OUAT vs. Other Fairy Tales: Compare & Contrast

[Shanna Marie]

27 minutes ago, KAOS Agent said:

I also thought it was amusing that he brought up a minor flaw in the movie - the type that nitpicky fans pick up on - and admitted it was a mistake and that something else should have happened. It's nice that he wasn't defensive about it and pointed it out himself.

I'll confess that I've developed a minor crush on Rian Johnson because I like the way he seems to think, and I like that he's earnest and comes across as rather humble.

As for not being defensive, that makes me think about when Mythbusters took on myths about Titanic, and James Cameron appeared. He supposedly has a huge ego, but he was rather enthusiastic about testing some of the events in the movie scientifically. He was thrilled when he was shown to be right, but took it pretty well when they showed that something didn't work. He did have a pretty good argument for why them proving that the fact that if they'd tied her life vest to the underside of that door, both Rose and Jack could have floated on it doesn't kill the movie: they came up with that idea after having more than a decade to think about it and when they hadn't just been dumped in freezing water by a sinking ship. Would you be able to think that clearly in those circumstances? It was more believable that they wouldn't have thought of that. He also digitally altered the Blu-Ray release when Neal DeGrasse Tyson told him the stars that were visible were wrong.

Now, imagine A&E getting that kind of criticism. When even James Cameron is better than you at coping when people point out flaws, you have problems.

[Rumsy4]

47 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said:

He also digitally altered the Blu-Ray release when Neal DeGrasse Tyson told him the stars that were visible were wrong.

I was actually going to mention this when I started reading your post. But yeah. I remember Neal DeGrasse Tyson mentioning it in his Startalk Radio podcast. I need to get back to listening to that podcast.

[Rumsy4]

Talking of podcasts, I sporadically listen to a Sci-Fi/fantasy podcast called Welcome to Nightvale. It's a sci-fi drama told in podcast format, with a narrator (who is one of the characters) and several supporting charatcers. I am so behind now, but I do want to catch up at some point. They're going to make a TV show out of it. I think it will have to be an alternate timeline from the podcast because it doesn't make sense to just redo the podcast as is in a different format. Unless it focuses on totally different characters--which wouldn't be fun. 

I recently listened to a horror genre podcast called the Black Tapes. It completely outdid LOST in leaving every single mystery unsolved. Every single one. I had only binged it in a week, so I wasn't that upset, but the long-term listeners were pissed. 

[Shanna Marie]

I've started Nightvale a few times since all my friends are into it, and I love it (except I generally hate the music used for the "weather"), but I'm not big on listening to things, so I never get around to keeping up with it, then have to start over because I forgot what happened before. I listen to audio dramas to fall asleep, but I suspect Nightvale would cause weird dreams. I love "strange little town" things, though, and it's funny how many Nightvale references have entered my regular conversation.

I suspect the TV series will lose a lot of the charm, though, because half the fun is that NPR-style radio show that sounds so calm and mild while it's talking about strange stuff. If they just show the strange stuff, then you basically have Haven in the desert.

One of my friends went as a Nightvale radio intern for Halloween, wearing a blood-spattered t-shirt with the call letters and a string of crossed-out intern names, carrying a coffee mug with tentacles coming out of it.

[KingOfHearts]

There's way too much to digest, so I'll keep it brief - I wasn't fond of the new Star Wars movie. 

Spoiler

I agree with @daxx that it had really great moments. Beautiful moments. But there was too much filler and I really hate the direction the plot is going in. There's no way Kylo Ren can hold his ground as the main antagonist in the next film. The scale of things actually got smaller, with so many deaths on both sides of the war. No Republic. There's no telling how big the First Order is. I thought ending the Jedi/Sith orders was really interesting, but the film really double-backed at the end and restored the status quo. Also - the entire middle can just burn.

Kylo Ren reminds me of Regina in all the wrong ways. The flip-flopping between redeemable and irredeemable got old so fast.

Edited December 19, 2017 by KingOfHearts
Added more Kylo Ren stuff

[jhlipton]

10 hours ago, KAOS Agent said:

There was an interview with Rian Johnson about setups/payoffs.

Have you seen the interview where he talks about how he inserted an homage to

Spoiler

Hardware Wars

?  That's funny!

[KAOS Agent]

I was reading another article about how audience knowledge of the characters from the original trilogy makes for a large disconnect between where we find them in the new trilogy and where we last saw them in Return of the Jedi. It was interesting because I think the same can apply to Once in S7. Both S6 and Return of the Jedi provided the characters with a happily ever after type ending. Evil defeated, families reunited, etc. When the audience meets Han, Leia and Luke in The Force Awakens, the difference in their lives was very jarring. Obviously, 30-40 years had passed (it helps that the actors had actually aged that much, so there was a very obvious visual cue unlike with Once), but the story was very short on details about why/how they came to be in that place. Without those details, it's hard for the audience to connect Young!Luke with the man he is in the present or understand Han & Leia's relationship. With a franchise as beloved as Star Wars, such huge changes to the characters without explanation is upsetting & confusing and can turn people off.

