Once Upon A...SHOULDA HAPPENED THIS WAY!

[KingOfHearts]

25 minutes ago, Camera One said:

I remember I was annoyed how they weren't defending Marian, but you could interpret this as everyone being afraid to trigger Regina further.  

The writers never seemed to be in sync with the actors. The actors will play something like this, and even the script may read like this, but the writers never did anything with it. (As if it were unintended.) Whenever you read interviews from the actors about how they portrayed their characters, often a lot of what they were thinking gets lost. Ginny and Lana interpreted Regina and Snow in S1 as actually loving each other deep down, and Jennifer went to great lengths to build a mythology for Dark Swan. None of that actually made it into the writing of the show.

I'm not arguing that writers should have creative control of the show, just that their acting doesn't seem to align with A&E's vision most of the time. I don't think the writers gave much direction to the actors on the subtext going on in the scenes or where the characters were going. They changed their mind so much that it had to be such a guessing game for the actors. It ultimately didn't matter if you thought your character was heading in one direction, because by the next episode, the writers flippantly decided to do something else.

Edited March 7, 2020 by KingOfHearts

[Shanna Marie]

50 minutes ago, KingOfHearts said:

I don't think the writers gave much direction to the actors on the subtext going on in the scenes or where the characters were going. They changed their mind so much that it had to be such a guessing game for the actors. It ultimately didn't matter if you thought your character was heading in one direction, because by the next episode, the writers flippantly decided to do something else.

It sounds like the actors were always having to come up with headcanon to make things make sense and find any kind of emotional truth. They ended up playing things that definitely weren't intended but that were the only way they could make things work. The show might have been better if the writers had gone with some of what the actors came up with, but they seemed to go out of their way to contradict what the actors came up with.

For instance, in season one, I could buy that Regina was actually conflicted about Snow and pulling her punches because she loved her even as she blamed her for everything. That's about the only way to explain how superpowered Regina, with all her magic and a horde of Black Knights doing her will, never managed to catch and kill nonmagical Snow, who was protected only by peasants. But then they later showed Regina catching and eagerly executing Snow and being gleeful when she thought for a moment that she'd actually killed Snow. That rules out Regina not trying and being conflicted.

[KingOfHearts]

16 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said:

But then they later showed Regina catching and eagerly executing Snow and being gleeful when she thought for a moment that she'd actually killed Snow. That rules out Regina not trying and being conflicted.

The writers could've given Regina and Snow a complex stepmother/stepdaughter relationship. But despite all the flashbacks, that was never really explored. It seemed like Regina showed fleeting sympathy for her a few times. (Like not telling her what actually happened to Daniel.) I think making Leopold just a nice guy was a poor choice if the writers were trying to make Regina look like a victim or at least understandable. What if she was using someone like Sidney to escape, but Sidney murdered Leopold without her consent? What if she didn't plan it and it just happened? 

I almost would've preferred the writers to make her more like an impressionable puppet instead of an obvious perpetrator. They wanted her to be both "misunderstood" and evil, which doesn't work. I think her character arc should've been taking a stand for herself and not letting herself be manipulated by people like Cora and Rumple. Let her be the "Evil Queen" because of a false perception. Then around the time the Curse happens, she's finally snapped.

If you go back, you can change or completely remove a lot of her crimes without impacting the story all that much. 

Edited March 7, 2020 by KingOfHearts

[Camera One]

1 minute ago, KingOfHearts said:

If you go back, you can change or completely remove a lot of her crimes without impacting the story all that much. 

It makes it all the more incomprehensible that the Writers kept adding to the rap sheet and making them worse and worse (eg. killing the groom on his wedding day, just because).  I think it showed how delusional and out-of-touch A&E were, thinking their contradictions and mixed messaging was master storytelling.  Between Regina and Rumple, we were getting whip-lash.  Not to mention the "I'm MM. I'm Snow"... you'd think everyone had multiple personality disorder when they're not even Cursed.

[KingOfHearts]

41 minutes ago, Camera One said:

It makes it all the more incomprehensible that the Writers kept adding to the rap sheet and making them worse and worse (eg. killing the groom on his wedding day, just because).

There's also stuff like Regina sending many children to their deaths to get the apple from the Blind Witch. Like... why? Why add that detail? What if Hansel and Gretel were the only children she sent in, but she put a protection spell on them so the witch couldn't harm them? Putting children in danger doesn't exactly make her a saint, but her body count wouldn't have to be so high. Or maybe she has a change of heart at the last minute and saves them? Maybe she teleports them out while they have the apple in hand? The point is that we didn't need a pile of childrens' skeletons. Regina didn't have to be irredeemable.

Rumple, on the other hand, shouldn't have redeemable. Full stop. He should've died at the end of 3A and came back for cameos in flashbacks. I would do the complete opposite of Regina and keep him an asshole to the end.

There were many avenues the writers could've gone with Belle in a post-Rumple world. She didn't need to be the Harley Quinn to Rumple's Joker. Showing a Disney princess make new friends and a new identity for herself would've been more empowering than her clinging to an abusive imp's arm. The writers could've done something original with Belle or utilized other characters from the Beauty and the Beast fairy tale to interact with her. She had great platonic chemistry with Hook (and Neal to a lesser extent). Remember when she was friends with Ruby for five seconds? Having Belle be this smart, emancipated Disney princess would've been a positive message.

 

[Camera One]

19 minutes ago, KingOfHearts said:

There were many avenues the writers could've gone with Belle in a post-Rumple world. She didn't need to be the Harley Quinn to Rumple's Joker. Showing a Disney princess make new friends and a new identity for herself would've been more empowering than her clinging to an abusive imp's arm. The writers could've done something original with Belle or utilized other characters from the Beauty and the Beast fairy tale to interact with her. She had great platonic chemistry with Hook (and Neal to a lesser extent). Remember when she was friends with Ruby for five seconds? Having Belle be this smart, emancipated Disney princess would've been a positive message.

I think that alone might have made 3B-6 a little better.  Rumbelle was a major problem and I think it was 4A when Rumple became unsalvageable.  

[Shanna Marie]

1 hour ago, KingOfHearts said:

Rumple, on the other hand, shouldn't have redeemable. Full stop. He should've died at the end of 3A and came back for cameos in flashbacks.

Or if they brought him back after 3A, he should have stayed a villain. He kept acting like a villain. He was only "redeemed" because of the magic pen of the writers. He didn't do much to earn it.

As for Belle, she never should have taken him back after 4A. When she caught him having given her a fake dagger and about to murder Hook for a power-gaining ritual and she kicked him out of town, that should have been it, for good. I never really figured out why she did go back to him. It was mostly because Reasons. She was infuriated to learn that he'd impersonated Hook to get her to give him the dagger, angry that he'd deceived them all to sneak back into town, and then he was trying to turn Emma dark. I don't get why the revelation that he was dying of his own evil, with his heart turning into a lump of charcoal, was what brought her back to him. That was actual proof that she'd been wrong about his good heart all along.

Then everything's perfectly okay because his heart is clean and he's not the Dark One anymore, except then he hijacks Hook's sacrifice and chooses to become the Dark One again, she leaves him, but then goes back to him because it turned out he wasn't the one who sped up her pregnancy.

Really, you don't have to change much except Belle constantly going back to him and a few speeches about how good he is to keep him as a villain for the rest of the series after 4A (well, season 7 aside). Keep Belle away from him and don't have him at the Last Supper at the end of season 6, and he works as the villain who's powerful enough that they can't get rid of him, and he might sometimes help against a greater villain if he's also at risk, but he might also scheme to destroy them all if that suits him, so they can never trust him entirely.

