Board Thread:Rant and Rave/@comment-34657163-20180329215610/@comment-5235494-20180419232010

Truthfully, I feel like OUAT stopped being OUAT quite awhile ago, long before Hyperion Heights (which I had hoped would recapture some of the show's original magic as well, but like you I was disappointed). There were definitely a few elements here and there after season one that I enjoyed, but it was after the breaking of the very first Dark Curse that I feel things started to really go downhill for the show. I don't think that Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz really considered what they could do after the breaking of the first Dark Curse, so they just decided to have other characters cast the Curse over...and over....and over....and over....and over...and over...and over again, time after time, making it so apparent that they obviously couldn't think of any other original ideas. Rumplestiltskin and the Evil Queen were two very solid villains early on in the show, and though Regina remains a fan favorite due to her incredible character growth and Lana Parilla's amazing acting skills, I personally feel that they should have kept her evil a little bit longer than just seasons 1 and (sort of) 2. She should have been the only character that cast the Dark Curse, and there shouldn't have been fifty million other Dark Curses cast by characters like Snow White or Peter Pan (for God's sake -__-) after the Evil Queen cast it the first time - it should have just been the Evil Queen's curse and been left at that. Not only did this take away from the show's originality, but it also made the Evil Queen look pretty damn weak as a character if everyone and their brother could cast the curse that, as I recall, was supposed to be "the darkest of dark magic" or "the curse to end all curses". And for the Evil Queen to be the one to cast it just made sense, because she has always been portrayed as a powerful witch in every form of media. When the first Curse was broken so early on in the show, it was after that point that the show became "magical villain of the week" opposed to the show's original premise of "fantasy versus reality" and the audience not being sure which was real because Henry could have just had a really big imagination. What made the show so great to begin with was the balance between real life problems and the fantastical problems that the fairy tale characters (supposedly) faced in their past lives. It was pretty devastating to see these characters we grew up with as children be torn away from their friends, families, loved ones, and duties and be stripped of absolutely everything that they once valued, trapped in our world where they didn't belong but retaining no knowledge of all the important things missing from them. It was sad because as the audience, we felt we knew these characters so well already, and after all that they endured to get their happily ever afters, it was all for naught because the Evil Queen destroyed their lives and completely demolished their homeworlds, and we didn't know what became of those worlds at the time so it was even sadder. For all we knew, their lost loved ones were dead or nonexistent, and in our world the survivors of the Curse that were whisked away to Storybrooke couldnt even grieve their losses because they were forced to repeat the same miserable day every day for 38 years. That was Once Upon A Time at its best, and season one is what I will always consider to be the one true canon season in my mind. Everything after that, including the "Reboot Curse" that created Hyperion Heights, will never be as good as the show was when it very first started - long before horrible plotlines involving ridiculous characters like Greg and Tamara, an evil Peter Pan, Cruella DeVille's overall campiness, THREE different Ursulas, half-baked fairy tale connections, an out-of-nowhere lesbian relationship between Little Red Riding Hood and Dorothy Gale that lasted only one episode, absolutely nohing being done with Sleeping Beauty and Mulan, Maleficent getting high off of "sleeping curse, toadstool, and pond water" or whatever, Prince Charming stating lines like "it appears to be...a door" (thank you, Prince Obvious), and the multitude of Disney cash-grab characters from 'Frozen' and 'Brave' being thrown into the mix for blatant merchandizing purposes. Honestly, had the show not been cancelled, they probably would have thrown Toy Story characters in the mix too, or even Star Wars for that matter.