I think Once struggles with the same thing. They count too much on the audience relating to Adult!Henry because he's Henry, but they missed the part about explaining the changes to the character. Yes, he's an adult and we'd expect changes, but he's difficult to connect to Young!Henry. He's just a guy with the same name, who obsesses about the 80s. This includes both cursed and non-cursed versions of Henry. Maybe there's too much of his father in him. Young!Bae was nothing like Adult!Bae. We have no real details about how that came about either.

And it's not just Henry. Rumpel is completely off. He's all of a sudden a good guy who doesn't use magic or want power anymore even though he's consistently been shown to backslide. He even wants to help Hook. It's crazy. We never saw that moment for him to hit rock bottom and make this change, it just happened offscreen with no real explanation. That's a huge change to his character and it's hard to believe without seeing a real reason/moment for that change to occur. This is why I feel like I'm watching a totally different show in S7.  A few of the actors are the same, but I don't feel like I know the characters they play and I have no reason to really care about them. The one thing I'll give Star Wars is that at least it gave me new characters to root for that hold my interest whereas Once completely failed at that as well.

[Camera One]

The disconnect is there for sure.  That's why I'm often wary of reunion sequels.  Too often it involves dredging up retread or reversions of characters or the character has gone through too much in the interim to feel the same anymore.  In this case both Star Wars and Season 7 are requels.

I hope I'll watch Star Wars next week.

[Shanna Marie]

I'm not sure I'd put the Once S7 and Star Wars new trilogy "requels" in the same category. At least, they're executed at very different levels.

I've been obsessed with Star Wars since 1977, but even I'll admit that the characters were never what I'd consider three-dimensional. Characterization was never George Lucas's strong suit. What worked for him was that what he did was use strong archetypes, so people felt like they recognized these characters and fleshed them out for themselves by bringing to the story everything they knew instinctively about storytelling, as well as their own interests and experiences. In a way, that was a big part of the appeal because it made the movie very personal to everyone who saw it. You had to invest emotionally for there to be much "there" there. You see this effect in a lot of things that become wildly popular, where if you're not invested, it looks thin and the popularity makes no sense to you, but if you do invest it becomes incredibly personal. It works in film/TV if you've got a good enough cast to work with so little material and bring enough of themselves and their own headcanon to the table, but it also means that everyone who sees the movie is essentially seeing an entirely different movie. I came to the original movie with Disney fairy tale type stuff being my main fiction (in fact, I went to the movie in a total snit because I wanted to see The Slipper and the Rose, which was playing at the same theater, and my parents outvoted me), so I latched onto Luke as the naive farmboy destined to find out that he's the Destined, Chosen One who'll be a great hero, and I remember being baffled that so many of my friends preferred Han because they'd been exposed to a lot more 70s culture antiheroes. I didn't have any good "baggage" to attach to Han's character to flesh him out, so he wasn't very interesting to me. In fact, I couldn't even remember his name after seeing the movie. When I watch the movie now, Han is an entirely different character to me than when I first saw the movie, since I have more and different details to add to what little is actually there (most of it brought by Harrison Ford's personality).

Then we get to the new trilogy, where for the most part they're actually writing characters, not just leaving them at archetypes. They're doing that to the existing characters, which means some fans are going to get upset because the way these characters are written doesn't match their headcanon that they filled in, and they're doing it with the new characters, which gets jarring if you were treating them like you did the original characters and mentally making up your own stuff to fill in the gaps and flesh them out and then the way they're developed isn't what you'd created in your headcanon.

With Once, I feel like they're almost going in reverse. The "original" run was all about deconstructing the fairy tale archetypes and building actual characters on them, but now in the season 7 requel, they seem to be going with archetypes, and not so much big-picture archetypes from the world of fairy tales and folklore or even popular culture, but from their own canon. There's no character to adult Henry because they expect us to import what we knew about child Henry, plus throwing in a bit of Emma and a bit of Charming. There's no character to Lucy because they expect us to just map her onto child Henry from season one. There's no character to Cinderella because I guess we're supposed to be mapping her onto Snow from season one (spunky resistance fighter in the past, meek wimp in the present).

[Mitch]

I was watching the "Librarians" last night...(don't judge...apparently I have a fondness for TV shows with bad special effects..) Anyway, some of them get sucked into a movie screen and are stuck in different genre movies..etc, and the rest of the gang has to free them. Not much different then Once (except this was one episode as opposed to a whole arc of going to the Underworld.) and I was thinking this would have been fun for Once to do, especially since the premise seems to be that all fiction is a reality somewhere.  I was also thinking that for being a town created by a curse and now the only place in the LWOM ....with magic....Storybrooke was pretty damn boring. Sure we had the clock tower and Regina's crypt and the Sorcerers mansion, but shouldn't the town been full of weird things..like a multiplex that would suck the characters into the movie's world or since they love whoring Disney stuff, an actual Haunted Mansion???(would love it to be haunted by all of Rump's and Regina's victims but we know they would never do that...) Since magic was trapped in such a small space it should have been going bonkers...with Regina's  trees grabbing people as the walk under them, etc. 