[Camera One]

Without Belle, they would need to give Rumple a storyline of some sort, since his centrics usually involve her in some way. 

I suppose they could have given Rumple some screentime with Henry instead?  Occasionally, Rumple could try to reach out to him?  Henry alternately getting mad at Rumple and then forgiving him couldn't ruin his character any more than they already had with the Regina stuff.  

Edited March 7, 2020 by Camera One

[Shanna Marie]

1 hour ago, Camera One said:

Without Belle, they would need to give Rumple a storyline of some sort, since his centrics usually involve her in some way. 

I suppose they could have given Rumple some screentime with Henry instead? 

That's where it might have helped to not kill Neal off so quickly. Actually deal with that relationship. Otherwise, it's not as though Belle really did a lot with Rumple. He was usually sneaking around behind her back or putting her to sleep. Her not being with him wouldn't change all that much. Season 4 wouldn't have to change, other than the end. 5A wouldn't have to change, just don't have her carrying around the rose in a jar, then don't have her break up with him and get back with him at the end. It would change their plot of 5B if she hasn't slept with him, therefore isn't pregnant, and therefore the whole "next child" thing isn't an issue. Maybe just deal with his previous time in the Underworld. There's no Belle in the box at the end of the season, and no Gideon plot for season 6, but season 6 needs a total rewrite, anyway. Maybe that's when Rumple is the final Big Bad and becomes an immediate threat, so they have to find a way to deal with him.

[KingOfHearts]

How do you solve a problem like Regina? Possible solutions:

1. Regina wasn't as bad as she seemed to be and was actually redeemable. Telling her guards to kill an infant and having numerous children eaten by a witch? Not on our family show! She didn't know her kingdom was in poverty or that her subjects hated her. She was just manipulated by Cora and Rumple.

2. The Evil Queen was not Regina. Regina was a shapeshifter, an evil twin, a clone, possessed by a witch, or under a mind control curse.

3. Mayor Mills was cursed and didn't know she was Regina. This would make things a little grayer if Mayor Mills didn't murder Graham and was just a power hungry politician. What if Mayor Mills wanted to redeem herself, then she gets her memories back, and realizes she's a mass murdering dictator in a past life? Were the cursed personalities real people? 

4. Regina freaking dies. She gets executed, she sacrifices herself to save everyone, kills herself out of guilt, or gets mercilessly killed by a Big Bad. She doesn't make it past season 3.

5. Regina loses all her memories and becomes a different person. Another gray solution. She either gets a clean slate or she gets fake memories.

6. Regina becomes the final villain of the series and never fully redeems herself. One of the least plausible solutions. Maybe she dies or gets sent to prison then comes back later to exact revenge. 

7. Regina loses her magic and Henry keeps his memory wipe from 3B. This effectively puts her on parole for the rest of the series and gives her some kind of consequences for her actions, but definitely not enough to equate to the magnitude of her crimes.

8. Timeline reset that prevents her from becoming the Evil Queen. This would require time travel shenanigans.

Anybody have any other ridiculous ideas?

Edited March 11, 2020 by KingOfHearts

[Camera One]

I think a number of those would have worked, or a combination of a few of them.

15 minutes ago, KingOfHearts said:

How do you solve a problem like Regina? Possible solutions:

1. Regina wasn't as bad as she seemed to be and was actually redeemable. Telling her guards to kill an infant and having numerous children eaten by a witch? Not on our family show! She didn't know her kingdom was in poverty or that her subjects hated her. She was just manipulated by Cora and Rumple.

This would have been the easiest.  She did not need to be fully manipulated, but she only aimed to hurt Snow, not random peasants.  They could stress that she had a psychotic break after Daniel died.   That could have explained her killing of Leopold.  

And her goal was not to kill Snow, but just put her under a Sleeping Curse.

If that was the degree of The Evil Queen's evil, then she wouldn't have killed Graham in Storybrooke.

Then for the rest of the show, she tries to repent and there is no manipulative messaging that the heroes were mean to her.  

[Shanna Marie]

1 hour ago, KingOfHearts said:

Anybody have any other ridiculous ideas?

The mob drives her out of town (but not over the town line, just to some remote cabin like Zelena's place) after the curse breaks and before she gets a chance to huff the spellbook and get her magic fully back. She loses her mansion and her position as mayor. No one wants anything to do with her. That gives her time to really think about what she's done, and that starts her changing. When Cora comes to town, she realizes that all this time when she was going after Snow, Cora was the one she was really mad at. She helps the others take out Cora. She helps stop the failsafe, goes to Neverland to help save Henry, and does the curse reverse. Back in their own world, she actually gains some empathy as she realizes that what she's going through now is what she put other people through, separating them from their loved ones. She doesn't start dressing as the Evil Queen again, doesn't sit around snarking. Instead, she gradually starts building some kind of trust and friendship with the others as they have to work together against Zelena. When they're brought back to Storybrooke, the relationships reset to where they were when the curse was reversed (since they don't remember the past year), where they're just starting to kind of trust Regina but they're not friends. Regina doesn't move back into the mansion and instead finds an ordinary house. Henry doesn't get his memories of growing up with her as his mother back, instead figuring out the magic stuff for himself. That's both good and bad for Regina. It means he never sees her as his mother, but it also means he doesn't remember her abuse. She becomes kind of like an aunt to him, and they build a new relationship. He's aware she used to be the Evil Queen, but he doesn't remember her in evil mode. When they break the memory spell (some way other than a TLK with Regina and Henry), Regina and the Charmings remember that they had started becoming friends, and that kind of wigs Emma out because she's still leery of her. Emma never becomes BFFs with Regina. Snow and Regina have a complicated relationship. At the end of the series, it's a big step when Regina is included in Emma's birthday party. They've both come a long way. Emma started with the single lonely candle and ends with a big party full of family and friends. Regina started out threatening Snow at her wedding and ends coming with a gift to Emma's birthday party.

[Speakeasy]

In response to @KingOfHearts suggestions

1-I think would weaken the series, I thought that her evil flashbacks got silly later on (justice for Outdoor Wedding Boy!😉) but in S1 she was compelling and menacing, I think trying to soften her in the past you'd lose something and I'd never ever want to lose her killing her father to cast the curse; the idea that she wasn't pure evil but was capable of love and CHOSE to give it up for revenge and spite was very powerful.

I would consider going with a slightly different take on this and maybe show that even if she was that bad, that she wasn't JUST that bad. She could be a bad person but an effective ruler. You could show she had supporters and allies for legitimate reasons. Maybe she was out there dealing with the witches and trolls, keeping the ogres at bay, putting the other kingdoms in their places and Making Misthaven Great Again and her black Knights were, at least partly, people who really thought she was doing a good job.

2-Sorry to say I think this is the worst possible solution-what exactly do you do with her if it turns out the most significant events involving the character were actually someone else?

3-This would have been interesting but you'd need to change A LOT for it to work-if she was just a corrupt small town beaurecrat then she'd need to be oblivious to Storybrooke's weirdness which changes a lot of S1.

4-A possibility but she was at the heart of the show, she and Emma were always the two most important characters and I can't help thinking it would be weird to remove her completely. (That being said there was a suggestion here somewhere she should sacrifice herself heroically and her last words are, with a sad smile; 'My gift to you is this happy day,' which I think would have made a great scene)

5-Not a fan of this one, you'd essentially be losing one of your central characters and keeping the actress around as someone else would be weird.

6-there was a suggestion here somewhere that from S4 onward (or something) Storybrooke' should get access to all the World Doors through the Sorceror's House and become the Deep Space Nine of Fiction-if Storybrooke' is Deep Space Nine that makes our Ginny Gul Dukat, and that's a  comparison I'd endorse all day long! The heroes have got to work with her for family or political reasons but she knows and they know and we know this is not a relationship that can end any way but with one side dead. This is probably my favourite.

