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

Shanna Marie · December 6, 2020

22 hours ago, Camera One said:

If they wanted to do "there are certain constants - events that will always happen no matter what", and one of them being Emma and Baelfire having Henry (hence Peter Pan having a drawing of Henry long before he was born), then they could have explored what changed in the past that resulted in that path.

Yeah, that definitely needed some explanation beyond a portrait of Baelfire on the wall and the existence of Henry. Everything else was self-explanatory, even if it wasn't exactly what was likely to have happened without a curse. The Charmings were ruling and were older, Hook was drunk and older. But since Emma only met Neal/Bae because of the curse, by definition in a world where the curse never happened, then that didn't happen and they needed to explain why and how it did.

22 hours ago, Camera One said:

I'm imagining a coffee table book, where a different map of their "world" is presented based on the information from each episode/arc.

Maybe that's what's "enchanted" about the Enchanted Forest: the geography is constantly shifting. One day, Camelot is on the northern border, but the next day it might be Xavier's kingdom. Next week it's Cinderella's prince's kingdom. But does the rest of the world shift around it or does the Enchanted Forest roam the world? Or there's something I read in a fantasy series where there was a spell that made all roads one road. You could set off on the road from your home, but while you were in the forest you could do this spell and then you'd be on the road to your destination, come out of the forest on the other end, and you'd be where you wanted to go, no matter how far away it was. So maybe it's not that all these lands are within walking distance, but there's some kind of forest portal that shifts you to the other land. If you know how to work it, everywhere's within walking distance. If you don't know what's going on, you might be in for some big surprises.

The geography where it relates to Cora's story gets pretty wacky. She meets "Prince" Jonathan in the tavern and believes his story about being a prince, which implies that she doesn't think he's the local prince, or she might have known who he was or known his name. When he doesn't show up for their meeting, she starts walking and ends up at Leo's palace, where she finds Jonathan and learns he's the gardener, not the prince. So, did she deliberately go to the palace expecting to find him there? Wouldn't she have known that the prince over her kingdom was Leopold, not Jonathan? Or did she walk a lot longer than that? But in that case, would she have known where to find him? Then later (in chronology), she's delivering flour to Xavier's castle in a wheelbarrow, which implies that her mill is in his kingdom or nearby. Was she away from home while working in the tavern, and that's how she didn't know who the prince was? Was she originally from Xavier's kingdom and working at a tavern in Leo's kingdom before having to go back home to the mill after she got pregnant?

You'd think a dedicated social climber and schemer like Cora would have known the names of all the eligible princes in the general area. She might not recognize them in an era before mass media, and I guess as princes their portraits wouldn't yet be on the coins, but she would know their names, and even if she thought she was in a Hallmark movie and Jonathan was the prince of Nowhereistan she'd never heard of who just happened to be taking a vacation and staying in a tavern so he could get away from his responsibilities and fall in love with a plucky waitress (though it not being Christmas should have been a clue), she would have known that the heir to that kingdom's throne was named Leopold, and she wouldn't have expected to find Jonathan at Leopold's nearby castle.

Camera One · December 6, 2020

Has anyone figured out how old Baelfire was when he escaped Neverland and came back to "our world"? How old was he when Regina's Curse brought everyone to Storybrooke? I couldn't fall asleep last night and was thinking about how he might have averted the Curse and eventually meet Emma and have Henry.

Shanna Marie · December 7, 2020

3 hours ago, Camera One said:

Has anyone figured out how old Baelfire was when he escaped Neverland and came back to "our world"?

I figure he was around 16 while he was in Neverland. Rumple became the Dark One when Bae turned 14. Then there was however long between that and Bae getting desperate enough to use the bean -- which seems to have expanded with the retcon of them having moved from the village to the castle and Pan trying to lure Bae. And then there was at least six months in London before he met the Darlings. He would have been that same age when he came back to our world, whenever that happened, and would have started aging again at that point.

3 hours ago, Camera One said:

How old was he when Regina's Curse brought everyone to Storybrooke?

That's the tricky part. Didn't someone notice that the birth date shown on his wanted poster made him 24 when he was with Emma? Of course, that would have to have been a made-up birth date, since he was born in another world more than a hundred years earlier. We don't know if that birth date was made up based on his age at that time or if it was made up out of thin air. But if it's anywhere close to his actual age, that makes him about 7 years older than Emma would have been at that time, and he would have arrived in our world about 8 years previously, which would have been nine years into the curse.

3 hours ago, Camera One said:

I couldn't fall asleep last night and was thinking about how he might have averted the Curse and eventually meet Emma and have Henry.

If Bae had gone back to his world with Hook when Hook made his last trip back before the curse, that automatically would have cancelled the curse, since Rumple wouldn't have needed it anymore. He would have probably done something to keep it out of Regina's hands or stop her from casting it, since it would have messed up his life at that point. He wouldn't have wanted to be stuck for 28 years not remembering his son he'd just been reunited with.

But then that would have made Bae about 16 when Emma was born and in his mid-late 30s when she was a teenager at the age she would have been to get pregnant with Henry. I guess that's a Jane Austen age difference that might not have been as shocking in that kind of world as it would be in modern America, but then there's the issue that a child mid-late 30s Bae had with Emma probably would not have been the Henry we know because it would have been a different sperm involved than the one that came from a Bae at a different point in his life.

Camera One · December 7, 2020

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But then that would have made Bae about 16 when Emma was born and in his mid-late 30s when she was a teenager at the age she would have been to get pregnant with Henry. I guess that's a Jane Austen age difference that might not have been as shocking in that kind of world as it would be in modern America, but then there's the issue that a child mid-late 30s Bae had with Emma probably would not have been the Henry we know because it would have been a different sperm involved than the one that came from a Bae at a different point in his life.

True, though I suppose if we're for total realism, getting pregnant with Emma a month earlier or later would have resulted in a different sperm cell and a different egg cell, too. If the constant in this universe was that Henry must be produced, then maybe the Fates of Ancient Greece ensured that particular egg cell and that sperm cell would fuse at some point.

2 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

If Bae had gone back to his world with Hook when Hook made his last trip back before the curse, that automatically would have cancelled the curse, since Rumple wouldn't have needed it anymore. He would have probably done something to keep it out of Regina's hands or stop her from casting it, since it would have messed up his life at that point. He wouldn't have wanted to be stuck for 28 years not remembering his son he'd just been reunited with.

That would have been interesting to explore from Rumple's perspective, because he probably would have realized that deep down, he never really wanted Bae back. At least not at the expense of his power. So my fictional story went something like this. Hook brings Baelfire back and he asks his father to give up his magic, and Rumple won't do it. Bae tries to destroy Rumple's magic himself and accidentally (or "accidentally") pricks himself with a spinning wheel and falls under a Sleeping Curse. Rumple puts the 16-year-old Baelfire into a glass coffin, and Rumple continues his life as The Dark One. And then eventually, a 16-year-old Emma finds Bae and gives him True Love's Kiss. Baelfire lives with the Charmings under an alias, and when they are adults, Emma and Baelfire marry and have Henry. Then, Rumple finds out and goes crazy and accidentally kills Baelfire, and Rumple ends up in jail.

Edited December 7, 2020 by Camera One

Melgaypet · December 7, 2020

On 12/5/2020 at 3:17 PM, Shanna Marie said:

Without all that, and living in a castle with actual rooms in a world without birth control? A big family.

Tangent: is the Enchanted Forest really without birth control? Things like pills, implants, and IUD's, yes. But magic existed. Wouldn't there be spells, potions, or charms that could block fertility temporarily (not permanently like whatever Regina drank)? And without magic...I mean, condoms have existed in our world since probably Ancient Roman times, usually made from linen or the intestines or bladders of goats and sheep. (Hey, maybe Ruth and Charming should've considered that sideline to help keep their farm afloat!) That's not even getting into whatever abortifacients were available. (Which is what I think Cora would have used, instead of dumping her newborn by the road, but whatever.)

This doesn't contradict the point that, in a world where the Dark Curse wasn't cast, Snow and Charming would've had a big family, both because that's what they would want and because royalty generally tended to have as many kids as possible. It just set me off on another tangent.

I think I first wondered about this regarding Lucy, and if she was planned or not. Because if she was, Henry and Jacinda were dumb (well, those two were dumb anyway, but specifically about this) to have a baby when they were living in the woods fighting a war to overthrow Lady Tremaine (and some nameless king.) But they didn't have any more kids after her, so...?

tennisgurl · December 7, 2020

19 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

Maybe that's what's "enchanted" about the Enchanted Forest: the geography is constantly shifting. One day, Camelot is on the northern border, but the next day it might be Xavier's kingdom.

You know how in some fantasy stories they include a map of the world at the beginning so we have some rough idea of where the characters are in relation to everything else or in general get a feel for the world? Its like Once goes the opposite way and instead keeps adding geographical information that makes things even more confusing. We have no clue where any of these kingdoms are in relation to the others, we don't know the differences between them, we don't even know most of their names, other than Mysthaven which I think just refers to Snows kingdom, but I could be wrong, which it is only called once in the entire show, its easy to even forget what kingdoms are in the same universe as each other given all the universe jumping that goes on. We don't even know where Hook, one of the main characters, is actually from. None of them are apparently very big, considering how many kingdoms seem to exist in a rather short area, they are almost more like city states than actual kingdoms, the EF is probably the biggest one we see, and it is seemingly just a big forest with some scattered villages and one castle with a market around it and a few port towns. The geography basically exists to get characters to where the plot wants them to be at the time, assuming we wont care or notice about locations and how kingdoms work, probably because they think the audience might find that too complicated, but instead of making things less complicated, it just makes things even more confusing because we have no idea how this world works or how people are getting anywhere or where anything is, even when it should matter to the plot. If Sherwood Forrest is in the EF, we need to have that established considering the main characters are its rulers. If George and Regina are teaming up, shouldn't we know what that means for their kingdoms when they are both defeated? Was there some kind of merging? Its hard to even figure out who is from what kingdom, which is pretty important when the rulers of the kingdoms and the line of succession are major plot points. I think the show didn't really realize that when you make everyone a prince or princess or king or queen, that they need a kingdom or something to go with that title. The show just really likes calling people princes or princesses because they think it sounds cute or cool or because Disney, even when it really has no reason to make them a member of a ruling family, they just liked the titles. It really became obvious in the Disenchanted Forrest with Tiana, who's princess title seriously raised about a billion questions about her kingdom and that entire world that are never answered, which could have been avoided if she was just a noblewoman or something. They basically created a billion different kingdoms by accident.

