A Thread for All Seasons: This Story Is Over, But Still Goes On.

[Shanna Marie]

11 hours ago, Camera One said:

A&E stole a bunch of stuff from "Lost" to make the selection of The Author mysterious, but as we discussed recently, we still don't know why Merlin created The Author in the first place, or why the Pen has the ability to write things that control other people.  Which means the "mythology" wasn't even completely fleshed out.

Or why there was a house full of blank storybooks when it was the pen that was magical, and it worked on any scrap of paper.

11 hours ago, Camera One said:

In Season 7, we don't see Adult Henry authoring much of anything so it's not a full-time job. 

Is he even still the Author, since his book seems to have ended with season 6, and maybe the opening of season 7, since Henry meeting Cinderella was at the end of his book. I don't think he wrote the book Lucy later found, or did he?

[Camera One]

The friend I watch "Once" with finally visited again, and we watched the 6B premiere together tonight.  She remembers nothing about what had happened, which is understandable for a casual viewer who hadn't watched for 2 years, I suppose.

I don't know what it is, but the actor who plays August bugs me in Season 6.  He looks so indulgently at Emma in this episode it's just weird.  I couldn't get into the Regina/Robin scenes at all, nor the Rumple/Belle/Gideon stuff.     

This rewatch with her is going to be quite a slog.  I can't think of any really good episodes coming up.

[Camera One]

Moving discussion to this thread:

1 hour ago, Shanna Marie said:

There is the problem that there really shouldn't be a Wish Henry. If there's no curse, then Emma never meets Neal. Neal going to our world had absolutely nothing to do with the curse (unless in Once Upon a Time in Offscreenville, we learn that he tried to have the Shadow take him back home, but they couldn't get there because of the curse, and so he ended up back in our world, but him trying to get home goes against everything else established about his character). Even if he did get back to their world at about the same time he got to ours, he'd have been in the same situation of being in his 20s when Emma was a teenager. 

The whole Wishverse was built around making points they wanted to make and having certain characters in certain situations. It was never an honest exploration of what life would have been like if the curse hadn't been cast, which makes the very basis for its existence fall apart. What it ended up being was an autonomous alternate universe Emma was sent to so she could be in a place where she wasn't a Savior -- not truly a place that only diverged because of the curse, but one where the curse just didn't happen to happen, along with other changes. Except we never found out where the real Wish Emma was. It doesn't seem like she reappeared once our Emma went home. Did she get sent somewhere else while our Emma was there? If there was an autonomous universe that allowed WHook to interact with other worlds before the wish was made, then there should have been a Wish Emma before our Emma made her indirect wish.

The Wish Realm was a poorly thought out means to an end - ultimately, it was a way to bring a different version of Robin Hood to Storybrooke so The Evil Queen could have her happy ending and Page 23 could be fulfilled.  Heck, they never even bothered to explain why Robin Hood didn't age in the Wish Realm, which seemed like such a big question in the 6B premiere.  

For sure it makes no sense why Emma would still have had a child with Neal, except they wanted to use all the same characters in the Wish Realm.  The only possible explanation is fate found another way to make a certain basic outcome happen.  Henry was in Peter Pan's prophesy, so maybe he had to exist somehow or another.  

The Wish Realm became more important than it should have because they decided to make it such an integral part of Season 7, especially in the finale.  Again, they never bothered to make any sense of it.  Like how could Wish Hook have a past with Mother Gothel in a completely different universe before Emma made the wish to create the Wish Realm?  The worldbuilding was abysmal.  Especially when they originally insisted that the Wish Realm people weren't real (books on the shelf are real but not the characters in them or something).  

These Writers constantly write themselves into a corner and then swing a sledgehammer all around to create some wiggle room, cause a mess, and then claim they meant to do it all along.

Edited March 2, 2019 by Camera One

[Shanna Marie]

3 hours ago, Camera One said:

For sure it makes no sense why Emma would still have had a child with Neal, except they wanted to use all the same characters in the Wish Realm. 

What's funny is that the secondary motive for the whole thing seemed to be to "prove" that Emma actually owed Regina a favor, that she was better off for the curse having been cast because it made her strong, and growing up as a princess with a loving family made her into a weak, useless idiot (ouch, I just sprained my sarcasm muscle). So, if they were trying to get to the "they all owe Regina so much for casting the curse, because look at what they would have lost if she hadn't done it" point, wouldn't Henry not existing at all have been a big factor? After all, that was part of Regina's "I regret nothing," since she knew that without all the evil she'd done, she wouldn't have Henry. So shouldn't it have been the same way for Emma, that she'd rather have gone through everything she did and have to deal with all the Savior stuff because if she hadn't, she wouldn't have had Henry? Henry should have been absent from the Wishverse since he wouldn't have existed without the curse, and thus even more reason for Emma to be grateful (gag) to Regina.

[Camera One]

53 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said:

What's funny is that the secondary motive for the whole thing seemed to be to "prove" that Emma actually owed Regina a favor, that she was better off for the curse having been cast because it made her strong, and growing up as a princess with a loving family made her into a weak, useless idiot

I actually fully expected that to occur in the Season 6 finale, a full-out alt reality to a world where Regina didn't marry Leopold, and how life would have turned out horribly for Snow, Charming, Emma, the entire universe, etc.  They could have ended up with the same problem - if Snow and Charming hadn't met, Emma wouldn't exist.  Though these are the same Writers who would assume even if Snow had a daughter with someone else, she would still look exactly like Emma, LOL.

[andromeda331]

2 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

What's funny is that the secondary motive for the whole thing seemed to be to "prove" that Emma actually owed Regina a favor, that she was better off for the curse having been cast because it made her strong, and growing up as a princess with a loving family made her into a weak, useless idiot (ouch, I just sprained my sarcasm muscle). So, if they were trying to get to the "they all owe Regina so much for casting the curse, because look at what they would have lost if she hadn't done it" point, wouldn't Henry not existing at all have been a big factor? After all, that was part of Regina's "I regret nothing," since she knew that without all the evil she'd done, she wouldn't have Henry. So shouldn't it have been the same way for Emma, that she'd rather have gone through everything she did and have to deal with all the Savior stuff because if she hadn't, she wouldn't have had Henry? Henry should have been absent from the Wishverse since he wouldn't have existed without the curse, and thus even more reason for Emma to be grateful (gag) to Regina.

That's why I hate Wish Realm. It could have been really fun to see what it would have been like if the Curse was never cast. What would they all be like? What would Emma be like? Instead it was just an excuse to get Emma to thank Regina for ruining her entire life so she wouldn't have had to grow up with her parents who loved her. Yeah, there's nothing worse in the world then that. Its suppose to be funny or no big deal when Regina kills Charming and Snow. Bullshit.

[Camera One]

With a friend who was catching up, I just watched "Murder Most Foul", "Ill-Boding Patterns", "Page 23" and "A Wondrous Place".  

Despite this stretch of episodes, I could see how someone on Netflix might binge through this show.  When watched one after the other, there are threads that continue through that sort of makes it feel like a long movie where all the details start getting mixed together.  For example, Killian had his counselling session with Archie in "Murder Most Foul" and they have a follow-up conversation at the beginning of "Ill-Boding Patterns".  

The other thing I noticed was how heavily Regina and Hook's story continued, while other characters like Emma, Henry and especially Snow & Charming (with their alternating naps) would just drop in and out of the story.  

I still enjoyed Hook and Charming's scenes in "Murder Most Foul".  Regina and Robin were rather boring, as were anything related to Rumple and Gideon. I was pretty appalled when Belle complimented Rumple on how he made the right decision when he told her he did the bleeding of Blue to save Gideon from getting dark.  I'm starting to think the random nature of this show sometimes saves it... like when Zelena suddenly shows up for a few episodes, and then we got an out-of-the-blue Aladdin/Jasmine/Ariel adventure.  What was really disjointed was Gideon popping up every once in a while to reassert that he was still a threat before disappearing at which point everyone forgets there's a threat in town and they do "everyday" things.

