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I’m guessing Cruella is the one who has a past with the Author, since they said he’s heavily involved with her upcoming centric.
I’ll take it if it means the Author isn’t secretly Will’s father.
[adrotate group="5"]"He was a lot of things to me" "The only conclusion was love"Actually…this brings me to another question: the Quill itself.
It seems that the Author is only truly the Author when he has the Quill. @Obisgirl joked about the One Ring, but I don’t think she’s far off here. The One Ring was created to be part of the Eye in the Sky. It corrupts anyone who is not The Eye in the Sky. Is the Quill searching for the “correct” Author—did the Quill reject this current Author for whatever reason, fester into his soul and force him to corrupt the stories in order to escape from him and go on to find another Author?
I know that sounds mental, but it’s actually a fairly big trope in fantasy literature. The hero and his magic sword/other object of power and the relationship between the two.
The Sword can only be pulled from the Stone by Arthur.
The One Ring must be with Sauron.
@Nevermore and I gave a quick reference to Michael Moorcock and his “Eternal Champion” stories in my “Temptation of Emma Swan” thread in which Elric and his sword Stormbringer have a (let’s just say) confusing and slightly parasitic relationship (much like Sauron and the Ring)Hal Jordon and the Green Lantern Ring
“The Wand chooses the Wizard, Harry” from JKR’s series
So is the Quill just an object that only gains power when the Author has it, or does the Quill have some sort of understanding about its proper owner.
"He was a lot of things to me" "The only conclusion was love"If they answer those burning questions about the Author, I’ll be thrilled. There are a lot of questions about him and fate/free will at the moment.
"He was a lot of things to me" "The only conclusion was love"On a different note, if “Author” is technically a job title, is “Sorcerer” also a job, occupied by many different people at different times? If so, what’s the job description? And if not, then… who or what is it?
I think the Sorcerer is their God Insert (if Author is their Lucifer Pre-Fall insert–and Michael/Apprentice cast him into the pit of hell…or book…)
One quill rule them all. Not a fan of The Lord of the Rings, but I couldn’t help it.
LOL. But you might not be far off if we want to factor in Tolkien’s less popular Silmarillon into account here (which I’m sure A and E have read, nerds that they are). It’s very Genesis meets Jewish/Christian extra textual additions but the idea that there was once naught but Eru Iluvater (GOD) and he created…ok, you know what. Just watch this. What I’m getting at is that the Author is Melchor, the one who disrupts the Song
"He was a lot of things to me" "The only conclusion was love"You can choose to act on a feeling or not, but you usually can’t choose to feel. But the corollary of that is that you also can’t force someone to fall in love — to bend them to your will in that way. In this, love is “autonomous” from the subject. Which brings up Authorial authority in relation to romances in the show. And I will leave that thought open-ended…
And I’ll close it up a bit with something that is relevant. One of the laws of magic is that you can’t make anyone fall in love with anyone else, as explained on WL. Jafar broke that law when he did his little Sorcerer spell and forced Ana to fall in love with him. Only Will’s TL freed Ana. The Author, so far as we know, hasn’t broken the laws of magic–he hasn’t raised the dead, forced people to fall in love or changed time. He’s writing a better story–in his head–but with the understanding that he still has to play by certain rules.
The idea is similar to the saying that if you can’t seem to find the story you’d want to read, you need to write it. Which makes me think that you’re right that he’s writing for himself. And presumably, if before that the stories were self-telling, in a sense, and Author(s) were in fact Archivists or maybe Translators, then this one is the first “genuine” author of the bunch (arguably. Depending on whether you think of art/creativity as generating something “new”)
That’s interesting. It makes me wonder what sort of fairy tales the Author knows before he was the author. While it’s not true to say that all fairy tales begin, progress and end the same way, our 21st mind set (and A and E’s mindset growing up when they did and working, literally, for the Great Mouse) is that they fairy tales do take on a one-note flavor. Hero meets Heroine. There is a conflict from an outside (usually magical) source: a wicked witch, a sea witch, an evil queen, a malevolent imp. There is a separation. The evil is defeated and “they lived happily ever after.” That’s why A and E started ONCE in the first place: to tell a story that hadn’t been told before because we all know these classic stories to the point where there is very little surprise. Might the Author not also have a similar mind set? He knows how stories end, because all stories end the same, so he’s changing it so that they never end, which necessitates a constant stream of drama, twists, and often OOC moment in order to keep the story going.
"He was a lot of things to me" "The only conclusion was love"I agree. Plus, if the Author was trapped in the book the entire time in Storybrooke, then he wouldn’t be able to write or manipulate stuff anyway.
True. But is there a new author? There are things in the book that are post-Author-sucking. Emma’s birth and being put in the wardrobe, for one. So was that *recorded* or was that *manipulated*?
"He was a lot of things to me" "The only conclusion was love"Is there a timeline of what stories are actually in the storybook and which aren’t? It seems like Regina is the Big Bad in Henry’s book. The audience has seen Regina’s backstory, but is any of that in the book? That would make her a sympathetic character and not so clearly the Evil Queen.
