Board Thread:Rant and Rave/@comment-24593235-20171007225142/@comment-5106672-20171009171036

Did they, though? Because based on Cinderella, the assumption here is that both Susans moved to NYC, went to the same acting school, irked a starlet named, say, Tiffany (but they're two different Tiffanys), set eyes on a producer named Lawerence (two different Lawerences), had their nice aunties run over by a truck and so on. Their motives and some details are quite different (one Tiffany had her expelled, the other tried to stab her; one Lawrence she slept with, the other she stabbed back because he was Tiffany's accomplice; one aunt was run over by a fan of Susan's, the other by Tiffany and so on), but the overall chain of events is the same.

And writing it down made me actually realise what I can't quite swallow about this set up: in past seasons, each character was treated as a plausible person who was alternatively pulling or being pulled by the events and trying to live their lives, like real people do. And the one time someone (Isaac) tried to treat them as storybook characters, it ended up pretty badly for everyone because you can't treat real people with real lives and real choices (in-universe, that is) as characters. Even the heroes and villains labels were deconstructed several times.

Here it seems like each character and what in-universe is their real life is just a literary template: we have "the Cinderella", "the Alice", "the Rapunzel" and so on, and the person who fills that slot in a certain parallel world will end up living that template, so long to free will. It feels much more fictional even in-universe and… ugh, I can't get behind that.

The thing is, I usually like meta in narrations, but this doesn't seem to be shaping up well. Sure, this is just the new pilot, but it really irks me to no end it seems to be playing against the established mythos. Then perhaps we'll find out something that makes it all click together, who knows, but for now… eh.

As I said, though, I'll wait for the winter break to binge-watch the first half of the season and see if a faster pace makes it any better. I've given OUAT credit in its darkest hour (S5A), I can do that again.