7-this would be a definite possibility, but you'd need some reason for her to actually be involved with the story without her magic-maybe that she still knows magic even if she can't do it, and maybe you could have some new villain who doesn't know she's been mugglised making waves and they'd get her all dressed up in her full Evil Queen suit to try and scare them off without giving the game away.

8-i don't think this is workable unless you radically rewrote the show, she's so involved with the rest of the main cast that if you edited out her evilness they'd all be different people and at that point you have a different program altogether.

[andromeda331]

10 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

The mob drives her out of town (but not over the town line, just to some remote cabin like Zelena's place) after the curse breaks and before she gets a chance to huff the spellbook and get her magic fully back. She loses her mansion and her position as mayor. No one wants anything to do with her. That gives her time to really think about what she's done, and that starts her changing. When Cora comes to town, she realizes that all this time when she was going after Snow, Cora was the one she was really mad at. She helps the others take out Cora. She helps stop the failsafe, goes to Neverland to help save Henry, and does the curse reverse. Back in their own world, she actually gains some empathy as she realizes that what she's going through now is what she put other people through, separating them from their loved ones. She doesn't start dressing as the Evil Queen again, doesn't sit around snarking. Instead, she gradually starts building some kind of trust and friendship with the others as they have to work together against Zelena. When they're brought back to Storybrooke, the relationships reset to where they were when the curse was reversed (since they don't remember the past year), where they're just starting to kind of trust Regina but they're not friends. Regina doesn't move back into the mansion and instead finds an ordinary house. Henry doesn't get his memories of growing up with her as his mother back, instead figuring out the magic stuff for himself. That's both good and bad for Regina. It means he never sees her as his mother, but it also means he doesn't remember her abuse. She becomes kind of like an aunt to him, and they build a new relationship. He's aware she used to be the Evil Queen, but he doesn't remember her in evil mode. When they break the memory spell (some way other than a TLK with Regina and Henry), Regina and the Charmings remember that they had started becoming friends, and that kind of wigs Emma out because she's still leery of her. Emma never becomes BFFs with Regina. Snow and Regina have a complicated relationship. At the end of the series, it's a big step when Regina is included in Emma's birthday party. They've both come a long way. Emma started with the single lonely candle and ends with a big party full of family and friends. Regina started out threatening Snow at her wedding and ends coming with a gift to Emma's birthday party.

I really like this idea. It would have made more sense and made for a better story.

[Shanna Marie]

On 3/11/2020 at 5:23 AM, Speakeasy said:

this would be a definite possibility, but you'd need some reason for her to actually be involved with the story without her magic-maybe that she still knows magic even if she can't do it, and maybe you could have some new villain who doesn't know she's been mugglised making waves and they'd get her all dressed up in her full Evil Queen suit to try and scare them off without giving the game away.

I think it would be possible to limit her power while still having stuff for her to do. Really, there should have been some kind of limits on everyone's power instead of the jazz hands can do anything (except when it can't). Regina didn't seem to get any power until she inhaled the spell book, and that was how she got her power really back after the curse broke in Storybrooke. What if all her power came from the book and she had to keep topping up on hits from the book, but every time she took a whiff of the book, a page went blank, so when she ran out of pages, she ran out of power.

Then after the curse when she's in Storybrooke and the odds of finding another book are unlikely, she realizes just how much of her power she's already used and how little she has left. One of the things that starts her transition to being not so evil isn't so much that she's becoming a good person, but rather the fact that she has to ration her power. Is that fireball worth it? Once she has to start thinking about whether each use of power is worth it, she has to start thinking about what she's doing and why, and that brings about a change of heart. Then she has power for when it's needed for important things, like the greater good, but no power to waste on petty evil.

(And I really like this concept, so I think I'm going to use it for my own work.)

[lovett1979]

On 3/10/2020 at 8:25 PM, KingOfHearts said:

3. Mayor Mills was cursed and didn't know she was Regina. This would make things a little grayer if Mayor Mills didn't murder Graham and was just a power hungry politician. What if Mayor Mills wanted to redeem herself, then she gets her memories back, and realizes she's a mass murdering dictator in a past life? Were the cursed personalities real people?

I really like this idea. One of the things that I loved in Season 1 is that, until she kills Graham by crushing his heart, everything we see of her in Storybrook is completely "normal." If we weren't also watching the Enchanted Forrest flashbacks, there would be no reason for the audience to think that Henry was right. 

Rumplestiltskin could still "wake up" when he heard Emma's name, and could spend the season coming up with ways to get her to break the curse (that's why this whole thing happened, so he could get to the Land Without Magic and find Baelifre). They would all fail until the last option, seriously injuring or sickening Henry. With Henry at the brink of death, Emma would embrace her love for him and give him True Love's Kiss, breaking the curse!

S2E2 is called "We Are Both" and David/Charming gives a huge speech about how he is both the shepherd-turned-prince and David Nolan, and Snow White (the fierce bandit and princess) is also mild-mannered school teacher Mary Margaret, etc. And they seem to treat them both as valid. The characters are called by both names, depending on the situation/land.

So Mayor Mills (who maybe isn't a horrible mother?) realizing who she used to be, but wanting to be the person she was in Storybrook, for Henry, could be an interesting journey.

[Speakeasy]

On 3/12/2020 at 8:52 PM, Shanna Marie said:

I think it would be possible to limit her power while still having stuff for her to do. Really, there should have been some kind of limits on everyone's power instead of the jazz hands can do anything (except when it can't). Regina didn't seem to get any power until she inhaled the spell book, and that was how she got her power really back after the curse broke in Storybrooke. What if all her power came from the book and she had to keep topping up on hits from the book, but every time she took a whiff of the book, a page went blank, so when she ran out of pages, she ran out of power.

Then after the curse when she's in Storybrooke and the odds of finding another book are unlikely, she realizes just how much of her power she's already used and how little she has left. One of the things that starts her transition to being not so evil isn't so much that she's becoming a good person, but rather the fact that she has to ration her power. Is that fireball worth it? Once she has to start thinking about whether each use of power is worth it, she has to start thinking about what she's doing and why, and that brings about a change of heart. Then she has power for when it's needed for important things, like the greater good, but no power to waste on petty evil.

(And I really like this concept, so I think I'm going to use it for my own work.)

That's a really good idea-it would certainly jive better with my concept of who she was as a character-that she still had all that rage and paranoia just churning away under the surface even if she was on Team Hero, and that she was arrogant and just could not let things go (see 'Blondie's going back to Boston, good-but what if she comes back? What if my baby goes out to find her? What if she tracks down that kid I orphaned back in the 80s and they team up and come back and kill me? Dance me to death in red iron shoes! I bet the people of this town would love that! Ingrates! I gave them indoor toilets and that's how they repay me! NO! EMMA SWAN MUST DIE!') so you're right that it would work a lot better if she was forced to take a look at what she was doing for reasons of pragmatism which eventually lead to empathy or something similar. Just looking at the character as established it doesn't seem likely she would become genuinely trustworthy if she had the option to use magical violence to get her way.

It'd be a good way to use magic as well. I always thought from S2 on that OUAT had a good idea about dark magic-its not addictive because it's literally a drug but because it gives you power and makes things easy-for people like Rumps, Ginny and Cora (and Zelena I guess but I thought her backstory was a mess) who have gone their whole lives acutely aware of their own physical and social weakness and vulnerability it's especially seductive. It doesn't make you bad because it rewires your brain to be evil or lets demons influence you or anything, it makes you bad because you've got to LET THE HATE FLOW THROUGH YOU for it to work. And you just get used to feeling angry and wanting to hurt people all the time. If you limited her magic you could do an interesting twist on the usual trope of 'super-person needs to avoid getting stressed so they don't break things with their superpowers'-Regina has to avoid getting too angry because then her impulse is to channel that rage into superpowers and if she does she's going to RUN OUT OF SUPERPOWERS.

