Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26971388-20161108223438/@comment-25926288-20161108232022

I'll play Hades Advocate (or contrarian) on some points.

1. Diversity--Having a diverse main cast is a wonderful thing, but in my opinion, it's far too late to add people to the main cast. Anyone added recently gets killed off or barely onscreen, which would be worse. They don't get some break from Disney as they don't (or didn't directly insert Disney).

2. Hype--They hyped up season 5 and it sort of fell flat. Now, business-wise, they should hype everything, but they sort of expected vague stories and EQ's return to inflate the interest, but it was rather questionable (or blind). There are decent cliffhangars, but you can't have them every episode or the narrative would fall into Surprise!Twist!Shamalyan!

3. Tied-in Plots--It's simply called having subplots. Those exist and have existed in the show always. Now, should they have such big gaps? Maybe, maybe not. However, not everything must tie together if it leads to something great (which we don't know).

4. LGBT Stuff--Well, we can agree, lol. But I'm sure it was because they felt the desire to do so (and publicity), nothing to do with fans. I would say twisting some characters would be okay, but no main cast character because it would scream "token" character and there's no room on the main cast.

What do you mean by no room? Will was in like five scenes and used for small comedy. Belle has finally started getting some screentime that's not asleep. Neal is dead. Robin is dead after being pushed offscreen. Zelena's starting to just be there for key witty moments. We can't even get the secondaries like Granny or the Dwarves to do anything.

If anything at all, this season is at least topping recent seasons as far as I've seen.