Escapism or grounded in the real world? You can’t decently escape unless you can identify with characters and/or story, and a character can be someone you would wish to be like or someone who is in many ways like you are but doing things better (most of the time). Be it one or the other, characters have a connection to us as we are in the real world. Furthermore even if a show is meant as escapism it reflects on the real world and its issues, if we like that or not, if we are aware of it or not. It doesn’t matter if an audience wants to take a fictional show as something reflecting on their reality, it always does anyway, questioning or upholding believes and views and societal images. And we never can watch or read fiction without our very own bias, based on our believes and experiences.
Yes and this is becoming one of my most basic problems with any sort of morality on ONCE. The premise of ONCE, at its heart, is fairy tales in the real world. I expect there to be fantasy, but I expect there to be a real world, tangible connection to what I experience here on Real! Planet Earth. Season one in SB felt that way. The EF was full of fantasy and magic and myth, but there was also a lot of realism to it: the heartbroken EQ, the tortured father, the girl who felt trapped by patriarchy, the princess who was living by her wits instead of depending on the kindness of strangers. SB was the opposite: it felt very real with just hints of fantasy woven in. There was adultery, political intrigue, small town America judgment, rediscovery of self like with Archie in his centric episode, mothers and sons…but there was a dragon in the basement of a library to remind me that this was a show about fairy tales.
S2 and S3 keep moving away from that balance of fantasy and the real and when questioned, the answer tends towards, “it’s love! anything goes!” or “it’s magic! anything is possible!”
ETA: the moral message on ONCE might be that “all love stories have their problems but you can overcome it!” but the growing issue is that the problems faced by our ships (most of them) are so far removed from our everyday reality–murder, magic, revenge, dark hearts, portal jumping, wife returning from the dead–that it’s hard to relate and find something realistically positive in them because of how far removed they are from reality unless you try really really really hard, and every single shipper does it. We boil our ships down to a quick tagline: “perfect true love,” “second chances” “hope after heartache” “seeing the good in others” but remove every single circumstance in the show in order get these pithy sayings.