This is genius! The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, can the road to redemption be paved with self interest and paranoia?

I wish you the best of luck with writing it, it's a great concept! 

Edited March 16, 2020 by Speakeasy

[Shanna Marie]

5 hours ago, Speakeasy said:

I always thought from S2 on that OUAT had a good idea about dark magic-its not addictive because it's literally a drug but because it gives you power and makes things easy-for people like Rumps, Ginny and Cora (and Zelena I guess but I thought her backstory was a mess) who have gone their whole lives acutely aware of their own physical and social weakness and vulnerability it's especially seductive. It doesn't make you bad because it rewires your brain to be evil or lets demons influence you or anything, it makes you bad because you've got to LET THE HATE FLOW THROUGH YOU for it to work.

I think another factor that doesn't get brought up often enough in fantasy when they're doing the magic=drugs thing is that if you have magic to solve your problems, your problem-solving and interpersonal skills atrophy, and that can also be what contributes to the slide to evil. If you can control people by doing a spell, casting a curse, or ripping out their hearts, then you don't learn to get along with people and work things out. You don't learn to compromise. It's my way or the highway. If you can wave a hand to make the world the way you want it to be, you don't learn to deal with things as they are or to take real action to improve the situation.

Rumple pretty much stopped growing emotionally or socially when he became the Dark One. Pre-Dark One Rumple didn't have great interpersonal or coping skills, given that he couldn't compromise to help make his wife happy, his solution to worries about going into battle was to frag himself, and his solution to his son's poisoning was to sell his next-born child. But once he got power, he didn't have to cope with anything. He just killed anyone who got in his way. Regina had the double whammy of first starting to use magic to resolve everything and then living for 28 years in what was essentially her own dollhouse, where she had total control over the lives of everyone else. No wonder she went nuts when Emma came to town and started weakening the curse. Suddenly she was in a situation in which she not only no longer had total control over everyone, but she also didn't have magical powers. Though I don't feel like the show really used that (and I'm not sure the writers were conscious of the situation they'd created). That did seem to be where they were going with her magic cold turkey in 2A, where she had to find other ways of dealing with situations, and when she had to use magic to deal with Zombie Daniel, it was a desperation move because she had no other options. Unfortunately, that got dropped and it was suddenly okay for Regina to use magic whenever she wanted, without addressing her need to learn other ways to deal with life. At least Zelena seems to have spent a decade or so without magic between seasons 6 and 7, so that could have a lot to do with her rehabilitation. She had to learn new ways to deal with life.

That was my complaint about the magic=drugs plot on Buffy. Willow's interpersonal coping skills were pretty much frozen at about age 16, when she started trying to solve her problems with magic, and it only got worse as she got older. But they didn't address that at all. They made it into strictly a physical addiction.

It even works with the real-world metaphor, since drugs do a similar thing. There's not only the chemical/physical addiction, but if you've been turning to drugs as a coping mechanism, then you forget how to cope without them. You don't know how to deal with stress, sadness, maybe even boredom. For another real-world metaphor, so many shootings are over stupid little things like Instagram rivalries, and it seems like once someone has a gun to lean on, they don't learn how to handle problems any other way.

[Camera One]

Those ideas would also have been a good solution to curtail the use of magic on this show.  It would have explained why the Blue Fairy was often reluctant to use magic.  It would have made the Writers create more creative plots that didn't use magic as an easy plot solver (at the end of the arc) or conflict creator (by making the villains super-powered).  

In addition, it would have made the redemption storylines for characters like Zelena, Regina or Rumple a bit more believable (though they'll still need to get rid of the flip-flopping that kept happening with someone like Rumple).

[Shanna Marie]

2 hours ago, Camera One said:

It would have explained why the Blue Fairy was often reluctant to use magic. 

A nearly immortal being with vast powers would have to be really careful about how she used her powers over the centuries to stop herself from getting too detached from reality and heading down a dark path. Magic would need to be a last resort after trying every other possible solution, which would lead to some really creative problem solving along the way.

It did seem like they gave the fairies the limitation of having to use wands and needing the diamonds to get power. And yet people like Regina had unlimited power. She could use magic all day with just her hands waving, not having to use specific spells, and without running out of power or getting tired. It's clear they never worked out how all the magic was supposed to work.

[Camera One]

34 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said:

A nearly immortal being with vast powers would have to be really careful about how she used her powers over the centuries to stop herself from getting too detached from reality and heading down a dark path.

And it is possible that she was reckless in her "youth", trying to siphon off the darkness from herself but accidentally creating the Black Fairy.  It could have tied back to reference to dark fairy dust that was mentioned in "Snow Falls".  And Blue could have played a bigger role when Emma took on the darkness in 5A, or with the whole split-self arc in 6A/6B.  Blue and Merlin could have had a history, disagreeing on how to deal with darkness.  Maybe even with Glinda and the Good Witches in Oz, and their questionable method of having half the realm ruled by wicked witches.  The possibilities were quite limitless.

Edited March 16, 2020 by Camera One

[lovett1979]

52 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said:

It's clear they never worked out how all the magic was supposed to work.

THIS

It would have been so much better if they had really established each person's magical abilities and limitations. Also, where does magic come from? Rumple gets and immediately understands magic when he becomes the Dark One, Emma has magic because she's the product of true love (does that mean that no once else on the show is the product of true love because they don't have magic?) and needs coaching from Regina, Cora and Regina both "learn" magic but Zelena has (and uses) abilities from birth (is SHE the product of true love? I don't think so) though needs Rumple's teaching to help control it, and Blue Fairy (all fairies?) has magic because she's a fairy, but has all sorts of rules (sometimes only dark magic can counteract dark magic, sometimes only light magic can counteract dark magic). But all of them seem to have similar (unlimited) abilities, with occasional limitations when the plot calls for it.

[andromeda331]

15 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

I think another factor that doesn't get brought up often enough in fantasy when they're doing the magic=drugs thing is that if you have magic to solve your problems, your problem-solving and interpersonal skills atrophy, and that can also be what contributes to the slide to evil. If you can control people by doing a spell, casting a curse, or ripping out their hearts, then you don't learn to get along with people and work things out. You don't learn to compromise. It's my way or the highway. If you can wave a hand to make the world the way you want it to be, you don't learn to deal with things as they are or to take real action to improve the situation.

Rumple pretty much stopped growing emotionally or socially when he became the Dark One. Pre-Dark One Rumple didn't have great interpersonal or coping skills, given that he couldn't compromise to help make his wife happy, his solution to worries about going into battle was to frag himself, and his solution to his son's poisoning was to sell his next-born child. But once he got power, he didn't have to cope with anything. He just killed anyone who got in his way. Regina had the double whammy of first starting to use magic to resolve everything and then living for 28 years in what was essentially her own dollhouse, where she had total control over the lives of everyone else. No wonder she went nuts when Emma came to town and started weakening the curse. Suddenly she was in a situation in which she not only no longer had total control over everyone, but she also didn't have magical powers. Though I don't feel like the show really used that (and I'm not sure the writers were conscious of the situation they'd created). That did seem to be where they were going with her magic cold turkey in 2A, where she had to find other ways of dealing with situations, and when she had to use magic to deal with Zombie Daniel, it was a desperation move because she had no other options. Unfortunately, that got dropped and it was suddenly okay for Regina to use magic whenever she wanted, without addressing her need to learn other ways to deal with life. At least Zelena seems to have spent a decade or so without magic between seasons 6 and 7, so that could have a lot to do with her rehabilitation. She had to learn new ways to deal with life.