My friend couldn't really follow some of plot points.  When Regina was talking about the snake, she didn't remember the snake was The Evil Queen.  She also couldn't remember who Nemo was, that Hook had a brother, or the whole Robin Hood had the lion tattoo stuff.  

She did manage to guess some stuff, though, especially in "Page 23".  She predicted that the Arrow of True Hate would make Regina realized she hated herself (when Regina said she LOVED herself in that episode, it was just so cheesy).  She also predicted Page 23 was the happy ending for The Evil Queen.

I suppose rewatching wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, though I don't think I could have sat through them myself alone without being tempted to fast-forward.  

Edited March 3, 2019 by Camera One

[daxx]

Where rewatching seasons 1-3 reminds me what I loved about this show, the current rewatch,the later seasons, kind of bum me out as we get closer to the season that nearly broke the show for me. 6. It’s taking me longer each weekend to get to the rewatch. Season 3 I could hardly wait for the next week.

[Camera One]

6B and 4B have a lot in common in terms of characters endlessly talking about darkness and redemption and who deserves a happy ending and who gets to be a "hero", and it's all a convoluted mess.  No wonder this show gets so repetitive and tiresome.  In 6B, there's Rumple speaking of darkness with Gideon (where apparently if someone does something evil FOR you, then you don't become "dark" yourself) and Regina trying to impart lessons of happiness to The Evil Queen, and Hook thinking he doesn't deserve a happy ending.  My friend also pointed out that everyone wants to be a hero in 6B, what with Gideon claiming to want to be a hero, and then Beowulf and Rumple in the flashback, and Jasmine and Aladdin in their episode, and Hook comparing himself to the "heroes".  Near the end of "Page 23", when Regina said she was going to let The Evil Queen go, Snow said maybe The Evil Queen can't be redeemed and pointed out that The Evil Queen should start by un-doing the bad things she did, the Writer later had Snow admit to Hook she had been wrong and she shouldn't have forgotten that everyone can be redeemed.  

I had forgotten Henry said the "rule" is he can't affect the lives of people in his book, and The Evil Queen wasn't in his book.  What was "his" book?  Didn't Isaac write it?  Henry said "technically" The Evil Queen isn't in his book but she was half of Regina, so she was!  Wasn't Henry basically granting a happy ending by writing "The Evil Queen ended up in a place where she could have a fresh start" (paraphrase)? 

Edited March 3, 2019 by Camera One

[KingOfHearts]

6 hours ago, Camera One said:

6B and 4B have a lot in common in terms of characters endlessly talking about darkness and redemption and who deserves a happy ending and who gets to be a "hero", and it's all a convoluted mess.

That and putting Emma into imminent doom because she's the Savior.

Quote

Henry said "technically" The Evil Queen isn't in his book but she was half of Regina, so she was! 

Even if you go by the show's reasoning that Regina was a "different person", it still doesn't work. If the Evil Queen was a separate entity from Redeemed!Regina, then she'd still be in the book.

In case anyone hasn't figured it out over the past 5 years, I'm a huge Disney fanatic and it's partially why I enjoyed watching this show. I feel as though A&E are not actually big fans of their source material - it's more like plagiarism than flattery. They only used Disney movies because they were iconic and had a lot to draw from. I never got the sense in interviews that A&E were excited about adapting the stories to live action. They never bothered to really do their research or understand the characters they were bringing into their universe. 

Edited March 4, 2019 by KingOfHearts

[Camera One]

I rewatched two more today... "Mother's Little Helper" and "Awake".  My friend wants to get to the end of the show (aka Season 6 - she heard about the cast changes and she said she's not interested in seeing Season 7), but we'll see if that actually happens.

I had forgotten about some of the plot points from 6B.  My friend was pointing out that there seems to be a lot of old characters returning.  I suppose so, though that seems to happen a lot with this show (eg. 5B), so I wonder if they did have most returning characters in 6B.  

The Black Fairy flashbacks in "Mother's Little Helper" were a tad tedious.  I don't think the reveal that Gideon's heart was controlled all along meshed with his evil expressions and sneers ever since he came to town.  Surely the Black Fairy wasn't controlling everything he said.  

I had forgotten how Snowing's sleeping curse was actually broken, by everyone drinking a little bit of the Sleeping Curse to "dilute" it.  It also didn't mesh with the redemption of The Evil Queen, who supposedly told Regina everything she needed to break the Curse, but didn't mention the fail-safe (causing the cure made by Regina and Zelena to backfire and weaken both hearts)?  

I kept wondering while watching these episodes why the end of the season hadn't been reached yet... the Gideon/Black Fairy threat really did feel long and drawn out.

Edited March 4, 2019 by Camera One

[Shanna Marie]

On 3/3/2019 at 7:14 PM, KingOfHearts said:

I feel as though A&E are not actually big fans of their source material - it's more like plagiarism than flattery. They only used Disney movies because they were iconic and had a lot to draw from. I never got the sense in interviews that A&E were excited about adapting the stories to live action. They never bothered to really do their research or understand the characters they were bringing into their universe. 

I think they mostly used the characters as a shortcut. They didn't have to actually develop characters or do any of the work if they used known entities. If the character has the same name and roughly the same costume (at least in flashbacks) as the Disney version, then the audience will already know everything that matters about them and these writers don't have to do anything. The audience will automatically like (or hate) them based on their Disney incarnation, so there's no need to really do any work to dig into the characters and figure out what makes them tick. By the end of the series, they were basically just pasting pictures of the characters onto sticks and waving them around and making them say "Hi, I'm Cinderella/Jasmine/Tiana, etc.," and that was their idea of character development.

[Camera One]

1 hour ago, Shanna Marie said:

I aree they mostly used the characters as a shortcut. They didn't have to actually develop chaacters or do any of the work if they used known entities. 

Yes, very much so.  I feel that they have mostly used the Disney and other well-known properties as a crutch in their storytelling.  They seem to expect a pat on the back whenever they change or subvert an original story as if it's the pinnacle of creativity. 

There are so many examples from this show where they are basically using a well-known character in name only (eg. Count of Monte Cristo).  Even a major character like Zelena... it was like they wanted to add Regina's jealous sister and tacked on the Wicked Witch personae to make her more interesting. 

There are other examples where they try to fit a square peg into a round hole (eg. Trying to squeeze "Aladdin" into the Savior mythology). 

It seems like "Frozen" is the only case where they really delved into the mythology and the original story and the Disney movie and then work in thematic similarities with "Once" and character parallels with its protagonists.  

Even Snow White didn't have many Easter eggs from the other iterations of the story. They never developed and rarely used her communication with animals.

Edited March 6, 2019 by Camera One

[Shanna Marie]

I've come to the conclusion during the rewatch that 4B has to be the low point of the series and the worst arc. There were some bad ideas later on, and there was some terrible execution, but this arc manages to be such a bad idea that there was no way to execute it well, and it was horribly executed. I don't think there's even much to redeem the storyline. Some of the guest characters were good, but they were barely used.

The "help Regina get her happy ending by finding the Author" plot was a really dumb idea, mostly because we all knew how it had to come out. There was no way they were going to actually end the arc with the Author writing Regina a happy ending that was really a happy ending unless maybe it was the end of the series or they were writing Regina off the series (and even then, I think that giving a character a happy ending that way would be extremely unsatisfying). What would they have done with Regina in the future if she had a magically granted happy ending? It was obvious that it would end up being some kind of "I write my own happy ending" conclusion, which is fine, except that every other character seemed to be endorsing Regina's "find the Author" quest and taking the idea that the only way she could get a happy ending was to have the Author write one for her seriously, so everyone ends up looking like an idiot when Regina reaches the obvious conclusion that this was a bad idea. And then Rumple is doing the same exact thing Regina is, but when he does it, it's an evil scheme they have to stop. How can two characters be doing the same thing for the same reasons, and with one it's a good thing that the other characters are helping with and with the other it's an evil scheme they must stop?