[tennisgurl]

2 hours ago, Mitch said:

I was watching the "Librarians" last night...(don't judge...apparently I have a fondness for TV shows with bad special effects..) Anyway, some of them get sucked into a movie screen and are stuck in different genre movies..etc, and the rest of the gang has to free them.

No judgement! I like the Librarians a lot! The effects are hokey, but the show doesn't take itself very seriously and has a lot of fun with its wacky plots, and I think its honestly well written and usually well acted. I really do wish Once had taken more advantage of the whole "all fiction is reality somewhere" thing, or played with more types of genres. I am a big fan of genre deconstruction and meta fiction, and I think they could have gotten a lot out of that. But, of course not, they had to just have almost every world they go to be another damn medieval forest, over and over again, and they never really got into the whole meta textual stuff, even when The Author was a thing. I mean, they have all of fiction, why not do something with that?!?!

Edited December 21, 2017 by tennisgurl

[KingOfHearts]

Quote

I mean, they have all of fiction, why not do something with that?!?!

I really liked Frankenstein's World Without Color, the Mr. Darcy cameo in OUATIW, and the concept of the Land of Untold Stories. I just wish they did more with these things.

[RulerofallIsurvey]

16 hours ago, tennisgurl said:

No judgement! I like the Librarians a lot! The effects are hokey, but the show doesn't take itself very seriously and has a lot of fun with its wacky plots, and I think its honestly well written and usually well acted.

I agree.  I've only watched a few of the Librarian episodes, but they were fun!  Kind of like, what a show about Fairy Tales should have been - you know, fun.  The effects are pretty hokey, but I remember the dialogue being pretty snappy, and I like that. 

[Mitch]

16 hours ago, KingOfHearts said:

I really liked Frankenstein's World Without Color, the Mr. Darcy cameo in OUATIW, and the concept of the Land of Untold Stories. I just wish they did more with these things.

Darcy made a cameo? When was that!! If only Rochester (why Boring Hood, what fun it would be to see Regina terrorized by Bertha...she could show her how to be a REAL crazy bitch)or Heathcliff would have been regular characters....

The Land of Untold Stories...(which was stupidly named...why does every realm need a name...or at least called Steampunk world) should have been explored more I agree... It just been a world full of literary /gothic characters..where there is a little magic..but not like all the rest of the goofy "fairy tale" worlds. 

It became increasingly clear that the show wasnt going to be Meta and take on the world of alternate realities of fiction, but a platform to whore out Disney products and characters, and the show suffered from that more each year.

[KingOfHearts]

Quote

Darcy made a cameo? When was that!! If only Rochester (why Boring Hood, what fun it would be to see Regina terrorized by Bertha...she could show her how to be a REAL crazy bitch)or Heathcliff would have been regular characters....

Darcy was a potential suitor for Alice in the episode, "Who's Alice?" Blink and you miss him.

Edited December 22, 2017 by KingOfHearts

[Camera One]

I thought that Mr. Darcy cameo was really fun too.  They also had Grendel as a monster (that reminds me I have to banish that horrific Season 6 Beowulf episode from my mind).

That reminds me... in OUATIW, I couldn't reconcile Jafar's dad as a younger man, and as the old man in the cage.  That was one of the weaknesses of the show for me.  It was like Young Rapunzel vs. Lady Tremaine.  

[Camera One]

I don't watch "Westworld" but I happened to read an article because it said they were bringing "Samurai World" onto the show, which I thought was interesting.  "Samurai World" could very well be next door to the Disenchanted Forest.

I was also reading an article where the actress who plays Rey on "Star Wars" argued back against the label of Mary Sue that some people are giving her.

Quote

In an interview while making the publicity rounds for Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the 25-year-old actress hit back at such critics who argue her orphan alter ego is merely the continuation of a long-running sci-fi archetype in which a female character is seen as  the embodiment of perfection given her amazing abilities and how easily things come to her.

In Rey's case in her debut in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, those included being able to pilot the Millennium Falcon despite never having left the junk planet Jakku, wielding lightsabers like a Jedi, and controlling stormtroopers' minds.

Ridley, however, wholeheartedly rejects the comparison.

"I don't buy the Mary Sue thing anyway. I find the term sexist in itself because it's Mary Sue. I don't think there's a thing called Ryan Craig," Ridley said in the sit-down. "When I was doing it … playing her I never felt sure of what was going on. It wasn't like this was happening and now I'm powerful and look at me go."

I never thought of her as a Mary Sue when I watched "A Force Awakens".  And I was wondering if anyone on "Once" would be considered a Mary Sue.

I then read the description of "Mary Sue" from the TVTropes.org page, which I presume is some sort of Wiki?