On 12/5/2020 at 1:41 AM, Speakeasy said:

Like... Is the implication that when they say darkness or evil they are actually talking about, ultimately, the idea of being active - trying to impose your own will on the world around you?

Its kind of interesting in a meta kind of way, there is this literary idea that good is essentially reactive while evil is proactive in a traditional narrative, that bad guys have to do something and good guys have to stop them, or some variation of that. Its why ambition is so often written as an "evil" trait when there is nothing actually bad about wanting to be successful or good at stuff, its the idea that people who are really active must also have some kind of moral failing, that being proactive is a slippery slope to making morally questionable and eventually evil actions, and wanting to go out there and fight evil when it isn't right at your door is "looking for trouble" or something. Good should always be on the defensive, because it going on the offensive could lead to something that the story will decide is not morally correct, and that if there is no evil, there is basically no story, because good should just be happy with whatever the status quo is. The only way good can be proactive is if the status quo is really bad, then they are trying for a new status quo or to get an old status quo back again. Its why ambition is considered a bad thing by so many narratives, they don't feel comfortable with people that are unhappy with their personal status quo, and assume that someone like that must be willing to do anything to achieve their goals, no matter how morally bankrupt, and often they are doing it for pride or greed or for powers sake. This show is interesting in that it takes that thread to its most logical conclusion, where we got to the point where good is supposed to be almost entirely passive, sometimes not even reacting to evil schemes so much as sitting around waiting for villains to do evil stuff even when they could very well take the fight to the bad guys, any form of bad magic is insanely powerful while good magic is often ineffectual in front of it, most good magic users are either former evil magic users or are basically useless (and become more useless when they become good), any attempt to be proactive against villains are either doomed to failure until the last minute or are seen as evil acts, like when Snow killed Cora, and even our hero ends up being forced by prophesy to be a hero, not because she wants to, and her great moment of heroism is letting someone kill her and then a villain taking the main bad guy out anyway. Several villains started their evil because they craved power, wanted to climb the social ladder, or change their fate or circumstances or gain power, most notably Cora, who's ambition is her main character trait, while the good guys were mostly born into power instead of having to fight for it, they just go along with their circumstances without really questioning it, and no attempts to really change the status quo beyond kicking Regina out are really attempted. Look at the Black Fairy and Emma. The Black Fairy desperately looked for solutions to try and save her son, and that just made everything worse, while Emma accepted her fate to die, a shaking broken mess, and it ended up working out through very little work on her part. Its almost like in this show, you need to have darkness in you to do anything at all, so we have pretty princess Emma being all flowers and lameness because she is super sweet so therefore useless and villains being the ones with the most screen time and can actually do things beyond reacting to them. If they had actually explored that and how the nature of this universe seems to run on this idea that good should always be passive and if it isnt they cant be good anymore and that darkness is the only way you can improve your life and actually get things done without just waiting around for bad things to happen, based on narrative convention, that could have actually been really interesting. Can good guys do more than just hope that things will work out?

Edited December 7, 2020 by tennisgurl

Shanna Marie · December 7, 2020

16 hours ago, Camera One said:

So my fictional story went something like this. Hook brings Baelfire back and he asks his father to give up his magic, and Rumple won't do it. Bae tries to destroy Rumple's magic himself and accidentally (or "accidentally") pricks himself with a spinning wheel and falls under a Sleeping Curse. Rumple puts the 16-year-old Baelfire into a glass coffin, and Rumple continues his life as The Dark One. And then eventually, a 16-year-old Emma finds Bae and gives him True Love's Kiss. Baelfire lives with the Charmings under an alias, and when they are adults, Emma and Baelfire marry and have Henry. Then, Rumple finds out and goes crazy and accidentally kills Baelfire, and Rumple ends up in jail.

That could work, and maybe the way Rumple stops Regina from casting the curse is by telling the Charmings how to take away her powers, to fit with what we learned in season 7. But teen Emma and Bae would have to get married and have Henry for Henry to be the age he is and Emma be the age she is. Unless there's yet another time issue. Say, Emma and Bae get married and have Henry in their early 20s. When Henry is a little kid, he and his dad go off for a little "adventure"/vacation (like what WHook did with adult Henry, but it's cute when you do it for a 5-6 year-old kid instead of embarrassing), but something goes wrong, and they end up spending what feels like 5-6 years for them while they've only been gone a week from Emma's perspective. That makes Henry the right age without Princess Emma having to be a teen mom, and it makes Bae the right age to look like mid-late 30s Neal in his portrait.

2 hours ago, Melgaypet said:

Tangent: is the Enchanted Forest really without birth control?

That's a good point. There are a lot of only children in that world for there to be no birth control. Were there any big families, other than the giants? Snow's an only child (though that fits with the fairy tale because in that story they had fertility issues). Cora seems to be an only child. Regina is an only child (though I suspect Cora wasn't keen on sleeping with Henry Sr.). Well, there's Zelena, but she was a half-sister and they didn't grow up together. Philip and Aurora seem to be only children. Charming was a twin but grew up as an only child (with them, they couldn't afford to have more children, so must have taken precautions). Bae was an only child (because Milah probably quit sleeping with Rumple). Belle's an only child. I'm sure a lot of this has to do with casting and not wanting to keep track of more characters associated with the main characters (until they wanted to pull a relative out of thin air for plot), but it looks like there must have been something in the water or food supply affecting fertility.

Melgaypet · December 7, 2020

1 hour ago, Shanna Marie said:

Snow's an only child (though that fits with the fairy tale because in that story they had fertility issues)

This is another reason it's irritating not to know how the line of succession works. Does the Enchanted Forest practice male primogeniture or not? Snow had no brothers, of course. I got the impression Abigail was Midas' heir, but we never got a hint that she had any siblings. Did Leopold marry again solely to give his lonely, motherless daughter a loving stepmother (and perhaps provide himself with some companionship, or a partner in royal duties, even if he were still in love with the late Eva), or was there hope (on his side, not Cora's) that a young, healthy wife might provide him with a male heir? That changes how we might view Leopold and Regina's marriage and how it might have soured.

I just got a flash of Princess Emma having friction with her younger brother - let's call him Leopold II. Emma is an adept stateswoman with strong diplomatic relationships with neighboring kingdoms, an understanding of court politics, interest in the justice system, etc. Prince Leo isn't a bad guy, by any means, but is most interested in "knightly" things like jousting, riding around with his mates, slaying dragons and the like, and is rather hopeless at the administrative parts of ruling (which is most of ruling, really) at which Emma excels. It naturally frustrates her that he is placed ahead of her in the succession, when she would be much better at ruling the kingdom - and Leo would probably be happier just being a dashing prince adored by all instead of a king, anyway.

I really should write a fanfic about all this, but it would require a plot. I am so bad at plot.

Shanna Marie · December 7, 2020

40 minutes ago, Melgaypet said:

Prince Leo isn't a bad guy, by any means, but is most interested in "knightly" things like jousting, riding around with his mates, slaying dragons and the like, and is rather hopeless at the administrative parts of ruling (which is most of ruling, really) at which Emma excels. It naturally frustrates her that he is placed ahead of her in the succession, when she would be much better at ruling the kingdom - and Leo would probably be happier just being a dashing prince adored by all instead of a king, anyway.

I recently read a fantasy novel that was basically this plot. The older sister was the brains of the family, good at diplomacy, able to do all the "boring" stuff, while younger brother was mostly a playboy type, not at all ready to settle down, likes having lots of mistresses with no commitment, hanging out with his friends, feasting, drinking, practicing swordplay, etc. Then the king was killed, the younger brother had to become king, and his older sister was quite frustrated. But then he had to grow up fast and he realized she was his best asset as an ambassador.

But we don't know how succession worked -- and I'm not sure the writers did, either. There were times they referred to Regina stealing Snow's throne, but then the rest of the time they made it seem like it was totally normal for the king's widow to take the throne, and Regina held on to that position even after she had supposedly reformed. During the missing year, I don't think there was any indication that Snow was a queen. She and Regina were sort of working as a team, but Regina was the queen and Snow was still a princess. We don't know if Snowflake would have been ahead of Emma in the line of succession (not that it matters, since Snow no longer seemed to be in the line).

Melgaypet · December 8, 2020

6 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

I recently read a fantasy novel that was basically this plot.

Heh. Well, I didn't claim it was an original plot. TBH, I think originality is a little overrated, anyway. An original idea, well-executed, is exciting, but a tried-and-true story can work well, too, especially if it's anchored by strong characters.

6 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

But we don't know how succession worked -- and I'm not sure the writers did, either. There were times they referred to Regina stealing Snow's throne, but then the rest of the time they made it seem like it was totally normal for the king's widow to take the throne, and Regina held on to that position even after she had supposedly reformed. During the missing year, I don't think there was any indication that Snow was a queen. She and Regina were sort of working as a team, but Regina was the queen and Snow was still a princess.

It's possible to fanwank this in the immediate wake of Leopold's death, I suppose. Depending on how old Snow was supposed to be at that time, a possible legal fig leaf for Regina to take power would be as regent to the young princess. Say it's the law that a underage heir can't be crowned until they're of age, whatever that is, even if the monarch dies before then. Then Snow would meet with a "hunting accident" and Regina would continue to rule, for the sake of the kingdom's stability, of course.

I can't think of a single excuse for why there wouldn't have been a coronation for Queen Snow White after winning the war against Regina and George, however.

Edited December 8, 2020 by Melgaypet

Camera One · December 8, 2020

8 hours ago, Melgaypet said:

Did Leopold marry again solely to give his lonely, motherless daughter a loving stepmother (and perhaps provide himself with some companionship, or a partner in royal duties, even if he were still in love with the late Eva), or was there hope (on his side, not Cora's) that a young, healthy wife might provide him with a male heir? That changes how we might view Leopold and Regina's marriage and how it might have soured.