I don't think anyone could have made anything good out of that storyline without significantly retooling it -- like maybe Regina working on this secretly on her own rather than the others all thinking it's an awesome idea and making sacrifices to help her. But then they wrote it horribly and made it even worse. For starters, they didn't bother to define any of their terms. They threw out terms like "happy ending" and "darkness" without seeming to know what they meant by them. With all the running around to get Regina's happy ending, it was never made clear what, exactly, that would be. Was she going to kill Marian again? Cure Marian so Robin could move back to town and be a divorced dad? Given that she never apologized to Snow or said anything about how her whole revenge quest was wrong, it was kind of dumb for Snow to be on board with all this, since part of Regina's happy ending might have been Snow's death. After all, she cast the curse to try to get a happy ending, which makes you wonder what she'd ask the Author for. Then there was all the talk of darkness, without any sense of what they meant by that. Lily supposedly had an extra helping of darkness, but she didn't seem to be evil. She mostly seemed to make bad choices with good intentions and then was really unlucky. I wouldn't consider that dark. Dark would be Regina in Evil Queen mode, killing without remorse and unable to bear anyone else being happy. How would you even measure someone's potential for darkness if they weren't actually dark? Do they look into the alternate universe in which they went another way and see how bad they were there?

They wasted the guest stars, they never followed up on any potentially interesting storylines. They let the Queens of Darkness in town because they were supposedly trying to redeem themselves, but then they never seemed to even pretend to try and no one tried to coach them or help them. There was Maleficent being in town with just about everyone she had a grudge against and doing absolutely nothing about it, plus no development of her backstory.

There was the eggbaby plot, which was retcon character assassination that made zero sense. The Author concept didn't make any sense, either -- he can change fate, but he's not supposed to, there are all the storybooks, but it's the pen that's magic, and the pen requires Dark Savior blood as ink (seriously?), the Author can't change fate in Storybrooke because the Savior gave happy endings there, except, wait, he can change things. He's trapped in the book, with the pen on the outside, but somehow he was able to write all the stuff that came after he was trapped in the book -- or was that another Author filling in?

And then the conclusion was a mass of anticlimax, with Regina getting what she wanted without needing the author, thanks to the retcon (and it had to be a retcon) about Marian really being Zelena, so she has her big "I write my own happy ending" epiphany after she already has it. Her tragic separation from Robin turned out to have been easily overcome, given that he still had his cell phone and she knew exactly where he was.

Not to mention Belle abruptly going back to Rumple after spending the arc being betrayed by him and after seeing that, no, he did not have a heart of gold, that it was literally a lump of blackened charcoal destroyed by his own evil.

And we won't even get into the mess of the finale.

[Camera One]

I just watched How Stella Got Her Groove Back and it answered some of those questions.

19 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said:

And then Rumple is doing the same exact thing Regina is, but when he does it, it's an evil scheme they have to stop. How can two characters be doing the same thing for the same reasons, and with one it's a good thing that the other characters are helping with and with the other it's an evil scheme they must stop?

Apparently, why it was an evil scheme is because Rumple and the Queens of Darkness want to "shift the entire balance".  In the bigger picture, that made no sense.  Rumple claimed in the premiere that the Author gives heroes and villains "what he deems just desserts" and he could change the rules.  After watching the arc, that was clearly not true. 

Eventually, what Isaac did was create some sort of fictional world where Rumple had his happy ending which would be replayed over and over again.  That's not even real life.  It's bad when things said within a half-season are later blatantly discarded like we're supposed to forget it all.  Much like the "war" that was coming, or Ursula and Cruella pretending to fit in. 

Quote

There was Maleficent being in town with just about everyone she had a grudge against and doing absolutely nothing about it

She did tell Regina, "There are worse crimes" than what Regina did to her.  We all know it's not possible to hold more than one grudge at a time.

Edited March 9, 2019 by Camera One

[KingOfHearts]

2 hours ago, Camera One said:

Eventually, what Isaac did was create some sort of fictional world where Rumple had his happy ending which would be replayed over and over again.  That's not even real life.  It's bad when things said within a half-season are later blatantly discarded like we're supposed to forget it all.  Much like the "war" that was coming, or Ursula and Cruella pretending to fit in. 

I'm fairly certain Rumple got tricked by Isaac. I don't think he counted on living in some sort of "timeless" existence where he wasn't self-aware and it was just an endless repeat. But even by Isaac's standards, the AU didn't make sense. It wasn't a world where villains won - it was a world where the "villains" were the heroes and the "heroes" were the villains. If it were truly a shift in balance, Regina would be torturing Snow 24/7, Rumple would have Belle's undying adoration, Zelena would have her own Storybrooke, and Hook would get his revenge on Rumple... oh wait. That all happened in the prime universe! So what's the freaking point??

Ursula was able to rebel against her father and humans, Cruella got to leave her attic and murder her mother, and Maleficent got to put a sleeping curse on her mother. Looks like all these villains got what they wanted and were still unhappy. Please tell me again how the heroes get everything and the villains get nothing.

Edited March 10, 2019 by KingOfHearts

[andromeda331]

4 hours ago, KingOfHearts said:

I'm fairly certain Rumple got tricked by Isaac. I don't think he counted on living in some sort of "timeless" existence where he wasn't self-aware and it was just an endless repeat. But even by Isaac's standards, the AU didn't make sense. It wasn't a world where villains won - it was a world where the "villains" were the heroes and the "heroes" were the villains. If it were truly a shift in balance, Regina would be torturing Snow 24/7, Rumple would have Belle's undying adoration, Zelena would have her own Storybrooke, and Hook would get his revenge on Rumple... oh wait. That all happened in the prime universe! So what's the freaking point??

Ursula was able to rebel against her father and humans, Cruella got to leave her attic and murder her mother, and Maleficent got to put a sleeping curse on her mother. Looks like all these villains got what they wanted and were still unhappy. Please tell me again how the heroes get everything and the villains get nothing.

Yeah, the villains always got what they wanted while whining they never did or except for small parts like Regina didn't get to kill Snow which was her own fault she only had a million chances and the Curse ended. Rumple got everything he wanted except Bae who bailed. But wouldn't go after him without his powers and Bae/Neal said not to being turned back into a fourteen year old. We're suppose to feel sorry for them. Oh, poor little villains all they did was murder and destroy millions of lives. 

[Camera One]

I get to watch more of 6B today before my friend leaves.  I don't think we'll get through to the Season 6 finale.  

"Where Bluebirds Fly" was a little better than I remembered.  So close to the end, and we got a Zelena centric, but she actually earned a redemption by giving up something so important to her.  Rumple never gave up magic for Belle, and yet they're supposed to be a True Love coupling to root for.

"The Black Fairy" was rather tedious, what with the boring scenes in Rumple's dream world.  It was selfish as hell of Rumple to drag Emma along and she wasn't even that mad or scared for her family members without her there.  

There was another use of "Not today!", this time from The Black Fairy.  If someone took a drink every time someone said the meaningless phrase "The Final Battle", that person would have alcohol poisoning.  

[Camera One]

We only got through three episodes - "When Bluebirds Fly", "The Black Fairy" and the musical episode.  In some ways, I'm glad I didn't have to rewatch the 6B finale right after.  Even though 6B was terrible, I didn't find rewatching too bad.  Maybe it was because I was curious what my friend thought.  She does find it frustrating when the characters do stupid things (which is quite often).   Who knows when we'll watch the 6B finale... by that time, she would probably have forgotten everything again.  The finale does segue into Season 7 so maybe she would be up to watching that.

