In honor of the S2 DVD coming out in a few days

[potentiality_26]

I'd like to outline my major grievance against Once Upon a Time.

The whole point of the show (call it a theme, if you like) is that in the fairytale world, everyone lived happily ever after; then the curse sent them to the real world, where life began to suck.

Here's the thing: other than Snow White and Prince Charming, absolutely no one got a happy ending.  This undermines the whole point of the show.  And it makes it so much less interesting.  There's a scene in one Ruby/Little Red Hood centric-episode where Henry comments that she just doesn't remember how cool she is.  It's this idea that gives OUAT so much potential: that these people had lives, they had had trials and tribulations, they fought and they got their happy ending- and then their memories and lives were stolen from them.  The David/Mary Margaret merry-go-round in S1 was not my favorite part, but it was still interesting because they went through so much to be together and BAM!  Gone, just like that.  It's much sadder, much darker, to have things like that happen then to have bad things happen in fairy tale land and the real world, as with Rumpelstiltskin and Belle.  All that says is "You still don't get to be with your True Love.  But, you get short skirts and indoor plumbing."  They're practically better off, in most cases.

Also, for the first three episodes (maybe four, it's been a while) the flashbacks seemed to be going backwards: Snow White and Prince Charming get married and the Evil Queen enacts the curse.  Evil Queen gets a hold of the curse.  Etc.  Am I the only one who wanted it to keep going that way?  Instead, the flashbacks just started jumping around and getting a concrete timeline together became the headache of my life.
  

Comments

[liliannabelle.livejournal.com]

I like your take on this. I can't begin to wrap my head around OUAT canon, I'm new to the fandom and I'm too in love with Rumbelle to even notice the other characters, I'm afraid. And when I do pay attention, it begins to annoy me, for the very reasons you have stated here. It feels for so many reasons that it could have been EPIC -- it's a great concept -- but it wasn't so brilliantly executed :/

[potentiality-26.livejournal.com]

ZOMG! *flails* Exactly. Mostly I only watch for Rumbelle and Jefferson (as evidenced, I think, by my content)- but I really, really want to love this show more than I do. It's like they wanted to do two different things that weren't really compatible (a gritty Game of Thrones type fantasy & fairy tales) and wound up stuck in the middle. Le sigh.

[liliannabelle.livejournal.com]

YES! I have been watching the S2 extras on the origins of fairytales and bewailing how this really could have been such a gorgeously EPIC show. And yeah, they do walk the line between too many extremes, not committing to one or the other. Also, imho, the writing is undermined by not holding the constant core of a character true from one world to the next, and wasting waaaaay too much screentime on junk, imo.

Would you mind if I friend you? I am new around here, and I keep inadvertantly offending people because I'm not 100% positive about OUAT :/

[potentiality-26.livejournal.com]

Oh, gosh- absolutely friend me. *friends you right away*

I'm new to LJ myself and I'm still scratching my head now and then about how friending works.

Yeah, absolutely- people who are serious about OUAT sometimes puzzle me too. I'm always thinking- "But could I just have bits of it?"