It is very unclear why Leopold even married Regina. The only verbalized reason seemed to be to give Snow a "mother". After the airing of "Bleeding Through", Jane Espenson said something about how they didn't care about Leopold in the story which focused on Cora. But by failing to flesh out Leopold's personality and motivations throughout the series, they essentially lost the chance to explore Snow's psyche and her feelings about the prospect of becoming the ruler of the kingdom after her father died.

Given they had no idea what to do with Snow post-2A, you'd think they would want to explore whether Snow wanted to rule or not. We learned that Leopold was always touring the kingdom. Why was that? Did Snow feel neglected? Why did Leopold often not take Snow with him? Was that why he felt the need to marry? But sometimes, she did go with him, so was he grooming her to become Queen? Regina seemed to have some powers in the Hercules episode but why wouldn't Leopold be making those decisions while on tour?

From A&E's perspective, it seemed easier to keep everything vague so they could write whatever and whenever depending on what the plot/centric needed that week.

Edited December 8, 2020 by Camera One

Melgaypet · December 11, 2020

The Wish World gives me a headache. Still.

At first, in "Wish You Were Here," it really, really feels like a magical holodeck. Not a real place with real people, but a construct created by Genie!Aladdin. This makes the killing of Wish!Snowing disturbing to witness, and quite telling about Regina's mindset, but it's not murder, because Wish!Snow and Wish!Charming are not real people. Emma and Regina are not heartless for orphaning and abandoning Wish!Henry because he's not real, either. This also explains any weirdness or inconsistencies about the place, it's not a literal representation of what would have happened if Regina didn't cast the Curse, just a fantasy poofed into existence by a genie with no interest in meticulous world-building, and it poofed right out of existence once Regina and Emma left. (And Wish!Robin, who became real because something something his soul. Maybe Zeus was in a playful mood when it came to resurrecting Robin.)
But then came "A Pirate's Life," with a Wish!Hook who very much still existed, to the point where he could jump worlds to the Disenchanted Forest and be summoned by Henry's message-in-a-bottle thing. Fine, okay. The Magical Holodeck Theory could still apply. For whatever reason, it didn't shut down after Regina and Emma left or after Aladdin stopped being a genie. This raises existential questions, but for simplicity's sake let's say if the Wish World can continue to exist without genie magic to sustain it, then it and all the Wish!People in it are now real. This can even be squared with Wish!Hook having a daughter, if that was the backstory Aladdin assigned the "character" of Drunk Old Hook and the daughter existed somewhere in the Wish World where Emma and Regina could have possibly encountered her. Sadly, Emma and Regina suck a little bit for not wondering about Wish!Henry after getting confirmation that the Wish!People still exist.
"Eloise Gardner" makes this impossible. Under the Magical Holodeck Theory, Wish!Hook began his existence as Drunk Old Hook, he couldn't have crossed over to the existing world of the Disenchanted Forest to meet Real Person Gothel and conceive Real Person Alice as a younger man. Magical Holodeck Theory is disproven.
So, Wish World must be an actual alternate timeline. Genie!Aladdin reached back to some point in time and caused a "fork," where one branch continued unchanged and the other took a route where Regina was somehow stripped of her magic and thus never cast the Curse. Everyone in the Wish timeline is as real as those in the Prime timeline. But then Wish World doesn't actually make sense as presented, which we've talked about at length. It also doesn't explain what the hell happened to Princess Emma, who is a real person who existed in this real place. Did Genie!Aladdin poof her elsewhere and put Emma Prime in her place, with a copy of her memories? Is she still out there somewhere? (Is this a possible explanation of why Wish!Henry was realm-hopping instead of attending to his royal duties?) Or did he magically merge her with Emma Prime? If so, does she still exist in some way inside Emma? Could the two of them conceivably be un-merged?

I wish (...heh. That wasn't purposeful word choice, but I'll leave it) Season 7 had dealt more with these questions, but A&E were clearly uninterested and likely incapable.

Edited December 11, 2020 by Melgaypet

Camera One · December 11, 2020

2 hours ago, Melgaypet said:

"Eloise Gardner" makes this impossible. Under the Magical Holodeck Theory, Wish!Hook began his existence as Drunk Old Hook, he couldn't have crossed over to the existing world of the Disenchanted Forest to meet Real Person Gothel and conceive Real Person Alice as a younger man. Magical Holodeck Theory is disproven.

So, Wish World must be an actual alternate timeline. Genie!Aladdin reached back to some point in time and caused a "fork," where one branch continued unchanged and the other took a route where Regina was somehow stripped of her magic and thus never cast the Curse. Everyone in the Wish timeline is as real as those in the Prime timeline.

I have a real problem with how the creation of the alternate timeline directly impacted the past of the people living in the Disenchanted Forest. What was happening there before Aladdin created the Wish Realm and changed its history? Gothel would still have been trapped in the Tower without Wish Hook.

2 hours ago, Melgaypet said:

Season 7 had dealt more with these questions, but A&E were clearly uninterested and likely incapable.

A&E claim to be such sci-fi geeks so one would think they would have loved figuring out the mechanics of all this.

Shanna Marie · December 15, 2020

On 12/10/2020 at 10:23 PM, Camera One said:

On 12/10/2020 at 7:42 PM, Melgaypet said:

"Eloise Gardner" makes this impossible. Under the Magical Holodeck Theory, Wish!Hook began his existence as Drunk Old Hook, he couldn't have crossed over to the existing world of the Disenchanted Forest to meet Real Person Gothel and conceive Real Person Alice as a younger man. Magical Holodeck Theory is disproven.

So, Wish World must be an actual alternate timeline. Genie!Aladdin reached back to some point in time and caused a "fork," where one branch continued unchanged and the other took a route where Regina was somehow stripped of her magic and thus never cast the Curse. Everyone in the Wish timeline is as real as those in the Prime timeline.

I have a real problem with how the creation of the alternate timeline directly impacted the past of the people living in the Disenchanted Forest. What was happening there before Aladdin created the Wish Realm and changed its history? Gothel would still have been trapped in the Tower without Wish Hook.

One idea that might work here is the infinite multiverses, where there's a universe out there for each possibility, what Terry Pratchett called the Trousers of Time. When some universe-altering thing happens, it creates a branch where things went the other way. So, Aladdin didn't create a universe based on the Evil Queen's wish about Emma's wish. He merely sent Emma to a parallel universe where she wasn't the Savior. It already existed and people had been living out their lives there. But the problem with that idea is the existence of Wish Emma. What happened to her? Was she obliterated when our Emma arrived? It doesn't sound like she poofed back after our Emma left, so she was gone. Maybe the two Emmas were merged, and that's why Emma was Princess Emma until Regina snapped her out of it. But if that's the case, Emma doesn't seem to have retained anything of Princess Emma. She wasn't all that upset about watching her parents be murdered right in front of her, and she didn't give a second thought to Wish Henry. They kept forgetting about that We Are Both concept, which would have been really confusing for Emma, since at this point she had the real memories of what her life was really like plus the fake memories of the life in which she didn't give up Henry for adoption plus the fake memories of growing up as Princess Emma, and that's not even getting into whatever was put in her head for the Author AU.

What might have been fun would have been a Freaky Friday type swap, where the consciousness of Princess Emma ended up in Storybrooke in our Emma, so she's a sheriff with magical powers, she's the Savior, and she's got a doomed destiny rushing at her. And then the consciousness of our Emma ends up in the body of Princess Emma, who's never really struggled (aside from losing her husband and being a single parent) and who doesn't have any real responsibilities (aside from being heir to a throne). I guess the problem there would be that the Princess Emma in Storybrooke side would be more interesting because she'd be the one really shocked by what she finds and expected to do things that she's really not up to. Our Emma with her own consciousness would really just be our Emma in a fancy dress, and after all she'd been through by then, she wouldn't be shocked to find herself in a fairytale world. We would, though, have actually had the "be careful what you wish for" aspect play out, since she'd have been aware of her wish in a way that she wasn't the way they did it.

But thinking about all this made me ponder what the branching point really should have been. They treated it as though Emma wasn't the Savior because the curse wasn't cast. That fits with the seasons 1 and 2 mythology, where the Savior thing was specific to the curse. Emma was the Savior because she was a True Love baby whose DNA was baked into the curse to create a back door for breaking it, and then it turned out that this gave her magic powers somehow in a way Rumple didn't expect. But the story comes during an arc that's all about how the Savior is an ongoing thing, a role other people have held in the past that has nothing to do with the curse. Not to mention other confusing stuff that's in there, like Regina and Henry being able to break curses on the whole town with TLKs in spite of them not being Saviors, and Snow getting rejected from the tree because she was pregnant with future Savior Emma who would have the potential to be a great hero or a great villain, which happened before the curse.

That got me started thinking about what would have happened if Emma wasn't the Savior. Did she become a Savior because she was made to be the Curse Breaker, or was that separate? Could she have still broken the curse without being the Savior (in the broader sense, not the curse sense)? If no, there's not much story there unless they found some other way of stopping Regina, but then do we have two different branches? There's the branch where Emma's not a Savior, and then a branch where the curse isn't cast (the branch where Emma wasn't Savior and the curse was cast might not have been possible for these circumstances because Emma might have still been an infant with time not moving). But if Emma could still have broken the curse without being the Savior, then there's the possibility she'd have been killed by Cora at the fight by the lake portal. Or maybe without the Saviorness, she didn't jump to save Regina from the Wraith, so Regina and the Wraith went through the portal and then Cora and Hook came to town, but then I guess they'd have had to find a different way to deal with Cora, unless Cora was less of a threat without Regina, or she went back to the Enchanted Forest when she realized Regina was there.

One way to get the Wishverse we saw might have been if the tree didn't reject Snow if Emma wasn't going to be the Savior, so there's no eggnapping, and that means they eventually do team up with Malificent and are able to stop Regina from casting the curse.

And now I wish I had time to write the story of Princess Emma finding herself as Sheriff of Storybrooke and the Savior, dealing with the Evil Queen and Regina, plus her parents are her age, and there's this pirate who wants to kiss her (I wonder, would she have heard about Hook from Bae?).