I liked the wedding planning thread through these episodes, even though it was disjointed (she was confused why the wedding was suddenly "tomorrow" when they had decided the previous episode to wait).  I still found parts of the musical episode moving and I think it was a nice way to close out Emma's story and her relationships with Henry, her parents and Hook.

In the grand scheme of things, things that happen within each episode becomes a moot point.  Zelena gives up her magic and stops The Black Fairy for 5 minutes.  They get the rest of the wand that Tiger Lily gave Hook and then Rumple betrays them in 5 minutes.  Emma's Song In Her Heart stops The Black Fairy for 5 minutes and she still got the Curse set and ready.  

Edited March 10, 2019 by Camera One

[Shanna Marie]

21 hours ago, Camera One said:

Apparently, why it was an evil scheme is because Rumple and the Queens of Darkness want to "shift the entire balance". 

I suppose they did want to create a world where the villains would win, so, okay, evil scheme. Except they also seemed to want specific things -- Rumple wanted his charcoal heart fixed, Ursula wanted her voice back, and Cruella wanted the Author to delete the restriction on her killing (gee, maybe this was the arc they should have mixed with the Wizard of Oz -- they set off down the yellow brick road to ask the Author for certain things). But even if that's different from what Regina wanted, there's the fact that Isaac was being punished for using his power to rewrite things rather than just recording events, so Regina asking him to do that would have been going against the rules, and that means the entire goal for the arc was wrong.

And there's the issue that all of this sprang out of nowhere. Regina came up with the notion that the Author might be able to change her fate after she looked at a book that accurately recorded events that happened in the past and decided that being written as a villain was what was causing her problems. No one had previously mentioned a concept of an Author. The book was magical in having powers of belief (though I think that in and of itself was a retcon from season 1 in 3B when Henry believed just because he touched the book) and appearing when it was needed, but that had nothing to do with any kind of magical author who had any kind of power of fate. When Regina first mentioned her idea about the Author, Rumple seemed surprised. It didn't seem like he had ever heard of this. And then after he's been stuck in the World Without Magic, suddenly he's an expert? He knows what kind of ink works, figures out that the Author is trapped in a magical door picture, and seems to know what the Author can do and his history. How did he learn all this? Likewise with August. We saw him forging the pages from the book and adding them. It had nothing to do with the Author. He didn't seem to know anything about it. Did the Apprentice give him the full Author briefing when he learned about Neal/Bae? Why? What did that have to do with anything? They go from this being a wacky idea Regina pulls out of thin air with zero evidence to lore that everyone knows about.

19 hours ago, KingOfHearts said:

Looks like all these villains got what they wanted and were still unhappy. Please tell me again how the heroes get everything and the villains get nothing.

Yeah, Regina is sitting in her mansion, holding the role of mayor that she can drop and pick up again when she wants, wearing her designer clothes and driving a Mercedes, not having faced any punishment at all for mass slaughter and disrupting an entire civilization, her former victims now coddle her and the son she emotionally abused thinks she's the best mom ever. But she doesn't get her way in one thing and she starts whining about not getting a happy ending and acting like there's some kind of cosmic conspiracy against her. That's another reason this is the worst arc. The primary goal of the heroes is entirely unsympathetic. It's hard to watch when you don't want the heroes to succeed.

[Camera One]

42 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said:

there's the fact that Isaac was being punished for using his power to rewrite things rather than just recording events, so Regina asking him to do that would have been going against the rules, and that means the entire goal for the arc was wrong.

And then, in Season 6, you have Henry blatantly trying to write "Emma wins the Final Battle" into the storybook.  Isn't that against the rules?  Isn't Henry supposed to be more heroic than Isaac?  I mean, I understand why he wants to do it, but trying should be a big deal.  

Quote

And then after he's been stuck in the World Without Magic, suddenly he's an expert? He knows what kind of ink works, figures out that the Author is trapped in a magical door picture, and seems to know what the Author can do and his history. How did he learn all this? Likewise with August. We saw him forging the pages from the book and adding them. It had nothing to do with the Author. He didn't seem to know anything about it.

This bothered me a lot the first time around.  

It's also a recurring plot solution the writers use, whereby Rumple, Regina or Zelena will suddenly have random knowledge because they know "magic".  

On the flip side, ignorance is also random.  I have a hard time believing that no one saw Isaac, or Rumple and Blue had no idea who the Sorcerer was.  Heck, Rumple had been to Camelot and he had been seeking The Apprentice to get the Hat Box. 

[Shanna Marie]

3 hours ago, Camera One said:

And then, in Season 6, you have Henry blatantly trying to write "Emma wins the Final Battle" into the storybook.  Isn't that against the rules?  Isn't Henry supposed to be more heroic than Isaac?  I mean, I understand why he wants to do it, but trying should be a big deal.  

Maybe they're counting motivation? Isaac was screwing with people for grins, to make for a better story, and because he thought heroes needed to be taken down a peg (an attitude he demonstrated before he became the Author, so obviously the Apprentice didn't do his due diligence in screening his recruits) while Henry was trying to save the day. A stretch, I know. Plus, Henry failed, so he didn't actually do it, while Isaac actually made people do things they wouldn't have done otherwise.

While I'm ranting about this ... not only was what Regina wanted Isaac to do wrong, but it turned out her thesis was incorrect. The Author had nothing to do with her not getting a happy ending. The deck wasn't stacked against villains. The Author was actually cheering for her and liked her. Ariel was right. Villains don't get happy endings because they go about them the wrong way, not because some Author is refusing to write happy endings for them. Regina wouldn't have been in this situation if she hadn't rejected her soulmate in the first place to choose revenge instead. Because of that, Robin married someone else (and Regina should never have been allowed to get him later as a result of her own evil getting his wife out of the way).

So, the heroes' goal for the arc turns out to have been not only a wrong thing to do, but was based on an incorrect thesis. And they were all behind it, not expressing doubts about whether or not it was a good idea. They didn't even have any kind of "duh!" moment in which they acknowledged that they had been wrong.

3 hours ago, Camera One said:

It's also a recurring plot solution the writers use, whereby Rumple, Regina or Zelena will suddenly have random knowledge because they know "magic".  

On the flip side, ignorance is also random.  I have a hard time believing that no one saw Isaac, or Rumple and Blue had no idea who the Sorcerer was.  Heck, Rumple had been to Camelot and he had been seeking The Apprentice to get the Hat Box. 

The easy fix for some of this (for this arc, not the recurring issue of random knowledge) would have been for Regina to have come up with her Author idea based on some information that she found rather than pulling it out of thin air. Then it would make some sense for Rumple to have knowledge about it -- maybe it's something he knew, but he didn't think about using it in that way or for that purpose until Regina mentioned it -- or for him to have access to information about it. But it's really odd that Regina just has this wacky idea based on absolutely nothing, and then other people just happen to either have or easily get information on this thing that has never been mentioned before.

[Melgaypet]

I hope this is the right thread for questions, because I have one. Today I re-watched "A Pirate's Life," the second episode (and my favorite) of that mostly-awful last season, and noticed this time around that in the scene where Lady Tremaine de-ages Wish!Hook the two of them clearly allude to having some kind of past together. Was that ever explained? Did it have to do with Rapunzel's/Gothel's/Alice's tower?

[Camera One]

43 minutes ago, Melgaypet said:

Today I re-watched "A Pirate's Life," the second episode (and my favorite) of that mostly-awful last season, and noticed this time around that in the scene where Lady Tremaine de-ages Wish!Hook the two of them clearly allude to having some kind of past together. Was that ever explained? Did it have to do with Rapunzel's/Gothel's/Alice's tower?

