured to the whole idea. I'm trying to keep an open mind but ...

From that article: I want to mail this to Adam and Eddy. I get wanting your fans to be happy, but no single story is going to make everyone happy. That's just facts, and the more the story tries to appease fans of Fanon Plot X, the more it's going to anger other viewers who are all, "But ... that makes no sense!" If you tell the story well and you tell it from the heart, people are going to respond positively. Feedback is important, of course, and I can understand them wanting to read up on fan reactions to find out what's working. But at the same time, I think it would behoove them to not confuse loud with popular and to also take a good look at more objective evidence that things aren't working -- things like sharp ratings drops -- and try to figure out why that is. Something made a whole bunch of people tune out all at once, even if that seems to be contrary to what the vocal online opinion seems to be.

Done. On both stories.

Thanks, guys! This feels like such a breath of fresh air. I actually can't wait to run into my awesome upstairs neighbor who lives next to the neighbors from hell. She told me that the NfH would knock on her door asking for like, slices of tomato, and then get angry with her when she said she didn't have any. Go buy your own tomatoes! I have a funny feeling we're going to squee together, haha. Worsel, that's terrible! I really don't understand the lack of consideration of some people, especially in an apartment/condo situation. When your floors are someone else's ceilings, there should be an expectation that things in your apartment should not regularly disrupt your neighbors' lives. Ugh. Sharky, I'm hoping so! I hope your neighbor moves soon and the people move in is a nice family, too. :)

Not really. Every time anything happened (especially with the water), I went to the management office to lodge a complaint. (I rent a condo.) The maintenance guys are great and they looked around each time and said everything was fine, mostly because I always caught it early. Even with the flood, the rain in my bathroom had woken me up early enough that there was only superficial damage in my place (they had to repaint my ceiling and I ended up buying new towels to replace the ones I'd used mopping up). The time with the arcing electricity, Maintenance was in my unit at 5AM wrapping everything in electrical tape for me so nothing behind the wall was exposed. Neither my landlord nor I had to pay for any of it, as it didn't originate with me; I have no idea how their landlord handled the damages on their end. But there really wasn't much I could do since I rent and they rented. The management office would pass along my complaints, but it was up to their landlord to decide what to do about them. (Which sucked because there was always that little fear in the back of my mind that I'd come home to a real flood. That was my complaint the most recent time: I'd been an hour away from leaving for a family party, so if it had happened any later in the afternoon, I would have been gone for hours and I wouldn't have caught it in time.)

This is probably awful of me, but my upstairs neighbors moved out this morning, and I am thrilled to pieces. These people were the neighbors from hell. I've had water running down my walls (and out my light fixtures) because they didn't understand the concept of their dishwasher not being a garbage disposal. I've had a flood in my apartment (in the middle of the night) because they left their sink on and fell asleep. I've had water dripping through my bathroom ceiling light fixture because they left the faucet on with a cloth in the sink and then went out. Oh, and during one of these water incidences? I had arcing behind my wall. The sound of the electricity crackling was what had woken me up. I was petrified I was going to wake up one night to an electrical fire. And this is on top of them coming down and asking to use my laundry card, like use your own damn laundry card because why should I have to pay to wash your clothes, and yelling and swearing at each other so loudly that I can hear them clearly through my ceiling. And of this morning, they're gone and I. Am. Stoked.

I watched the Mary Margaret/Emma scene from the end of "True North" (where Emma tells Mary Margaret that Henry thinks Snow White's her mother) the other day for old times' sake and was struck by how absolutely lovely it was. I always thought it was lovely -- it was my favorite scene in all of season 1 -- but it was one of those scenes where nothing super-duper plot-y happened. Mary Margaret's folding laundry and Emma's lounging on her bed and the two of them are just talking. It's just ... where the hell are the scenes like that now? Because they're trying to cram entire arcs into 11 episodes now as opposed to 22, there isn't time for those scenes. Pacing has always been a problem for this show but I think I'd rather deal with a couple of dull filler episodes while the arc spans a full season than have so much plot build-up get resolved with a ten-second kiss or hug because they're trying to do so. much. at once. It wouldn't be so repetitive if they hadn't blown through three classic villains in a season and a half. And now we've got three for eleven episodes! The stories they're trying to tell are so. damn. rich but because of the story structure, they don't have the time to really delve into those stories properly. It's all surface-level, and when they try to go deeper (like the issues Ingrid brought up for Emma), they don't really deliver on the follow-through. It's so frustrating because with just a little more time and care for character over plot and attention to detail, this show could be amazing.