KAOS Agent · December 18, 2020

I've been watching S1 and I forgot how awful Regina is. The writers were fond of saying Enchanted Forest Regina was a long time ago and Storybrooke Regina was different and never did anything too bad. Graham was bad (rape and murder are hard to justify as she's changed), but her actions towards Kathryn are truly horrific. Planning her kidnapping and murder. Sending a woman she knows is married to another man into a real marriage with someone else and being all pleased when Kathryn calls her a good friend is sick. Let's not even go into her actions regarding two young children who have been living alone for almost 30 years and her sending them away from their father (again!) knowing they will suffer when leaving town. She doesn't have a single redeeming virtue in the first season. I don't know how anyone can think Mayor Mills was different in any way from the Evil Queen.

Melgaypet · December 18, 2020

3 minutes ago, KAOS Agent said:

I don't know how anyone can think Mayor Mills was different in any way from the Evil Queen.

If anything, Madam Mayor was scarier than Her Evil Majesty. Without magic and working within the confines of the "real" world, Regina had to be more subtle and thus, creepier.

The relationship between Henry and Regina makes it clear how much their later so-called closeness (I call it codependency, but tomato, tomahto) was a retcon. There is no sign in season 1 (except maaaybe the finale, but it's still a stretch) that Regina has any genuine affection for him at all, and he had her number throughout. Oh, Henry, I liked you so much before you had the Heart of the Truest Dumbass.

CCTC · December 18, 2020

As much as Regina annoyed me in the last few seasons, when I rewatched season 1 a couple of years ago, I was impressed with her acting as both the evil queen and the more evil in a different way Mayor Mills. Mayor Mills was cold and calculating and quietly ruthless. The Evil Queen was not just camp, but underneath her sneering façade a bundle of raw anger and pain. It is understandable why she was a popular character. When I watched that season when it first aired, not once did I think this is a character they are going to redeem.

Until the finale, I assumed she did not care for Henry at all. If they were going to reform her -- (or what they should have done is make her a gray character at best, not a hero) -- they really should have made the formation of a bond more gradual and a couple of seasons instead of Henry not really liking her to hero worshipping her on the flip of a switch (I think for stopping a spell from destroying the town when she herself cast the spell to hurt Emma and Snow?). It should have been more of a process with some slower steps.

KAOS Agent · December 20, 2020

On 12/18/2020 at 2:46 PM, CCTC said:

I was impressed with her acting as both the evil queen and the more evil in a different way Mayor Mills. Mayor Mills was cold and calculating and quietly ruthless. The Evil Queen was not just camp, but underneath her sneering façade a bundle of raw anger and pain. It is understandable why she was a popular character.

Oh I agree. Both the Evil Queen and Mayor Mills were menacing, ruthless characters and Parrilla did an incredible job keeping the Evil Queen from being too campy. It's why it was so disappointing when the split Evil Queen was running around town in S6 and she was a total joke. The weird dancing and endless sneering were awful. Not that the transition to camp hadn't been happening for years, but a purely Evil Queen ought to have been scary and not a clown.

The later whitewashing of her crimes in Storybrooke though, does take away from the character they created in S1. She was a really great villain because you knew she really would go as far as murdering a newborn to get what she wanted. She would do anything and everything necessary to keep the curse in place.

They also destroyed her character's S1 awesomness by making others the ones controlling things behind the scenes. In early seasons, she had been manipulated but she seemed to have some agency and most of her plans and actions were her own, while later retcons basically turned her into a stupid puppet.

CCTC · December 20, 2020

9 hours ago, KAOS Agent said:

It's why it was so disappointing when the split Evil Queen was running around town in S6 and she was a total joke.

The episode where she cursed Snow and Charming was really the only time split EQ showed potential of being a true threat. She was ruthless, efficient, and I believe toned down the the camp. I am not sure she even did anything after that except drop vague references to what happened to David's father (I don't remember a lot of the season). The pacing and momentum was strange that season. Something big would happen and instead of going with the dramatic build, it would be dropped and not revisited for months. There were also a number of things simply resolved off screen. Yes - Emma told me you killed my Dad - I know this should be a big moment but we will deal with it in 15 seconds.

It is really amazing (but maybe not surprising) that they gave split EQ a happy ending. She did not do a single thing to justify redemption. She did not even stick around to help uncurse Snow and Charming.

Camera One · December 20, 2020

4 hours ago, CCTC said:

I am not sure she even did anything after that except drop vague references to what happened to David's father (I don't remember a lot of the season).

Yes, it was quite laughable early in the season when she did the usual villain thing and went all muahahahahaha over her grand plan of letting the protagonists destroy each other!

Quote

It is really amazing (but maybe not surprising) that they gave split EQ a happy ending. She did not do a single thing to justify redemption. She did not even stick around to help uncurse Snow and Charming.

Agreed. Her leaving Storybrooke as a "hero" was so unearned and ridiculous, leaving without solving the Heart Curse problem and then we got a few episodes of Regina and Zelena doing random stuff to end it. It is very similar to how Ivy/Drizella left in a glow of light with the sister she tried to sacrifice 5 minutes before, while again, Regina and Zelena left to do random stuff to end the Henry Poisoned Heart Curse.

That was two seasons in a row of basically the same pattern. They are *that* unoriginal.

The moral rules are completely inconsistent. For heroes, their lesson is always to be ashamed of any lie or secret or anyone they hurt, regardless of intent (eg. self-defense? who cares?). While the lesson for Regina was to love her WHOLE self, even the mass murdering parts. While with Rumple, it was to simply zone in on how he's a good man deep deep deep deep deep deep deep underneath. By Season 7, Ivy was worthy of redemption because she once had a great relationship with her sister and she didn't even have to offer to sacrifice herself... truly a new low.

Edited December 20, 2020 by Camera One

KingOfHearts · December 20, 2020

1 hour ago, Camera One said:

By Season 7, Ivy was worthy of redemption because she once had a great relationship with her sister and she didn't even have to offer to sacrifice herself... truly a new low.

She almost murdered her own sister, but didn't. In the same episode she got her heroic send-off. Only on this show.

Shanna Marie · December 20, 2020

On 12/18/2020 at 3:46 PM, CCTC said:

It should have been more of a process with some slower steps.

That applies to just about everything about Regina's redemption. They literally went straight from her planning to murder everyone in town to her being hailed as a hero. I guess in season two they started to do it as a process, with her making efforts to change and her realizing she'd been abusing Henry and starting to build a relationship with him, but then they completely lost that in the second half of the season when she reverted to form as Cora's henchman, and then after she stopped the failsafe it was like everything was instantly better.

With Henry, they didn't just fast track their reconciliation, they retconned their relationship. In season one, he really did believe she didn't love him, Emma's superpower told her Regina was lying about loving him, there was absolutely no sign of affection between them, and when she was competing with Emma over him, instead of trying to win him over, she set up Emma to hurt him. Then starting toward the end of 3A, it was like they'd had such a close bond all along. You got the feeling in season 1 that she wasn't a bedtime stories kind of mom, but she's the one sitting by his side after they rescue him from Pan, and then when he gets his memories back after the year in New York, they start acting like they have the kind of buddy-buddy relationship where they talk about her dating life.

This racing through her redemption has always baffled me. A villain-to-hero redemption arc is juicy stuff, and when it's clearly their favorite character, you'd think they'd have been all over that, really digging into the process. There's all the angst and soul searching. Scenes of her trying to build a relationship with Henry could have been so good. But they skipped it entirely. They cut the good stuff from their favorite character to just instantly make her a hero.

Camera One · December 20, 2020

3 hours ago, KingOfHearts said:

She almost murdered her own sister, but didn't. In the same episode she got her heroic send-off. Only on this show.

You say "almost murder", I say "dealing with perceived adequacies of self and premature reversion to survival instinct tempered by residual emotional connection to painful past". Tomato, tomaaato, hero, villain. Such a fine line.

Edited December 20, 2020 by Camera One

KingOfHearts · December 20, 2020

Regina's acts in S1 alone make her pretty irredeemable (attempting to kill a newborn comes to mind), but I think a lot of viewers would've given her character a pass if the redemption took longer and the other characters didn't immediately start giving her a benefit of a doubt. It doesn't help her redemption arc began in S2 and it had a lot to do with why 2B got people to stop watching altogether. It makes Regina's better material in later seasons, as scattered as it may be, less watchable because of the bad taste left in everybody's mouth from 2B. Regina had some good moments but it was always an uphill climb to get there. (And a lot of falling down again.) I think what bothers me the most is not Regina herself most of the time but how the other characters acted. Nobody asking about Graham, Charming not standing up for Snow, Henry suddenly loving Regina for no reason, and zero dispute over custody of Henry. Its like most of S1 didn't happen. All the adults stop acting like adults, and Henry becomes practically inhuman.

Thats probably my biggest gripe with the show in retrospect: all the characters stopped acting like real people and became caricatures. Its wasbt even just around Regina, but in general. I know it was supposed to be fairy tales, but wasn't the gimmick that it was fairy tales mixed with real life? The characters acted more realistic in even some of the quirkiest S1 flashbacks than they did later in the LWM.

Edited December 20, 2020 by KingOfHearts

KAOS Agent · December 21, 2020

1 hour ago, KingOfHearts said:

The characters acted more realistic in even some of the quirkiest S1 flashbacks than they did later in the LWM.

This is why S1 is still an enjoyable watch for me. It's so completely different in tone and story than the remainder of the show that it's easy to divorce from everything that came next.

2A did somewhat maintain most of the elements of S1, but they made the mistake of bringing back magic and immediately separating everyone instead of taking a little time to give the audience some much needed payoff for the events of S1. The minute poor little Regina was sad-faced because she wasn't invited to the reunion dinner of the family whose lives she'd destroyed, the show changed for the worse.

tennisgurl · December 23, 2020

The really ironic thing about A&Es love of Regina overtaking the show was that in many ways Regina was just as much a victim of their obsession as anyone else. Because they loved her so much and wanted her to be the hero as well as the saddest woobie to ever woobie, they basically skipped all of the juice character development that she should have had going from villain to hero, and just fast tracked her to hero status, which made her redemption weak and her character boring. Then by trying to make her more sympathetic, by making it so that her turn to evil and so much of what she did was actually the manipulations of others who were just using her to further their own goals, it took away what made her a threat, and made her look like an idiot who was easily manipulated and never had a second of real agency.

