Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-5698213-20130930195403/@comment-22525977-20131001032841

I was thinking along the lines of the Home Office having something to do with it:

1. It's obviously to Pan's benefit to have crossover with a lot of other worlds so he can find someone with the heart he needs, and the more people who have even a tiny grain of a thought that magic might be real, the more people that he can abduct (recall that resolute skepticism renders the skeptic immune to seeing magic a la Emma and August's legs, and the Shadow appears to need his victims to actively take his hand rather than just grabbing and running—otherwise he would have just snatched one of the Darling boys up without giving Bae a chance to sacrifice himself).

2. Pan/Shadow is also immortal by way of living in Neverland. If he had some way of seeing the future—and I can only assume he does, since he has his prophecy thing about the heart of the truest believer—then he could have seeded the stories of the fairytales taking place in the modern day in the past of our world. And since future-telling is unreliable at best in the OUaT 'verse, that explains why the traditional tales we have are so different from the stories we see in OUaT.

3. Now, things like Wonderland and the Land Without Color have little bearing on Pan's agenda, and it's doubtful if he even knows about them until such time as we see him invading those worlds, too, but: Wendy and Alice both come back to our world after their adventures and, judging from the OUaT in Wonderland trailers, their Alice, at least, tells her story. That would explain the existence of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, as well as the Pan stories. Frankenstein is trickier, unless there are portal jumpers who, unlike Jefferson, can get to our world but for whatever reason don't frequent the FTR (maybe the Blue Fairy keeps them out? She does seem very invested in forcing Rumpel to cast the Dark Curse, what with the lying about the world-hopping trees). Simple enough, then, for them to spread stories around.

Another alternative that I've been toying with is that we're thinking about the causality in reverse, here: It's the stories that came first, and as they picked up steam and spread through the cultural conscious, they started to gain awareness and become real—sort of like the way small gods work in Discworld, only instead of belief specifically, stories are powered by being told?

This theory would have the benefit of also explaining how Mulan can be in the same world as Snow White, Rumpelstiltskin, King Midas, and Lancelot. The FTR isn't a realm of fairytales at all, it's a giant morality tale crossover multiverse. Frankenstein is in the gothic horror 'verse, Wonderland is where things like fictionalized mathematical criticism and theatre of the absurd go, and Neverland houses horror stories or something?

Furthermore, the reason the FTR and the gothic horror 'verse don't have any means of travelling to and from our world without massive worldbreaking magic, but Wonderland and Neverland appear to have no such issues (Pan kidnapping children all the time, the rabbit hole, the looking glass, etc.) is because Wonderland and Neverland both have an element of travelling between worlds built into their stories, whereas the kind of stories in the FTR and the GH 'verse are contained strictly to the universe they exist in.

By this logic, there is also a Science Fiction universe and a universe full of nothing but alternate histories and another one where EVERYONE IS A COWBOY and probably a universe that looks superficially similar to the real world, except with magitech/steampunk/dieselpunk/urban fantasy elements a la the Dresden Files and so on.