Board Thread:Rant and Rave/@comment-24593235-20171007225142/@comment-5106672-20171009142619

CoolDudeAl wrote: GothicNarcissus wrote: TheRose123 wrote: I think, honestly, under the circumstances, the writers did the best they could. With the majority of the cast leaving, the lack of fairy tales to adapt, and the decreasing viewership, they were under a lot of pressure for Season 7.

I hope consecutive episodes get better as they will know where they are going with this story. Season 1 was similar in the sense that they didn’t know how the show was going to turn out by the first episode. The writers have said that they didn’t know what storyline or tone they were going for until episode 7.

Lack of what? The Brother Grimm's body of work alone contains, like, over 200 fairy tales. Condense the ones that are too similar and you still get an overwelming number. Add in Andersen if you want to keep it Western European, the 1001 Nights to go Middle-East-y, Afanasyev's collection of Russian and Slavic tales… and that doesn't even cover ancient mythologies or non-Euro-Mediterranean folklore. They could have gone on forever just on raw material to fish from. Except your forgetting an important fact, most of those tales would be unknown to 99% of the audience. How many people were going to watch a season of the Princess Mayblossom? Adam and Eddy could have done amazing twists on that tale, and no one would care. No one would even know they were twists, because no one knows the original tale. This show only works because the things being adapted are things the vast majority of the audience knows about. Yes, well. I guess they're reaping what they've been sowing since S4, after all, which is an audience that's less receiving to anything they're even slightly unfamiliar with. Whatevs, it's not like we're unfamiliar with lost potential either.

That said, I touched upon the subject in the main thread, but I think I might expand that here: I think some of us are bummed by this episode because, however much you're trying to reboot it, you can't re-Pilot a series after six years.

Meaning, we were a-okay with S1 unfolding the mystery and mythos of the show step by step because it was building the world from scratches: everything was new and was a piece of a bigger picture that was yet to be completely constructed. There was no canon other than what they were building in progress.

Conversely, after six seasons, we have that bigger picture and now they're basically painting over it. It's only natural we're less patient with that because there is a canon and we need to know if whatever they're doing now fits it or not.

Namely: all in all it was okay for both Ariel and Ursula to functionally be the Little Marmaid; it was okay for both Briar Rose and Aurora to be Sleeping Beauty, or for both Elsa and Ingrid to be functionally the Snow Queen. Heck, it was even okay for both Clorinda and Anastasia to be functionally Cinderella's stepsister, or for both Cinderella and Cora to funcion as the Miller's Daughter. They covered similar roles in different spins of the same tale, but their characters were distinct enough not to overlap.

Now what's with this new realm? I mean, having another Cinderella who's named the same, whose stepmother is also named the same, who goes to a generally similar chain of events as Ashley!Cinderella… well, that stretches the willing suspension of disbelief a bit too tin because it takes away the unicity of the characters we've known for six years.

What irked me the most, though, was Alice. So she's been to Wonderland too. Is it the same Wonderland we've known for six years and a spinoff? Ain't it strange that two girls both called Alice came and messed around there? Or is it yet another Wonderland? Do realms multiply according to what the plot demands? Is there a parallel Victorian England too? What's even the point and distinction of all these new realms popping up right, left and center?

TL;DR, it was okay for S1 to take its sweet time to unfold the mysteries because we were finding out the questions alongside the answers. S7 raises a lot of questions based on six seasons of mythos, and so far doesn't seem very consistent with it – in fact, it threatens the mythos we're accustomed to. And this is why, I think, even hardcore (albeit critical) fans such as myself have been less forgiving of this new episode and are freaking out in frustration.