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

Camera One · December 19, 2019

In the Brigitte Hales interview I referred to in the Media thread, she talks about how she was really good at coming up with Act 3 twists and Act 6 twists.

I am assuming the Act 6 twist is the end twist, so the cliffhanger? What is the Act 3 twist? What would be some examples?

I looked up her episodes in Season 7 so far.

S7: "Garden of Forking Paths", "Eloise Gardener" and "A Taste of the Heights"
(S6 were "Dark Waters", "Page 23" and "When Bluebirds Fly")

The most recent one was "A Taste of the Heights", so using that as an example... the Act 6 twist was that everything Dr. Facilier did in the flashback was to gift Regina a watch? What was the Act 3 twist? Sabine finding out she didn't have a valid license for her food truck?

Edited December 19, 2019 by Camera One

Speakeasy · December 20, 2019

21 hours ago, KingOfHearts said:

And this is where the show is so clumsy. The writers seem to be aware that people in this universe would view magic as a bad thing because of the overwhelming number of dark magic users and tragedies inflicted by magical means. It wasn't just Greg and Tamara, but Nick, Neal, Henry, Violet, Frankenstein, and most citizens of Storybrooke that viewed magic as something inferior or that needed to be destroyed, regardless of the side of the coin. The problem was that antimagic was always viewed as a negative thing. (Except maybe in the case of Baelfire, but boooy did that get retconned in S6.) It wasn't a fair argument because A) the writers made 95% of the light magic users stupid or useless, and B) there were never any anti-magic people portrayed as sensible. They were either some good person gone rogue like Henry or someone eeeevil with a taser like Tamara. The writers never even bothered to explore whether or not there could be a compromise. They just ended up with "yeah magic is good because it's more fun to write for."

'i hate magic' is an easy code for someone being intolerant or for picking an unnecessary and violent solution because it makes you think of real world witch hunts. You're right that it's poor world building not to re examine that assumption when looking at a world where there ACTUALLY ARE WITCHES.

There's also just not much to indicate how common magic really is, this came up a few pages ago, and how feasible it would be for the average EF peasant to believe in getting rid of it. If magic is really pervasive, magic makes the flowers grow, a white witch is the village midwife etc, then wanting to ban it in a fairytale realm might be like wanting to take down the internet to stop trolls or ban cars to stop traffic deaths. If, however, it's the domain of a clan of unreliable fairies and various cackling psychopaths living in big castles and fireballing people at fucking random, then a land without magic would sound pretty good to most people.

Because besides the Dark Curse a lot of characters have been bereaved or injured by magic, just recalling at random: Gepetto lost his parents, Hook lost his brother and his lover, Ruby killed her first love and became a pariah, Snow White's parents were killed and her throne usurped by magic, Abigail was separated from her lover, Midas can't touch another person, Ingrid accidentally killed her sister, Philip was turned into a dog, Aurora was cursed to constabt nightmares for thirty years and for that matter Snow, Henry, David, Aurora, Dorothy, Belle and anyone else who ever went under a sleeping curse will have painful nightmares every night for the rest of their lives...

And I'm sure there are many more examples, as I say, ignoring the various dark curses and to say nothing of all the faceless randoms killed by sirens, mermaids, dragons, witches, wraiths, dark ones and so on.

That's a selection of the cons column, the pros column is looking pretty spare even if you keep the times where magic undid a bad thing done by other magic. The most useful things it can do are making portals, healing injuries and killing ogres, which are all fine things, I'll admit, but they leave room for discussion when weighed up against the cons.

Then there's the fact that anyone growing up or having a lot of experience living in America or the modern world with all our ideals of equality would see witchcraft as it exists in the EF as the worst and most horrifying kind of inequality, worse than royal privelege by orders of magnitude. A king is above the laws of the realm, a witch is above the laws of nature.

It's probably more glaring because magic kept getting more powerful and more violent as the series went on. In S1 I at least got the impression Regina was scary but not invincible, Snow was going to snipe her in one episode. Then episode by episode you had her snapping people's necks with a glance and catching arrows out of the air... And her sister vaporised someone and perfectly impersonated her for months despite being FUCKING DEAD! how is a normal person supposed to fight that? How is a normal person meant to have a second's peace of mind in a world where these people exist?

Spitballing for a second: Sonequa Martin Green, who played Tamara, is a pretty good actress, so I could imagine another version of the show where she could be sympathetic and actually trying to raise an anti magic faction in Storybrooke... You could possibly cut out Greg and have her actually recruit Neal into her crusade, and they'd have a genuine point, in fact they could frame this as Neal trying to redeem himself for ditching Emma and running from his past; returning to save his son and his people from the evil that had befallen them, ultimately, because of him.

So anyway, yes. But if you come up with good arguments against magic you need to come up with good arguments for it besides saying 'MAGIC!' in an enthusiastic voice with wide, happy puppy eyes.

21 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

Tat's distressingly common. Fans will idolize characters whose behavior they would find abhorrent in real life.

Ok in fairness on this point... One of your friends tells you she's dating a MUCH older man with a history of anger management problems, depression and alcoholism who used to be the leader of a criminal gang and was obsessed with killing the kingpin who murdered his girlfriend, but decided to turn his life around when he finally did so and felt empty inside, it was after that he and your friend fell in love.

Do you tell your friend that he sounds like a keeper, or are you a little hesitant? 😉

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And then there are the people who write love letters to serial killers. There's a very common attitude that heroes and good people are boring, while villains and antiheroes are automatically more interesting. From reading most Internet discussion of TV/movies/books, you'd think that the absolute worst thing a person could do is try to be a good person and not succeed 100 percent. Those people are the worst evil and deserve to suffer. Meanwhile, the mostly bad person who does one good thing, even if it's actually selfish, is the greatest hero ever. That's true for almost every show. The most hated character who is raked over the coals is probably the one who tries to be good. At best, he's boring. At worst, he's a hypocrite because he failed to be perfect in spite of considering himself to be good.

This is an interesting phenomenon which I'll admit to falling into myself quite a lot, not the writing to serial killers bit, but the idolising of villains.

A lot of my favourite characters are villains, and that includes Regina in the earlier seasons. I think villains are generally attractive because they connect with our Follow the Leader instinct; they don't follow rules so they're obviously strong enough to make their own. There's a similar reaction where the most popular hero is the Bad Boy or the Antihero or the rule breaker.

Who actually liked Luke Skywalker more than either Darth Vader or Han Solo in the original trilogy. Anyone? Thought not.

At the same time, I've been thinking about the discussion of people pasting social issues onto Regina in particular. I don't think she's a good model for any of the issues people attach to her. I don't think that's the point though, racism and sexism and homophobia (not that there's more than a sliver of a hint of her not being straight, but whatever), difficulties for adoptive parents, mental illness stigma, these are real issues and it's easier to imagine all of them attached to her than to the shows other baddies, but the reason people want her to be a victim is because the narrative of the world is against her. If you feel the narrative of the world is against you, that society is not on your side, it's probably attractive to align with the person who wants to burn it down and dance in the ashes, at least in a fantasy.

So from that perspective maybe heroes are automatically part of the privileged elite because 'the world' expects and wants them to win and be happy. They are propping up and profiting from or will profit from the society that works against you. And however sad their backstory us on the screen, they are still expected to be happy at the end.

I don't think anyone goes in actively thinking like this,by the way, I think rational arguments coalesce around these perspectives.

Maybe I'm overthinking bit and it's more that,in fiction, 'heroes' tend to be passive or at most reactive, while 'villains' tend to be active. This is interesting in itself because in reality very few people who get called heroes are passive, quite the opposite, heroes are the people who charge in to solve a problem everyone else accepts or ignores, or to create or win something that no one else had tried.

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This show was written for those fans. This forum does seem to break the usual mold, in that the more vocal people here didn't buy it. Maybe the fact that the writers were obviously pushing that narrative made us resist.

It really does push all the buttons it can to get this perspective across, particularly as the series goes on and the original good characters get more and more useless.

Note; the above are taken from the 'Chosen' episode thread

Edited December 20, 2019 by Speakeasy
Added explanatory note

Camera One · December 20, 2019

35 minutes ago, Speakeasy said:

If, however, it's the domain of a clan of unreliable fairies and various cackling psychopaths living in big castles and fireballing people at fucking random, then a land without magic would sound pretty good to most people.

Looking from a fairy tale perspective, set in a world with a scary dark forest, I suppose magic really was mostly the domain of cackling witches and evil warlocks. The good fairies were indeed rare and they appeared randomly.

From a writing perspective, it was clear they found it easiest to make the good magic users completely useless so the protagonists won't have access to "easy" solutions, but this was actually done very inconsistently with unintended consequences. The other agenda of the Writers was their highlighting of Regina and Rumple meant they needed an alliance between the heroes and these favorites so they constantly wrote the heroes going to or relying on the villains for help.

That created a problem with a character like the Blue Fairy. They made her unable to do anything and unable to answer anything, even though she should have been the heroes' go-to for advice. Instead, everyone went to Rumple. At the same time, they did occasionally use Blue or good magic to come up with a easy deux-ex-machina solution near the end of an arc, so it created the sense that Blue was holding back and CHOOSING not to help, making her seem shady.

The Writers COULD have incorporated this into their storytelling. Blue could have been a wise sage who saw everything in black and white, so there could be a reason why she may or may not help in any given situation. They seemed to hint at this characterization... I really liked how Blue continued to show contempt for Regina and Rumple well into Season 4.