Anyway, I did find this description amusing:

Quote

The author wants to write a badass but doesn't know how. This leads to a character who mistreats everyone around her and is never called out on her abrasive, casually abusive behavior.

The first part does describe Murderella to some degree, but she is somewhat called out on her behavior, at least in Hyperion Heights.

Edited December 25, 2017 by Camera One

[Mabinogia]

I've never heard of that definition for Mary Sue. Usually it is a character who is perfect in every way, the smartest, the strongest, the prettiest, bestests woman to ever have existed. I don't think Once has that kind of Mary Sue. Though, now I think of it, I'm surprised we haven't had "practically perfect in every way" Mary Poppins yet. 

The "mistreats everyone around her and is never called out on her abrasive, casually abusive behavior" sounds like Regina, unless it means being called out by fans. Because fans call her out like crazy but on the show everyone kind of seems to have just accepted her being a total bitch to them.

I also never found Rey to be a Mary Sue. She's just someone who kind of flys by the seat of her pants and hopes for the best. I never ever EVER want this show to get anywhere near Star Wars. They have ruined enough fairytale and literary characters. Leave Star Wars the hell alone you hacks! Actually, Mary Poppins, too. And anything else you have yet to destroy with your crap writing. 

[Camera One]

9 minutes ago, Mabinogia said:

Leave Star Wars the hell alone you hacks! 

A&E have said they loved Star Wars too much to adapt it.  Their subconscious probably recognize that everything they touch turn into a disaster.

Having said that, Jacinda is really Princess Leia and her long-lost brother Luke will show up, one of the Witches turn out too be Darth Vader and Mother Gothel started off as Yoda.

[jhlipton]

Daisy Ridley:

Quote

"I don't buy the Mary Sue thing anyway. I find the term sexist in itself because it's Mary Sue. I don't think there's a thing called Ryan Craig,"

She's wrong -- the male equivalent is "Marty Stu"  James Tiberius Kirk is one.

[Shanna Marie]

It does seem like female characters are more likely to be labeled Mary Sues than male characters are to be labeled Marty Stus. Sometimes, it's as though a female character who can walk across a room without tripping over her own feet and who manages to do anything semi-competently gets called a Mary Sue.

I think the real hallmark of a Mary Sue is a character the writer identifies with so closely that he/she can't be objective about them. That's what leads to all the other characterstics -- being the Destined, Chosen One with Magical Specialness; being instantly good at everything for no good reason; being able to be nasty to people and still have them love her; all the boys are in love with her and all the girls are jealous; or else she's the ultimate victim and everyone hates her unfairly, etc. Not every Mary Sue is all of these things.

If there's a Mary Sue/Marty Stu in the Star Wars universe, I think it was Anakin Skywalker in the prequels. It got to ridiculous levels how "special" he was, and I got the feeling George Lucas was way too fond of that character.

On Once, Emma on paper could easily have gone into Mary Sue territory: She was a Destined, Chosen One, she had unexpected magical powers, she was a princess, she won a fight the first time she picked up a sword. But they never wrote her as a Mary Sue. She screwed up a lot, and every time she got called out on it. Not everyone automatically loved her. And then she slid off the edge of the show along the way.

I don't think Regina started as a Mary Sue, but the writers fell in love with her along the way and in a lot of ways turned her into a Mary Sue, starting in season 3. She got the magical pixie dust True Love, she suddenly had the most powerful White Magic ever, all the people she used to torment loved her and would sacrifice for her. The rules of the universe seemed to rearrange themselves around her.

[Rumsy4]

4 hours ago, jhlipton said:

Daisy Ridley:

She's wrong -- the male equivalent is "Marty Stu"  James Tiberius Kirk is one.

I’d heard the term “Gary Stu” before. 

Regina certainly turned into a Mary Sue starting somewhere around Season 3. 

[daxx]

9 hours ago, Rumsy4 said:

I’d heard the term “Gary Stu” before. 

Regina certainly turned into a Mary Sue starting somewhere around Season 3. 

Regina has Mary Sue moments but the worst case in my viewing experience is Lana Lang in Smallville. So bad I don’t even know where to begin. That didn’t even go away after the creators were canned but continued to season 8. I guess the writers just got used to writing her that way?

[Trini]

On 12/24/2017 at 9:58 PM, Shanna Marie said:

It does seem like female characters are more likely to be labeled Mary Sues than male characters are to be labeled Marty Stus. Sometimes, it's as though a female character who can walk across a room without tripping over her own feet and who manages to do anything semi-competently gets called a Mary Sue.

