Board Thread:Show-Related Questions and Answers/@comment-26569765-20171118234222/@comment-24304025-20171119111024

My thoughts on this

1) It's not like the WR made any sense back in S6, but now with S7 I can say 100% sure that I wouldn't have minded as much a twin brother for Hook just to keep Colin in the show instead of this terrible choice to incorporate the WR.

2) Let's forget interviews and such. At this point it is clear that the writers have NOT planned it. It is not like they haven't changed their minds 34342 times before.

3) Let's also forget what characters THINK about the WR. Not because they said it is fake it is indeed. Hades said Robin no longer existed. Fans complained, Adam came up with the "surprise, he lied" thing. Lancelot was supposed to be dead etc. etc. etc.

4) What does the show present us? A real realm, with real backstory and real people. That fact (which it is) was just ignored to hide the fact that Regina murdered innocent people. The Queen never wished for a new realm to be created. She wished for Emma to have never been the Savior. If the Author cannot write people into existance, I fail to believe that a genie can. What happened is the WR existed (but people called it EF, it only became known as WR for those who knew of the wish decades later). Whether or not it was possible to go from real EF to WR via a portal remains unclear and is not likely.

5) We just had a flashback prior to 610, therefore the world already existed. We have people coming and going in and out the WR, therefore it is reachable via magical means just like any other world. If people from real EF can go to NEF and vice-versa, there is no big deal in saying that the WR is like any other world, it just happens to have people with same names and appearance.

6) Conclusion: I'd like to believe that the WR exists as a real world. The wish simply replaced Princess Emma with real Emma. However, the less troubled way to deal with it is that anything that we saw or learned about is fake. That flashback never actually happened, we are seeing what WRRegina and WRHook remember. Also, the wish must have changed the past in other realms, such as NEF, giving Gothel the possibility to meet WHook. As a third option, there is this idea a couple of people have had, that NEF was also created by the wish with fake backstory, which, seeing how badly developed the story became, wouldn't be that far-fetched.