I have some absolutely wonderful loyal readers who read and review pretty much everything I write but it took me quite a few stories to attract the readership. The Once section at ff.net moves very fast, so it's easy for new stories and new authors to just get lost in the shuffle because things will get knocked off the front page in a couple of hours. (And to be perfectly honest, I still have no idea how I attracted the readership I have. I remember watching in shock as the favorites on "Can You Help Me" climbed past anything I had posted on ff.net in any fandom ... and I've been posting in various fandoms since 2001. It's now my fifth most-favorited story and the four ahead of it are all Once stories. I mean, I'm thrilled and super-grateful but it also completely boggles my mind.)

I'll have mental guideposts. Like, I may know I want to hit Plot Point A and Plot Point B but I can't write Plot Point B until I work up to it because I don't always know how I'm going to get there. What happens, then, is that Plot Point B comes out in like twenty minutes because I've had it planned in my head since the beginning of the story and my brain is all, "Finally! We can get this out on paper now!" My first drafts are generally very dry. There's not a lot of kick to the descriptions or the dialogue; it's more about seeing where the story goes in this chapter. My second draft is a line-by-line rewrite and that's where I beef up the descriptions and add humor to the dialogue and the inner monologue. I regularly double my word count from first draft to second. All subsequent drafts are just fiddling with wording and adding things here and removing things there. (The exception to this is when I do a writing exercise because one of the self-imposed rules of the writing exercises is no editing after the fact. So when I'm doing an exercise, I pay more attention to the description and humor and emotions the first time around since I know I won't be going back at it for round two.) I do, however, have days where writing just is not working. Sometimes I just need to set it aside for an hour or so. Sometimes I have to set it aside for the day and pick it back up the next. I'll have chapters like that, where stuff just happens and I have absolutely no idea where it came from. I have fun with those chapters. I've tried to write two stories at once and it just does not work for me. I end up getting confused and it ends up slowing the process down for both stories. On rare occasions, I've set aside a multi-chapter to bang out a one-shot that won't leave me alone but for the most part, I'm only working on one thing at a time. I'll throw characters in if I need them to be there for plot reasons, but if my goal is to write, say, a Charming Family bonding piece (which is 90% of what my stuff is, haha), having, say Regina show up would be disrupting what I want to do. (Especially the ones I was setting at the point in the show when Regina was actively plotting to kill the Charmings!) I don't like writing AU, either. I've had people give me vaguely AU prompts and I've asked to adapt them sightly so that I can still write the meat of the prompt in a way I'm more comfortable with. Thankfully the prompters have been good with that! I try to set my stuff so that it can fit between episodes (or even between the scenes of certain episodes). There's so much opportunity with this show for missing-scene fic or episode codas and imagining the stuff that happens in Offscreensville. If the show canon-balls my stuff after the fact, oh well, but I do try, when I set things earlier in the timeline, to make it as canon-compliant as I can. (I do, however, continue to write Season Two Snow, even in my post-season two fics, because I can't stand what they've done with her and Emma and from the reviews I get on them, I'm not the only one.)

Ooh, a process post! Yay! For me, I have to write linearly. Mostly this is because I don't outline. I can't. A whole chunk of the fun for me is seeing where the story goes. Planning it all out beforehand through an outline take so much of the fun out of it. (This, as you can imagine, was very problematic in school. I was lucky enough to have a couple of teachers who would let me hand in drafts instead of outlines.) So what'll happen is I'll have an idea of what I want to do with the story but I won't always know how the characters are going to accomplish what I want them to do. (Yes, I have written myself into many, many a corner this way, but it's how I have to work. If I outline a story, I kind of feel like I've already written in and then have no desire to actually write the thing.) But a lot of times what will happen is as I write and as the story develops, I'll suddenly have a little epiphany and be all, "This! OMG this is the ending of the story!" And then I have to wait to write it because I can't write it until it's time for it because I have to write linearly, haha. To give an example, I once wrote a pre-series Supernatural story about John leaving Sam and Dean at a haunted motel (without knowing it was haunted). The ghost was a little five-year-old girl who'd been killed on the premises, but she didn't know she was dead. And as I was writing the scene where she's explaining to Sam why she's hanging around (because her mom always told her if she ever got lost, she should stay where she was so her mom could find her), it hit me that that was how they were going to get her to cross over: by convincing her to go "home" because her mom had found her. It's not something I planned at all when I came up with the idea ... it just came to me halfway through the story, heh. Now sometimes, if I'm sitting on an idea for some reason (I can only write one story at a time, so sometimes I'll be ruminating on an idea for my next story while working on the current one), I will end up planning the whole story from start to finish in my head. Those are the stories that end up getting written in like, a week and a half and I end up posting chapters every other day. Mostly I write what I would want to see and hope others want to see those things, too. I won't put certain elements in a story that I don't feel belong there even if I have a reader asking me for them (like, 99.8% of the time, Regina's not going to show up in my Charming Family stuff). I've definitely had chapters take turns I never intended when I started writing and I've certainly had the characters take off on their own but most of the time, I'm okay with what comes out. If I'm not okay with it, I rewrite it until I am. (There was one chapter in I think "Crumbling Walls" that I must have rewritten five or six times because the characters kept taking it to angstier places than I really wanted and I felt like it was reading like melodrama for the sake of it. Trying to reel that sucker in was a nightmare.)