That was my complaint about the magic=drugs plot on Buffy. Willow's interpersonal coping skills were pretty much frozen at about age 16, when she started trying to solve her problems with magic, and it only got worse as she got older. But they didn't address that at all. They made it into strictly a physical addiction.

It even works with the real-world metaphor, since drugs do a similar thing. There's not only the chemical/physical addiction, but if you've been turning to drugs as a coping mechanism, then you forget how to cope without them. You don't know how to deal with stress, sadness, maybe even boredom. For another real-world metaphor, so many shootings are over stupid little things like Instagram rivalries, and it seems like once someone has a gun to lean on, they don't learn how to handle problems any other way.

In season one I really though that was where they were going. They had Cinderella asking when they were about to trap Rumple whether they should even be using magic that seemed to be causing all their problems. Almost everyone who went looking for a magic solution ended up not working or making things worse. When Rumple shows up as her fairy godmother and Cinderella's talking about how horrible her life is he tells her to change it. Which she probably could have. Maybe she didn't have the courage or confidence. But she could have changed her life herself. She could have left. She could have cleaned up and went to the ball herself. Regina didn't have to marry the King after getting rid of her mother. She was completely free then. She could have left, she could have turned him down. Even right before she casts the curse her father's pointing out she could leave and start over but she wouldn't.  Rumple too had options his wife wanted to leave the village they easily could have done that and he could have improved his life but he chose not to. He chose magic.  In the first season he really came of that he regretted not going with Bae. His comment to Emma about how quick kids grow up. Also as Belle pointed out to him that he could have been happy but he was too much of coward. Despite choosing magic and becoming powerful neither Rumple or Regina were at all happy. Rumple was still every bit the coward even though he had magic.  Even when Regina had everything she could want she still wasn't happy. It seemed like they would come to the conclusion that magic had ruined their lives and/or they should have fixed their problems rather then turning to magic. It seemed to tie into Emma helping people but without magic. Trying to help Ashley, who took her advice and instead attacked Rumple trying to steal the contract back when she didn't need to do that. Emma thanks to her years in the foster system to point out to Rumple that the deal wouldn't hold up in court and he probably wouldn't want to go to court anyways due to his own dealings. Or tracking down Nicholas and Ava's father and managed to get to him. She was weakening the curse but also coming up with solutions that didn't require magic. It really seemed like that's where they were going with the magic and it was really interesting idea. It was pretty much true. Then of course they dropped it. 

[Camera One]

The show was all about how All Magic Has a Price! 

I have played around with a rule where for cases like the Fairy Godmother granting a single time-limited wish, it was only in a case where someone had already suffered, so they got a small reward... in that case, their price had already been paid, through their generosity to others in spite of their own suffering.  And maybe that could be why a Fairy's powers are so limited... they could only help someone using magic if that person had paid the price and the universe was giving them back something, but the wish granted is usually not huge. Cinderella got a night at the ball, but it opened up a chance meeting with the Prince who saw her as someone genuine he wanted to pursue, and that was what gave her the happy ending.

So it's not that villains can never get a happy ending... it's that they don't deserve a happy ending, and karma will always come back and bite them.

Edited March 17, 2020 by Camera One

[Speakeasy]

I loved the idea which was posted somewhere on here, that all magic comes with a price, but that the price is paid by the person who wants the magic done-in effect meaning all spells follow the same rules as genie wishes with an ironic karmic reaction. The suggestion there was that Rumplestiltskin was always going around making deals specifically so he could do magic cost free, since by the laws of magic he wasn't technically the spellcaster.

I filled up a few notebooks trying to work out how this might work but what I came up with looked nothing like the kind of magic in OUAT-you wouldn't survive the pushback from throwing around fireballs or snapping people's necks with telekinesis.

[Shanna Marie]

21 hours ago, Camera One said:

So it's not that villains can never get a happy ending... it's that they don't deserve a happy ending, and karma will always come back and bite them.

That was pretty much the lesson of the Ursula episode in 4B -- Hook was failing when he was only trying to give Ursula her voice back because of what he needed from her and both of them resorted to threats. Then Ariel gave him a good slapping around and told him that the reason villains don't get happy endings was that they go about it the wrong way. Once he set out to try to help Ursula for her sake and to undo the wrong he'd done her, and once he, Ursula, and Poseidon got over their egos and were able to apologize and reconcile, things worked out for all of them.

Unfortunately, the writers apparently forgot they wrote that episode and we were right back to Regina whining about things not working out for her because she was a villain, even as she focused her entire life on getting her own happy ending.

It's not that there's some universal law about villains not getting happy endings. It's that the things villains tend to do tend to have negative consequences.

[Camera One]

54 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said:

That was pretty much the lesson of the Ursula episode in 4B -- Hook was failing when he was only trying to give Ursula her voice back because of what he needed from her and both of them resorted to threats. Then Ariel gave him a good slapping around and told him that the reason villains don't get happy endings was that they go about it the wrong way. Once he set out to try to help Ursula for her sake and to undo the wrong he'd done her, and once he, Ursula, and Poseidon got over their egos and were able to apologize and reconcile, things worked out for all of them.

Sometimes, it felt like Hook was in a different show than Regina and Rumple.  I wonder how the Writers reconciled that.  Writing different characters using a completely different set of moral rules is a real talent.

I think they should have had Ursula stay and help, to make up for all the bad that she had done.  I guess she was one of those One-And-Done-Redemptions™.

Edited March 18, 2020 by Camera One

[Shanna Marie]

5 hours ago, Camera One said:

Sometimes, it felt like Hook was in a different show than Regina and Rumple.  I wonder how the Writers reconciled that.  Writing different characters using a completely different set of moral rules is a real talent.

I have joked that the Writing Elves crept in at night and wrote the Hook parts, but I think the real issue is that Hook was a character they loved as a character, while Regina was a character they loved like she was a real person. When writers like a character, they tend to give him good material -- lots of angst and growth and good scenes demonstrating that. They were also working with an actor who liked to be stretched, who wanted a character who was very different from himself. They treated Regina like she was a real person, giving her good things, making things easy for her, and it sounds like they were dealing with an actor who felt the same way, wanting Regina to get the things she wanted and wanting Regina to be more like her. Doing that, you end up with two very different approaches.

6 hours ago, Camera One said:

I think they should have had Ursula stay and help, to make up for all the bad that she had done. 

How much bad did she actually do? We didn't see much. We saw her moment of turning herself from a mermaid to a tentacle creature, then I guess she was bad enough (or maybe just had potential for darkness) for Rumple to summon her. She hung out with Maleficent and Cruella, then slummed it in New York for a while, apparently not hanging with Cruella. Then she joined in some hijinks, threw Hook overboard, and threatened Snow. Maybe giving Hook the info he needed and returning to the side of good was enough. We'll never know because they didn't bother to give us any idea how evil she was or if she was evil.

I wish we could have seen her at least one more time, like during Hook's season 6 adventure. It would have come in handy for him to have the sea god and his daughter as allies. He could really have punked Blackbeard that way. Was Poseidon in any way connected to Zeus and Hades the way he is in Greek mythology, or was he separate in this reality?

[Camera One]

17 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said:

How much bad did she actually do? We didn't see much. We saw her moment of turning herself from a mermaid to a tentacle creature, then I guess she was bad enough (or maybe just had potential for darkness) for Rumple to summon her. She hung out with Maleficent and Cruella, then slummed it in New York for a while, apparently not hanging with Cruella. Then she joined in some hijinks, threw Hook overboard, and threatened Snow. Maybe giving Hook the info he needed and returning to the side of good was enough. We'll never know because they didn't bother to give us any idea how evil she was or if she was evil.