Camera One · December 27, 2020

On 12/20/2020 at 3:54 PM, KingOfHearts said:

Thats probably my biggest gripe with the show in retrospect: all the characters stopped acting like real people and became caricatures.

I find that with many shows and I wonder if I'm seeing "the man behind the curtain" or Pinocchio's puppet strings too easily (so many "Once"-related analogies to use to describe this phenomenon).

Even if the characters don't become caricatures, they often become chess pieces moved around, which was the other major problem with "Once Upon a Time". Characters began to act or speak whatever was demanded by the plot. I've mentioned before Snow and Charming's dialogue eventually being interchangeable, but that even applied to the characters with a more distinctive "voice", who the Writers seemed to enjoy writing for more. I think Brigitte Hales mentioning that she enjoyed writing for Hook because of his "voice", but really, some of his lines could also have been said by Charming without the aye captain accent.

In addition to plot, Henry became inhuman by Season 2 because he was being used as a blunt tool for Regina's redemption. This eventually applied to Snow. On Rumple's side, Belle was also used as a blunt tool for this purpose. So having some characters completely serve other characters' development also made them act less like real people.

The lack of worldbuilding is also connected to this, because without defining the worldview of different groups of people who grew up in the Enchanted Forest, that made it more difficult to define their "voice". Another is their "technique" of writing character backstory, by simply tacking on new events or leaving things completely undefined until they needed to make something up for a centric. They pretty much made up Charming's childhood in the later seasons, so those experiences did not define any of his actions or decisions in the earlier seasons.

Edited December 27, 2020 by Camera One

Shanna Marie · January 2, 2021

On 12/20/2020 at 5:54 PM, KingOfHearts said:

Thats probably my biggest gripe with the show in retrospect: all the characters stopped acting like real people and became caricatures.

I did a series of posts on the Woulda Coulda Shoulda thread about how the story would have gone differently if the characters had been allowed to have even slightly realistic reactions to events. Heck, just keeping them consistent with their established character traits would have helped, like not having the character whose defining trait is supposedly WALLS just believe whatever an extremely shady person says when the plot needs her to suddenly be gullible instead of street-smart.

The rant about how the Camelot characters were dragged down to make our team look better got me started thinking, and the morality in that arc has to have been the most twisted in the series (though there's a lot of competition).

Just look at the Percival incident, what brought it on, and what the consequences were:
There's Percival, who lost everything when Regina torched his village, and now he sees her coming to Camelot as the Savior, and they're giving a ball for her, so he tries to kill her, and knowing she has magical powers, he sets it up so she can't use her magic to heal the wound he inflicts, but he gets Robin instead, and he's instantly killed by Charming.
Robin gets badly wounded after defending Regina, but gets healed magically by Emma.
Charming rushes in to kill Percival after he goes after Regina and wounds Robin. This doesn't seem to bother anyone. He, as a stranger, kills a member of Arthur's court, and it's no big deal. Yes, he was defending another, but the idea of Camelot is supposed to be justice, and no one being above the law, so you'd think they'd have had some kind of hearing before declaring that the killing was justified.
Emma has nothing to do with any of this. She's just a witness, having to watch as a ball gets thrown for the "Savior" when all she ever gets for being Savior is grief. But then she's guilted into putting her soul at risk to heal Robin and starts getting the gold, scaly skin after doing so.
Regina started it all by indulging in mass slaughter, but the only thing she seems upset about is Robin being wounded. She doesn't seem to feel at all guilty about facing one of her victims, and no one seems to care that the "Savior" who's a guest at Camelot is actually the Evil Queen who has done a great harm to a member of the court, who is now dead. True, Percival should have handled it better, maybe by going to Arthur in the first place instead of taking vengeance into his own hands in a sneaky way (which goes away from who Percival is supposed to be in the legends), but it seems weird that Arthur is more concerned that Percival attacked Regina than he is about why.

Regina and Charming being put on trial by Arthur might have made for an interesting storyline.

Then there's the fact that in this whole arc, the sure way to have something horrible happen to you is to do something good to help someone else. There's Robin nearly getting killed from defending Regina, Hook getting mortally wounded and then turned into a Dark One and being killed and sent to the Underworld for rescuing Snow from Arthur, and Emma turning darker from healing Robin, and what sends her completely into Dark One mode is saving Hook.

Meanwhile, the sure way to become a villain is by being a victim. There was Percival, who had a legitimate gripe against Regina, but he's the villain for spying on her and trying to kill her. Nimue becomes the ultimate evil for stopping a mass murdering serial killer. Emma gets turned into a Dark One by sacrificing herself to save the town from the free-form Darkness, and Hook gets turned into a Dark One when he's wounded while rescuing Snow.

On the other hand, Merlin is supposedly totally good even though he's responsible for so much of the bad stuff that happens in the whole series, from the Dark One to the Author. What turns him "dark" is being forced against his will to do bad stuff with his magic.

The whole thing is utterly bizarre.

Shanna Marie · January 11, 2021

Oh gosh, it just occurred to me that the one person who really comes out ahead in the whole Dark One/Camelot situation is Rumple. It all starts when he comes back to town to scheme to get the Author to rewrite his ending because his centuries of evil have caught up with him and so corrupted his heart that it's killing him. His "comeuppance" for that is:

He gets the darkness removed from his heart, giving him such a clean slate that he can do one act of mild bravery and be a pure and perfect hero capable of drawing Excalibur from the stone.
He gets his wounded leg healed -- by his worst enemy
He gets a symbolic victory of beating Hook in a duel while he's totally mortal and Hook is a Dark One, getting to rewrite their first encounter (yeah, Hook probably could have ended him instead of poofing away, but the fight was treated like Rumple genuinely got the drop on Hook)
He gets his wife back
He's able to get his powers back, now with a more or less (but getting less by this point) clean heart so he's got another couple of centuries before it clogs with darkness again
And he ends up getting to kill his ex-wife and his father a second time, with no one ever finding out about him destroying Milah

He almost destroys everything, several other characters are killed as a result of his actions, others suffer terribly, but he comes out of it better than he was before, with no real consequences.

tennisgurl · January 11, 2021

5 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

He almost destroys everything, several other characters are killed as a result of his actions, others suffer terribly, but he comes out of it better than he was before, with no real consequences.

You want one of the bad guys to have to get a comeuppance for their evil? Don't be silly, comeuppances are for heroes not villains! Villains can slaughter children and bathe in their blood and still get rewarded for taking a week off from murdering people because they realized it was in their best interest with fluffy heaven and being crowed queen of everything, but if heroes so much as swat at a fly they are branded Dark of Soul, have all of their happiness snuffed out, and can only hope that with a certain amount of self flagellation they can be forgiven for their evil deeds against that fly.

Speakeasy · January 12, 2021

7 hours ago, tennisgurl said:

You want one of the bad guys to have to get a comeuppance for their evil? Don't be silly, comeuppances are for heroes not villains! Villains can slaughter children and bathe in their blood and still get rewarded for taking a week off from murdering people because they realized it was in their best interest with fluffy heaven and being crowed queen of everything, but if heroes so much as swat at a fly they are branded Dark of Soul, have all of their happiness snuffed out, and can only hope that with a certain amount of self flagellation they can be forgiven for their evil deeds against that fly.

Lots of baddies get their comeuppance-Ingrid, Hades, Pan (twice), Arthur, The Black Fairy, Jafar, Gothel, a bunch of others. Villains only get to dodge the Hammer of Karma (or in some cases come back even after getting their heads smashed) if they're particularly charismatic and popular.

daxx · January 12, 2021

15 minutes ago, Speakeasy said:

Lots of baddies get their comeuppance-Ingrid, Hades, Pan (twice), Arthur, The Black Fairy, Jafar, Gothel, a bunch of others. Villains only get to dodge the Hammer of Karma (or in some cases come back even after getting their heads smashed) if they're particularly charismatic and popular.

Or if their names start with R.

KingOfHearts · January 30, 2021

On 12/23/2020 at 9:55 AM, tennisgurl said:

The really ironic thing about A&Es love of Regina overtaking the show was that in many ways Regina was just as much a victim of their obsession as anyone else. Because they loved her so much and wanted her to be the hero as well as the saddest woobie to ever woobie, they basically skipped all of the juice character development that she should have had going from villain to hero, and just fast tracked her to hero status, which made her redemption weak and her character boring. Then by trying to make her more sympathetic, by making it so that her turn to evil and so much of what she did was actually the manipulations of others who were just using her to further their own goals, it took away what made her a threat, and made her look like an idiot who was easily manipulated and never had a second of real agency.

She became such an empty husk in later seasons. Her working with the heroes should've been interesting (as it was in 3A), but it was always really boring. She was just kind of there because she was reluctantly on the side of the angels, not because she was invested in what they were doing. Her motivations were poor and uncompelling. Sometimes they didn't even make sense. Like, I really don't think she would've cared enough about Emma to go to Camelot or about Hook to go to the Underworld. If anything, I feel like she would've stayed behind to keep Storybrooke under control. She was just there because she had to be. She had a stronger motivation in S6 since the villain was literally herself, but she was super passive about it until the Page 23 episode.

She just did good things because "that's what a hero does", not out of any real conviction. If being a hero went out of vogue she would've realistically ditched it.

Quote

The rant about how the Camelot characters were dragged down to make our team look better got me started thinking, and the morality in that arc has to have been the most twisted in the series (though there's a lot of competition).

Camelot had a lot of intriguing moving parts in it, like the whole Guinevere/Lancelot/Arthur drama, Nimue/Merlin, etc. But there just wasn't enough time invested into it. The Dark One mythology was really cool, but Dark Swan was doomed to fail on arrival. Like every other arc on this show, the writers were trying to do too much with too little time. In addition to the Camelot stuff, you had the Storybrooke stuff and Merida's two episodes. What's crazy is that the writers were given a whole extra episode and yet it still felt like a big chunk of story was missing.

Ironically, Zelena was one of the best parts of 5A and she had pretty much nothing to do with it.