Edited December 20, 2019 by Camera One

Shanna Marie · December 20, 2019

7 hours ago, Speakeasy said:

Spitballing for a second: Sonequa Martin Green, who played Tamara, is a pretty good actress, so I could imagine another version of the show where she could be sympathetic and actually trying to raise an anti magic faction in Storybrooke... You could possibly cut out Greg and have her actually recruit Neal into her crusade, and they'd have a genuine point, in fact they could frame this as Neal trying to redeem himself for ditching Emma and running from his past; returning to save his son and his people from the evil that had befallen them, ultimately, because of him.

I'm still angry that they botched the anti-magic story so badly that they could never really return to it. There should have been anti-magic factions in Storybrooke, post-curse. After all, these people's lives had been hijacked for 28 years, thanks to magic. They'd been living in a magical dictatorship before that. Greg had a perfectly valid reason to hate magic and to hate Regina. I don't think we ever learned Tamara's reasons, but maybe hers were just as valid. Wanting to avoid magic should have been a perfectly reasonable option. And then suddenly the whole thing was thrown out the window and undermined, with it having been a scheme of Pan's all along, and the anti-magic people were more evil than even the evil magic users and got killed horribly.

7 hours ago, Speakeasy said:

Who actually liked Luke Skywalker more than either Darth Vader or Han Solo in the original trilogy. Anyone?

(Raises hand) Me! I was a total Luke fangirl, 100 percent on Team Luke. Not only was he endearingly earnest, but he was capable of great snark (especially in the original movie) and was a total badass. I had the poster from The Empire Strikes Back with Luke in that gray uniform over my bed when I was in junior high. Which may be why I find the whole villain/bad boy attraction so baffling.

7 hours ago, Speakeasy said:

So from that perspective maybe heroes are automatically part of the privileged elite because 'the world' expects and wants them to win and be happy. They are propping up and profiting from or will profit from the society that works against you. And however sad their backstory us on the screen, they are still expected to be happy at the end.

I think that does make some sense. There's also the fact that in a lot of respects it's easy to be a villain. If you're a hero, you have to try all the time. It's hard. You have to make sacrifices. If you screw up and fall short of ideals, you've failed. There are lower expectations for a villain. Do one good thing, make one grand gesture, and you're a hero, given the same kind of honor as the hero who's been trying all along. Fail and it's no big deal because everyone expects you to fail.

They actually had this conversation on this show, when Emma was so mad about finding out about the eggnapping, and she said it was because she expected more of her parents, while she knew Regina and Hook had been villains, so it wouldn't have been so disappointing to learn they'd done something bad.

So, who do you identify with, the one who has free rein to be as snarky and awful as they want but who can get the same acclaim by doing one great thing, or the one who never gets to stop trying to do right, no matter what it costs?

I mostly look at all this as a self-perpetuating writing failure. Writers who think heroes are boring will write boring heroes, so the next generation of writers will think heroes are boring and write even more boring heroes.

7 hours ago, Camera One said:

Looking from a fairy tale perspective, set in a world with a scary dark forest, I suppose magic really was mostly the domain of cackling witches and evil warlocks.

And these stories come from a time when witchcraft was believed to be real and was feared. There aren't a lot of good magic users in fairytales other than fairies.

7 hours ago, Camera One said:

From a writing perspective, it was clear they found it easiest to make the good magic users completely useless so the protagonists won't have access to "easy" solutions, but this was actually done very inconsistently with unintended consequences.

And at the same time they made the villains so superpowered that it required a deus ex machina to defeat them.

Camera One · December 21, 2019

2 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

I'm still angry that they botched the anti-magic story so badly that they could never really return to it. There should have been anti-magic factions in Storybrooke, post-curse.

I was disappointed that they never dug into the "Should we stay or go?" debate in 2B. They could have revisited that in 3B when they DID go back, and had to adjust back to medieval lifestyle and technology but their setting seemed to be a moot point for these characters.

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(Raises hand) Me! I was a total Luke fangirl, 100 percent on Team Luke. Not only was he endearingly earnest, but he was capable of great snark (especially in the original movie) and was a total badass.

I preferred rooting for Luke over the villains as well, and the arrogance of "bad boy" Han Solo sort of annoyed me.

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I mostly look at all this as a self-perpetuating writing failure. Writers who think heroes are boring will write boring heroes

And on this show, it was like a chore they had to get through before they could play with the shiny toys and favorite scene stealing villains.

Speakeasy · December 21, 2019

14 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

I'm still angry that they botched the anti-magic story so badly that they could never really return to it. There should have been anti-magic factions in Storybrooke, post-curse. After all, these people's lives had been hijacked for 28 years, thanks to magic. They'd been living in a magical dictatorship before that.

Yep, and it would be an interesting irony that a curse would be the thing giving them the chance to get free from the power and fear of magic!

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Greg had a perfectly valid reason to hate magic and to hate Regina. I don't think we ever learned Tamara's reasons, but maybe hers were just as valid.

I certainly don't think they were mentioned, so it's possible they weren't planned. You could have had it be a personal tragedy or she could just look at Stirybrooke from the outside and think it looks scary.

Cos if you stumbled into Storybrooke without knowing it was a Disney Fairy Tale, it would look an awful lot more like a Stephen King novel.

I noted from Tamara's wiki page that Marton Green said she couldn't stay past episode 3:1 because she had a regular space on Walking Dead, so that was out of their hands.

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And then suddenly the whole thing was thrown out the window and undermined, with it having been a scheme of Pan's all along, and the anti-magic people were more evil than even the evil magic users and got killed horribly.

Yeah... It's an interesting bit of framing there as well, since even at their worst Greg and Tammy don't do anything worse than Gina and Rumple, but it clearly makes them unsalvageable.

I remember reading a review that was quite angry about Regina getting tortured and specifically about her getting tortured by a man... Like maybe that was reinforcing unhealthy imagery, I'm not sure if it would have been different if Tamara had been the one going after her.

Pan being behind it just didn't work, thematically, I don't think. Peter Pan seems clever and tricky, but sending cryptic messages to people in another works and waiting for them to do something useful doesn't seem like an Evil Peter Pan thing to do, it just doesn't seem like enough fun.

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(Raises hand) Me! I was a total Luke fangirl, 100 percent on Team Luke. Not only was he endearingly earnest, but he was capable of great snark (especially in the original movie) and was a total badass. I had the poster from The Empire Strikes Back with Luke in that gray uniform over my bed when I was in junior high. Which may be why I find the whole villain/bad boy attraction so baffling.

Well that teaches me to assume 😁

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I think that does make some sense. There's also the fact that in a lot of respects it's easy to be a villain. If you're a hero, you have to try all the time. It's hard. You have to make sacrifices. If you screw up and fall short of ideals, you've failed. There are lower expectations for a villain. Do one good thing, make one grand gesture, and you're a hero, given the same kind of honor as the hero who's been trying all along. Fail and it's no big deal because everyone expects you to fail.

They actually had this conversation on this show, when Emma was so mad about finding out about the eggnapping, and she said it was because she expected more of her parents, while she knew Regina and Hook had been villains, so it wouldn't have been so disappointing to learn they'd done something bad.

That's definitely the way it ends up being on screen. And being a hero seems like a thankless task, like constant denial and pain for a nebulous ideal.

I think there's a cluster of assumptions that go with this as well, like that heroes are either almost-inhuman good robots, or they're liars pretending to be good robots. That they're smug and self righteous and above you and sneering down at you from their high horses. That you would never enjoy being a hero because you wouldn't get to do anything fun. That villains are honest (at least with themselves), that they didn't get the chances the heroes did, that they are the only ones who see the world as it really is, that they're strong and can do the nasty stiff that needs to be done.

Stuff like that.

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I mostly look at all this as a self-perpetuating writing failure. Writers who think heroes are boring will write boring heroes, so the next generation of writers will think heroes are boring and write even more boring heroes.

Absolutely, and they take a bunch of other lessons that aren't necessarily there.

There's an idea attendant in this that being a good person means you have no internal conflict and never make mistakes (and if not you're not really a good person). The writers are big Star Wars fans, so this is a bit odd considering that Han's big hero moment is when he overcomes his selfish impulses and saves his new friend, or that Luke's ultimate moment of triumph isn't blowing anything up but in holding back from killing in anger.

KingOfHearts · December 21, 2019

25 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said:

I think Emma's clues were more obvious -- things like the storybook that depicted people in the town, then the whole incident with Jefferson, with the clincher being Henry passing out from eating the apple tart. After that, Emma fought a dragon, so the TLK was icing on the cake.

Did Storybrooke magically create records to make everything line up, or could Emma have looked at photos to show people didn't age? Were there old school photos of Henry's friends or anything?

If Emma were to look on the internet or even just Google Maps, would Storybrooke just not exist? (I think in 3B they show a map of Storybrooke on a GPS app.) What about the disappearance of Owen's dad? I feel like it wouldn't have taken much investigating to find something wasn't right about Storybrooke, unless the town magically adapted so efficiently no one would ever tell the difference.

Also - Storybrooke dropped down in presumably an unoccupied area in the woods in Maine. Hyperion Heights is in an urban neighborhood of Seattle. Did the curse just alter the memories of all the real life people, like HH always existed? What was there before HH? Did it look the same, just with different names on the buildings? Or was it undeveloped and suddenly a suburb dropped on it? At least in Maine, it had a cloaking spell and existed where nobody (except Kurt and Owen) would be at. HH seemed to be completely connected to the outside world the entire time.