I hate the term "Mary Sue". Besides the fact that it seems to mean something different every time I see it used; it generally seems to boil down to "female chaacter I don't like". I just wish people would say what they mean instead of using this mostly vague label. /rant

[Shanna Marie]

Last week, my PBS station marathoned a series called Dickensian, which in a sense does for the works of Charles Dickens what Once does for fairy tales -- up to a point. Basically, all of the works of Dickens take place in a shared universe, and the characters from different books interact. Only, it doesn't seem to be twisting them too much. It mostly seems to be filling out the lives of these people before the stories in which they appear, with the main twist being the fact that they interact (and I think there's some artistic license in the time period in which they're set, as some of those books don't take place during the time in which they were published, so Bleak House, for instance, would have already happened before the 1840s, but we're seeing the backstory after Victoria takes the throne). So, we see Miss Havisham as a young woman, and they're setting up the circumstances in which she'll end up being jilted. The future Lady Dedlock (from Bleak House) is her best friend, and that family is in debt to Scrooge and Marley. Jacob Marley is murdered, the inspector from Bleak House is investigating it, and among the suspects are Fagin and Bill Sikes (from Oliver Twist). I'm only a few episodes in (after recording the whole thing), and it's interesting. It looks like it's available on BritBox, if you have that streaming service.

[Camera One]

I'll have to catch that sometime.  I think I'd want to read the rest of Dickens' books first.  I still have a few to read.  

I haven't been to an actual musical for over a decade but my friend wanted to see "Aladdin" since it was in town.  It was entertaining and I enjoyed the singing and visuals.  I was surprised that the cartoon Aladdin and Jasmine still felt more real and emotionally real to me, than the musical versions.  Musical Aladdin seemed too buffoonish and dumb.  To some extent, it was a problem in the movie as well, since he never really came clean to Jasmine.  It was Jafar who ultimately revealed his true identity to everyone.  I had hoped Aladdin would come to more of a realization on his own and redeem himself more.  Jasmine was a little too abrasive and whiny.  My friend she didn't like how feminist she was, though I didn't find that a problem.  

Of course, the musical adaptation was high art compared to the "Once" versions of Aladdin and Jasmine.  Watching the musical did remind me that the whole theme of wanting to be free came out in many different aspects of the Aladdin story, from Aladdin himself, to Jasmine, to the Genie.  It's too bad "Once" didn't use that theme to build a coherent half-season arc.  Or did A&E intend "The Shears" to be a metaphor for becoming free from one's destiny.  Instead, it became a big joke.

[Rumsy4]

True confession. I haven't read an unabridged edition of any of Dickens' works. For some reason, he's the one Victorian author I can't seem to actually--read. I seem to have this mental block when it comes to Dickens. I think the problem was that when I was a kid I read abridged editions of several Dickens novels, without realizing they were abridged. I guess I might go for an audiobook at some point. I need to decide which one I should try first. Probably Oliver Twist. I think he would have made for an excellent Lost Boy in ONCE.

[Mabinogia]

12 minutes ago, Rumsy4 said:

Probably Oliver Twist. I think he would have made for an excellent Lost Boy in ONCE.

yet another great missed opportunity. 

[Shanna Marie]

I'll admit that I haven't read a lot of unabridged Dickens. I think abridging improves him a lot because his works were generally not meant to be read straight through as a novel, since they were published as serials. It's like watching the old Doctor Who stories when PBS sticks all the episodes of a story into one episode, and that means there's a lot of padding because of having to recap a bit from the previous segment that's not needed when they're all put together. In a sense, some of Dickens does read like a season of Once, since he was still writing after the earlier chapters were already published, and there are times when he changed his mind. There are characters who vanish, subplots that fizzle out and go nowhere, continuity issues, pacing issues, and sometimes plot holes or alien vampire bunnies. I love the story of Our Mutual Friend, but it gets really crazy as a novel because you can tell it was written as a serial and he got trapped in things he'd already published and would have liked to have revised, and there are a couple of plot lines that just stop. Either he lost interest in them or he forgot about them.

But I love the BBC TV miniseries from Dickens books, and BBC radio does some good audio dramas. I just finished listening to an audio version of Dombey and Son on the BBC Radio website.

This Dickensian series is getting hard to watch because you know where it's all going. I keep wanting to yell at the TV to warn characters not to do things. The only characters out of this bunch who have happy endings are Scrooge and the Cratchitts. Everyone else comes to a horrible end, and this series is about how they got into those jams. It's sad when one of the few characters you know is going to be okay is one of the most awful people now.

You know, a more apt resident of the Land of Untold Stories would have been one of those Dickens characters whose story got dropped. I'm still not sure how people whose stories have been told and retold repeatedly in many forms qualified as "untold."

[Camera One]

23 minutes ago, Rumsy4 said:

True confession. I haven't read an unabridged edition of any of Dickens' works. For some reason, he's the one Victorian author I can't seem to actually--read. I seem to have this mental block when it comes to Dickens. I think the problem was that when I was a kid I read abridged editions of several Dickens novels, without realizing they were abridged. I guess I might go for an audiobook at some point. I need to decide which one I should try first. Probably Oliver Twist. I think he would have made for an excellent Lost Boy in ONCE.