Edited January 30, 2021 by KingOfHearts

tennisgurl · February 2, 2021

On 1/29/2021 at 6:46 PM, KingOfHearts said:

The Dark One mythology was really cool, but Dark Swan was doomed to fail on arrival. Like every other arc on this show, the writers were trying to do too much with too little time. In addition to the Camelot stuff, you had the Storybrooke stuff and Merida's two episodes.

Its always been a real problem with A&E where they have lots of ideas that have potential, but they get too excited about all of their ideas and try to do all of them at once (pun intended?) so the plots get all jumbled up, moving frantically from one plot or idea to the next, without tying them together into a consistent arc, and they move from one to the next so fast that none of them have time to properly develop. So we ended up in Camelot, one of the most iconic settings and some of the most iconic characters in the European cannon, with the promising Dark One mythology to explore while there, which should have been enough for one arc, but then they decided to try and shove in a million other random characters and plot elements so they didn't have time really develop those interesting ideas. So the Dark One mythology ended up being somehow both overly complicated and never fully explained and was never used to its full potential, and Camelot ended up being such an afterthought that we had to watch deleted scenes to even find out what happened to it and to the characters we met there. This is why A&E are pretty good creatives, but are terrible show runners. Show runners need to come up with the overall direction of the show and help to keep the plot focused, and A&E are good with ideas, but bad at long running plots and character development.

It really sucks how the Camelot characters got treated. In the end, the only one who got any closure was Arthur, who got a very rushed but pretty good ending, or even any real idea of what is going to happen to Camelot now. And of course, poor Percival, one of the most screwed over characters in the whole show, both as a literary character and as a character in this show. But of course, the treatment of Percival is a classic Once trick to get us to feel more sympathy for their pet characters (who's names start with an R) no matter how much horrible stuff they do or have done, without having to make them really work for forgiveness, or have us feel bad for the victims. So we get Percival, a person who very clearly had good reasons to be pissed off at Regina and suspicious of her and these mysterious people who have come to his kingdom, clearly lying about the identity of the murderous tyrant in their ranks, who tries to expose her as the killer that she is (who, again, is clearly lying about who she is) and get revenge for his slaughtered family and friends. In most stories, Percival would either be straight up heroic in getting justice for his murdered family and village and protecting his new home from people who, for all he knows, are planning to do the same thing here that she did to his childhood home, or at the worst, would be played as sympathetic but morally ambiguous, especially if he found out that Regina reformed but still wanted to kill her, or they wanted to do more of a "revenge is bad" story where Percival means well and is truly trying to avenge his family and protect Camelot, but is going about it in the wrong way. Then this becomes a tragic story where a man is killed after being blinded by revenge and grief, or is killed due to a tragic misunderstanding where he thought that the Oncers meant harm to Camelot and he acted before he could think more, where Regina had to face the consequences of her actions and feel real remorse for the things that she did when confronted with one of her victims, and that inspired everyone to come clean about who the Savior really is.

BUT, the show does this thing where they try to make characters that have (usually justified) issues with R&R seem way worse than they actually are, or makes them do even worse things and turn into mustache twirling villains to make R&R look better in comparison, or so we don't have to feel bad for the victims. With Percival, what he is doing is really understandable, but he is framed as being this super evil villain, even being shot in frame in this really sinister way, who is so awful apparently that Regina cant even pretend to give a crap about his dead family and he is killed by Charming without a second glance. But what did he actually do to make him be framed as so horrible, especially next to Regina, who has apparently killed so many people she cant even keep them all straight? They did something similar with Greg/Owen, a guy who had every reason to be furious at Regina and want justice, but he has to become so cartonnishly evil, wanting to torture Regina and kill everyone in Storeybrooke while cackling like a supervillain and giving evil monologues, so that we don't care about Regina killing his father and he can be killed quickly and never spoken of again. Again, he is framed as being totally evil, not as a tragic figure driven to murder due to trauma and loss. Then with Belle's father, he was totally correct to want his daughter to ditch the supervillain abuser that she is dating, but he has to escalate things by trying to wipe her damn memory in some kind of underground Bond villain trap, all to make Rumple look like the better guy to run Belle's life in comparison. Marion, one of the only people freaking out about the Evil Queen drinking milkshakes with the former leaders of the resistance against her, was not even Marion at all so now her legit points can be ignored. Even long dead characters like Gaston, Eva, and Bae can be ret-conned into being horrible (or at least worse than we thought they were) so that Rumple and the Mills women can look better by comparison, or that what they did to them is now retroactively justified. Its especially annoying with Gaston, who like some of the previously mentioned characters, is doing something that should be framed as more "morally grey" then "totally evil" while the show shows him to be totally the bad guy so its alright that Rumple killed him ages ago. And again, nothing he did is as evil as all the crap that Rumple has pulled. The same with Eva and how everything she did with Cora was framed as her being Just As Bad as Cora, but its so obviously not anywhere near the awful things that Cora did, no matter what stupid lines they make characters say about how they "thought we were the good guy" or how the shows wants to frame things. Its a very tricky bit of characterization, always twisting other characters to make them look worse than their favorites, even when it really makes no sense.

scarynikki12 · February 5, 2021

On 2/3/2021 at 12:59 AM, Camera One said:

The latest idiotic list from Screenrant... you'd think they can't get any dumber...

Once Upon A Time: The 5 Most (& 5 Least) Realistic Storylines.

I'm not going to get into all of them but I'd swap Dark Swan, Regina's "redemption", Rump and Belle, Pan, and Camelot.

I still think Dark Swan was an excellent idea and the lead up to Emma giving in was well done. Where they went wrong was adding in Brave and making Hook a Dark One to set up the Underworld nonsense. It was just too much and made the Storeybrooke scenes uninteresting.

Rump and Belle are only realistic if the constant abuse is what you're referring to. The way she was treated over the course of the show was honestly horrifying yet they get a happily ever after because he's supposed to be the Beast.

Robbie played Pan so perfectly that I could never want him to be anything other than what he was but the book version is hardly a hero so there's literary precedent. Even the Disney version is a little brat on his best days so villainous isn't a stretch.

Camelot could have been so great. The fact that it was a facade conjured by monstrous Arthur is exactly my jam. But, like all of their ideas, it fizzled away. No unmasking to the people of Camelot, the Percival nonsense, and Arthur not getting held accountable. A waste. I will say that, looking back, they should have just paired Arthur with Regina after Robin died. He would have made way more sense as a partner for her than Mr Who Cares That My Girlfriend Murdered My Wife Because We Can Bone In A Crypt?

Which brings me to Regina. Nothing about her "redemption" worked or made any sense. I'll stop there rather rehash all my issues with her story.

Shanna Marie · February 6, 2021

On 1/31/2021 at 10:06 PM, KingOfHearts said:

They did a really good job in S1 of balancing the happy fairy tales with a dose of realism thrown in there. I'm not sure what the secret sauce was, but Storybrooke felt more "adult" and there was a little bit of cynicism at times, but good seemed to win in the end... most of the time. It wasn't perfect. You had Graham's murder in that season, after all. But the show did a good job of doing cheesy fairy tale stuff while also dealing with grayer issues like child custody, infidelity, etc. I feel like you can keep the "hope/good always wins" without dumbing down the show. You can have complex issues without going super edgy. Its just that they would make grayer issues like killing in self defense so black and white. It was either super dark and edgy or disingenuously light.

I moved this over from the media thread because the discussion had drifted to be more about the show than about the article that kicked it off.

Anyway, I was thinking about how season one was the least dark while still the most nuanced. I'm not sure exactly how I'd define "dark," but the psychological torture stuff would be part of it. I guess the whole Storybrooke setup was sort of psychological torture, but it wasn't the same thing as Emma being made to think that her magic was dangerous and terrible, so she had to destroy a part of herself in order to be around her family while she was actually being manipulated into that so Rumple could use her power for his own ends, destroying her, and meanwhile he had also ripped out Hook's heart and was forcing him to do things he hated. Or Emma finding out that her parents basically rejected her before she was born and had her altered to suit what they wanted in a daughter, which meant putting all of her darkness into someone else. Or Emma being punished for sacrificing herself to save the town from Rumple's rogue Darkness by being turned into the Dark One and being tormented from within and then Hook got mortally wounded and Emma had to choose between letting him die and turning him into a Dark One so he'd be immortal, but then she had to kill him herself, anyway.

Bad things can happen without being "dark," though I suppose Graham's death retroactively became a lot darker because he not only never got justice but his killer ended up basically winning the whole show without ever having any consequences for murdering him.

It feels like their premise for the way their universe worked changed midway through the series run. In season one, the idea seemed to be that the stories were real, but they happened in a different way than we'd heard and maybe had more angles to them than we heard in fairy tales because instead of being fairytale characters, they were real people who were more complex. Regina may have talked a couple of times about getting her happy ending, but she was shown to be wrong to have that as a goal. No one in that season said anything like Ariel's line from season 4, in which she said that villains don't get happy endings because they go about it the wrong way, but that seemed to be what the series was showing. Regina cast her curse so she could get her happy ending, but she wasn't happy even though she had everything because of the kind of person she was. She didn't know how to be happy and was going to be dissatisfied with everything because she was so bitter inside. Meanwhile, even though the curse took everything away from Snow, she had a kind of contentment in her life that Regina would never have. Mary Margaret was well-liked in the town, had work she enjoyed, loved her students, did volunteer work, and generally had a meaningful life. It was like the Whos and the Grinch, where he could take everything away from them, but they still had joy.

But then in season 4, (and it possibly started earlier), it was like they were fairytale characters instead of real people whose stories had been turned into fairy tales, and they were self-aware about the tropes. It wasn't just naive kid Henry with his storybook talking about how heroes always win and villains don't get happy endings. The characters were spouting that stuff as though it was a law of the universe and took it seriously (aside from that bit with Ariel). That was what made the series start feeling so childish, when grown-ass adults were running around talking about whether they'd get their fairytale happy ending.