That’s tricky. It doesn’t seem like Regina/Daniel/Cora drama is in the book–and nor is Cora’s back story–but we do know that there is a picture of Young! Snow looking at Cora’s flowers, a scene from “The Stable Boy” before Snow reveals Regina’s love for Daniel to Cora. So…is the heart ripping in the book? But, on the other hand, Bae is in the book–Nealfire showed his story to Tamara so does that include Rumple taking on the DO curse? Regina does seem like she’s the Big Bad in the book, but not the reason behind the Big Bad. Did the Author think that Regina’s motivations weren’t a good enough story? That seems antithetical since evil for the sake of evil is the easy and unnaunced story.
"He was a lot of things to me" "The only conclusion was love"That’s a really interesting question, on both ends. So the first aspect — if villains and heroes are literally made by the author, where does free will come into play? The analogy I kept thinking back to is a chess board, where the pieces are sentient. This is a trope in a lot of films and stories (from Start Wars to Harry Potter, for example). I think the question is always whether the game “plays itself,” or whether someone is manipulating/ordering the pieces about. And where the player stands in relation to the playing board (is the player outside/above the board, or is he/she inside the game, taking on the place of a piece, as in the first HP)? Clearly, the stakes would be different. The other question we might ask is whether the player is playing solo (or against him/herself), or is there an opponent?
That’s a really good way to look at it. If we take the first HP movie for example, Ron, Hermione and Harry have free will: they can move as they please, but there are consequences. When Ron falls from his horse after his sacrifice, Hermione almost “breaks rank” and goes to help in until Harry reminds her that they are still playing the game and must win. Hermione could have gone to Ron if she wanted; the only thing stopping her were the consequences of her actions. However, the other players–the pawns and queen and knights, ect–are “sentient” in that they will move when ordered, but if you do order them around they have no agency on their own. They are just literal pieces that do not make choices on their own. Ron/Hermione/Harry manipulate the literal pieces for their own benefit, and to some extent Ron is overseeing everything since he’s the Wizard Chess-guy, but if Hermione and Harry chose not to listen to Ron’s suggestions, there are serious consequences.
To bring his back to ONCE–certain characters might be literal pieces…or rather, perhaps, not characters but objects or plot devices. They do not have any agency themselves but if you tell them to do a thing, then they will do the thing. The Author is a bit like Ron–he can tell you want to do, or make a helpful suggestion as to what you should do, but you always have the ability to say no. Snow and Charming listened to the Author and went down a different path, but they could have said no. They could have chosen to not listen to him–the Author did not WRITE them going down a different path. Once he they listened to his suggestion then it played out as he wanted and intended knowing certain characteristics of Snowing. But from the start it was a suggestion and the couple following the suggestion.
Then we get into the really hoary stuff. Is Neal dead because CS makes for a better story? Is Rumple revived and apparently evil because it makes for a better story? Does a tormented Regina who can’t be with Robin make for a better story? etc => In other words, are we to take this as Authorial design, or authorial design (Author vs show writers)?
Well, lol. I’m not touching that first question with a ten foot pole (and neither will anyone else! *MOD GLARE*) but it does go back to something @MatthewPaul brought up which is that on some level the Author and they way they’ve depicted him in Fischler is very much a stand in for Adam and Eddy themselves. If they want the story to keep going, like you just pointed out the Author does, then there are no happy endings or unhappy endings yet. You have to keep the story going by inserting new plots, new challenges, new twists. The Author doesn’t want the book to be over, so he manipulates it to keep it going. Adam and Eddy do the same thing. Too early for Regina’s happy ending…so insert Marian.
And finally, I keep asking whose story. Who is the Author writing/telling this story to? Who is his presumed audience? Obviously for previous authors it was something very general, like “humanity”… So who is this one writing for that he suddenly felt the need to change the rules and write a better story?
That’s a brilliant question and not one I have the answer to. Is it selfish amusement. I talk a lot of Shiny Toy Syndrome and how A and E are just boys with toys, but isn’t that what the Author is to? I think he’s telling the story to himself, and to borrow from FanFic world, he has a lot of plot bunnies.
"He was a lot of things to me" "The only conclusion was love"Something else to think about, what the current Author did, interfering in Snow’s story? Was that the first offense, or was it just the first time he was caught red-handed? Was there a previous offense? Is there a three strikes, you shouldn’t have done that and then he was banished?
That’s a good question too. It seems like it was less about what the Author did to Snowing and more about what he did to the Apprentice.
"He was a lot of things to me" "The only conclusion was love"I’m glad the aging thing will be addressed.
Yeah but if it’s some sort of plot device I’m going to be rather eye-rolly. I mean, that’s really the only explanation, right? Some magical plot device that they found that let them keep their age from the time they fell through the portal. Did they discover the literal fountain of youth?
"He was a lot of things to me" "The only conclusion was love"