Edited December 21, 2019 by KingOfHearts

Camera One · December 21, 2019

28 minutes ago, KingOfHearts said:

Did Storybrooke magically create records to make everything line up, or could Emma have looked at photos to show people didn't age? Were there old school photos of Henry's friends or anything?

If Emma were to look on the internet or even just Google Maps, would Storybrooke just not exist? (I think in 3B they show a map of Storybrooke on a GPS app.) What about the disappearance of Owen's dad? I feel like it wouldn't have taken much investigating to find something wasn't right about Storybrooke, unless the town magically adapted so efficiently no one would ever tell the difference.

LOL, you'd expect a bailbondsperson to look into all that, right?

I can buy that Emma in 1A would not even try looking into that stuff because she so firmly did not believe.

But in 1B, if anything, she should have been curious to look into Regina and the town itself after what happened to Graham (even if it was "natural" causes), and definitely after the Jefferson episode. Not to mention everybody in town seems to claim their memories are hazy.

Emma doing her own investigation would have made the season more interesting and her belief more gradual and less stagnant for the longest time. After the Jefferson episode, she just went back to not believing.

Edited December 21, 2019 by Camera One

KingOfHearts · December 21, 2019

41 minutes ago, Camera One said:

But in 1B, if anything, she should have been curious to look into Regina and the town itself after what happened to Graham (even if it was "natural" causes), and definitely after the Jefferson episode. Not to mention everybody in town seems to claim their memories are hazy.

She was the f'ing sheriff, wanted to find dirt on Regina, and was locked into a vicious custody battle. Of course she would be investigating all the weird crap about Storybrooke. It's always talked about how Emma was a bailbondsperson who was clever, could read people, and always got her man, but what did she really do? When has she ever really figured out something on her own without it being spoon-fed to her?

Also - did Emma not have any connections from her job that could've helped her? Nobody she could call for information or do some digging? Did she not find it weird Storybrooke existed right near where she was found as a baby?

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Not to mention everybody in town seems to claim their memories are hazy.

If the curse was smart enough to create fake records (enough to clear an adoption out of town), why didn't it create better fake memories for everyone?

The more I think about Emma's journey to belief, the more I think the writers used the "she didn't want to believe" mantra or her WALLS as a crutch. They couldn't make her too smart because she couldn't be smarter than themselves.

Edited December 21, 2019 by KingOfHearts

Camera One · December 21, 2019

A&E couldn't figure out any of these natural avenues to explore, so they were impatient to break the Curse hoping that would lead to new story ideas. Which they also glossed over superficially and that's how they were pretty much out of ideas by Season 4 and had to rely fully on new shiny toys. And even that avenue was tapped out by Season 6.

It's a textbook example of how to squander every potential route when writing a television series.

Shanna Marie · December 21, 2019

2 hours ago, Camera One said:

I can buy that Emma in 1A would not even try looking into that stuff because she so firmly did not believe.

But in 1B, if anything, she should have been curious to look into Regina and the town itself after what happened to Graham (even if it was "natural" causes), and definitely after the Jefferson episode. Not to mention everybody in town seems to claim their memories are hazy.

I guess it depends on how much you expect her to believe at any given point. From her perspective, it's utterly ridiculous to think that this really is a town of cursed people from a fairytale land. She might have started to think that Regina's behavior was shady and want to research her -- which she kind of did with Sydney, though that required her to be way too trusting for someone with WALLS. She didn't do any of her own research to verify anything he gave her. But up until Jefferson, I don't think she had any reason to believe that this could really be magic.

Maybe after Graham's death she should have looked him up, at the very least to notify his next of kin. He had a foreign accent, so he's clearly not originally from Maine. She might have looked him up on some kind of state law enforcement database. If he's a licensed peace officer in the state, he should have some kind of record. Ditto him as an elected official. If he doesn't exist, that's something to find suspicious. Or if she tries to contact next of kin and they don't exist, or they don't know what she's talking about.

Could she have got the adoption records after the fact? Look into how Regina got Henry from another state entirely. Even if she as the mother couldn't get info on a closed adoption, as a law enforcement official she might have been able to get something. Or go after it using whatever connections she had from her bail bonds work. If Henry was able to find her, she might be able to get some kind of records, find out what credentials Regina used -- she'd have to have a date of birth, which is probably going to look out of whack, thanks to the curse, a Social Security number, etc. The records within Storybrooke might constantly update so that the birth dates make sense, but would the curse be able to alter records in the outside world?

I'm not sure what she could have done after Jefferson. That was weird, and she might be verging on starting to accept it all, but what could she have looked up? I guess that's when she could have tried to get info on the town from the outside world. All the records in the town would have been suspect. Maybe a more serious talk with Henry, but too much of that might have taken away from the shock of seeing him pass out from the apple turnover, and that was a genuinely good moment.

For season 7, my main problem is how little Lucy investigated. Henry at least seemed to have a pretty comprehensive idea of what was going on and why he believed that. With Lucy, she had no evidence at all. There was nothing she ever pointed to as proof of her assertions, no reason she ever gave for believing that a fantasy novel was true and about her family. Her book wasn't about this curse or these people, so it's not like with Henry's book that explained what happened to the people in Storybrooke and it all kind of fit. Lucy's book was about an entirely different cast of characters, so it didn't fit. Even for the characters that were in Hyperion Heights, she didn't seem to have figured it out. But there was no equivalent of the season one scene in which Henry points out the characters to Emma. Even though there's a British-accented detective with one hand whose name is Rogers, Lucy never seems to figure that he's Captain Hook, and she doesn't use this as evidence of her curse theory. That makes the adults even considering believing look kind of silly. I don't think anyone ever asked her why she believed the book was real.

andromeda331 · December 21, 2019

But Emma didn't have to believe to investigate things. Especially when she was Sheriff. There was enough for her to look into. Regina of course. She was shady as Hell and Emma knew that. She knew she had her hand or whatever into every thing in town. Start with her. Look into money, budgets, and everything associated with Regina. Look into the laws. Regina clearly didn't know all of them because she tried to appoint Sidney but she actually could only appoint a candidate. Emma correctly pointed out to Rumple how his deal with Ashley over her baby wouldn't hold up in court. They could have had Emma investigating different things that happened. She didn't have to believe yet. She helped Ashley, she helped Hansel and Gretel, and could have used her real world knowledge and skills she picked up as a bailbond's man which they really should have used. Of course they didn't cause A&E didn't care about that. But would have made more sense then Emma not really investigating the weird and suspicious events going on.

Camera One · December 21, 2019

She could have followed Regina around more, or set up surveillance equipment in her father's vault. Technically, Emma should have technological knowledge that Regina and Rumple would not have and it should have been her advantage (which was hinted at in the pilot when Emma used technology to find out whose credit card Henry used).

Ditto for Snow in the Enchanted Forest. There was a line in the pilot where David said the animals are abuzz with the Queen's plans, but it was a throwaway and Snow never used her bond with animals to her advantage. We're supposed to be impressed with Snow holding a sword except half the time, she (or Charming) was holding a sword against a threat where a sword would be useless.

2 hours ago, KingOfHearts said:

They couldn't make her too smart because she couldn't be smarter than themselves.

Which was the problem throughout the series, and it made the heroes seem stupid and always depending on villains or ex-villains.

Edited December 21, 2019 by Camera One

andromeda331 · December 21, 2019

2 hours ago, Camera One said:

A&E couldn't figure out any of these natural avenues to explore, so they were impatient to break the Curse hoping that would lead to new story ideas. Which they also glossed over superficially and that's how they were pretty much out of ideas by Season 4 and had to rely fully on new shiny toys. And even that avenue was tapped out by Season 6.

It's a textbook example of how to squander every potential route when writing a television series.

That's what really stinks the most. There was so much they could have done, so many different routes, they had so many great characters or ones that could be great if given the time, rich back stories, and all of literature to pull from. And they squandered all of it.

andromeda331 · December 21, 2019

2 minutes ago, Camera One said:

She could have followed Regina around more, or set up surveillance equipment in her father's vault. Technically, Emma should have technological knowledge that Regina and Rumple would not have and it should have been her advantage (which was hinted at in the pilot when Emma used technology to find out whose credit card Henry used).

Ditto for Snow in the Enchanted Forest. There was a line in the pilot where David said the animals are abuzz with the Queen's plans, but it was a throwaway and Snow never used her bond with animals to her advantage. We're supposed to be impressed with Snow holding a sword except half the time, she (or Charming) was holding a sword against a threat where a sword would be useless.

Which was the problem throughout the series, and it made the heroes seem stupid and always depending on villains or ex-villains.

I forgot about the vault! Your right. She could have looked into that. She knew where it was. She could have gone back at any time to look around. Or maybe put in cameras catching Regina going in and going below. They really, really should have made so much more use of the technically. It really should have been what gave Emma something she had over Rumple and Regina or to hold her own against them. Like Rumple pointing out towards the end of the first season to Regina how much harder it was kill someone in this world. Even Regina knew that she realized all of the evidence would lead back to her. Another miss opportunity.

Camera One · December 21, 2019

So how did Kathryn's kidnapping work anyway? Regina knew she was driving out of town. Did Kathryn crash the car because of the Curse? And then Gold came and picked her up, and held her captive somewhere without ever revealing himself? Or did Regina/Gold fake the accident and grabbed her elsewhere? I forgot why Rumple agreed to help Regina with this.