I generally don't have a problem when Regina and Emma are working together. Their bickery banter amuses me, for the most part. The stakeout and double-con in 3x13, Regina teaching Emma magic in 3x17, that was fun (at least for me). But 4x05 was not bickery banter. It was not fun. It was an entire episode of Regina hurling verbal abuse at Emma (because that is totally what it was) and Emma Swan, of all people, sitting there and taking it. It was out of character for Emma to just follow Regina around like a kicked puppy and frankly, it was out of character for Regina, too, to spend the entire episode kicking the puppy. And when I see people (fans, certain official social media accounts, etc) touting the "I don't WANT to kill you" line as something aww-worthy? No. Sorry, but no. That's not healthy. That's not okay. That is not a basis for any kind of friendship or relationship. If the best thing you can say about someone is that you don't want to kill them (or that they don't want to kill you!), that's a run-like-hell red flag. So, sorry, show, not buying what you're selling.

I loved to hate Regina. Now I'm just tired of her. I don't care about her anymore because all she does is freakin' whine and blame everyone else for her problems and that's not fun for me to watch. I want them to pick a damn side and let her stay there. Make her good. Make her evil. I don't really care. Just keep her wherever the hell they decide to put her so she can actually develop and not waste my time. To be perfectly honest, I liked the Regina in "Going Home." Give me that Regina, not the one who blames Emma/Snow/the wind for ruining her life. (I don't feel well today and apparently it's making me cranky, haha.)

Happy birthday, Zuleikha! This. I've long thought that Regina thought that she loved Henry a lot more than she actually did. Because let's be honest, here, it was the way she treated Henry that led him to think she was the Evil Queen in the first place. And it was the fact that she was trying to make him think he was crazy rather than tell him the truth about the Curse and the fairy tale characters that led him to bring Emma to Storybrooke. And let's not forget that like, a week and a hald ago, TV-time, she was trying to kill Henry's family so she could have him all to herself. I thought her line at the beginning of season 2 -- that she didn't know how to love very well -- was much more in line with what actually transpired onscreen during season 1, and that was something I could get behind -- Regina learning how to love better. I do consider Regina's giving Emma and Henry happy memories of a life lived together probably the nicest thing she's ever done, and I liked that gesture so much more than Henry's "I wish I had never gone to get Emma" bit. That whole thing, with Emma's look of panic at her parents and Hook when Regina tells her she's going to forget them makes me misty just thinking about it. Because Emma finally has her family and now she not only has to give them up but she won't even remember that she had them. This. So much. And I still remember how much my Captain Swan loving self freaked the hell out when Hook showed up at her door at the end, because finally, Emma had her own "I will always find you."

The fangirl in me is saying, "OMG totally take her, I would have loved to do something like that as a kid!" (Because it's true, haha. I still remember when my mom took me to see John Stamos when he appeared at a local mall. I couldn't have been more than 9.) The adult in me totally understands your hesitance. I've only ever been to one con (a Supernatural one in Boston a couple years back ... daxx, you're going to have a blast!) but that was a dedicated SPN con so the only people there were SPN fans. It was indeed very expensive but I think well worth it. We had so. much. fun and my sister and I both agreed that if they ever came back this way, we'd do the whole weekend rather than just the one day. I've never been to a Comic Con, though I have heard that at least San Diego's seating is first come first serve so people essentially camp out to make sure they get seats for what they want to see. I would assume that if you're paying for an autograph or a photo op, that's a "definitely get to do" kind of thing, especially if you can purchase them in advance. Maybe ask her if she'd rather this or that so that way you don't end up dropping money on stuff she's not really interested in? (For example, my sister and I put our money towards the photo ops rather than the autographs because we would rather have come home with the pics of us and the celebs than autographs.)

I have issues with biopics as well, depending upon the level of fabrication. In a way, biopics are worse because they reach a much wider audience with their falsehoods. If it's a pretty faithful retelling of the person's story with only a couple of things heightened for drama, okay. If it's a complete "unauthorized biography of Person X"-type movie (think Lifetime's Aaliyah movie and I'm sure the upcoming Whitney Houston one), then no, not okay. At least with the ripped-from-the-headlines crap that Law & Order used to pull, they would change the names of the people and highlight the fact that they were dramatizing and changing the real story.