We didn't see her do much evil, but she's supposed to be one of the "Queens of Darkness", so you would expect she did more than most and gained her reputation through actions.  Plus if she were really good, she would feel guilty about whatever little she did do which was wrong.  Threatening to strangle Belle, for one.  Plus I liked the actress, and I think having her team up with the heroes would have been fun to watch.  It was just plain weird the character was dropped halfway through the arc.

[Shanna Marie]

17 hours ago, Camera One said:

It was just plain weird the character was dropped halfway through the arc.

Everything about that arc was just plain weird. Even aside from the whole "We must find the Author to write a happy ending for Regina!" plot. We had three fairly iconic villains who did little more than go on a joyride with Regina, and two of them were fairly quickly eliminated. The third had a story set up that ended up going nowhere.

They did an arc about "darkness" without having any idea what they considered darkness to be. Teen Lily was unhappy in spite of having just about everything (hmm, sounds familiar), but adult Lily just seemed to have bad luck and make poor choices. I wouldn't have called her "dark." Emma supposedly had more potential for darkness than Regina, and Rumple was trying to turn her dark. But then when Emma actually took on the Darkness and became a Dark One, none of this story carried over or mattered at all. Not to mention the Eggbaby and the idea of being able to suck darkness from a fetus.

And that's not even getting into the bizarre love triangle with Belle, Rumple, and a suddenly disappearing Will, in which Belle went back to Rumple after he betrayed her multiple times and after she learned that his heart was, in fact, so dark it was killing him, in spite of all her faith to the contrary. And without getting into the "Marian was really Zelena all this time" nonsense.

Ursula leaving abruptly mid-season was possibly the least weird thing about that whole arc. There was some potential raw material in there that could have been fleshed out, but that arc was just a mess.

[Camera One]

I guess it's a pattern with these Writers.  What happened to Ursula wasn't that unusual considering Hyde's story ended four episodes into 6A.   Or Guinivere/Lancelot being a moot point after four episodes of 5A.   Or the Coat Hangers staying Coat Hangers for pretty much all of 7B.  

[KingOfHearts]

2 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

Everything about that arc was just plain weird. Even aside from the whole "We must find the Author to write a happy ending for Regina!" plot. We had three fairly iconic villains who did little more than go on a joyride with Regina, and two of them were fairly quickly eliminated. The third had a story set up that ended up going nowhere.

I believe 4B's weird structure was A&E's response to people claiming the show had become too predictable. (I was one of them, and I regret it now.) By the time 4B rolled around, the writers had settled into the half-season arc formula. 3A, 3B, and 4A all had issues but the structure kept them from going off the rails. They all had somewhere to go, despite the meandering through filler centrics in the middle. 4B was essentially throwing random crap at the wall to see what stuck. But the funny thing was when something stuck, it still got thrown away because there were a dozen other things to get to.

While the the Author/Regina plot was dumb, it was a proactive goal with a (albeit warped) positive theme. It was one of the few overarching plots that didn't involve the characters reacting to an external threat or a new contrived magical problem. It was completely ridiculous and didn't make a lick of sense, but it wasn't as bleak as everything else. Of course, it ultimately went nowhere because Regina didn't get her "happy ending" (whatever that was supposed to be) until the very end of the show. So like... what was all that about? I feel my mind going to mush just writing about this.

4B's three main issues were:

1. There was too much going on with no centralized plot.

2. It was overly serious and too bleak/dark for what it was.

3. None of the major plots made sense.

I'm totally okay with the Queens of Darkness and each of them getting their own side story. Each of them except Cruella had connections to the main characters, so the writers wouldn't be forced to sidetrack that far. We never really saw them function much as a unit outside of the Chernabog episode or when they went "bad-girling" with Regina. Why were they working together? Did they develop any real frenemy relationships between each other? What did they do together post-Chernabog in EF? They were ultimately just Rumple's Angels, and that's degrading because they weren't horrible characters. They weren't the problem with 4B. The Eggnapping/Lily plot was.

Quote

And without getting into the "Marian was really Zelena all this time" nonsense.

Oh my gosh. I forgot that was in 4B. It was like every episode was about a completely different plot!

So we had: Emma's darkness, The Author, Eggnapping, Lily, Rumple/Belle/Will love triangle, The Queens of Darkness, and Zelena/Robin. What the hell?

And in the middle of all of that, the writers threw in a random flashback about Regina being barren. Okay??

Edited March 19, 2020 by KingOfHearts

[Camera One]

13 minutes ago, KingOfHearts said:

And in the middle of all of that, the writers threw in a random flashback about Regina being barren. 

If we look at the arc from afar, I think we see that it was a very cohesive story, with a theme that deeply explored motherhood from all angles, culminating in probably one of the masterpieces of television history - "Mother".

We had a very selfish mother - a self-professed hero - who stole another "villain"'s daughter and disposed of it in the cruelest way possible.   Snow tried to assuage worries about her own child by disadvantaging another woman's child.  We see the impacts of this on two girls who grew up without their biological mother - Emma and Lily.  Then, we had Cruella, whose mother tried to suppress her true nature.  Ursula's story too was kickstarted by the loss of her mother.  And then we had Zelena, whose journey in motherhood was just beginning.  While we saw the heartwrenching flashback where Regina couldn't have a child.  Meanwhile, Isaac, The Author, was the mother of stories.  And then we come to the finale, called Operation Mongoose.  Mongooses are dedicated mothers.  And it's hard not to think about Mongooses without accidentally saying MOTHER Goose.  

[Shanna Marie]

2 hours ago, KingOfHearts said:

So we had: Emma's darkness, The Author, Eggnapping, Lily, Rumple/Belle/Will love triangle, The Queens of Darkness, and Zelena/Robin. What the hell?

If they had just picked one theme and worked with it, it would have helped matters. They had material for several arcs here.

So, maybe focus on the Author stuff, which would deal with the mythology and reasoning there (like, what the hell, Merlin?), plus maybe explore the concept of a happy ending -- is there such a thing, as long as you're not dead? They later brought up the idea of a "happy beginning," which makes more sense, but that wasn't a lesson Emma needed to learn. Regina was the one obsessed with happy endings. This arc could have dealt with issues like what a happy ending is, who gets one, and why, with such lessons as "villains don't get happy endings because they go about them the wrong way" and "I write my own happy ending." I don't really see where the Queens of Darkness need to fit into this, except, I guess, to provide an antagonist and a contrast to St. Regina. I don't think they realized that Ursula did provide a contrast, since she got over herself and reconciled with her enemies. The way they did handle all that was such a mess, with everyone being gung-ho about the goal, which turned out to be a bad goal (even Regina admitted that), and Isaac was being punished for doing the sort of thing they were going to ask him to do, and yet none of Regina's cheerleaders ever had the "wow, what were we thinking?" moment, even when it led them into some pretty awful stuff.

Then the Darkness stuff should have been a totally different plot, building toward the Dark One thing, so that it mattered that Emma was able to resist the effort to turn her dark, and that gave her strength for dealing with the Dark One. I'd rather skip the eggbaby entirely, but if you're going to use that story, then actually use it. Emma is uniquely suited for holding the Darkness long enough to deal with it without being corrupted by it because she has no native darkness. Having the Dark One just makes her normal, or something like that. Then they could have delved more into what was going on with Rumple and what darkness means, what it does to people.