I liked "Great Expectations".  I found "Oliver Twist" hard to get through, but I plan to try again eventually.  I remember reading "A Tale of Two Cities" in high school English and half the class failing because they didn't understand the book, LOL.

Edited January 1, 2018 by Camera One

[Shanna Marie]

A Tale of Two Cities is one of the few I read straight through. I was reading it for school, but ended up plowing through it early rather than on the class schedule because I couldn't put it down. I liked David Copperfield. I think it was easier to get through because of the first-person narration. I really, truly love A Christmas Carol because his use of language there is so lovely. It shows that he had a chance to edit and polish that one before it was all published.

I think I'm going to tackle Bleak House next.

[CCTC]

I liked David Copperfield, A Christmas Carol, and ultimately like Tale of Two Cities but it was touch and go for awhile.

The one I did not care for was The Curiosity Shoppe.  I know it was a different time but the heroine was so passive and so easily victimized and so sweet and beloved that you wanted to strangle her.  

[Rumsy4]

2 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

I think abridging improves him a lot because his works were generally not meant to be read straight through as a novel, since they were published as serials.

Lol. That’s a good point. But Victorian writers in general tended to ramble or philosophize in the middle of the narrative. I love Gaskell’s North and South, but parts of it are practically unreadable (the only place the mini-series improved on the original was tightening the characters of Higgins and Bessy). It always makes me admire all the more Austen’s razor-sharp economy of words. 

2 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

You know, a more apt resident of the Land of Untold Stories would have been one of those Dickens characters whose story got dropped. 

Absolutely! There are even a bunch of unfinished works from different authors that would fit the bill. Like Austen’s Sanditon. 

Quote

I'm still not sure how people whose stories have been told and retold repeatedly in many forms qualified as "untold."

Explain that on twitter, Adam!

[Camera One]

3 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

I'm still not sure how people whose stories have been told and retold repeatedly in many forms qualified as "untold."

The name didn't even make sense from the first episode where they revealed the existence of the Land of Untold Stories.  How is "Jekyll and Hyde" an untold story?  Unless they meant this was the version that was never-before told, but that also applies to Snow White and all the other fairy tales they butchered, uh, I mean adapted for this show.  

[Mabinogia]

I was really confused by the "untold stories" concept too. It would have made sense if they'd been side characters from main fairytales, like the story of one of the evil step sisters or the White Rabbit, or one of Merida's brothers from Brave, or any character from a fairytale who was a sidekick, or just mentioned but didn't really have their own story told. Those are characters with untold stories. 

I forget what the reasoning in show was, for that to be the land of untold stories. I'm assuming they tried to explain it somehow. 

[Rumsy4]

Considering Eddy's alleged interest with the red-shirts on LOST, I'm surprised they didn't go that route with ONCE. In fact, we even stopped seeing red-shirts on ONCE. Storybrooke was starting to look like a ghost town populated only by the Nevengers, Granny, and the dwarfs. I'm guessing with both Rumple and Regina gone, people will slowly start trickling back in. ;-)

Edited January 1, 2018 by Rumsy4

[Shanna Marie]

39 minutes ago, Rumsy4 said:

I'm guessing with both Rumple and Regina gone, people will slowly start trickling back in. ;-)

The rest of the citizens of Storybrooke were living in caves in the hills, hiding out from the latest round of unspeakable evil coming to take over Storybrooke. That is, the ones that were left after the mass exodus through the magic door at the end of season five. Or had they discovered the doors in the Sorcerer's mansion, and had they been slipping away all along?

2 hours ago, Mabinogia said:

I forget what the reasoning in show was, for that to be the land of untold stories. I'm assuming they tried to explain it somehow. 

I think their attempt at explanation made it make even less sense. The stories were untold ... because they were in a different book? Something like that. Really, it was more like the pause button world, people escaping their stories because they didn't want them to play out, like Jekyll, Nemo being wounded, the Count of Monte Cristo wanting to keep the handmaid from dying, etc. Which was also an interesting concept (potentially) -- people who could see the train wreck coming and wanted to avoid the inevitable, and who might leap at the chance of changing things. Like I'm seeing in this Dickensian series, where Miss Havisham's evil suitor is doing a whole flag drill with red flags and I keep wanting to shout at the screen "Your dog doesn't like him! You should know to run! He convinced your friend to leave the country! Do not get engaged to this man!" but we know that the whole point of Miss Havisham is that she got jilted and hates men (after seeing this, I don't blame her). I could see her brother, after realizing what he unleashed and how he's getting caught up in it, wanting to take them to a place where everything's on hold. But that's not "untold stories."

Untold Stories would be the other stepsisters, or perhaps other girls at the ball whose only hope was meeting a prince who didn't get to. Or the people outside Sleeping Beauty's castle who had loved ones inside affected by the spell, so they were separated.

[Mabinogia]

8 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said:

Untold Stories would be the other stepsisters, or perhaps other girls at the ball whose only hope was meeting a prince who didn't get to. Or the people outside Sleeping Beauty's castle who had loved ones inside affected by the spell, so they were separated.