But back to the darkness, thinking about whether the curse counted as psychological torture got me started wondering how the whole time not moving thing worked. Was it that the days blurred together in a hazy way so they weren't sure whether it was a day, a week, or a month that had gone by (sort of like the past year), and they weren't aging in a way that would make it obvious that it was years passing, so there were different days and things might happen, or was it more of a true Groundhog Day thing, where it was really the same day over and over again, possibly with minor variations, but resetting at the end of each day? In a lot of respects, the latter would fit better with the way the characters reacted because it would mean they really only lived one day in their fake identities before Emma came to town, and then there were however many months before the memory spell broke. That would be a lot less "we are both" traumatic and confusing than if they actually had lived the full 28 years, remembering the days that went before, but unsure of the passage of time. But then some things wouldn't fit, like Snow giving Henry the book, since she remembered that. Maybe proximity to Henry stopped the reset from working, since things didn't reset for him.

And what would it say about Regina if she managed to go through 28 years of Groundhog Day without learning anything or becoming a better person?

Camera One · February 6, 2021

14 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said:

But then some things wouldn't fit, like Snow giving Henry the book, since she remembered that. Maybe proximity to Henry stopped the reset from working, since things didn't reset for him.

That's a good question about Groundhog Day vs different days but hazy. Maybe it was a combination... most events would be repetitive but the Curse responded with variation if someone with active agency like Regina or Owen and his dad came into a scene.

The Book thing totally doesn't fit. Did they ever explain why the Book magically appeared?

KAOS Agent · February 6, 2021

55 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said:

But then some things wouldn't fit, like Snow giving Henry the book, since she remembered that. Maybe proximity to Henry stopped the reset from working, since things didn't reset for him.

They did actually say that if Henry was involved it modified those around him since he wasn't part of the curse or affected by it. He was going to school and getting different lessons every day, but for everyone else, it was making bird feeders every single day. Ingrid's arrival is the one that really makes no sense. She too would have changed things and been unaffected. Do we really think Regina wouldn't notice a new person in town after 15 years of cursed Storybrooke?

Shanna Marie · February 6, 2021

42 minutes ago, Camera One said:

That's a good question about Groundhog Day vs different days but hazy. Maybe it was a combination... most events would be repetitive but the Curse responded with variation if someone with active agency like Regina or Owen and his dad came into a scene.

When we saw the flashback of the early days of the curse, it was very Groundhog Day, with the same events happening every day, and not even just people acting the same way. That sign Marco was working on slipped.

So, to a large extent, Regina was Bill Murray without the personal growth, and she did it to herself. Her idea of the thing that was the only way to get happiness, and worth murdering her father for, was to live the same day over and over again for 28 years. She didn't seem to have known that would be the result, but then she also didn't want the curse broken. Did she want to go on that way for eternity? I still wonder what she thought would happen when Henry grew up and she was still the same age, and then he got old and died, and she was still the same age.

6 minutes ago, KAOS Agent said:

They did actually say that if Henry was involved it modified those around him since he wasn't part of the curse or affected by it. He was going to school and getting different lessons every day, but for everyone else, it was making bird feeders every single day.

Did we know specifically that he was getting different lessons? Because I'm not sure how everyone else in his class would be getting the bird house lesson and then getting reset, but he had a different class. Or was it different classes for the year Henry was in their class, only with that blurry thing that made them not realize it, but then when he moved on to the next grade, they went back to resetting every day?

7 minutes ago, KAOS Agent said:

Ingrid's arrival is the one that really makes no sense. She too would have changed things and been unaffected. Do we really think Regina wouldn't notice a new person in town after 15 years of cursed Storybrooke?

Especially not a person with a unique position in town, unless Regina never went for ice cream until after Henry was around. She might have missed someone who lived in the suburbs and never really interacted with her, but someone with a shop on Main Street would be pretty noticeable.

51 minutes ago, Camera One said:

The Book thing totally doesn't fit. Did they ever explain why the Book magically appeared?

It was the magic of the Book, I guess. Snow said it appeared in her closet, and then it showed up again in season 3 when they needed it, but only Snow found it because she wanted it. It wasn't there when Emma looked. I know we speculated it was something maybe Blue set up, but later it sounded like it was something the Author did, except we also learned that the Author was locked up at that time and wasn't supposed to have any power.

Considering they spent an entire arc on the Author, it's amazing how much we never learned. We never learned the why of the Author and the magic pen that was also kind of alive and why the pen needed Dark Savior blood to work, we never learned why the mansion was full of blank books (even without the Author actually living there to have filled it with neat blank notebooks he'd found but was too intimidated by to actually write in them), and we never learned how or why that one book showed up for Snow.

Camera One · February 6, 2021

There was this deleted scene. The ice cream shop would have been already there, but it was run by Dopey the dwarf, I think? Regina came in and asked who the hell Ingrid was.

Regina seemed to accept Ingrid's "explanation", so it suggests that it wasn't necessarily Groundhog Day. Or Regina would have known definitively that something was up if Dopey the Ice Cream server wasn't standing behind the counter exactly the way he did every day. Unless Regina rarely went into the shop, and assumed that Ingrid only appeared daily at certain times in the day? If so, you'd think she would check back to be sure. Speaking of which, why didn't Ingrid erase Regina's memories too?

Edited February 6, 2021 by Camera One

KAOS Agent · February 6, 2021

2 hours ago, Camera One said:

Regina seemed to accept Ingrid's "explanation", so it suggests that it wasn't necessarily Groundhog Day. Or Regina would have known definitively that something was up if Dopey the Ice Cream server wasn't standing behind the counter exactly the way he did every day. Unless Regina rarely went into the shop, and assumed that Ingrid only appeared daily at certain times in the day? If so, you'd think she would check back to be sure.

The problem is that they clearly showed it was a Groundhog Day experience. Every day everyone was wearing the same thing doing the exact same things, Marco fixing the sign with Gold walking right under it all, Mary Margaret walking down the street and bumping into Regina, MM teaching the bird feeder lesson every time we saw her. Regina knew exactly what everyone did every day, so when Ingrid shows up, she would disrupt things. Does she have to tie up Dopey every single day? Her interactions with him and anyone he previously had contact with and now doesn't or anyone else would cause ripple effects in everyone's actions. Delaying one person five minutes could mess up a ton of stuff if that person was meant to run into someone else and now doesn't. I know we're putting too much thought into things, but they set up the scenario and now made it completely impossible to believe that nothing would have changed when Ingrid showed up.

They obviously further changed their own canon with the stupid flower and Emma's parents literally slamming the door and sacrificing Emma for everyone else. That whole episode doesn't work with their Groundhog Day system they had already created, but they clearly didn't care about anything at that point.

Camera One · February 6, 2021

17 minutes ago, KAOS Agent said:

Does she have to tie up Dopey every single day? Her interactions with him and anyone he previously had contact with and now doesn't or anyone else would cause ripple effects in everyone's actions. Delaying one person five minutes could mess up a ton of stuff if that person was meant to run into someone else and now doesn't. I know we're putting too much thought into things, but they set up the scenario and now made it completely impossible to believe that nothing would have changed when Ingrid showed up.

The ripple effect is an interesting point. Having Ingrid being there would have to change the Groundhog routine of everyone she interacts with, just like when Owen and his dad showed up. Ruby and Granny serving them would mean they're not doing some other daily routine.

Ingrid seemed to become the "ice cream lady", so did her memory spell cause Dopey to continue to show up at the ice cream shop daily too but assume Ingrid was meant to be there, or what?

I wonder if they deleted the scene for time, or for a deeper reason (probably not given them).

Edited February 6, 2021 by Camera One

KingOfHearts · February 6, 2021

14 hours ago, Camera One said:

Speaking of which, why didn't Ingrid erase Regina's memories too?

This seems like it would've been the most logical explanation. In the scene, Ingrid makes a remark about feeling like someone in a previous life cursed her, which would've really set Regina's suspicions off. It makes Regina look pretty dumb for thinking it was all hunky dory. I can normally handwave a lot of stuff because Storybrooke to me was "enchanted" like the castle in Beauty and the Beast, and nothing everything had to be explained, but that scene was written so clumsily. I'm not surprised they axed it.

The Storybrooke curse itself was an interesting concept. Part of me wishes they played with it more instead of breaking it and treating 28 years like no big deal, but the other part knows whenever the writers did mess with it, it didn't make any sense. Everything with Kurt/Owen, Snow and Charming waking up mid-curse, Ingrid, and adopting Henry was really janky. Some of the worst stuff in the show post-S1 had to do with cursed Storybrooke flashbacks.

16 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

And what would it say about Regina if she managed to go through 28 years of Groundhog Day without learning anything or becoming a better person?

This I find really hard to believe since her redemption was so fast-tracked later. Did it really take her 18 years to decide to adopt a child? To realize she had a "hole in her heart"? How much of a haze was she herself in? How she would've dealt with living in her own "happy ending" should've been really interesting. That would change a person. She went 28 years without change, but then like in 5 years she goes from Evil Queen to Good Queen of the Universe.

It would've been more interesting if we just assumed she was still evil in S1, but she actually changed a lot as a person and was trapped like everybody else, only with memories intact. Then we'd realize Rumple was the one keeping everyone cursed for his own purposes. As important and great Regina was a main antagonist in S1, it doesn't really fit her story or what the writers wanted to do with her character in the first place.

Camera One · February 6, 2021

9 minutes ago, KingOfHearts said:

It makes Regina look pretty dumb for thinking it was all hunky dory.

She was too distracted by chunky monkey.

Shanna Marie · February 7, 2021

Whether Groundhog Day or hazy blur, the fake memories of the life before the curse brought them to Storybrooke would have had to reset along the way just because of the passage of time.

For instance, going with the idea that Snow and Emma were literally the same age after the curse, that would make Mary Margaret forever 28 during the curse. The curse dropped them in 1983. 1983 Mary Margaret would have graduated from high school in 1973. She would have been a child of the 60s, old enough to be aware of and remember the Kennedy assassination, about to start high school when Armstrong walked on the moon. 2011 Mary Margaret when Emma came to town would have been born in 1983 and graduated from high school in 2001. Even in an isolated small town, those would be two entirely different sets of fake memories about her life before she was 28. If it's a Groundhog Day scenario, then I suppose the fake past could have been rewritten every day when things reset. If it's the hazy blur, then maybe those memories were never all that clear to begin with and they just didn't think about their pasts. But even then, there had to have been times when a childhood memory would have been appropriate to come up. Like, when Mary Margaret found the fairytale book and knew it would bring hope to Henry, she would have remembered reading fairy tales with her parents. That Mary Margaret would have remembered seeing the Disney fairytale movies on home video, whereas 1983 Mary Margaret would have remembered seeing them at the theater when they were brought back for a revival, or she'd have had those "the story and the songs" records.