You'd think Gold would have wanted Emma to break the Curse as soon as possible, so he could go find his son.

Anyway, I was just wondering what else Emma could have done to investigate, but there weren't many real clues.

Edited December 21, 2019 by Camera One

Shanna Marie · December 22, 2019

1 hour ago, Camera One said:

She could have followed Regina around more, or set up surveillance equipment in her father's vault.

Heck, just entering the vault and finding the hidden room would have been pretty good proof that something weird was going on. That might not have been absolute proof of magic, but it would have been proof that something was seriously wrong with Regina.

1 hour ago, Camera One said:

So how did Kathryn's kidnapping work anyway? Regina knew she was driving out of town. Did Kathryn crash the car because of the Curse? And then Gold came and picked her up, and held her captive somewhere without ever revealing himself? Or did Regina/Gold fake the accident and grabbed her elsewhere? I forgot why Rumple agreed to help Regina with this.

You'd think Gold would have wanted Emma to break the Curse as soon as possible, so he could go find his son.

My impression was that Kathryn was unable to leave town because of the curse, and Gold got her after that. I'm not sure why Regina would have outsourced that to someone she knew she couldn't trust, but I suspect Rumple was willing because he knew that letting Regina think Kathryn was dead and letting her frame Mary Margaret would be a big step toward getting Emma to believe when it was revealed that Kathryn was okay. It would totally undermine Regina. But I'm not sure he was in any rush to break the curse. He was afraid of what would happen when he found Bae, so I think he was doing busy work along the way -- doing things toward finding him so he could feel like he was trying, but actually kind of trying to put it off as long as possible.

I don't remember where they got the DNA evidence that showed that the heart they found was Kathryn's. Did Emma just take Regina's word, or did she contact the state lab (since Storybrooke only had one cop, I don't imagine they had a DNA lab)? Was there no follow-up to that part of things. I know Regina got Sidney to take the fall for it, but how did they explain the DNA results?

Camera One · December 22, 2019

1 hour ago, Shanna Marie said:

Heck, just entering the vault and finding the hidden room would have been pretty good proof that something weird was going on. That might not have been absolute proof of magic, but it would have been proof that something was seriously wrong with Regina.

Emma and Graham did search around the coffin, so I don't think Emma would have searched again.

But if she followed Regina and watched her go into the vault and realized how long she spent in there... she would eventually have opened the door to find that Regina seemingly wasn't inside. That would have eventually led to the discovery of the hidden staircase.

I like the concept of Emma looking into finding Graham's family and hitting a dead end.

I'm surprised Regina didn't have August followed by her goons. They would have found his secret book binding workshop.

KingOfHearts · December 22, 2019

4 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

I don't remember where they got the DNA evidence that showed that the heart they found was Kathryn's. Did Emma just take Regina's word, or did she contact the state lab (since Storybrooke only had one cop, I don't imagine they had a DNA lab)? Was there no follow-up to that part of things. I know Regina got Sidney to take the fall for it, but how did they explain the DNA results?

I remember a line saying they got the DNA evidence from the hospital.

Camera One · December 22, 2019

I wonder how Regina would have reacted if Emma left for Boston and came back with a team of CSI experts who owed her a favor.

Camera One · December 22, 2019

I was thinking about all the titled characters on this show... I guess what they have in common is that multiple people in succession can assume these roles (perhaps the last two are an exception).

The Dark One
The Author
The Savior
The Guardian

The Sorcerer
The Apprentice

Aside from The Dark One, which originated in Season 1, the others were rather ill-defined with inconsistent roles.

The mythologies for "The Author", "The Savior" and "The Guardian" were so poorly thought out and made so little sense that I think they really brought down their respective seasons (Season 4, Season 6 and Season 7). The mythology for "The Dark One" was fleshed out in Season 5 and it wasn't as bad as the others.

In the case of The Author and The Guardian, characters spent most of the season searching for them.

It's like the Writers came up with these titles solely for the mystery factor. Heck, in Season 1, August was called "The Stranger" for a few episodes.

Edited December 22, 2019 by Camera One

KingOfHearts · December 23, 2019

4 hours ago, Camera One said:

It's like the Writers came up with these titles solely for the mystery factor. Heck, in Season 1, August was called "The Stranger" for a few episodes.

I bought the script for this deleted scene from an auction that explains the show's mythology. Here's a snippet.

Regina: "Who is this stranger who has come to town?"

Mr. Gold: "I forgot to mention it to you, dearie. He's part of the prophecy. After the Savior™ comes to town, the Stranger™ will also arrive to assist The Truest Believer™ to nudging her toward belief. The Stranger™ will also come to the Dark One™ seeking guidance."

Regina: "Then kill him when he does!"

Mr. Gold: "Leave and forget about this entire encounter... please™."

Edited December 23, 2019 by KingOfHearts

Camera One · December 24, 2019

If the Writers had character timelines along the wall in the Writers' Room, then they could have easily pointed to a gap where there was still story left to tell. Rather than hitting the exact points in the story over and over again ad nauseum. It might also have prevented some of the timeline and continuity errors along the way. If there had to be retcons, they could have been inserted more thoughtfully.

And then in Season 7, when they had multiple timelines, you'd think they would have plotted all the events visually so the Writers could figure out ages or time intervals.

It is all just so common sense.

A&E and the Writers are like the characters that Alice meets in Wonderland. Completely wackos in their own little worlds with their warped nonsensical lines of thought.

Edited December 24, 2019 by Camera One

tennisgurl · December 28, 2019

The last few episodes of Once are just so...world breaking levels of bad. Season six is probably my pick for worst season, due to the terrible character assassinating ret-cons and such things, while season seven is more boring and pointless than “this makes me sick to my stomach it’s so morally repugnant” but then the last few episodes episodes of season seven happen, and they just take all of what has been established about this universe and chuck it down the drain into a sewer system of madness from which there is no escape. I mean, Victorian 80s prehistoric mean girls? Regina conquers the multiverse but it’s totally a good thing because Hail Regina? Even by this shows standards, it just went soaring off the rails.

Camera One · December 30, 2019

On 12/28/2019 at 3:30 PM, tennisgurl said:

I mean, Victorian 80s prehistoric mean girls? Regina conquers the multiverse but it’s totally a good thing because Hail Regina? Even by this shows standards, it just went soaring off the rails.

It seemed like they were desperate to outdo themselves to make an even more shocking finale than last year's but in the process it became more like a laughable parody.

They had also promised all season that it would make sense in the end, and it totally didn't.

Speakeasy · December 30, 2019

The writers enjoy the idea of it being a madcap adventure series where anything can happen, something like Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen where you could have any combination of characters working together in wacky combinations to defeat outlandish threats and overcome bizarre problems.

Adam Kitsis and Edward Horowitz are not Alan Moore.

Like, that line at the end where they say 'oh yeah, Lily's dad was Zorro'

'Zorro is a dragon? Huh'

I liked that line, I thought it was funny as a kind of 'this show, huh? Why not?' throwaway. But it seemed at times like they tried to make the whole story of throwaway lines and allusions to 'woah, this show huh? Crazy, anything could happen!' But you can't build the story out if that, a crazy story that mashes people from different stories together to tackle bizarre problems needs to follow normal story rules, it needs to have substance, it can't just get by on saying 'woah, here's, fuck, I dunnow, Cinderella 2 and Tiana-you know the black princess?- and they've got a food truck, ain't that whacky?'

Edited December 30, 2019 by Speakeasy
Typo

Camera One · December 30, 2019

Their villain backstories may not all have been up to snuff, but at least their revealed motives sort of explains their actions. At least in Season 1, Regina's malice was mostly towards Snow and her friends, so it made sense that her backstory involved blaming Snow for something she did. Rumple's villainy was easily attributed to the "Curse" of the Dark One, and it was believable that he took the magic to protect his son but got corrupted by magic. Of course, retcons damaged these rationales but they did work at the time. Similarly, Zelena targeted Regina so naturally her backstory involved jealousy of her sister. Ditto for Ingrid and her desperation to have new "sisters". Peter Pan was out to save himself and even the ridiculous I want to take over Storybrooke could be explained as his infantile desire to be the master of whatever domain he's in. The Black Fairy wanted to destroy Emma and it was a lame prophesy but at least she had a reason for it.

Dr. Facilier didn't even have a backstory, so his goal of getting the Dark One dagger was weak all-round. Mother Gothel did get a backstory but the motivating flashback in "Flower Power" did not track with her actions, which were all over the place. Her desire for the Dark One dagger also made no sense. The only other person I could think of who wanted the Dark One powers was Cora, and I suppose she was just power hungry overall.

Shanna Marie · December 31, 2019

On 12/28/2019 at 5:30 PM, tennisgurl said:

The last few episodes of Once are just so...world breaking levels of bad.

Yeah, I have very mixed feelings about the rewatch coming to an end. On one hand, I'm a little sad, like the show is really and truly over now and discussion here will die away. On the other hand, there's a lot of relief that it's almost over and I won't have to make myself watch any more episodes, as I'm barely getting through them. In the first couple of seasons, I looked forward to the rewatch each week. Now I find myself dreading it and trying to just get it over with.