I don't remember them following up on that.  Wish!Hook/Whook met Mother Gothel after Lady Tremaine trapped her in the tower, so I don't think Whook and Lady Tremaine interacted after "A Pirate's Life".

Maybe they intended to do more flashbacks with Lady Tremaine but instead decided to write her out?  When Season 7 began, they talked as if they planned to keep this new cast for multiple seasons.

[Melgaypet]

37 minutes ago, Camera One said:

I don't remember them following up on that.  Wish!Hook/Whook met Mother Gothel after Lady Tremaine trapped her in the tower, so I don't think Whook and Lady Tremaine interacted after "A Pirate's Life".

Maybe they intended to do more flashbacks with Lady Tremaine but instead decided to write her out?  When Season 7 began, they talked as if they planned to keep this new cast for multiple seasons.

Thank you for answering so quick, @Camera One. I never could keep Rapunzel/Tremaine/Victoria's whole story straight, and it's embarrassing to be confused by a show as dumb as this one became.

You might be right about them having more flashbacks in mind for Tremaine. I thought it was sudden when she was killed off. I wasn't complaining - I found her intensely boring as a villain - but it felt very abrupt.

[Shanna Marie]

15 hours ago, Camera One said:

I don't remember them following up on that.  Wish!Hook/Whook met Mother Gothel after Lady Tremaine trapped her in the tower, so I don't think Whook and Lady Tremaine interacted after "A Pirate's Life".

Maybe Lady Tremaine met WHook when she stopped by to check on her captive and found WHook and Alice instead? Not that we ever saw this. Season 7 was very flaily, like they kept coming up with plans and panicking when things weren't working, so they just dropped characters and storylines at random. All the Cinderella-related stuff (except, unfortunately, Cinderella herself) just vanished in a poof of never mind midway through the season.

[Melgaypet]

5 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

All the Cinderella-related stuff (except, unfortunately, Cinderella herself) just vanished in a poof of never mind midway through the season.

Ha! Cinderella/Jacinda was just so boring. She and Henry (and their kid) were so boring together. I think they made a mistake trying to set up the two of them as the season's True Love couple á la Snow and Charming. Honestly, Henry had more chemistry with Evil Ivy.

This show left me with so many questions. A by-no-means-comprehensive list:

• Why did no one ever connect the dots about Graham's murder? That still makes me so mad!
• Why did Charming never punch Neal/Baelfire in the face?
• Why did no one ever tell Regina to spank her inner moppet and grow up already?
• Why did Hook end up with backstory where he killed, like, everyone's father?
• Seriously, what's up with the super-powerful magic ladies forcing men to have sex with them? That's so disturbing, do the writers not see that they're writing rape stories?
• Why did we spend what felt like a hundred years on that Author business and why did it never make any sense?
• What's with the idea that being raised by her actual parents would turn badass Emma into a simpering twit?
• For the ostensible protaganist, why could GrownUp!Henry lift right out of season 7 and not effect the larger plot at all?
• Also, did they just give up on having the timelines make any sense whatsoever?

[Camera One]

14 minutes ago, Melgaypet said:

• Also, did they just give up on having the timelines make any sense whatsoever?

It's worse than that.  They've convinced themselves their timeline makes sense, even admonishing people who were criticizing before they saw the entirety of Season 7.  I think we've concluded that there is no way the timeline in Season 7 can make sense as written.

Edited March 14, 2019 by Camera One

[Shanna Marie]

49 minutes ago, Camera One said:

I think we've concluded that there is no way the timeline in Season 7 can make sense as written.

Not unless Regina, WHook, and Zelena were doing some serious juice cleanses and had work done. And even then, there's no way to reconcile Alice's story within the larger timeline and have it fit with the curse, the Tremaine story or with Robyn's arrival. And then there's Emma and Hook's baby that's an infant before Henry leaves home when they go back to past Storybrooke, but they don't announce the pregnancy until after Henry's been away long enough to age into another actor in the original timeline -- but she's born before the timeline would have been affected by the cursed-back-in-time people showing up, so it can't be the beignet truck showing up that made Hook and Emma have a kid earlier in the new timeline. So, did Henry just not notice he had a little sister before he left town, and they were trying to figure out a way to break it to him when they ran into him as an adult, and the kid was already a tween by that time?

Sorry, my brain is still exploding over all that.

1 hour ago, Melgaypet said:

Why did we spend what felt like a hundred years on that Author business and why did it never make any sense?

That is one of the great mysteries of the universe. They devoted more than half a season (since they started that plot during the A arc) to the characters all pursuing a goal that they ended up negating, and no one seemed to notice that they'd wasted their time. It never made sense because they seem to think that plotting and planning is for chumps and they threw out whatever they needed for the plot of each individual episode without considering how it fit into the big picture. Mostly, I think all of it was an excuse to set up their hero/villain swap alternate reality, and even that was terribly executed because they didn't actually swap heroes and villains in a way that said anything about heroes, villains, or their outcomes.

[RolloTomasi]

The Author plot was one of those rare plots where it was obvious from the very beginning it was going to be a waste of time. There were only two possible outcomes. Either the Author did affect everything, which would torpedo the entire canon history they had already created (as much as they hadn’t torpedoed it yet themselves) or the Author didn’t, which meant the characters wasted about two thirds of a season on something that turned out to be pointless. It was a real lose/lose storyline, which you don’t usually see. Master storytellers! 

And I still wish the heroes/villains AU didn’t have the characters literally switch places. Instead of making Regina a bandit, keep her the Evil Queen but with the support she craved. Keep Snow the bandit, but one who the villagers despised because of the repercussions of what her war with Regina does to them. I guess it was easier to just cut and paste the names in a script though. 

[Shanna Marie]

10 hours ago, RolloTomasi said:

The Author plot was one of those rare plots where it was obvious from the very beginning it was going to be a waste of time. There were only two possible outcomes. Either the Author did affect everything, which would torpedo the entire canon history they had already created (as much as they hadn’t torpedoed it yet themselves) or the Author didn’t, which meant the characters wasted about two thirds of a season on something that turned out to be pointless. It was a real lose/lose storyline, which you don’t usually see. Master storytellers! 

About the only way they could have made it work would have been to keep it as just Regina with that goal, and either she's going behind the others' backs to try to carry it out or the others are all trying to talk her out of it, so that there's conflict. That way, most of the characters would be in the right, and the story would be about Regina getting to the inevitable conclusion that she writes her own happy ending, which everyone else has been telling her all along (the words "you were right" would need to come up). And it's not enough to sustain a whole arc. That should have maybe been a B plot for a couple of episodes. As it is, all the characters ended up looking like idiots when none of them figured that out for themselves. At the very least one or two characters should have dissented.

10 hours ago, RolloTomasi said:

And I still wish the heroes/villains AU didn’t have the characters literally switch places.

That was such a mess because their thesis was so unclear. If we're getting into how villains don't get happy endings normally, then they could have had the world where the villains won (though that wouldn't be too different from the real world, given that Regina was a queen and Rumple had his castle and power over all the rulers in the surrounding kingdoms). Or change the way the world views them, so everyone loves Regina for getting rid of Leopold and Snow, while Bandit Snow is an unpopular figure. Making Regina into Bandit Snow and Snow into the Evil Queen didn't do anything. It could have, if they'd used it as a way for Regina to walk a mile in Snow's shoes and understand how badly she persecuted Snow, but Regina is allowed no actual, honest character growth. They didn't even seem able to keep straight what they'd actually done and how it worked. They had the Regina fangirls for Isaac's book and were treating it like he'd done some bold thing in making Snow White the villain and Regina the hero, but "Regina" isn't a known character outside this show, and if Regina had never been the Evil Queen, then there's no "aha! I switched things up!" impact for her being in Snow's old role, and in a book you don't know that they switched actresses. The fangirls were essentially fangirling Season One Snow under a different name.

