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So, I don’t really want to post this in the allocated thread because this is a negative comment, so this seems like a nice safe space to do this. I find it so deeply ironic that the next story to be butchered on OUAT’s chopping block is apparently The Count of Monte Cristo, which is a pretty iconic story about revenge, hope, and forgiveness in the European literary canon. I.e. what OUAT claimed to be about, but then, *see discussion of Neal and Robin above.
I’m kinda heartbroken in advance at what they’ll likely to do to it – I grew up with Dumas and Jules Verne, and considering the steampunk aesthetics of the Land of Untold Stories, I have a feeling that this is the direction they’re taking. Except, A&E are essentially your stereotypical bad fanfiction writers who will bend the original work beyond recognition just so their Mary Sue/Stu “player character” wish-fulfillment insert can come out smelling like roses. This bodes badly, y’all.
[adrotate group="5"]I think CS is a symptom rather than the cause. Ultimately, the show became at one point or another a kind of cash grab that was no longer interested in creatively reimagining familiar fairytales while telling complex stories about hope, family, and fate/connections. And yeah, I also think much of this had to do with the fact that A and E are not only incompetent storytellers, they are also unoble to learn from their mistakes. At any sign of criticism they seem to either throw a boy-tantrum or lie. But criticism wouldn’t even be a huge issue if they had a vision for the show and the world they are building which they clearly do not. Also, they have a pretty amaterish understanding of what raising the stakes might look like aside from an exercise in shark jumping.
Ultimately I think OUAT ended up with the mixed blessing of getting a bunch of excellent actors it doesn’t deserve, and who have managed to keep this disaster going long past the point of where it ought to have tanked.
I stand by my zombie OUAT analogy.
*sigh* I stand by my previous insane fandom remark.
This flabbergasts me too. I mean, it’s Josh Dallas. He seems as innocuous as they come. His character is as innocuous as they come. Is this just what all fandoms are like, or is this one particularly ridiculous? I mean, surely GoT must be getting a lot of raging trolls, but is that simply that HBO can hire counter-trolls to monitor social media and mitigate the keyboard warriors more effectively?
@POM — I don’t actually disagree with you, I don’t think Rumbelle is creepy, but that’s more a factor of how it is being portrayed by the actors. The potential is there in the writing. If Bobby chose to play Rumple the same way he did with young Cora and EDR did a kind of “wide eyed innocent” take on Belle we would quickly end up in The Secretary/50 Shades territory (which is the same problem as with the vampire stories. They all eroticize a massive power differential between the partners. I think this is what the people who cry Stockholm are responding to in relation to Rumbelle). But the actors chose to do something different, thank heavens.
@RG — everything you said about love on OUAT. So much this!!!
That’s just a theory, until we know where everyone’s contracts stand.
Yeah, I think if Bobby leaves, this will have a domino effect, not just because all the dearies will decamp too, but because Rumple’s character’s so axial to everyone’s story that if they take him out, very little ‘core’ content will be left, not just in terms of characters, but in terms of world building.
I wish A&E would write S6 as the final, and if S7 gets the green light, they do a post-scriptum. Almost like a “20 Years After” to Dumas’ Three Musketeers. But I think they are too arrogant and creatively bankrupt to not just try to squeeze the last juices out of whatever’s left of OUAT at that point. And you just know they won’t resist pairing Regina with Hyde (or whoever else) because that’s all it seems A&E think their audience cares about. If this happens, I predict a moment of “self-realization” for Regina, who realizes that she didn’t really love Robin, it was her trying to be her best self, and she actually likes her men with a bit more rot at their core. (Can’t you just see A&E trying to sell you that like it’s the new iPhone? Srsly)
He first saw her when she was 14 because that’s the age she was chosen as “the slayer” and in the season 2 finale Buffy says her mother has been washing blood out of her clothes for two years.
Yup. All the vampire stories seem to have that fundamental element of creepiness to them, and the CS pairing is just another instantiation of that. But then again, RumBelle also has that creep factor potential, with the major difference that Bobby’s interpretation of Rumple really plays down the leery factor, in particular with Belle. Colin, on the other hand, sort of plays it up.
Maybe it’s more of a play on bitter medicine/bitter pill, but altered to fit with Jekyll’s serum? So, metaphorically, some sort of unpleasant situation/hard decision that someone is forced to accept?
Either that, or they’re talking about hoppy beer.
On another not, this is apparently an actual thing. Linked for language.
Well, now that’s wholesome message. Who wouldn’t want to get behind that? *sigh*
It is seriously like a hundred things that are a mess because they are trying to surprise us now instead of trying to build a story, build a world, build characters.
I think this also goes back to the Henry discussion above — and why Henry’s not a particularly compelling character anymore. A&E (and maybe this is also ABC’s pressure, it’s certainly typical of Hollywood anyway) seem to feel the need to constantly “raise the stakes.” So more villains, more magic, more earth-threatening, world-shattering mega super big threats, more “heart-stopping romantic moments” (cue totally inappropriate make-out sessions in cemeteries). And so we also get this ridiculous inflation of superlatives (truest believer, author, more evil than all the evils etc).
What they don’t seem to get is that raising the stakes means working with character motivations, because ultimately the audience isn’t going to care about the bigger badder more villainous villain/ impending cosmic doom if the main characters or the world they inhabit no longer make any sense and aren’t worth emotionally investing into. But they keep screwing this up. I mean, Rumple was compelling as an antagonist because there was this conflict set-up: he was willing to see the world burn, but all of it was to find his son. So you have these two sets of stakes, in tension, and that was interesting. Without Neal, the character just sort of collapsed on itself. Similarly, Emma was so compelling because here you have this pretty traumatized survivor who is tasked with saving a bunch of strangers by precisely overcoming the very isolation she is both a victim of, and works so hard to maintain in order to survive. But then, that whole complicated psychological/cosmological set up becomes about Emma’s Walls TM and Hook’s man pain. Anyway, outside of the hardcore shippers who are invested in the romances, I honestly don’t know what the stakes are for the GA at this stage.
So yeah, it’s not just insane writing, it’s an exercise in incompetence.
albeit without Spike’s emotional complexity or character development or detailed back story and character consistency
Or Spike’s humor or social astuteness.
Henry is more annoying than Dawn.
To me the difference is that Dawn was chiefly whiny, whereas Henry is whiny and entitled. I did like him in the first season though, but he got worse and worse with each passing season.
I could get excited about this. If nothing else, it’s about time a peasant got a decent storyline.
Oh, I would absolutely get excited over this. Proletariat of the (multiple parallel) worlds, unite 😉 And actually, that makes me think that the one thing I so wish they had developed more was the political economy of Storybrooke. As in, how the heck is SB getting supplies if it’s invisible? Who’s providing the utilities? I know, magic, but that’s not a particularly satisfying explanation.