I think the show I love is the potential that it seldom lived up to. There were some truly magical moments, and the material was there for there to have been so much more, but it was very seldom what I wanted it to be. There's this other series that exists only in my head, and I'm generally disappointed with what I actually see on the screen. It's basically a series made for YouTube, best enjoyed in clips rather than in whole episodes. If you see the clips of the good parts, it looks like an amazing series. If you actually watch the whole thing, it doesn't hold together well.

daxx · December 31, 2019

1 hour ago, Shanna Marie said:

In the first couple of seasons, I looked forward to the rewatch each week. Now I find myself dreading it and trying to just get it over with.

I gave up the rewatch after season 5, I just couldn’t watch 6 again. I went back to the beginning again. I think from now on I’ll just plan to end my watch with season 5 to preserve what I still like about this show in my mind.
I really truly intended to do the whole rewatch but after getting so far behind I finally accepted that’s as far as I was getting.

Shanna Marie · January 14, 2020

Comparing the season one curse and the season seven curse is pretty telling. Just going by what we knew during season one (ignoring later retcons) ...

Season one:
Rumple wants the Dark Curse cast because he wants to reach his son in the Land Without Magic without having to give up his own magic. He grooms and cons Regina into casting it as a way of getting revenge on Snow, but first he sets it up to meet his own needs, embedding a backdoor that creates a Savior who can break it and stashing a supply of True Love potion so he can bring magic to that world. Regina thinks she's choosing to cast the curse as a way of getting to a place where villains can have happy endings and she can make Snow miserable. She's so desperate after trying everything to get revenge and failing that she's willing to sacrifice her father to cast the curse.

In the curse, Rumple is one of the wealthiest people in town and has a great deal of power over the people. He's also managed to get a lot of his own magical objects and precious items belonging to other people brought over in the curse to his pawn shop. He's not aware of things for most of the curse (possibly so he won't have to suffer through it all), but has it set up so that when he hears Emma's name, he'll wake up, and he's planted a spell that gives him some control over Regina. Regina is the mayor of the town and lives in a mansion. The people she wants revenge on have been given fake personalities that are opposite of their true selves, and some of them are separated from their loved ones or have different relationships with them. When the curse starts weakening and the Charmings find each other, Regina gives David a "wife" to keep him away from Snow. When Emma breaks the curse, it's a dramatic change as everyone comes back to their true self, and then moments later, Rumple brings back magic.

Season Seven:
Gothel wants the Dark Curse cast so she can get back to the Land Without Magic in order to wipe it out all over again. Drizella learns about the curse from Regina and decides that's what she needs to get revenge on her mother (something she hasn't yet done much about, and she decides this in the middle of a war against her mother when there's a whole rebel movement who'd be keen to help). Gothel cons Drizella into joining her coven and casting the curse, but they don't need a sacrifice because they can just use Regina's blood and make her cast the curse.

The curse makes Gothel a prisoner of Victoria's, and Drizella is Victoria's much put-upon assistant. They make Victoria think it's her curse and that she's in charge. Gothel spends three years as a prisoner until she's freed by WHook/Rogers, who thinks she's a missing girl he's been looking for. Everyone else who's been brought along by the curse seems to more or less be themselves, just not remembering being from a fairy tale world. Some of the families/partners have been split up, but they all find each other, and nothing stops them from being together. Somehow, all the precious objects and magical items (including some that were in Storybrooke) end up in Rumple's evidence locker. After Gothel loses some of her coven and her chance at the Guardian, she decides to recruit her own daughter to cast her spell. Buy the time Henry and Regina break the curse, most people have already got their own memories back and already have the same relationships that they used to have.

The season seven plot makes no sense, to begin with. The motivations don't work. There's a lot of "but why?" going on. And the emotional stakes just aren't there. Breaking the curse changes almost nothing.

Camera One · January 14, 2020

Laid out like that, it's clear how stupid Season 7's plotting was. In Season 7, it was all about the surprise twist in Season 7 (surprise twists were a feature of Season 1 too but at least they were developed and still made sense in retrospect). Having Ivy be Victoria's abused assistant was all about springing the twist that Ivy was the real mastermind of the Curse, not Victoria. Actually surprise, the Big Bad is Gothel, and you'd never guess that she actually CREATED The Land Without Magic, and her motive is wiping out the entire human race!

Shanna Marie · January 16, 2020

On 1/13/2020 at 10:45 PM, Camera One said:

Laid out like that, it's clear how stupid Season 7's plotting was.

Just typing that out almost broke my brain because I kept trying to find some thread in there that would tie it all together, but there was no way to lay it out so that there was any kind of motivation-to-action flow. I've accused them of making it up as they went, and I do think there was a lot of that going on, but it does seem like maybe they were trying to repeat season one with Gothel being the real force behind the curse, the way we learned Rumple was behind the season one curse. But they didn't set it up very well. Rumple's actions made sense even if you looked back at the season with the knowledge that he was behind it all. He had everything set up and planned, and he put himself in a favorable position. The only reason he had to wait for 28 years was that he had to wait for the Savior to break the curse.

There was no reason for Gothel to have waited years, no reason for her to have to be a prisoner. I'm not clear on how the magic was working or not, but it seemed like she was sitting back and waiting for something to happen, and it happened at random, for no reason. I guess the prisoner thing was also a ripoff of season one Rumple, but he got himself imprisoned in the Enchanted Forest in a way that got him close to the Charmings. In the curse, though, he was powerful, wealthy, and in control.

And I keep coming back to the fact that the Dark Curse wasn't necessary for Gothel. A magic bean would have accomplished what she wanted. She and her coven could have jumped through the portal and done their trick. If it was something to do with magic working, they needed to make that a lot more clear, like the way we saw magic arrive in Storybrooke.

Camera One · January 16, 2020

1 hour ago, Shanna Marie said:

but it does seem like maybe they were trying to repeat season one with Gothel being the real force behind the curse, the way we learned Rumple was behind the season one curse. But they didn't set it up very well.

I agree... I've always believed that Gothel was meant to be a replacement for Rumple for Season 8 and onwards if the requel had been a success. They checked off a lot of the same boxes... mysterious, cagey, creepy, fond of deal-making, etc. They might eventually have shown Alice warming up to her mother. The evidence for the contrary was that they didn't give her a "Desperate Souls" type episode near the start of 7B. Maybe they had a more sympathetic slower burn backstory which they ditched for the more clearcut Angry Tree Nymph™ flashback but I can't fathom what it would have been.

Edited January 16, 2020 by Camera One

companionenvy · January 19, 2020

Now that we've finished the rewatch (which, admittedly, I abandoned a long time ago, though I've continued reading the threads each week), I wanted to make one, likely final-ish post on the show. And yep, it is going to consist - as my first post on this forum did -- almost entirely of venting about Regina, but as it is the last time, I hope you'll indulge my final thoughts on all the mistakes I think the writers made with her, as I think a) she is the primary reason the show was not ultimately successful, from a quality standpoint, and b) it is interesting to me from a writing perspective.

1. There is a difference between a "dark" or "complex" character and a sociopathic one. It isn't a failure of the viewers for being unable to sympathize with someone who routinely crosses the moral event horizon over a period of many years; it is a failure of the writers for being unable to understand that comfort with moral grayness doesn't require one to accept absolutely any action a character might commit as compatible with emotional investment in and sympathy for that character.

2. For a sad backstory to really work as a mitigating factor for a villain, it has to be in some measure commensurate with the crimes committed; It should also be meaningfully worse or different from the problems faced by other characters. If Regina were a character in a show set entirely in the modern world, abusive Mom killing your boyfriend reads a little differently than it does in a world in which most characters had pretty horrific backstories, including murders of loved ones, abusive upbringings, abandonment, etc. Not everyone responds to trauma differently, and I can afford sympathy for someone who snapped after a terrible event. But that stops somewhere short of gleefully massacring villages and murdering children for reasons with only the most tangential relationship with her goal of revenge - against someone who was herself a ten year old child at the time of her innocent mistake.

3. If you want to redeem a villain, people-especially the villain's victims--need to react realistically to that person, and the reactions need to be proportional with the harm done. Doing otherwise isn't only a failure of characterization, it is a whitewashing of the villain. Snow and Emma need to be permitted to be righteously angry at Regina, rather than having their anger painted as darkness. If they become friends with her, it should take a long time, require real and direct atonement on her part (not "she was willing to sacrifice herself to stop the mass-murdering device she started, and would have killed her along with everyone else anyway") and should never lead to an easy or fully comfortable relationship, let alone for one that allows for Regina to continue making snarky cracks about Emma's upbringing and past, Snow not being able to keep a secret, etc. A scene in which Regina has fun controlling Dark One Emma should never, never happen in a show in which these two are even grudging allies, let alone close friends. Similarly, the show cannot show Regina as a gaslighting, cold, and arguably abusive mother whom Henry disliked and feared and then try to sell them as having a warm mother son relationship without doing a lot of intervening work to rebuild that relationship.

4. Do not create false equivalencies between the hero and villain. There are degrees of bad. Killing one person unjustifiably for a defined and perhaps understandable reason is bad; killing ten thousand people because it makes you feel good is on a whole other universe of badness. Killing a person in self-defense or defense of others is not a crime at all, and should not be regarded as such. For the hero to make such comparisons suggests self-flagellation; for the villain to do so suggests severely incomplete redemption; for the show to do so is evidence of lazy and morally offensive writing.