[andromeda331]

1 hour ago, Shanna Marie said:

About the only way they could have made it work would have been to keep it as just Regina with that goal, and either she's going behind the others' backs to try to carry it out or the others are all trying to talk her out of it, so that there's conflict. That way, most of the characters would be in the right, and the story would be about Regina getting to the inevitable conclusion that she writes her own happy ending, which everyone else has been telling her all along (the words "you were right" would need to come up). And it's not enough to sustain a whole arc. That should have maybe been a B plot for a couple of episodes. As it is, all the characters ended up looking like idiots when none of them figured that out for themselves. At the very least one or two characters should have dissented.

That was such a mess because their thesis was so unclear. If we're getting into how villains don't get happy endings normally, then they could have had the world where the villains won (though that wouldn't be too different from the real world, given that Regina was a queen and Rumple had his castle and power over all the rulers in the surrounding kingdoms). Or change the way the world views them, so everyone loves Regina for getting rid of Leopold and Snow, while Bandit Snow is an unpopular figure. Making Regina into Bandit Snow and Snow into the Evil Queen didn't do anything. It could have, if they'd used it as a way for Regina to walk a mile in Snow's shoes and understand how badly she persecuted Snow, but Regina is allowed no actual, honest character growth. They didn't even seem able to keep straight what they'd actually done and how it worked. They had the Regina fangirls for Isaac's book and were treating it like he'd done some bold thing in making Snow White the villain and Regina the hero, but "Regina" isn't a known character outside this show, and if Regina had never been the Evil Queen, then there's no "aha! I switched things up!" impact for her being in Snow's old role, and in a book you don't know that they switched actresses. The fangirls were essentially fangirling Season One Snow under a different name.

That would have made more sense for the AU world were villains win. No way Regina wanted Snow's bandit life or fighting against the Queen. She would want to be cheered for taking down Leopold and Snow, all the attention, everyone doing everything for her, helping her, loving her, maybe endless men lining up to be her boy toy. Or some fantasy of how things would have worked out if Daniel lived and Cora never interfered. Probably living at the manor, riches and happy or whatever. Maybe with a Cora who gave her consent to their marriage and love and support. Rumple would want all the power, kill Hook or torture him repeatedly and kill him. Bae who never left and probably the same except on board with his powers and stuff, married to Belle and proof that he wasn't a coward or something.  

[Camera One]

Isaac is basically A&E.  It's interesting that at the book signing, all the fans were gaga over Regina even though she wasn't the bold and audacious villain.  

Edited March 15, 2019 by Camera One

[Melgaypet]

The Author thing...it was so weird to me that so many characters bought into Regina's whining about someone denying her a happy ending. It seemed obvious that the message was going to be "you write your own happy ending" and it made the other characters look stupid that they never said this to her. If villains don't get happy endings, than stop being a villain!

Which only proves to me that Regina was a "dry drunk" sort of villain, not actually reformed. She may have stopped murdering people, but she didn't actually change herself. She was still a narcissist with a giant victim complex, and that's why she was never happy, because she couldn't be.

Storybrooke needed a Villains Anonymous chapter, with a strong emphasis on Step 8.

Edited March 15, 2019 by Melgaypet

[Camera One]

So I was wondering... what made Rumple the Savior?  We were led to believe that Emma was the Savior and powerful because she was the result of True Love.  It would be a stretch if Fiona and Malcolm were True Love.  I suppose "capable of great good or darkness" did apply to Rumple as well as Emma.  But if the Savior was fated to die to save the world, then how could The Savior potentially become evil?  If Rumple's Saviorness was Sheared away, would that still apply?  And what about Aladdin?  What made him The Savior?  I feel we need another season to explore these questions.  Instead of Charlie's Angels, maybe the spinoff can be Blue's Angels, starring Emma, Rumple and Aladdin.

Edited March 16, 2019 by Camera One

[Shanna Marie]

22 hours ago, Camera One said:

So I was wondering... what made Rumple the Savior?  We were led to believe that Emma was the Savior and powerful because she was the result of True Love.

It depends on which season it is. In season one, Emma was the Savior because she was the product of True Love and Rumple baked her DNA into the curse so that she would serve as a back door that would allow it to be broken. He was totally surprised when she turned out to have magical powers (which implied that a Savior wasn't a thing before that or you'd think he would have known about it). Somewhere along the line, she became a general-purpose Savior, where it was her job to bring about all happy endings and wasn't just due to the curse. They really went off into la-la land in season 6, when suddenly Saviors are this thing everyone seems to know about. They don't seem to have anything to do with True Love or being born to break a curse. Basically, they're the Slayer, with with generic magical powers rather than vampire-slaying abilities. There's one born every generation, and when one dies or stops being a Savior, the next Savior is born, but they tend not to live long because they're doomed, and their magic powers aren't very useful because they start getting the shakes and can't defend themselves.

And of course these writers would make Rumple the Savior, who really should have been a great hero, except his mother cut his destiny so he wouldn't be doomed. Otherwise, he'd have been powerful and as good as Emma. That was one of their more bizarre whitewashing retcons.

[Camera One]

Ha, good points.  I wonder... was Emma the first Savior to beat the odds and didn't die prematurely (not counting the Saviors like Aladdin or tiger moms of Saviors like Fiona who conveniently got hold of the Shears of Destiny, which are probably available at the local Enchanted Forest Walmart).  

Edited March 17, 2019 by Camera One

[tennisgurl]

The whole Author plot is one of the most baffling plots this show has ever done, it raises about a trillion questions, and then just ignores them. I mean, Jefferson set up how this universe works really simply. There are tons of worlds all in a row next to each other where stories come from, and they push and pull and sometimes cross into each other, but they all exist together simultaneously. All the stories we know are from other worlds, and while they didnt explain exactly how we GOT those stories and how exactly that all worked, but I figured that they could explain that later, as far as broad strokes world building, it worked out just fine. 

But then the stupid Author stuff came up, and the worlds of stories where everything is perpetually in one time period and can be manipulated by some Author guy and he follows ( I guess interesting?) people around either just writing down their lives like a creeper, or changing stuff to make things "more interesting" and they're all basically trapped in a time vortex doomed to repeat the same things over and over for our amusement. Before, they were just other worlds that we got peaks of, but now? Its a special story world that exists for story purposes, which is pretty fucked up honestly. I mean, its all so complicated and poorly thought out, and has such horrible implications (so our heroes are from a whole universe created just for the entertainment of people in our world?) and so many weird existentialist questions about how these story worlds work, and its just...never dealt with. Like, how is this now a bigger deal?! If I found out a lived in a story world that was stuck in the same time and I never noticed because of how I was written and I existed for strangers to watch my life, I would be pretty fucking freaked out, but no one even deals with it!

Its like if in St. Elsewhere, they told us midway through the series that the whole show was inside of a snow globe in the mind of an autistic kid, then they just ignored it and carried on like it never happened. This should be a huge revelation in the shows universe, but its just used as another excuse to prop Regina up and create another stupid forgettable villain, and some half assed Disney imagery shout outs.

[Shanna Marie]

18 hours ago, Camera One said:

I wonder... was Emma the first Savior to beat the odds and didn't die prematurely (not counting the Saviors like Aladdin or tiger moms of Saviors like Fiona who conveniently got hold of the Shears of Destiny, which are probably available at the local Enchanted Forest Walmart).  

There is no telling, since it seems like Saviors were retroactively created.