What did she remember about her parents? Did she remember Leo and Eva, but as small-town Americans, and they died while Mary Margaret was young? Did no one in town have extended family, aside from Ruby and Granny?

The reset/blur thing would have become more complicated when Henry came along. The memories would have had to adjust to account for him growing up and them not. 28-year-old teacher Mary Margaret cuddled baby Henry while she was volunteering at the hospital, but then 28-year-old teacher Mary Margaret also had him in her class when he was 10. Did she remember it as her being a college student candy striper volunteering at the hospital when she cuddled baby Henry?

Writing Wrongs · February 9, 2021

I have a question about the Zelena as Marian plot twist. So presumably Zelena had no say in being cursed by Ingrid. How did her glamour stay intact? Once her heart was out of her chest, wouldn't it show signs of blackness like Regina's and Snow's? I'm also assuming that Zelena (Marian) was faking the frozen curse that had her and Robin cross the town line?

Speakeasy · February 10, 2021

9 hours ago, Writing Wrongs said:

I have a question about the Zelena as Marian plot twist. So presumably Zelena had no say in being cursed by Ingrid. How did her glamour stay intact? Once her heart was out of her chest, wouldn't it show signs of blackness like Regina's and Snow's? I'm also assuming that Zelena (Marian) was faking the frozen curse that had her and Robin cross the town line?

Her glamour extended into her internal organs.

.

I believe that's the actual explanation that was given by the writers. It's quite a trick. I wonder if it would fool a DNA test as well?

My personal explanation is that she absorbed Marian's personality and it wasn't until after she and Robin were in New York that her real personality reasserted herself. So at that point she still had Marian's pure heart. I can't back that up with screenshots but I think it makes more sense than the on-screen explanation.

Camera One · February 15, 2021

The Production Arts thread is locked, so I guess I'll post it here.

I decided to listen to some "Once" music (also music from "The Crown") on Youtube on random shuffle while working, and it's almost funny to look at the track titles. Can't believe I enjoyed listening to "The Good Curse". Yikes. And of course out of all the tracks from all the seasons, it has to play "The Good Queen" too. I would like the music without realizing the context, LOL.

I wish they had come out with an official soundtrack for Seasons 3-7 as well as for the Wonderland spinoff. I guess Mark Isham sometimes released tracks to promote episodes and some of them got released unofficially. I would have liked Alice and Cyrus's theme, though a short clip of it is on a suite of music.

Edited February 15, 2021 by Camera One

tennisgurl · March 4, 2021

So I was watching Guardians of the Galaxy not long ago for the millionth time, but for some reason this time it really made me think of this show and its sad attempt to rip off the big climactic scene for that episode with Regina and the Fury. Its funny, I have watched plenty of shows and movies and such that they included shout outs and homages to other stories, some do them all of the time and are very obvious about it, and I often really enjoy those shout outs. It can be a fun way for creators to send some love to stories they enjoy and inspired them, to pay homage to their genre, foreshadow upcoming plot points, add extra cultural context to your story, there is a lot you can do when you give shouts outs to other works. Some shows will even come up with whole plots that are allusions to other stories, or write characters that are clearly inspired by other works. This show should, in theory, be perfect for a show with tons of shout outs and allusions to other stories. Its a show literally about stories, a big crossover between fairy tale characters, Disney properties, and various other well known public domain characters, its should be the ideal show to shout out other stories and make it seem natural...and yet they are awful at it. Despite having the ability to use images from one of the biggest entertainment dynasties in the whole world and setting up a universe that is entirely based around the importance of stories and the idea that all stories are based in reality, almost all of their obvious shout outs are just sad and embarrassing. I have been trying to figure out why that is exactly.

I think the Regina Guardians scene is a where my answer lies. It seems like an homage to a well known scene in a well known movie, a pretty standard idea for a shout out, but it just feels so lazy and contrived because it feels like a pale copy of the original scene. A good homage should reference another work, but should also add its own spin or just add it to the background as something fun, or use it in its own narrative in a way that has an actual purpose to trying the two things together thematically. Lets look at the two scenes in the context of what lead to them.

In Guardians of the Galaxy, the big thing where the heroes all join hands to absorb the energy from the magic space rock to all take the energy together so that none of them die of it all going into one person is the climax of the entire film and the formation of their team. Its a huge moment of character development for all of our heroes, who have all been alienated and alone for years and have dealt with tons of trauma and loss and came together at first out of convenience but then actually bonded together and found friendship for the first time. Its especially the culmination of main character Peter's character arc in the movie, even having a call back to his inability to be with his mom in her dying moments out of fear of losing her, so him being able to open up to people again is a big part of his arc. Its essentially the theme of the whole movie, that people are stronger together and can bring out the best in each other. Also from a more plot perspective, they have no idea if this will even work and its already been established that normally touching this thing will lead someone to explode (we saw this happen earlier) so we know that this is a risk, and we know what could happen here because we know what the magic space rock does. Also they are doing this not just to save each other, but to stop a crazed space terrorist from destroying a whole city of innocent civilians, making the stakes even higher and adding more heroism and nobility to what they are doing, despite the fact that they are all criminals who started off the movie mostly pursuing selfish goals. Like I said, big character growth and the culmination of the whole plot.

What did we get in Once leading into that scene? Regina bullies Emma into saving Regina's boyfriend even though she knows it will hurt Emma after he was stabbed due to Regina's own history of wonton murder, which she shows no sign of regretting when confronted by someone who's family she murdered. Then she has to give her life in exchange for Robin's because all magic comes with a price (take a drink!) and one life needs another, but then Snowing, Grumpy and Arthur do the Guardians bit and all take some of the poorly explained Fury's life suck magic by holding onto Regina, they glow, and the Fury fucks off back to wherever it came from and everyone just smiles about their win. I guess the biggest moment of character growth is that Regina didn't try to kill some rando in her place and did try to give up her own life, which is at least something, but it hardly had the depth and culmination that the original one had. Regina's story wasn't about her accepting help or these people learning to trust each other or even her accepting consequences, because there are no consequences. Its just another scene where everyone has to worship Regina and give up everything to help her, even Arthur who doesn't give a single crap about her and is just doing this to get into the EF crews good graces, so its not about any kind of bond or sacrifice or the culmination of any kind of arc, and the Fury is so poorly explained I have no idea why this is even happened or what could happen. So because they split the life suck between them, does that mean they all have a few years shaved off their lifespans? I have no idea, that should be how it works based on what was established but nobody mentions it so I guess no one cares, and no one actually sacrifices or risks anything. Its just the way to end a problem of the week and a way to make Regina look good even when she is doing really shitty stuff. It really means nothing in the grand scheme of things besides her pushing Emma further towards the dark side, and refusing to let Regina ever suffer any consequences.

The problem with this show using these images is that it just makes you think of the better original version, with their version coming off as a cheap copy. They understand the scenes and ideas, but have no idea why they actually work. Its also a bigger issue with the show, it just become so ridiculously cliché, using all of these well worn tropes without having any understanding of why they ever worked in the first place. A show about stories should be a perfect place to explore common fairy tale themes or even just general narrative plots and characters, but it all just felt like the show was copying other shows and movies and such that A&E saw and thought looked cool or that it was the kind of thing a fantasy show should do. Lets do the "persecution of magic people" story! Lets do a million "revenge is bad" stories! Lets do some "magic comes at a price" stories! Lets have every damn couple on this show have a meet cute where they hate each other on sight then fall in love for no reason! Lets just copy the ending of Guardians of the Galaxy because we saw that on Netflix last weekend! Its why I always make jokes about how you can tell what A&E have been watching lately based on what is happening in the show, they get all of their ideas from whatever they were watching. Their homages and use of common tropes feel less like allusions or fun shout outs than they feel like stealing other peoples better ideas but not understanding why people like them. Its just copying.

Shanna Marie · March 6, 2021

On 3/4/2021 at 2:41 PM, tennisgurl said:

Its just another scene where everyone has to worship Regina and give up everything to help her, even Arthur who doesn't give a single crap about her and is just doing this to get into the EF crews good graces, so its not about any kind of bond or sacrifice or the culmination of any kind of arc, and the Fury is so poorly explained I have no idea why this is even happened or what could happen. So because they split the life suck between them, does that mean they all have a few years shaved off their lifespans? I have no idea, that should be how it works based on what was established but nobody mentions it so I guess no one cares, and no one actually sacrifices or risks anything. Its just the way to end a problem of the week and a way to make Regina look good even when she is doing really shitty stuff. It really means nothing in the grand scheme of things besides her pushing Emma further towards the dark side, and refusing to let Regina ever suffer any consequences.

Wasn't there also something in that scene in which they talked about it being proof of Regina being a real leader or the real Savior who could lead them, or something like that? But it really had nothing to do with Regina having any kind of leadership. It was just everyone else taking a big risk and potentially sacrificing themselves to make sure Regina got what she wanted, which is basically a day ending in -y rather than a noteworthy event. For it to have been about Regina being a leader, it would have meant her being the one to step up with the idea of joining forces in order to help someone else.

The idea of learning to become a real leader would actually have been a good character arc for Regina, since there's a big difference between being a tyrant and being a leader, between getting leadership because of who you married (and then murdered) and being chosen by others to lead. But going there would have meant admitting that Regina was actually deficient in something.

Did we ever see Regina actually being a real leader? As far as I can recall, she mostly just snarked about other people's plans and/or focused on her own personal issues. Then when something happened that meant she had to step up and deal with it, she had her "Who, me? I couldn't possibly" moment that meant the others then had to give her a pep talk/tongue bath to tell her how special she was before she'd do the thing. I guess Roni was kind of the leader in season 7, but that was mostly because everyone else was pretty much useless and they all hung out at her bar. But figuring out what needed to be done, understanding who would be best for what role, and rallying everyone to a cause (that wasn't about her) wasn't exactly Regina's strength.

Given that Robin only lived a couple of months longer, I guess that even if they spread the rest of his lifespan that they cheated the Fury out of over the whole group, they'd each only lose maybe a week.

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