5. You can successfully write a show around a villain or anti-hero, provided you follow the above rules. It is really hard to do that, however, if you have other prominent characters who aren't as horribly compromised and are interesting, complex figures in their own right. If Emma had been adopted in infancy by a nice, middle-class family, and gone on to have a stable, generally happy life - albeit one that included an unexpected teenage pregnancy and a painful decision to place her child up for adoption -- that wouldn't actually make what Regina had done to her and to Snowing (let alone to any of her other victims) any better, but it might make her a less compelling character, giving room for a more-muted version of the villain character to engage our sympathies and attention. As it is, even if Regina hadn't been as bad as she was, why would I care more about her than about the abandoned, troubled ex- foster-kid rebuilding her life and finding home and family for the first time? Why would I care more about her relationship with Henry - the child she essentially stole and abused -- than about Snowing and Emma building relationships with the child stolen from them? Why would I want to see Regina's coronation, rather than the Charmings coming into their own as leaders?

This comes into relief especially clearly in S7. Yes, the writers had to deal with JM, GG, and JD's departure from the show. But if they had had any respect for their characters, or their audience, they would have realized that what they did by making Regina so central - both to the fate of the realms and to Henry's life - was totally disrespectful to characters and relationships viewers had far better reason to invest in.

6. The rewards you give your reformed, mass-murdering villain should stop somewhere short of being Queen of Literally Everything, Ever.

Companionenvy out!

daxx · January 19, 2020

@companionenvy I want to applaud this whole post!

andromeda331 · January 19, 2020

10 hours ago, companionenvy said:

Now that we've finished the rewatch (which, admittedly, I abandoned a long time ago, though I've continued reading the threads each week), I wanted to make one, likely final-ish post on the show. And yep, it is going to consist - as my first post on this forum did -- almost entirely of venting about Regina, but as it is the last time, I hope you'll indulge my final thoughts on all the mistakes I think the writers made with her, as I think a) she is the primary reason the show was not ultimately successful, from a quality standpoint, and b) it is interesting to me from a writing perspective.

1. There is a difference between a "dark" or "complex" character and a sociopathic one. It isn't a failure of the viewers for being unable to sympathize with someone who routinely crosses the moral event horizon over a period of many years; it is a failure of the writers for being unable to understand that comfort with moral grayness doesn't require one to accept absolutely any action a character might commit as compatible with emotional investment in and sympathy for that character.

2. For a sad backstory to really work as a mitigating factor for a villain, it has to be in some measure commensurate with the crimes committed; It should also be meaningfully worse or different from the problems faced by other characters. If Regina were a character in a show set entirely in the modern world, abusive Mom killing your boyfriend reads a little differently than it does in a world in which most characters had pretty horrific backstories, including murders of loved ones, abusive upbringings, abandonment, etc. Not everyone responds to trauma differently, and I can afford sympathy for someone who snapped after a terrible event. But that stops somewhere short of gleefully massacring villages and murdering children for reasons with only the most tangential relationship with her goal of revenge - against someone who was herself a ten year old child at the time of her innocent mistake.

3. If you want to redeem a villain, people-especially the villain's victims--need to react realistically to that person, and the reactions need to be proportional with the harm done. Doing otherwise isn't only a failure of characterization, it is a whitewashing of the villain. Snow and Emma need to be permitted to be righteously angry at Regina, rather than having their anger painted as darkness. If they become friends with her, it should take a long time, require real and direct atonement on her part (not "she was willing to sacrifice herself to stop the mass-murdering device she started, and would have killed her along with everyone else anyway") and should never lead to an easy or fully comfortable relationship, let alone for one that allows for Regina to continue making snarky cracks about Emma's upbringing and past, Snow not being able to keep a secret, etc. A scene in which Regina has fun controlling Dark One Emma should never, never happen in a show in which these two are even grudging allies, let alone close friends. Similarly, the show cannot show Regina as a gaslighting, cold, and arguably abusive mother whom Henry disliked and feared and then try to sell them as having a warm mother son relationship without doing a lot of intervening work to rebuild that relationship.

4. Do not create false equivalencies between the hero and villain. There are degrees of bad. Killing one person unjustifiably for a defined and perhaps understandable reason is bad; killing ten thousand people because it makes you feel good is on a whole other universe of badness. Killing a person in self-defense or defense of others is not a crime at all, and should not be regarded as such. For the hero to make such comparisons suggests self-flagellation; for the villain to do so suggests severely incomplete redemption; for the show to do so is evidence of lazy and morally offensive writing.

5. You can successfully write a show around a villain or anti-hero, provided you follow the above rules. It is really hard to do that, however, if you have other prominent characters who aren't as horribly compromised and are interesting, complex figures in their own right. If Emma had been adopted in infancy by a nice, middle-class family, and gone on to have a stable, generally happy life - albeit one that included an unexpected teenage pregnancy and a painful decision to place her child up for adoption -- that wouldn't actually make what Regina had done to her and to Snowing (let alone to any of her other victims) any better, but it might make her a less compelling character, giving room for a more-muted version of the villain character to engage our sympathies and attention. As it is, even if Regina hadn't been as bad as she was, why would I care more about her than about the abandoned, troubled ex- foster-kid rebuilding her life and finding home and family for the first time? Why would I care more about her relationship with Henry - the child she essentially stole and abused -- than about Snowing and Emma building relationships with the child stolen from them? Why would I want to see Regina's coronation, rather than the Charmings coming into their own as leaders?

This comes into relief especially clearly in S7. Yes, the writers had to deal with JM, GG, and JD's departure from the show. But if they had had any respect for their characters, or their audience, they would have realized that what they did by making Regina so central - both to the fate of the realms and to Henry's life - was totally disrespectful to characters and relationships viewers had far better reason to invest in.

6. The rewards you give your reformed, mass-murdering villain should stop somewhere short of being Queen of Literally Everything, Ever.

Companionenvy out!

Well said!

Shanna Marie · January 21, 2020

On 1/19/2020 at 7:19 AM, companionenvy said:

You can successfully write a show around a villain or anti-hero, provided you follow the above rules. It is really hard to do that, however, if you have other prominent characters who aren't as horribly compromised and are interesting, complex figures in their own right.

I would add to this ... if you start with one protagonist and the story structured around that person, telling the story from that person's perspective, you can't abruptly switch focus while still keeping the first character's viewpoint.

The series started with Emma clearly being our protagonist -- the story begins because Emma comes to town, and the story is about her realizing her true identity and being able to carry out her destiny of breaking the curse while also accepting her role as Henry's mother. The story is told from her perspective, as she's the fish out of water, coming to this strange small town, and then later dealing with the fairy tale world and family she comes from but knows nothing about.

Then suddenly the focus starts shifting to Regina, but I don't think the viewpoint changes. I don't feel like we ever really get into Regina's head, as much as we see her tears. I feel like we get a good sense of all of Emma's internal struggles, mostly because her conflict plays out dramatically on the screen. In a book, we'd get a lot from Emma's perspective, either with a tight third-person narration or first-person. With Regina, I feel like the show tells us a lot, but there's still a distance. We're told to feel sorry for her, but we don't really get into her from the inside out. It's like there's an invisible Jane Austen-style omniscient narrator telling us about Regina. I'm not sure you really could get into her head and have her be at all relatable. Think about 2B -- the mother who abused her and killed her love comes to town and frames her for murder, then murdered a hostage in spite of getting what she wanted, and Regina decides to go ride or die with her mother. We never really know what she thinks about all this, and I'm not sure we can because it would be really hard to rationalize that internally unless you're a sociopath.

And I think this may be why certain fans became so obsessed with Regina -- since we never really get into her head, that makes her a lot easier to put yourself into, like wearing a Regina skin suit. She makes a good avatar because you can make your interior life be hers.

It's weird because in most arcs, the real emotional struggle is Emma's, even if the characters are all acting like Regina's issue is most important. Like 4B, where everyone's running around trying to help Regina find the Author, but meanwhile the emotional story is about Emma having the villains focusing on trying to turn her dark, even as she learns a shattering truth about herself and her family.

Generally, we have the character who has an actual emotional struggle, and then we have the character who cries prettily and occasionally makes a speech about how unfair everything is for her but who gets everything she wants without a struggle, and the writers can't seem to decide who the real main character should be. Sometimes they even switch gears in the middle of a story, like in 5B, when it starts out being Emma's quest to save Hook but turns out to be all about Regina's family, and that story's resolved with a memory restoration.

If they always thought of it as Regina's story, then they needed to have structured it differently from the start. I don't think they even show any redemption potential in season one. The closest she comes to being even remotely human is when she doesn't want Henry to die from eating the turnover she meant for Emma. That makes it even weirder when she suddenly starts getting all the attention and the series becomes more and more about her.

If you look at the pilot, you'd expect the finale to be about Emma being a princess surrounded by family at a birthday celebration. I know that Emma being out of the show for season 7 was a factor, and it would have been weird to end with an Emma-focused scene, but it's not like Regina became the new protagonist in season 7. If they wanted to build to the finale they had, they needed to have her play a more active role and do something that warrants the reward she got.

Not that there was anything that warrants that reward. You can't give a reformed villain a bigger version of the thing they took during their evil. The Hooks' ending is more apt -- they were criminals but turned their lives around to become cops, and after having lost all their loved ones, they ended up with families as doting dads and being part of a community.

companionenvy · January 22, 2020

On 1/20/2020 at 10:04 PM, Shanna Marie said:

Then suddenly the focus starts shifting to Regina, but I don't think the viewpoint changes. I don't feel like we ever really get into Regina's head, as much as we see her tears.