In season one, it really did seem to just be about the curse -- Rumple took samples from both of the Charmings to create the potion that would bring magic to the World Without Magic and put a drop of it on the curse scroll to create the back door (which suggests that any child the Charmings had could have broken the curse, not just specifically Emma, since they weren't even really together at the time so Emma didn't exist in any way -- so, could Snowflake break a curse cast from that scroll? If they used Regina's blood from curse 1 as the sacrifice for casting the season 7 curse, then maybe Snowflake or Emma still should have been able to break it). I don't think there was any sign in season 1 that Emma definitely had magic powers. There was the flickering of power when she arrived in Storybrooke, but was that because she had magic or just because the Savior had arrived in the town created by the curse she could break?

Then in season 2, suddenly she had magical powers that surprised even Rumple. My read on it at the time was that it had something to do with the fact that her DNA was part of the potion that held magic, like maybe it had some kind of backdraft effect. It worked because her parents were True Love, but that didn't mean that everyone with True Love had that power.

I think it was in season three that they started talking about Emma being the Savior in general, not just for this curse. At the same time, they were talking about her being a Savior because of being a True Love baby. But then there was the True Love proliferation. Everyone could have True Love. TLKs were all over the place, and the town was full of True Love babies. So for Emma to be different, the Savior had to be some other thing -- and, strangely, it was something everyone suddenly had heard about but never mentioned before.

I think the bigger question than "did they all die early" would be "did any of them do any good?" Because you'd think that a Savior who'd done all kinds of great deeds and actually saved a lot of people would have become famous, and everyone would have known about Saviors much earlier in the story.

I still wish they'd just kept it as Emma being the Savior for the curse, with unexpected magical powers thanks to Rumple's tinkering (and maybe her ultimately being his downfall, with his own scheming being what created someone powerful enough to defeat the Dark One). Because she's a good person, she'd want to use her power for good to help people. She wouldn't have to be some designated Savior to make her keep helping people after she broke the curse. It would have been better if she was helping just because, not doing it because she felt some obligation from being the Savior, which became a burden when she realized that it came with some doomed destiny.

[Camera One]

8 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said:

I still wish they'd just kept it as Emma being the Savior for the curse, with unexpected magical powers thanks to Rumple's tinkering (and maybe her ultimately being his downfall, with his own scheming being what created someone powerful enough to defeat the Dark One). Because she's a good person, she'd want to use her power for good to help people. She wouldn't have to be some designated Savior to make her keep helping people after she broke the curse. It would have been better if she was helping just because, not doing it because she felt some obligation from being the Savior, which became a burden when she realized that it came with some doomed destiny.

Me too.  I think in Season 3, they struggled to find a purpose for Emma without the Savior moniker, which is rather pathetic. 

Blue knew Rumple was The Savior when he was born, so I guess it was a retcon in Season 7 in the musical episode when Blue told Snowing that the song in her heart would help Emma when she fought The Final Battle, meaning Blue knew Emma's fate was to die, but she chose not to tell Snowing because of what happened with Fiona?  

[Shanna Marie]

2 hours ago, Camera One said:

Blue knew Rumple was The Savior when he was born, so I guess it was a retcon in Season 7 in the musical episode when Blue told Snowing that the song in her heart would help Emma when she fought The Final Battle, meaning Blue knew Emma's fate was to die, but she chose not to tell Snowing because of what happened with Fiona?  

And that means that Blue knew Emma was a general-purpose Savior when she went along with Gepetto's scheme to send Emma through the wardrobe alone with Pinocchio -- so did she know Emma would turn out okay, or was that a bad decision with someone who was that important? And did she know about that great potential for darkness when allowing her to go alone with an unreliable 7-year-old?

Then again, Emma didn't actually fight the Final Battle with the Black Fairy. She won a minor skirmish with the Song in her Heart. Rumple fought the Black Fairy. Emma didn't use the song in her heart when she sacrificed herself to Gideon.

Their retcons got so tangled up.

[Camera One]

In Season 4, it seems like they reverted back and were still using the "True Love" reason for Emma's great potential for light and darkness.  A single conversation imprinted this rule into the show's worldbuilding:

Quote

Maleficent: Your child is the product of true love, which means it could grow to be a powerful hero capable of great good. But with the potential for that good also comes something else.

Snow White: What?

Maleficent: The potential for great darkness. Your child might turn out to be just like us.

Snow White: You mean a...

Maleficent: A villain. Darker than any this realm has ever seen. 

It made no sense.  This was separate from The Savior mythology that popped up in Season 6.

[Shanna Marie]

1 hour ago, Camera One said:

Maleficent: Your child is the product of true love, which means it could grow to be a powerful hero capable of great good. But with the potential for that good also comes something else.

So, basically, a pregnant woman in a True Love relationship doesn't count as a hero by the Tree of Wisdom (or whatever it was) since a child who's the product of true love could be a powerful hero or a terrible villain, and the woman is judged by the fetus she's carrying.

Seriously, did they even think about what they were writing here?

Does this mean that a pregnant woman in a so-so relationship where both of them are heroic but don't necessarily have true love would have been okay?

[andromeda331]

6 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

There is no telling, since it seems like Saviors were retroactively created.

In season one, it really did seem to just be about the curse -- Rumple took samples from both of the Charmings to create the potion that would bring magic to the World Without Magic and put a drop of it on the curse scroll to create the back door (which suggests that any child the Charmings had could have broken the curse, not just specifically Emma, since they weren't even really together at the time so Emma didn't exist in any way -- so, could Snowflake break a curse cast from that scroll? If they used Regina's blood from curse 1 as the sacrifice for casting the season 7 curse, then maybe Snowflake or Emma still should have been able to break it). I don't think there was any sign in season 1 that Emma definitely had magic powers. There was the flickering of power when she arrived in Storybrooke, but was that because she had magic or just because the Savior had arrived in the town created by the curse she could break?

Then in season 2, suddenly she had magical powers that surprised even Rumple. My read on it at the time was that it had something to do with the fact that her DNA was part of the potion that held magic, like maybe it had some kind of backdraft effect. It worked because her parents were True Love, but that didn't mean that everyone with True Love had that power.

I think it was in season three that they started talking about Emma being the Savior in general, not just for this curse. At the same time, they were talking about her being a Savior because of being a True Love baby. But then there was the True Love proliferation. Everyone could have True Love. TLKs were all over the place, and the town was full of True Love babies. So for Emma to be different, the Savior had to be some other thing -- and, strangely, it was something everyone suddenly had heard about but never mentioned before.

I think the bigger question than "did they all die early" would be "did any of them do any good?" Because you'd think that a Savior who'd done all kinds of great deeds and actually saved a lot of people would have become famous, and everyone would have known about Saviors much earlier in the story.

I still wish they'd just kept it as Emma being the Savior for the curse, with unexpected magical powers thanks to Rumple's tinkering (and maybe her ultimately being his downfall, with his own scheming being what created someone powerful enough to defeat the Dark One). Because she's a good person, she'd want to use her power for good to help people. She wouldn't have to be some designated Savior to make her keep helping people after she broke the curse. It would have been better if she was helping just because, not doing it because she felt some obligation from being the Savior, which became a burden when she realized that it came with some doomed destiny.

6 hours ago, Camera One said:

Me too.  I think in Season 3, they struggled to find a purpose for Emma without the Savior moniker, which is rather pathetic. 

Blue knew Rumple was The Savior when he was born, so I guess it was a retcon in Season 7 in the musical episode when Blue told Snowing that the song in her heart would help Emma when she fought The Final Battle, meaning Blue knew Emma's fate was to die, but she chose not to tell Snowing because of what happened with Fiona?  

So do I. It made sense that Emma was the Savor for that specific Curse. She was suppose to break the Curse which she did. She did what she was suppose to do. Just like the glass slipper was part of Cinderella's story, and True Love's Kiss was to wake up Snow White. 

[Shanna Marie]

It just occurred to me during a bout of insomnia last night that the second half of the Wonderland spinoff and the 3B arc, which were airing at about the same time, had essentially the same plot. The villain was angry because of having been rejected by a parent and forced to grow up unloved in poverty while a half-sibling grew up in luxury as royalty, and the villain's plan was to do a supposedly impossible spell that would allow him/her to change this. Meanwhile, the villain imprisoned and enslaved his/her magical mentor. I guess they didn't have a lot of ideas.