Yes, this is it exactly. The untold stories are the stories of the people in the background, who got burned by someone else's story. It would be fascinating to hear the story of one of the people who lost a loved one to the sleeping curse that affected not just Sleeping Beauty but everyone in the castle. They have every right to be bitter. Not only did their loved one get cursed, no one seems to care because the story wasn't about them. The other girls at the ball is brilliant. The entire trajectory of these women's lives changed when Cinderella, who wasn't supposed to be there, showed up at the ball. Those are the untold stories of people who got caught up in someone else's story. That would have been an interesting place to visit, a place of refuges from other stories who want their moment in the spotlight, who want their story to be told. 

Thinking about it, that should be where Henry went when he wanted to get all involved in other stories to be a hero. He should have gone to the place where untold stories are just waiting to be told. He could right the wrongs done to these bit characters. He could have been their hero since they never had a hero of their own. They could have, half way through the season, blown our minds. Cinderella isn't the hero of this story, it's Tiana, who was also at the ball, who was meant to be the one the prince fell for except Cinderella crashed the party as part of her story, totally screwing up Tiana's story and leaving it untold. (yes, I'm looking for any way to get rid of Murderella)

[tennisgurl]

The whole "Land of Untold Stories" thing reminded me a bit of Grant Morrison's Animal Man run where the hero, who is experiencing breaks in the Fourth Wall of his comic, stumbles into a kind of comic book Limbo, where characters who have been forgotten or retconed out of continuity just sit around waiting to be written into a story again. I think that is maybe what they were going for with the LoUS, but, like most Once stories, the very promising idea is immediately squandered to spend more time on Regina and convoluted plotting.

Actually, the same run had an interesting ending to contrast with the whole half assed "Author" subplot we got. 

Spoiler

Animal Man realizes that he is a fictional character and his whole world is controlled by writers from a "real" world, and he ends up confronting Grant Morrison himself (or, at least, a stand in that Morrison wrote into the story) and tells him off for making his life suck to create drama for the story, and how all writers use and abuse their characters. Morrison ends up re-writing the story so that Animal Man gets a happy ending because he learns a lesson about treating his fictional characters better. 

I really am disappointed that the show never went full meta, and just kind of hinted around it. Granted, comparing A&E to Morrison is like comparing a diamond ring to a cracker jack box prize, but it just seems like such an inevitable story and idea, that was never really explored. 

[Guest]

6 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

I think their attempt at explanation made it make even less sense. The stories were untold ... because they were in a different book? Something like that. Really, it was more like the pause button world, people escaping their stories because they didn't want them to play out, like Jekyll, Nemo being wounded, the Count of Monte Cristo wanting to keep the handmaid from dying, etc. Which was also an interesting concept (potentially) -- people who could see the train wreck coming and wanted to avoid the inevitable, and who might leap at the chance of changing things.

{snip}

Untold Stories would be the other stepsisters, or perhaps other girls at the ball whose only hope was meeting a prince who didn't get to. Or the people outside Sleeping Beauty's castle who had loved ones inside affected by the spell, so they were separated.

I think they ultimately did all of these.

First Henry came across OUAT books with characters he'd never seen before, like Paul Bunyan and Babe. They were the inhabitants of the Land of Untold Stories.

Then it did seem like people just fled their stories to get away from a bad end.

Didn't Cinderella's stepsister also end up in the Land of Untold Stories too?

I'm also think that the initial idea of there being other versions of the fairy tales from S1-6 that is the premise for the requel S7 was also probably something they were thinking about for land of Untold stories.  That begs the question of whether the abort they did was because they figured out they needed to save the concept to go on with S7 with a reduced cast or if they aborted it because the network didn't like it.

As with everything else, they take an idea that has a lot of possibility to revitalize the show and then do absolutely nothing with it.

This show would be a lot better if they could at least motivate themselves to read Wikipedia to inspire a couple ideas and avoid doing absolutely nothing episode after episode.

[Rumsy4]

I watched the first episode of Black Mirror Season 4. This Show's like a bleaker and more cynical version of the Twilight Zone. The main character in this episode is an underappreciated gamer nerd. He reminded me a lot of Rumple and Isaac--the sort of guy who is overlooked by women and bullied by more powerful men, etc., etc.. He is the creator of an immersive simulated reality game sometime in the future. Without spoiling things too much, let's just say, I could see exactly how A&E would've written the episode. 

[Guest]

The Magicians is returning next week and I was watching a trailer.  It got me to thinking about OUAT because both shows do part of their time in the real world with magic and part in a magical land.

The Magicians is on a basic cable network historically run by evil corporate monkey turds.  I have to imagine that their budget reflects that.  So why is their production quality so much better than OUAT?

They get to have extras that make the world seem populated. Their CGI isn't completely embarrassing half the time.  You don't sit there going, well that is obviously green screen.  They get to change their wardrobe.  They don't seem to mill around the same set for half a season.  Or maybe they do, but when they do they aren't in the midst of an adventure in a new land where they should be seeing and exploring things. 

