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You guys and Lana Parrilla are really the only reason I’m still watching this sinking titanic show.
LOL. Hear hear. Sinking titanic overrun with zombies.
For me it’s Lana, RC, and this community. I think if any of these components go, I will finally feel justified to stop wasting my time and put this damn thing to rest. Lana at least has a relatively well-written character to work with — though I agree with you, the ships are nothing if not tedious at this point. And it infuriates me that these writers can’t write interesting couples without making them blander than string cheese, or inserting unnecessary, farfetched, and vaguely distasteful “drammaz.”
You didn’t hear the news did you? That’s gonna be Season 6…yeah, Adult Dark One Snowflake comes from the future to wage a war to stop his sister Emma, whose gonna do something very bad in the future.
#headdesk
I will say however, I expect Snow and Charming to be pivotal at the end of this. With this whole sharing a heart thing, my prediction has always been that the two of them would bite the dust together in a last moment of glory to save Emma and or save baby Neal, which would mirror the pilot.
I think there are several different points here: there’s the narrative question, and the centrality of their stories to OUAT more generally, there’s the branding and name recognition question (OUAT=fairytales=Snowhite) and there’s the contract pragmatics. If the contracts are up, they’d have to redraw a contract for next season, and depending on how they plan to deploy the characters and how much screen time they’ll have, I presume the network could just offer less money. Then it’d be up to Ginny and Josh to decide what they want, and if they’re ready to move on, then that’s that.
Re: narrative. Snow and Charming act more as the armature for other characters — for Regina and Emma mostly. They don’t really have any independent relationships of any significance outside of those two, except occasional group scenes — most of their closer ties (Red for example) got relegated to forgotten character island. This means that they’re already a pretty atomized node in the network. So they might be more useful to the writers as ‘sacrificial’ characters to kill off, sooner rather than later, as a way of moving along the characters they’re more interested in writing (Emma and Regina). They can tie some lose ends — Snowing giving their blessings to Emma and Hook, asking to raise baby Neal as their own — and voila. The end of their journey.
As to how that happens — via the heart share or ridiculous gimmick thought up while drunk the night before — is probably not very high on the list of considerations.
I’m just going to leave this here. A new study on gender and language use in Disney cartoons. I’m sure many have seen it already — and it’s nothing to rejoice at.
As I sit here typing, I can’t quite figure out if the focal shift (from heroes to villains) goes along with the thematic shift (from family to romance) but I do think they work together.
Perhaps it’s a symptom of a paradigm shift in the show: family and other non-romantic relationships (like friendships) at some point were no longer “enough.” I think in the early seasons OUAT actually played with this idea quite consciously, and actively worked to subvert some of the classic fairytale romance tropes: so first, the primacy of the Emma/Henry/Regina relationship, and later Regina’s ultimately ill-fated efforts to resurrect Daniel and cling to the past. Even early OQ was very meta about the “necessity” of romance as an ingredient of a “happily ever after” — but then, all the meta just stopped, and it all became very straight forward. Much of this might be simply a fall back to the “cultural standard” — a sort of regression to the mean over time.
The finale of S4 was so self-aware that it makes me think that A and E are actually more aware of what they’ve done to their story than I have previously credited them with.
I think aware — yes, but self-critical — no. Like they know something’s off, but they aren’t quite able to step away enough from it to fix it (or listen carefully enough to their critics to get a sense of what directions they might take).
The writers likely came up with this idea because they had been struggling to do anything interesting with Snow and Charming for a while, thus this twist was created to mix things up a bit. This also may have been an attempt to further emphasize the grey area between heroes and villains.
I think that another reason to take Snow and Charming down a notch was that OUAT’s concept of “evil” is suffering from a bad case of inflation. So each new villain introduced just ups the ante — both Hook and Zelena are good examples of this. While Cora, Rumple, and Regina had done some despicable things, they weren’t cartoonish in their villainy. Sure, Regina and Rumple were pretty flamboyant, but there was always something very human and almost realistic underneath the carnivalesque antics. S2 Hook, before he went Fabio, started to wander into campy “opera villain” territory. But then came Zelena and made all the rest of them look like boyscouts (and what she lacked in equal opportunity genocidal tendencies, she made up in targeted sadism). But now OUAT decided to take on the project of making her sympathetic. That’s a tough sell if you have any characters that can act as any kind of moral compass. So taking down Snow and Charming from their heroic perch is a way of leveling the field.
I think you’re right that it backfired, and it also didn’t really work. Zelena might be entertaining in her ridiculousness, but I wouldn’t call her relatable or sympathetic. It’s also telling that she’s at her most likeable when she derides the other characters, which have become increasingly unlikeable themselves.
The great irony here, by the way, is that Frozen is one of the few Disney movies that actively places family love over romantic love.
Yes, absolutely! (And also everything you said in the post about Emma’s hero journey is spot on). Which is why it’s also so frustrating that Emma is now stuck in her own version of eternal recurrence (the reset to 0 phenomenon). And while I also agree with some of the other posters here that Regina’s arc stands out as the only one that’s relatively well done, sometimes it feels like OUAT treats character development as a zero sum game. Which makes me wonder if maybe the writers have a very limited set of ideas about how characters can develop, and therefore if the progression doesn’t go along a certain model, the character stagnates. Emma, Snow, Charming, and Rumple all suffer from different degrees of fossilization at this stage.
