Board Thread:Rant and Rave/@comment-32664989-20170723205831

While I love this show and fell in love with it in Season 1, I've noticed a lot of inconsistencies with the character arcs, story arcs, and more than enough retconning. WIth Season 7 coming up, I'm unsure with these "new" stories. We got stories introduced in previous seasons that never were continued again. For example, Will and Ana's relationship seemed to fall apart in Season 4, then never mentioned from them again. Another example is when Mal and Lily's quest to find the baby daddy was disappeared. It seems that the writers put many plots happening at the same time only to forget them.

With the amount of retcon, it's too much for my taste. The amount of memory curses seem overused. It seems like lazy storytelling. A few episodes like Awake and Family Business make my head hurt. The writers are so reliant on these memory curses so that the audience can be left in the dark as well.

The characters have inconsistency with the choices they make with their character traits. This isn't all bad. For example, when Snow killed Cora, that was a shocker and that was excellent writing (I'm a HUGE fan of ironic storytelling). Another example how this can be a great thing is all of these redemption arcs with the villains. However, there are some characters who just aren't consistent. Rumple goes through a hero-villain cycle where he's a villain for a season then a hero for the next and then a villain for the next and etc. Likewise, Zelena starts out being a villain in S3, then has redemption in S5, only to join the Serum EQ in S6 and finally having closure at the end of it. I also have a problem with their secondary and non-main characters. They used to focus on them a lot in earlier seasons, now I feel like they're unimportant. Plus, they always add new characters every season for their theme, and quite to be quite frank, it's harder to get a feel for them. I feel that the writers don't know what to do with their characters until they need them for plot.

I really truly enjoyed this show, but I really hope S7 has a lot of consistency with the writing. 