This is a great point. Because there are shows that have successfully moved on from an initial protagonist, Orange is the New Black being the first that comes to mind. But in that case, the change is part of a broader perspective shift, where we gradually start moving from sympathy with a protagonist more immediately identifiable to most of the audience toward sympathy with characters whose experiences are more removed from our own.

For Regina, it really is closer to a self-insert figure in a fanfic universe, where the writer gets that Harry Potter nominally still has to be the hero and central POV and Ron and Hermione have to be main characters, but suddenly everyone at Hogwarts is obsessed with beautiful transfer student Phoenix Whiffengold, who has super-special magic powers, and with whom Harry falls madly in love. So while we aren't getting the story from Phoenix's perspective, the perspective we are getting becomes unaccountably centered around this figure, even when common sense and character logic would decree otherwise.

So, in Regina's case, more obvious heroes Emma and Snow for some odd reason wants to be Regina's best friend, and spend a lot of time worrying about her and her feelings even while they are neglecting other relationships and skirting around the fact that her feelings are often irrational, self-pitying and occasionally downright evil. And, of course, at the end, once those characters are more or less off-stage, Regina gets her ending without any regard to what makes any sense in a world in which people that aren't her exist. There is no basis at all for Wish Henry to accept her as his mother, even if he were moved enough by her non-explanation of her actual murder of his actual grandparents to forgive her. Whether or not Snow wants to be Queen, isn't succession going to be an issue? Is she OK formally resigning her rightful throne to Regina, and also cutting out Emma, Henry, and Hope, who should all also have a potential claim to it in a hereditary monarchy? What about all those other kings and queens? And, of course, what about the fact that their solution makes no sense given the multitude of timeline issues? It doesn't matter, because the universe bends itself to serve Regina's story.

On 1/20/2020 at 10:04 PM, Shanna Marie said:

f you look at the pilot, you'd expect the finale to be about Emma being a princess surrounded by family at a birthday celebration. I know that Emma being out of the show for season 7 was a factor, and it would have been weird to end with an Emma-focused scene, but it's not like Regina became the new protagonist in season 7. If they wanted to build to the finale they had, they needed to have her play a more active role and do something that warrants the reward she got.

I know they couldn't do an Emma-centric finale, but the obvious answer was to do a Henry-centric one; if anyone is getting crowned, it should be him. Not that adult Henry was a particularly compelling character, but it would have been the narratively warranted ending in a world in which Emma was only able to make cameos.

Shanna Marie · January 23, 2020

14 hours ago, companionenvy said:

For Regina, it really is closer to a self-insert figure in a fanfic universe, where the writer gets that Harry Potter nominally still has to be the hero and central POV and Ron and Hermione have to be main characters, but suddenly everyone at Hogwarts is obsessed with beautiful transfer student Phoenix Whiffengold, who has super-special magic powers, and with whom Harry falls madly in love. So while we aren't getting the story from Phoenix's perspective, the perspective we are getting becomes unaccountably centered around this figure, even when common sense and character logic would decree otherwise.

I'd say it's even more like if, after the first few Harry Potter books, the focus shifted to Draco, even though the books were still from Harry's point of view. Never mind that Draco was a horrible, racist bully and did terrible things to all the characters. He's suddenly the most important thing in Harry's life, and he, Ron and Hermione spend a lot of time making sure Draco is okay. Draco is kind of working with the good guys now, but he's never actually renounced his allegiance to Voldemort or said he was wrong to be a Death Eater, and he's certainly never apologized for all the horrible things he did to the other students. Still, they all consider him a friend now and hang out with him, even while he's snarking at them and calling them insulting names. Everyone's still expecting Harry to do everything in the fight against evil. He's the one who suffers and sacrifices, but in the big climactic scenes, he's usually rendered helpless while Draco swoops in to do something to save the day. When Draco does something moderately heroic, the kind of thing Harry does on a daily basis, they throw a big festival in the Great Hall. But Harry doesn't resent him. He just smiles and joins in the praise. After all the buildup and development of the tight bond and relationships between Harry, Ron, and Hermione, Harry starts frequently ditching them to go check on Draco. A story may start to look like it's going to focus on Harry and what he's going through, but it will shift to deal with Draco, even while Harry continues being the viewpoint character. And yet there's no real struggle for Draco's stories. When he gets a girlfriend, it's because a magic spell showed him the perfect person. The relationships he's tanked with his bad behavior are easily mended and all is forgiven. Meanwhile, we get hints of all the struggle and torment Harry is going through as the chosen one whose destiny is to face the ultimate evil and probably die, but Harry's never allowed to dwell on that because he's too busy watching what Draco's up to. And then after Harry spends a year away from the school, Draco gets elected Head Boy over all the magical schools. (I'm sure that there are probably a number of fanfics that are almost exactly this. And many more in which Harry and Draco are in love while this scenario plays out.)

14 hours ago, companionenvy said:

I know they couldn't do an Emma-centric finale, but the obvious answer was to do a Henry-centric one; if anyone is getting crowned, it should be him. Not that adult Henry was a particularly compelling character, but it would have been the narratively warranted ending in a world in which Emma was only able to make cameos.

I think the main problem with any ending they decided to do at the end of season seven was that there was no actual protagonist of season seven. I can't tell that anyone worked as a viewpoint character. The story sort of started when Henry came to Hyperion Heights, but I don't feel like we were seeing the world through his eyes. He may have broken the curse, but I don't feel like there was any narrative drive toward him breaking the curse. Lucy also doesn't seem to have been the protagonist or viewpoint character, not even in the way season one Henry was. She wanted the curse broken, but she didn't really do much of anything toward that goal. Regina was mostly a background character. Rogers/WHook came pretty close to being a true protagonist, in that he was actively working toward a goal, but I don't feel like he was a viewpoint character, and he was off in his own little side plot, not the main story. Since there was no real drive or perspective from any of the characters, no matter what they did at the end, it would have fallen flat.

I think instead of that big throne room thing, I'd have ended with the future characters finding a way back to their time after a big meet-and-greet with the Storybrooke people, then Blue waving her wand to erase the Storybrooke people's memories of the future, then an extended montage of them going about their daily lives, kind of like the end of season 6, but maybe in more detail and seeing where they are now, like showing Hook and Emma at home with their baby and Henry visiting them and the Charmings popping by. Then maybe at the very end, Henry gets the motorcycle, and we see him get the idea to go traveling, so we know the story will continue (though that still doesn't explain how there's a baby at that time who wasn't born until Henry aged into another actor). That way, the future characters get their send-off and we end the series with the Storybrooke folks and a look at where they are now. They didn't need a big thing like the coronation. I guess they were going for the bookend from the pilot, but when things have changed so much, you can't really bookend. The cycle would be going from a purely fairytale world to something that's utterly ordinary but still a bit magical. If they really must echo the beginning, have the Charming family gathered at the farm, and Regina barges in, only this time she's bringing lasagna instead of threatening a curse.

Camera One · January 23, 2020

51 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said:

I'd say it's even more like if, after the first few Harry Potter books, the focus shifted to Draco, even though the books were still from Harry's point of view. Never mind that Draco was a horrible, racist bully and did terrible things to all the characters. He's suddenly the most important thing in Harry's life, and he, Ron and Hermione spend a lot of time making sure Draco is okay.

Or the series ends with Harry and all the characters cheering as Voldemort is crowned President of the Wizarding community.

companionenvy · January 23, 2020

6 hours ago, Camera One said:

Or the series ends with Harry and all the characters cheering as Voldemort is crowned President of the Wizarding community.

This actually is the more valid comparison. Draco, nasty as he is and unaccountable as it would be if the actual protagonists started centering their lives around him in the manner Shanna described, was still pretty much EvilLite. Regina, as a despot responsible for countless deaths, is a lot closer to Voldemort, which makes the whole thing even more bizarre. There might have been a way, had the books taken a very different direction, to sell a redemption arc even for him--think Anakin/Darth Vader--, but there's no way to sell an ending in which he is embraced by everyone to the extent that they shame other people for not being on-board with the love-train, let alone make him ruler of the wizarding world. Similarly, if Vader had lived at the end of Jedi, the very best that could have been justified is him being allowed to live out the remainder of his life quietly, maybe with Luke and Leia forgiving him enough to establish some kind of uneasy relationship. And that's assuming there was a valid reason he couldn't be punished through any legal system.

daxx · January 23, 2020

3 hours ago, companionenvy said:

There might have been a way, had the books taken a very different direction, to sell a redemption arc even for him--think Anakin/Darth Vader--,

It’s even worse when you look at the actions shown rather than told. Regina’s evil was fully shown where much of Voldemort’s was offscreen.

Shanna Marie · January 23, 2020

13 hours ago, Camera One said:

Or the series ends with Harry and all the characters cheering as Voldemort is crowned President of the Wizarding community.

True, it's not a perfect comparison. I went with Draco instead of Voldemort because at least Draco was around the other main characters in a way that would possibly allow them to be friends, and Voldemort provided a kind of outside evil that Draco might have teamed up with the heroes to fight, and therefore become a hero. Voldemort was so ridiculously evil and beyond human that there would have been no way to imagine him hanging out with Harry and company or joining them against an even greater threat. So, say, if Draco had been responsible for murdering members of Harry's family and making Harry have to live with his awful relatives, where he was abused, and Harry knew this. And if we'd learned after Harry started focusing on Draco and trying to be his friend that Draco had slaughtered everyone in his village before he came to Hogwarts.

