Board Thread:Spoilers!/@comment-12698078-20130924211033/@comment-22525977-20130925020239

ChocolatEyes613 wrote: TNOandXadric wrote: I'm REALLY interested to know how the writers deal with the, quote, "'other media' versions of the characters." By "other media", they mean the Disney animated films. Yes, I know. Sorry, should've been more clear—I mean I want to see how they deal with the implication of the Disney films existing in the OUaT 'verse IN ADDITION to the characters themselves being real people. Obviously, the Disney films + things like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein  aren't exact autobiographies of the OUaT cast, and it wouldn't make sense for them to be since the show's premise means that no one or almost no one in our world knows that the FTR exist.

In reality, Disney's version of Mulan exists because it is based on the legend of Hua Mulan, and many of the Disney princess movies are watered down versions of extant fairytales. Frankenstein exists because Mary Shelley had an idea and wrote a novel about it. Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass were Charles Dodgson's critique of new ideas in the field of mathematics (he was basically the square to end all squares). And so on.

However, in the Once 'verse, Cinderella and Snow White and Victor Frankenstein and the Queen of Hearts actually exist. They aren't just fictional stories; they're real people. It follows that for them to be stories about them in our world, which has never been exposed to the real versions of the characters, there has to be some reason for it beyond "someone, somewhere, told a story, and then it got written down and that's how we know about it today."

To put it another way: the musical Wonderland was is inspired by Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, but it dealt with an adult Alice who lived in New York City in the modern day. The play begins with Alice's mother-in-law reading from the actual book Alice in Wonderland to Alice's daughter, Chloe, and after going to her own Wonderland, Alice exhibits knowledge about how the books work. Thus, it's a modernized version of Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass, but it's one that exists in a universe where the books still exist.

Compare this to the BBC's Sherlock, where Sherlock Holmes and John Watson et al are put in modern London. In this universe, Arthur Conan Doyle's original Sherlock Holmes stories were never published—this Sherlock is the original Sherlock, and no one makes any references to either the books or the fifty gazillion other adaptions of them in the course of the show because, in this version of our world, none of those things exist. This is a common convention in these types of adaptions, and it's one that we as the viewers accept without question.

Once, however, is in a position similar to Wonderland, in that it's a modern setting where the stories are still stated to exist in our world. The difference is that the Alice of Wonderland is explicitly not Alice Liddell and we aren't expected to believe that she is: she's explicitly a different, unrelated modern woman whose name is Alice and who has a dream where she goes to Wonderland and goes on a journey of self-discovery similar to, but different than, the Alice of Lewis Carroll's books. Once, on the other hand, IS trying to get us to believe that their Snow White is the Original Snow White, and so far they've done a handy job of convincing us of that. Now that they're acknowledging other versions of the tales in-universe, though, they need to justify their existences in order to maintain the illusion that their version is the Real, Original, True version.

Does that make sense?