I guess 4A actually started the downhill slide into misery, with Emma being tormented about her powers and whether she was a threat to her family, but it really got going here, with the whole battling darkness thing, and from there it was a steep slide into the Dark One and the Underworld and the Savior shakes and doom prophecy, and why was anyone surprised that Jennifer Morrison wanted out? It must have been oppressive coming to work each day and living all that, over and over again, with hardly any joy or triumph to balance it out.

2 hours ago, KingOfHearts said:

And in the middle of all of that, the writers threw in a random flashback about Regina being barren. Okay??

I think that kind of fit the theme, since it was part of her being the main thing getting in the way of her own happiness, and that led to her realization that she writes her own happy ending. But it's also part of the problem of trying to make her more sympathetic in the present by making her more evil in the past -- how many people, including children, died because of her longing for children that stemmed from her making herself barren just to spite her mother? There were the kids she sent after the apple, then she practically orphaned Hansel and Gretel (and was willing to kill them) when they rejected her, and then there was Owen's father. But poor Regina.

[KingOfHearts]

2 hours ago, Camera One said:

If we look at the arc from afar, I think we see that it was a very cohesive story, with a theme that deeply explored motherhood from all angles, culminating in probably one of the masterpieces of television history - "Mother".

Oddly, "Mother" is probably one of the better episodes of 4B. It was uplifting in the midst of a lot of depressing stuff going on. Emma reconciling with her parents, Lily uniting with Maleficent, etc. The plot was finally being tied together... somewhat.

You could apply this "motherhood theme" logic to most of the Disney canon.

Quote

I think that kind of fit the theme, since it was part of her being the main thing getting in the way of her own happiness, and that led to her realization that she writes her own happy ending.

The theme had gotten so lost at that point. Underneath everything, there was this plot about Regina finding her happiness. Prior to that episode was "Lily", and before that was "Sympathy for the DeVil". Regina's focus was on saving Robin from Zelena, not her happy ending. It was a bit of "too little, too late". A similar thing happened in 4A where we finally got the Ingrid/Emma flashbacks, but they happened in the middle of all the PLOT stuff and after everyone stopped caring. 

Another reason I didn't like the "Mother" flashbacks was because it was two retcons at once - Cora coming back from Wonderland and Regina drinking poison to make herself barren. 

Quote

But it's also part of the problem of trying to make her more sympathetic in the present by making her more evil in the past -- how many people, including children, died because of her longing for children that stemmed from her making herself barren just to spite her mother? 

The lesson Regina learned really didn't fit her where her redemption arc was at the time. She was acting selfish the whole time and even her big revelation was self-centered. She still lacked empathy. The same thing happened in S6 when she learned to love herself. It was still all about her. 

Edited March 20, 2020 by KingOfHearts

[Speakeasy]

Emma's darkness is ok as a theme-I guess, though personally my eyes rolled back inside my head and I had to have them surgically realigned* when Rumpy said 'ah, you see EMMA actually has the greatest potential for darkness dundundun!' it's so obvious and so nonsensical at this point-but I really think that it needed a better working knowledge of what 'darkness' actually is in this context.

Because when you're talking about dark ones and dark magic you can just assume dark=bad but if you introduce the idea if prenatal darkness transplants you need a decent idea of what is being transplanted and how it's going to impact the patients.

Like with Lily it seemed that her having extra darkness seemed to make her angry and dissatisfied, ok, we can work with that... But if that's the case and Emma has NO darkness shouldn't she be a supremely self confident go-with-the-flow type? She seems like she's got a bit of frustration.

Seriously what is darkness?

Does everyone have darkness? Is it just the normal impulse toward fear, doubt, frustration, anger etc or is it something extra that makes you extra bad? Is the implication here that unless you had an extra darkness infusion-like Lily- you'd never be dissatisfied in what is generally agreed to be a pleasant situation?

What is Darkness when it's at home? 

I mean the whole 'steal a baby dragon to do a prenatal darkness transplant' plotline was cringeworthy anyway and bizarre since you'd really think it would have come up at some earlier point-but IF you're going that way...

*Not really

[Shanna Marie]

On 3/20/2020 at 5:27 AM, Speakeasy said:

Because when you're talking about dark ones and dark magic you can just assume dark=bad but if you introduce the idea if prenatal darkness transplants you need a decent idea of what is being transplanted and how it's going to impact the patients.

Like with Lily it seemed that her having extra darkness seemed to make her angry and dissatisfied, ok, we can work with that... But if that's the case and Emma has NO darkness shouldn't she be a supremely self confident go-with-the-flow type? She seems like she's got a bit of frustration.

Seriously what is darkness?

To further muddy the waters, there's the way they talked about darkness with Hook, where it was treated like a clinical depression that he struggled with.

So there's darkness as in the Dark One, which is a literally dark entity that consumes a person from within and makes it so that everything they do, even beneficial deeds done for good reasons (like healing Robin), is shaded with evil and takes them further down the dark path.

Then there's Lily, who seems to make bad choices so that she seems to have bad luck. That didn't really strike me as "dark." I guess maybe having the darkness in her meant she was always going to make the wrong choice.

But I don't feel like we saw the flipside of that with Emma. Emma also made a lot of bad choices. I guess the difference between her and Lily was that Lily was willing to use and abuse people to get what she wanted, and she didn't care about the consequences to other people as the result of her actions, and I don't feel like Emma was ever that callous (well, except for the Cleo flashback, but everything about that was a big WTH). I guess Emma had to be pretty light to come out of the life she had without being a terrible person.

There was the Black Fairy, where obsession warped good intentions into darkness and evil.

And there was Hook battling inner darkness in a way that sounded like he was battling depression. That in and of itself shouldn't be evil, but it contributed toward his evil because it affected his world view in a way that allowed him to focus only on the dark side of things.

But the whole thing where Emma has the greatest potential for darkness makes zero sense. Maybe if you're looking at it in terms of power and ability, and the person who has a great ability and power has the potential to do either great good or great evil, but that doesn't mean potential for darkness, it's more about potential to have an impact. Emma had the potential to make a great impact on the world, for good or for ill, but that doesn't mean she had potential for darkness. And don't even get me started on the idiocy of having a pregnant woman not qualify as a hero because the embryo she was carrying, only days after conception, had potential for darkness.

[Camera One]

Darkness works like different generations of cell phones.  It depends if you have Darkness 1, Darkness 2, Darkness 2S, Darkness 3, Darkness 3S, Darkness 3 Plus or Darkness Note 3.

On 3/20/2020 at 3:27 AM, Speakeasy said:

Like with Lily it seemed that her having extra darkness seemed to make her angry and dissatisfied, ok, we can work with that... But if that's the case and Emma has NO darkness shouldn't she be a supremely self confident go-with-the-flow type? She seems like she's got a bit of frustration.

I think someone (maybe The Apprentice) specified that Emma would only be free of darkness after the ceremonial un-darking if Emma was raised by parents to cultivate the lack of darkness, or something to that effect.  So that's why Emma wasn't free of darkness and the eggnapping was for naught.  

[Shanna Marie]

11 hours ago, Camera One said:

I think someone (maybe The Apprentice) specified that Emma would only be free of darkness after the ceremonial un-darking if Emma was raised by parents to cultivate the lack of darkness, or something to that effect.  So that's why Emma wasn't free of darkness and the eggnapping was for naught.  

I guess the whole thing was Isaac just trying to set up a situation in which the heroes would be strongly motivated to do something really unheroic so he could say that heroes weren't that great, after all. It had nothing to do with actually removing darkness from Emma. It was essentially a pointless snipe hunt, just to see if they'd fall for it. They may not have had their free will altered by Isaac, but the Apprentice did, and what he told them wasn't true. It was what Isaac wanted him to say.