It makes me think that the problem is that A&E can't run a show more than they can't write a show.  Their inability to find a way to execute the show they want within the budget limitations basically causes them to write to the budget concerns instead of finding a creative way to manage them and hide them from the audience.

The thing that is frustrating is that with other shows you can look at them and say, well the first season was rough but they learned how to deal with it and the production issues are less noticeable. later

This show had producer help in season 1 and they didn't seem to be able to learn as they went along or add people who could help them beyond then.

[Camera One]

28 minutes ago, ParadoxLost said:

It makes me think that the problem is that A&E can't run a show more than they can't write a show.  Their inability to find a way to execute the show they want within the budget limitations basically causes them to write to the budget concerns instead of finding a creative way to manage them and hide them from the audience.

Their ability to write a show is pretty lame, so I think that's still the bigger weakness.  Most of the time, I think the show does look better than the story.

I wonder if it's normal for the showrunners to be in a completely different city than where the show is actually filmed.  I guess it happened with "Lost" with Damon and Carlton in LA and the filming in Hawaii?   I would imagine it's a lot harder to make quick and effective decisions from that far away.

Edited January 3, 2018 by Camera One

[Rumsy4]

They probably blew half the budget in Regina/Evil Queen outfits. And Eduardo has said that they typically make at least two copies of the elaborate outfits as they get damaged filming all those forest scenes. No wonder they don’t have enough money for everything else.

[Camera One]

They can save money by buying Mary Margaret's wardrobe from the bargain bin.

[jhlipton]

On 1/1/2018 at 11:37 AM, Shanna Marie said:

the people outside Sleeping Beauty's castle who had loved ones inside affected by the spell, so they were separated.

What about the people in the castle waking up and dealing with a world that is One Hundred Years Later.  That could be fun, too.

On 1/1/2018 at 11:58 AM, tennisgurl said:

The whole "Land of Untold Stories" thing reminded me a bit of Grant Morrison's Animal Man

This sounds a bit like "Stranger Than Fiction" (which is the only Will Ferrell movie I've ever liked!

3 hours ago, ParadoxLost said:

The Magicians is on a basic cable network historically run by evil corporate monkey turds.  I have to imagine that their budget reflects that.  So why is their production quality so much better than OUAT?

The Magicians is a show I'll never watch.  While the rest of SyFy has plenty of People of Color (Lt Roberta Warren is the leader of Z Nation, and Superstition is about a whole family of PoCs), I think I saw one black woman in the previews for The Magicians and she was Eeeeeeeeevil!  No thanks.

[tennisgurl]

37 minutes ago, jhlipton said:

This sounds a bit like "Stranger Than Fiction" (which is the only Will Ferrell movie I've ever liked!

4 hours ago, ParadoxLost said:

Yeah, there are definitely similarities. I wish Will Ferrell played normal more, he is pretty good at it. 

39 minutes ago, jhlipton said:

The Magicians is a show I'll never watch.  While the rest of SyFy has plenty of People of Color (Lt Roberta Warren is the leader of Z Nation, and Superstition is about a whole family of PoCs), I think I saw one black woman in the previews for The Magicians and she was Eeeeeeeeevil!  No thanks.

I am honestly wracking my brain, and I've seen all of The Magicians, and I cant think of a major black female character I would call Eeeeeeeeevil. I seriously have no clue, unless something was taken out of context, or I am forgetting a fairly major plot point. The Magicians isn't the best minority representation on SyFy, but its not awful. 

[Souris]

If you're looking for new versions of classic fairy tales, try Marissa Meyers' Lunar Chronicles novels, starting with Cinder. I enjoyed the heck out of them. Sci-fi takes on Cinderella, Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel and Snow White.

[Guest]

15 hours ago, tennisgurl said:

I am honestly wracking my brain, and I've seen all of The Magicians, and I cant think of a major black female character I would call Eeeeeeeeevil. I seriously have no clue, unless something was taken out of context, or I am forgetting a fairly major plot point. The Magicians isn't the best minority representation on SyFy, but its not awful. 

The Dean of the school is black.  One of the leads is Indian.  Another is gay and is (was?, can't remember) in a relationship with a black King.

I too can't think of a black female character who was evil.

The Magicians may not be on the leading edge of minority representation but its not really any worse than this show.

[jhlipton]

On 1/2/2018 at 10:48 PM, tennisgurl said:

I am honestly wracking my brain, and I've seen all of The Magicians, and I cant think of a major black female character I would call Eeeeeeeeevil.

All I saw was a split-second preview, so I may have been mistaken.  It was only for a single episode as well.

9 hours ago, ParadoxLost said:

The Magicians may not be on the leading edge of minority representation but its not really any worse than this show.

NABA (Not As Bad As) this show is hardly a ringing endorsement.  The Magicians stands out on SyFy because the network really is better than that.