Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-1916997-20150312220054/@comment-25926288-20150818122238

While retcon is a storytelling tool, it shows retrospective revising and that could be for the better of for the worst, but generally the readers or viewers tend to dislike it.

The only major retcon in this story is the "You cannot truly love without a heart". That was stated by Cora which is why it became prevalent. She took out her heart so she could not feel love and be hindered by it. The worst part was watching season 3b and Wonderland side by side. Within the same few weeks you had Will get his heart removed to rid him of the heartbreak and love for Ana and then also have Regina truly loving and breaking the curse without her heart. That was jarring.

However, the key part to any analysis is looking all over. Interestingly enough, Graham was able to truly love without his heart. So this was established prior to season 3. So, in essence, it's a retcon of a retcon. That's pretty much what makes it terrible to me. It's like they retconned that fact specifically for Cora and Will. Then they retconned it back for Regina to break the curse. That is the problem.

There aren't many retcons in the show, most can be excused away as vague tellings of what happened. They leave reasonable size gaps within their narrative to fit things within a moment's notice. We have so many unnamed, unnumbered kingdoms (of the EF), undefined magic (they put a little in and not really defined because what can't Witchcraft do? If you say that it can't do three things then that would make Genies and Wizard/Witches the same in terms of capabilities), and ambiguity spread across the narrative in little pockets.