But if Emma not being raised properly could result in her still having darkness, what about Lily? Would being raised properly mean her darkness didn't matter? It looks like she had good parents and a far better situation than Emma had, but she was still a mess. Was that because of the extra darkness, the fact that she was Maleficent's daughter so she had a genetic tendency toward villain behavior, or was she just a brat? And how much of her adult life came from the Apprentice telling her she had extra darkness and therefore creating a self-fulfilling prophecy and giving her an excuse? You know, maybe telling a troubled teenager prone to making bad decisions that damage other people and with problems taking responsibility for her actions that she can't help it because she has extra darkness might not have been such a great idea. That just gives her a reason to give up and give in to her "darkness" rather than trying to do something with her life.

On the other hand, now that I think about it, maybe that worked out for the best. That might be why she was just a sad-sack loser instead of ruthlessly ruling Wall Street while destroying the environment and small businesses, as I'd figure someone with extra darkness would be doing. If she didn't know, and therefore didn't have an excuse, she might have done something, but with that out, she just gave up and figured she didn't stand a chance, so she did nothing.

[Camera One]

I was thinking that it was a real shame the show never tackled the beloved story "The Princess and the Pea".  

It would have been funny if there was an episode of Emma having to prove she was a princess or something.  

[KingOfHearts]

12 hours ago, Camera One said:

I was thinking that it was a real shame the show never tackled the beloved story "The Princess and the Pea".  

I wish they would've done something with Swan Lake. Although, Emma's costume design in the S3 finale was most likely an homage to the animated adaptation, The Swan Princess.

They should've done more simple references to more Grimm's, Hans Christian Anderson stories, or nursery rhymes. They didn't need to do complete retellings. I would've like to see more random shenanigans like Bo Peep the Warlord that borrowed loosely from popular concepts. Just take material that doesn't have much to it and then take a bunch of liberties with the details.

Edited April 12, 2020 by KingOfHearts

[Camera One]

Normally, I wouldn't suggest that Writers take random allusions and throw them into a show before thinking through overarching plot and character development.

But since the overarching plots and character development were horrible by Season 6, I'd rather have that season be random references to fairy tales, folktales, myths, Disney movies, classic novels, etc.  Heck, have all the realms accidentally reunite at the beginning of Season 6 and the characters just deal with all sorts of randoms for that season.

Edited April 12, 2020 by Camera One

[Shanna Marie]

On 4/12/2020 at 12:48 AM, Camera One said:

It would have been funny if there was an episode of Emma having to prove she was a princess or something.  

They really could have done a lot with that. Emma can probably sleep anywhere, given that she spent so much time on the streets as a kid, so she'd fail the pea under the mattress test. On the other hand, she's probably hyper-aware of possible threats, so she wouldn't be able to sleep while feeling like someone was watching her to see if she reacted to the pea, so it would look like the pea was bothering her and she'd pass the princess test.

[Speakeasy]

On 4/12/2020 at 8:01 PM, Camera One said:

Normally, I wouldn't suggest that Writers take random allusions and throw them into a show before thinking through overarching plot and character development.

But since the overarching plots and character development were horrible by Season 6, I'd rather have that season be random references to fairy tales, folktales, myths, Disney movies, classic novels, etc.  Heck, have all the realms accidentally reunite at the beginning of Season 6 and the characters just deal with all sorts of randoms for that season.

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

[Shanna Marie]

2 hours ago, Speakeasy said:

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

They also could have had a lot more fun with the fish-out-of-water thing, however the Untold Stories came to town. We had a whole bunch of people from other worlds who didn't get the memory download, and the most we got out of it was a couple of shots of Musketeers walking through town and Vikings playing darts. We could have had modern life orientation sessions on using electricity safely, looking out for cars, and how to use a cell phone. There had been individual characters new to this world before, like Hook (when they remembered he didn't have a Storybrooke identity) and Elsa, but never a big group, all at once.

In general, the writers seemed entirely uninterested in seeing how storybook characters reacted and adapted to the modern world. When they bothered, it was highly amusing, so I don't know why they kept forgetting that some of the characters were really out of their element, to the point that it was hard to tell who got the memory download and who didn't.

[Speakeasy]

On 4/22/2020 at 7:32 PM, Shanna Marie said:

They also could have had a lot more fun with the fish-out-of-water thing, however the Untold Stories came to town. We had a whole bunch of people from other worlds who didn't get the memory download, and the most we got out of it was a couple of shots of Musketeers walking through town and Vikings playing darts. We could have had modern life orientation sessions on using electricity safely, looking out for cars, and how to use a cell phone. There had been individual characters new to this world before, like Hook (when they remembered he didn't have a Storybrooke identity) and Elsa, but never a big group, all at once.

There were also the Camelot people, they certainly didn't seem too familiar with the modern world, but it impossible to tell whether they got a curse download or not because besides that one party we didn't really see how they were coping with life in Storybrooke.

On 4/22/2020 at 7:32 PM, Shanna Marie said:

In general, the writers seemed entirely uninterested in seeing how storybook characters reacted and adapted to the modern world. When they bothered, it was highly amusing, so I don't know why they kept forgetting that some of the characters were really out of their element, to the point that it was hard to tell who got the memory download and who didn't.

OUAT always, well after season 1, seemed to take the attitude that really examining the difference between fairy/fictionland and the real world would be too distracting. There's never really any examination or discussion of the fact that they're fictional characters and what that means-not in a way that makes much sense anyway. 

[Camera One]

There were the Merry Men who chose to live in the forest.  We really never got to see their perspective or mindset, but it made sense that they would feel more comfortable in the woods.  The 3B Curse didn't come with a Curse download, I don't think?

[KingOfHearts]

7 hours ago, Camera One said:

There were the Merry Men who chose to live in the forest.  We really never got to see their perspective or mindset, but it made sense that they would feel more comfortable in the woods.  The 3B Curse didn't come with a Curse download, I don't think?

No, I don't believe it did. I guess Zelena did a speed read of What to Expect When You're Expecting in just a couple days to become a fake midwife. But she was reading it later in S5 so who knows? 

I think it would've been interesting if everybody in the 3B curse got a cursed personality but their real personalities still intact, like the original characters after the first curse broke. As you said, the writers didnt do much with their fairy tale personalities outside of having the Merry Men live in the woods. What if Zelena's cursed personality was actually a midwife, or Robin was some lawyer who sued rich people taking advantage of the poor? I've always wished the show did more with the cursed personalities because they were just so interesting. It's like all these fascinating characters in S1 "died" because the fairy tale personalities took over. I miss Mary Margaret, dammit.

[Camera One]

I hadn't read this interview with Rebecca Mader in Season 7

Quote

 I would like to do a spin-off with Zelena and Regina in New York, and we’re cops. We’re still Zelena and Regina, it’s like Cagney and Lacey, bit of a reboot, but it’s still got a magical element, because by day, we’re like badass cops and we go around and we get like drug dealers and bad guys, but then by night, it’s like the capes come on and I’m the Wicked Witch and she’s the Evil Queen, and we just doodle around Manhattan. She’s on the back of my broomstick. The flying monkey. We just get rid of all of the bad guys, like a superhero movie. Then, during the day, we’re bickering because we got each other’s Starbucks order wrong. I mean, it literally writes itself. I would watch that, but not like a full-on drama, drama; it would have to be a dramedy because we’re both so ridiculous and funny in real life that we’d have to throw in some of that stupidity into the show.

Would this have been a good spinoff?  I think Regina was more palatable as a character away from her victims like Snow and Emma, so it might have worked.  But only if there were other hidden fairy tale characters in New York.  

[Speakeasy]

Parilla and Mader had fantastic on screen chemistry, that could have been a great series.