Jafar was angry at his father for treating him as nothing and was going to do the spell that allowed him to break the rules of magic. Immediately, he was making his father love him, but wasn't he also planning to use the breaking of the "you can't change time" rule to go back and make his father love him as a child? Then we have Zelena mad at her mother for giving her up, so she was going to go back in time and arrange so that her mother would have been able to marry the prince and keep her, and Regina never would have been born.

I think they gave us more of the process with Jafar and how it was that he was able to pull off the supposedly impossible to break the rules of magic. He had to amass a lot of power by enslaving the sorceress and getting three genies under his power, and it took years for him to do this. We never learned how Zelena managed to crack the time travel code. She just somehow had this spell that no one else had heard of (and yet there was info on it in the Storybrooke library). It conveniently required items that corresponded to the virtues represented by the witches of Oz, but we don't know if that was just part of the writers stretching for a theme or if it was significant and a reason no one had previously figured it out. I guess her knowing the spell was like all her other omniscience, like her knowing to have Philip and Aurora watching out for people coming back from Storybrooke, or her knowing to send Walsh to watch Emma months before they came up with the idea of doing the curse to get to Emma, or her knowing what Hook was doing while he was entirely separated from all the other characters, or her knowing Hook's feelings when he and Emma weren't at all involved, or her knowing that Marian was Regina's boyfriend's wife, or her knowing enough about Marian and her history to interact with her husband and son for months without them noticing anything.

[Camera One]

Reading an old A&E interview from the end of 5B:

Quote

Was it originally planned for Regina to face more of her victims in the Underworld?

KITSIS: No. For us, we liked the idea that she had to get closure with her family. We loved having the victims that were there go up. A bunch of villagers we’ve never met before we didn’t think was as interesting as putting her in an arc with her sister, mom, and dad.

That pretty much shows we got exactly what they intended in terms of Regina's redemption.  The Writers didn't care about random villagers we've never met before.  Until The Count of Monte Cristo, I guess.

Quote

Will we see more of Ruby and Dorothy?

KITSIS: Meghan [Ory] is the lead on a new series, so we were not, unfortunately, able to bring her back this year, but we’d love to see her again next season should the actress make herself available.

HOROWITZ: It was our intention to include them in this end run of episodes, but scheduling got in the way. We hope to be able to include them next season.

So we would have gotten more Ruby Slippers?  In what capacity, I wonder.

Quote

Will we get to see what happened to Lily and Maleficent and who Lily’s dad is?

HOROWITZ: Next season. Oh yeah, we’ll have plans. You’ll see, hopefully they’ll be great.

KITSIS: I’ll say this, we hear the fans. We know what stories you feel like we’ve dropped, and we’ve got an episode for you next year.

HOROWITZ: We’ve got some plans to try to address many of those things next season.

What happened to those plans, eh?  They're usually not that definitive, so they must have really wanted to show Lily again.  Of all the storylines they've "dropped".

Edited March 25, 2019 by Camera One

[Melgaypet]

Okay, I have more OUAT thoughts. I just finished the seventh season. I think I described it as "mostly awful" in another post, and I stand by that, but I also think it's enjoyable enough if you lower your standards, turn off your brain, and just embrace the nonsense. But here's what's bugging me at the moment. Prince Henry from the Wish Realm calling Regina "Mom." That...is insane. Yes, yes, he set aside his vengeance, embracing hope and forgiveness, Regina is the most wonderfullest lady in all the multiverse, bow down before her magnificence, but Mom!? Prince Henry was not raised by any version of Regina. He would know her as the Evil Queen his grandparents defeated decades before an alternate version showed up to murder his grandparents (which happened! Prince Henry may have been revenge-obsessed, but THAT IS LITERALLY WHAT HAPPENED) and somehow his actual mother, Princess Emma, was subsumed into an alternate version of herself and then both disappeared. Regina claiming to be his mother would be offensive from Prince Henry's point of view, wouldn't it? Even if he did choose to forgive her and consider her a hero, he wouldn't think of her as his mother. That makes no sense. If his mother exists at all, it's in Emma Swan's memories, yes? Wouldn't he seek her out? If he was going to call anyone 'Mom' wouldn't it be her?

I'm clearly failing to follow my own advice to embrace the nonsense, and it's just a blink-and-you-miss-it moment, but it's just like, is the show written by Martians? Because no human being would react this way.

Also, I'm grumpy that the Hyperion Heights curse wasn't broken by True Love's Kiss between Wish!Hook and Alice.

[Camera One]

I was in the area and stumbled upon Whook's police station (some sort of society for youth and family) and Roni's bar (which was just a clothing shop).  I didn't realize it was just off a major street.  Visiting Hyperion Heights is like visiting Disneyland, really.  😈   I didn't have time to do a ritual to Regina so I could cross over to the alternate universe existing in the same space but in a different realm of story.  

Edited March 30, 2019 by Camera One

[Shanna Marie]

On 3/28/2019 at 4:26 PM, Melgaypet said:

Regina claiming to be his mother would be offensive from Prince Henry's point of view, wouldn't it? Even if he did choose to forgive her and consider her a hero, he wouldn't think of her as his mother. That makes no sense. If his mother exists at all, it's in Emma Swan's memories, yes? Wouldn't he seek her out? If he was going to call anyone 'Mom' wouldn't it be her?

You'd think. But by that point in the series, I guess they'd gone all-in on the Regina worship and were no longer even coming close to imagining what actual people would think. This was, after all, the episode in which the people Regina had spent decades terrorizing elected her queen of the universe. We also ended the series with four versions of Regina: The Evil Queen, Wish Regina, Present Regina, and future Regina who returned to the past. It's all the Reginas, all the time!

On 3/28/2019 at 4:26 PM, Melgaypet said:

Also, I'm grumpy that the Hyperion Heights curse wasn't broken by True Love's Kiss between Wish!Hook and Alice.

But we had to add to our Regina worship quota. After all, Henry bypassed his wife and daughter (which would have provided the symmetry with season one) to go kiss Regina to break the curse.

And wasn't there supposed to be no Savior with this curse? Was the first one broken just because of the TLK, or did the TLK have to involve a Savior? If there's no Savior, would any random TLK work?

I'm picturing the writers wearing their "Long Live Regina" buttons in the writers' room, going, "More Regina! What else can we give her? After all, it's not like they can double cancel us because of what we put in the final episode! We're going out anyway, so let's go out with a bang! I know, we'll make Regina queen of the universe!"

[Camera One]

On 3/28/2019 at 2:26 PM, Melgaypet said:

But here's what's bugging me at the moment. Prince Henry from the Wish Realm calling Regina "Mom." That...is insane.

1 hour ago, Shanna Marie said:

You'd think. But by that point in the series, I guess they'd gone all-in on the Regina worship and were no longer even coming close to imagining what actual people would think. This was, after all, the episode in which the people Regina had spent decades terrorizing elected her queen of the universe. We also ended the series with four versions of Regina: The Evil Queen, Wish Regina, Present Regina, and future Regina who returned to the past. It's all the Reginas, all the time!

I thought Wish Henry calling Regina mom was more egregious than normal because he had zero relationship with Regina before, and this switcheroo occurred within such a short time of him being so vengeful.  It's like they just assumed Wish Henry was Original Recipe Henry since it was the same actor, which comes off as sloppy in spite of their usual Regina worship.  One could sort of explain why Original Henry, Snow, Emma and even the town might worship Regina over the course of the series (not convincingly, of course), but Wish Henry had just met the woman so there was zero justification.

Edited March 31, 2019 by Camera One