I think trying to find “causality” with why the show went so awry (fanservice or story) is always going to be speculative insofar as it tries to attribute intent to the writers. But we certainly can think about how it went south (i.e the mechanics) — so that’s where shark jumps and plot holes come into play. The other question is what sorts of messages OUAT then promotes, wittingly or not. In that sense, re: shipping — there’s an argument to be made that the kind of bullying, ship obsessed fandom doesn’t just come out of thin air, but is actually produced by the show itself. @RG, your observation about the change in the shipping practices suggests exactly that — that there’s a turning point in the “mood” of the fandom that also corresponds to a turning point in the show.
Similarly, the upthread discussion of SQ I think illustrates the way OUAT shifted gears with privileging romantic love: that all (non-blood-kin) “pairings” are tinged with something like potential romance is a bit odd. There’s something about OUAT then that seems to promote a rather narrow and rigid hierarchy of who counts as “significant others,” while executing a weird sort of double speak — so it’s about family on the surface, but what “motors” the story and characters forward is the romance.
I believe that the moment they decided to make a love interest of Hook as a gimmick that they thought would bring in viewers as jumping the shark and that it irretrievably changed the show from it’s original formula.
I agree with much of what you said, but I’m curious about what you (and others here) think that original “formula” was, and how it’s changed. For me, it was the way in which kinship ties, both biological and fictive, drive one to grow as a person. So for example, the fact that the TLK in S1 was about parental love was this wonderful, unexpected twist on the standard folklore.
OUAT then began to emphasize how romantic love is the driving agent of change, as it is meant to (often literally) re-form the other person (seemingly successful and hence celebrated by the audience with CS, and to some extent OQ, unsuccessful and hence condemned by the audience with Rumbelle). An emphasis on romance — and mind you, budding romance, rather than, say, long term marital love is a lot more “run of the mill” and unoriginal, culturally speaking, than the kinship story.
And I think it’s also pretty pernicious. For one, because it sidelines all other relationships. So Snow and Charming, who were first at the core of the story, got kicked to the curb and dumbified in favor of “hotter,” newer pairings. The result of this is that OUAT seems to perpetuate the pop culture stereotype that old married couples are “boring,” and there are no stories to tell about them except for the occasional marital squabble and comic relief. Second, vertical kinship ties (parents/children) now only figure as an explanatory model for why such and such a villain grew up to be a massive jerk (always the parents’ fault, with the refreshing exception of Cruella). And third, it simultaneously essentializes a person’s identity along a polarized Hero/Villain contrast pair (with all the handwringing about whether the former villain is really a hero, should be a hero, can be a hero, ad nauseum over the last 3 seasons… so much flailing over being, or not being a hero, as if that’s actually a thing), but simultaneously requires for that identity (now inscribed and overdetermined) to be overcome for the sake of the romantic partner. That seems to have been the new formula for writing the 3 main “ships” of the show — with small variations with each couple — and since the ships are now the focus of the show (CS in particular), that’s more or less all OUAT’s doing these days. I might be oversimplifying a bit.
he show was declining and making him a love interest, creating a love triangle, was the gimmick they used to keep the viewers interest, a failed gimmick, which i believe was the point at which the show strayed irretrievably from it’s original formula.
I suspect that CS is not so much the cause as it is the symptom of the show’s creative bankruptcy. I think that the reason many people feel that “Going Home” would have been a suitable show finale is that it had more or less wrapped up all main storylines, without repetition or retcons.
Moving from there, OUAT became a kind of exercise in jumping the shark: what they’re doing seems to be able to keep the show afloat in the short(ish) run, without worrying too much about the overarching narrative, or writing quality (ie minimal effort). The stories about the initial main characters — Emma, Regina, Snow, Charming, Rumple, Henry, and Neal — are done. A&E don’t seem to have any more stories to tell about these characters. Hence, Snowing’s progressive “idiotification”, Rumple’s “eternal recurrence” problem, Henry’s meager screen time, Emma’s permanent stagnation at the paranormal romance heroine stage, and Neal’s death.
Sure, there are some themes that get picked up from previous seasons, and A&E like to suggest that it’s been planned all along, but half the time it feels like the writers are coming up with the script the night before. For what it’s worth, I suspect that if the show had lasted fewer seasons, the original CS/SF love triangle would have resolved very differently.
Of course, inserting love triangles is an easy way to keep people watching. So CS/SF was the first. Now we’ve had the Regina/Zelena/Robin conundrum (and, of course, SQ in the background). If OUAT makes a bid for another season — and hey! it’s $$$, so there’s no reason to think they won’t — I suspect there will be a new love triangle.
Thoughts on who that might be?
I wouldn’t be surprised at all to learn that time in the Underworld moves a lot slower than time does in SB.
Which would actually be in line with some religious cosmologies (say, the hell realms in Buddhism). But I still suspect that there’s something about the Underworld that essentially means that time stands still there, perhaps until Emma.
A quick thought: apart from everything others have already posted here, I think one of the most pervasive “shark jumpy” features of OUAT — and I think one of its biggest problems — is its insistence on constantly introduce new realms, rather than exploring and developing what they already had going — i.e. Storybrooke. Frozen’s a pretty obvious example, but actually the Greg and Tamara plotline and subsequent Neverland were even worse. And Oz wasn’t spectacular either.
It looked like Season 1 was setting up things for what would happen if the “real world” found out about SB. And arguable, SB is by far the most interesting location in the show — much more so than all the shoddily CGI-ed fairy tale realms that we see once and never revisit again. I think by opting for thinking up new realms to throw at the viewer, they’ve really lost an opportunity with SB.