That shows just how ridiculous the whole thing was -- if you try to translate the situation to another property, the most apt comparison for Regina's villainy is too much to even begin to imagine the outcome we got. The only way you can make it even somewhat reasonable is to compare it to a much lesser villain.

I think one of the weirdest things about Regina is that at the moment they seem to have decided to focus on her and turn her into a hero, that's when they started adding to her evil in the flashbacks. In season one, she was responsible for engineering Leopold's death, she ripped out Graham's heart, raped him, and murdered him, she sent children to die, and she repeatedly tried to kill Snow, but we hadn't yet seen the mass murders. Her redemption would still have been a tall order, and I never would have bought Emma and the Charmings being her best friend or Henry getting so clingy with her, but I could have imagined her being tolerated in the town and included in the fight against outside evils. But while they're trying to make us see her as the biggest victim who ever victimed and setting up her redemption (via stopping her own mass murder scheme), they also made her past crimes so much more massive and kept adding to the body count in deeds that had zero to do with anything Snow might have done and were just plain petty.

Shanna Marie · January 26, 2020

Inspired by the discussion on the media thread about a video about "plot holes" that weren't (I haven't watched, since I don't want to give something that silly the views), what are some of the most annoying plot holes? I'm defining a plot hole as something needed to make the plot work that doesn't actually make sense if you think about it. They mostly seem to come from logical leaps, in which the characters go from A to D or even X without any explanation about how they got the information, or from the characters having to behave in out-of-character ways (usually being stupid). Unanswered questions and unfired Chekhov's guns are different categories. I'm leaving out season seven because it was one big plot hole.

A minor one from season one that I didn't notice until the latest rewatch and that I now can't unsee is how Henry knew that his birth mother would be the Savior. On the show, it comes across like he learned about the curse and the Savior from the storybook and then tracked down his birth mother, who was the Savior, but there was nothing in the book that suggested Henry had any connection to the Savior. It's an easy enough fix, if maybe he looked up his birth mother with the idea that, being from the outside world, she could help him find the Savior, but then when he found her and her name was Emma and it turned out she was found as an infant in Maine, he did the math. But I don't think the show ever explains it.

It's also a bit strange that Rumple engineers the curse being cast to reach his son in the World Without Magic more than a hundred years after his son went there, and he somehow expects to find his son still alive. Yeah, he got the prophecy about finding his son again, but I don't think the seer specified that he would be alive. He could have got there only to find a grave. Though I don't recall if they gave us a timespan in season one before we knew about Neverland. He would have been old, since he was a teenager before Regina was born, but I don't think in season one we knew that more than a century had passed. This may be mostly a retroactive plot hole, in that elements introduced later weakened the original plot. What we get in season one works. Then in season two we learn that Bae went to our world in Victorian times and that he ended up in Neverland. In later seasons, the story is weakened still further when we learn that there were other ways to travel to our world, that Bae was in Neverland when the curse was cast, and that Rumple had a magical device in his castle that could have shown him where Bae was, in a world that he could have reached more easily.

Then there's Zelena's kiss curse on Hook in 3B, which requires villain omniscience. For her scheme to work, she has to know that Hook is currently in love with Emma, in spite of him not really doing much to show that during his time back in Storybrooke. Regina snarks about him giving Emma doe eyes, but he gets all mushy about Neal and Henry, too. Then Zelena has to know what happened with him and Ariel in the past, as well as what he feels about that, and she has to be able to perfectly duplicate Ariel, someone she's never met, as far as we know, and have detailed information about Ariel's life. But we don't see how Zelena could have known about any of this stuff. She had her magical iPad thingy in Oz, but I don't think we saw her using anything like that in Storybrooke. We saw her using it to look at her own past, and she was able to see what Regina was doing in the present. It was never established that she could see any event, anywhere, at any time with it (which would have introduced still more plot holes). We also saw her using flying monkeys as spies, but that would have required her to bother having Hook followed back in their world, even though he left the rest of the group and was off on his own, having nothing to do with any of the other Storybrookers. We did see that she was also able to perfectly duplicate Marian and know everything Marian knew, so I guess that's consistent, but she at least was around Marian and killed her, so there was some chance for her to absorb her essence, or whatever. She was never around Ariel. How did she even know what Ariel looked like? And if all you have to do to learn everything someone knows is take on their form, that introduces still more plot holes, as it's pretty dumb that they didn't make use of that. What's your enemy in another world up to? Take on her form and find out everything she knows! If Zelena could see any event anywhere at any point in history and if she could know everything someone knows by taking on her form, then how was Zelena defeated? They shouldn't have been able to surprise her.

There are a lot more, but I want to leave room for others to play.

Camera One · January 26, 2020

18 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said:

A minor one from season one that I didn't notice until the latest rewatch and that I now can't unsee is how Henry knew that his birth mother would be the Savior. On the show, it comes across like he learned about the curse and the Savior from the storybook and then tracked down his birth mother, who was the Savior, but there was nothing in the book that suggested Henry had any connection to the Savior. It's an easy enough fix, if maybe he looked up his birth mother with the idea that, being from the outside world, she could help him find the Savior, but then when he found her and her name was Emma and it turned out she was found as an infant in Maine, he did the math. But I don't think the show ever explains it.

That is an interesting question. I think it did have to do with her name. The show didn't spell it out, but I think it could make sense with your scenario, or the following one:

The storybook did say Snow and Charming's name was Emma and that she would be the Savior. I don't think Henry would have immediately connected himself with the Savior.

Maybe completely separately, Henry was desperate to escape Storybrooke (because the book made him believe the idea of the Curse and was freaked out by everyone else aging except himself), so he stole MM's credit card to find out his birthmother's name.

I think he connected the dots when he found out that his birth mother was named Emma, and thus concluded that she was the Savior from the storybook.

Edited January 26, 2020 by Camera One

Shanna Marie · January 26, 2020

4 minutes ago, Camera One said:

Maybe completely separately, Henry was desperate to escape Storybrooke (because the book made him believe the idea of the Curse and was freaked out by everyone else aging except himself), so he stole MM's credit card to find out his birthmother's name.

I think he connected the dots when he found out that his birth mother was named Emma, and thus concluded that she was the Savior from the storybook.

That's my fanwank, that he wanted to find his birth mother after learning about the curse, in part because he was hoping for escape, and maybe because he wanted to find the Savior who'd been sent to that world but knew he'd need help, and his birth mother was the only person he could think of in the outside world that he could go to for help. Then he figured it out once he found her name. But I don't think the show ever came close to spelling that out. I'm not sure the writers even realized that there was a logical leap in there.

Camera One · January 26, 2020

Henry had some nice conversations with Emma in Season 1, so I think A&E could have used one of them for Henry's explanation. Maybe A&E thought that was too boring exposition.

Edited January 26, 2020 by Camera One

Camera One · January 26, 2020

43 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said:

It's also a bit strange that Rumple engineers the curse being cast to reach his son in the World Without Magic more than a hundred years after his son went there, and he somehow expects to find his son still alive. Yeah, he got the prophecy about finding his son again, but I don't think the seer specified that he would be alive. He could have got there only to find a grave.

They used that prophesy as a crutch to explain how Rumple knew what to do. So he just knew that Baelfire would still be alive somehow as long as the Curse was cast at a particular time, it seemed. How specific was the prophesy anyway? Was that how he knew it was one of Cora's daughters who would cast the Curse for him?

Could Rumple have included into the Curse that they be transported to a time when Baelfire would be alive?

Though if that were the case, you'd think he would have cast the Curse earlier so he could have been reunited with Baelfire as an older boy instead of as a grown man.

Edited January 26, 2020 by Camera One

Shanna Marie · January 27, 2020

1 hour ago, Camera One said:

They used that prophesy as a crutch to explain how Rumple knew what to do. So he just knew that Baelfire would still be alive somehow as long as the Curse was cast at a particular time, it seemed. How specific was the prophesy anyway? Was that how he knew it was one of Cora's daughters who would cast the Curse for him?

I don't remember when they revealed the various bits of the prophecy. The "the boy will lead you to your son, but the boy will be your undoing" thing wasn't revealed until season 2, right? And I think the thing about Cora's daughter casting the curse came up in season 2. I'm not even sure if the "you'll find your son" bit was in season one. They never did handle prophecy well in this show. Things just happened the way you'd think from a superficial reading of the prophecy, with no twists or deeper meanings. There never seems to have been the slightest consideration, either from the perspective of the show or from Rumple, that the prophecy might have been vague or misleading.

1 hour ago, Camera One said:

Could Rumple have included into the Curse that they be transported to a time when Baelfire would be alive?

I recall that there was a mention in season one about the curse transporting them in time as well as in space. That might have made it all make a lot of sense, but then they later showed that things were in sync between worlds, so all was happening at the same time, which killed that.

So this really was a retroactive plot hole. I think it might have worked in season one, but as they added more to the backstory and changed the situation, it made less and less sense.

Camera One · January 27, 2020

8 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

Then there's Zelena's kiss curse on Hook in 3B, which requires villain omniscience.

Villain omniscience was a major problem on this show. I suppose it's a problem on many shows, but your example with Zelena outlined so many times it happened within a single arc.

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