Board Thread:Character Discussion/@comment-4839682-20131003142941/@comment-22525977-20131010175428

XxBadWolfxX wrote:

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This portrayal of true love is mere fantasy in this show. A Disney thing. Consistant with the modern fairy tales the show is modeled after. The show is suppose to be this way.

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I know what Rumple did was plain wrong however I didn't see him choking Belle.I saw him grabbing the chin of what he believed was Peter Pan. A person Rumple obviously has alot of issues with. Also noting how impossible it would really be for the true Belle to be in Neverland. ...

''7. Mary Margaret is REALLY sex-negative and it makes me uncomfortable. ''

How tho.

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So all in all I like the few surprises like Jack being a girl Ect...

But also the show stays consistant with the modern day fairy tale versions

So we can picture how writers got these stories and assembled them into the tales we have in our world now.

I love it! ;D These are the elements that make this show worth my time ^.^ And that's saying alot because I have a deep hate for most American sitcoms.

And I usually prefer Brittish shows. I don't think it is a Disney thing, and it certainly isn't modern to treat love the way OUaT seems to. Look at Princess and the Frog or Tangled, where the love that develops between Tiana and Naveen or Rapunzel and Flynn is never treated as the end goal or as a tangible force that is powerful in and of itself rather than powerful because of what people do with it. I have no problem with miracles happening because love is involved. In Anyone Can Whistle, for example, the town is bankrupt and in a drought; protagonist is walled up and desperate for connection, the love interest helps her begin the process of breaking down the walls, at the end they kiss and water starts fountaining out of the rock they're standing on—textbook "kiss->magic" set up.

The difference between what ACW does and what OUaT does is that, in ACW, the miracle isn't because of the kiss itself, but because Fay finally has found the point at which she can drop her walls without needing to rely on a set of very specific and kind of bizarre coping mechanisms (previously to this, she has to put on a particular wig and wear a particular dress and use a particular accent in order to feel anything at all)—so the miracle and the kiss are both coming from the same place, which is Fay making this emotional breakthrough.

In OUaT, however, the True Love's Kiss can be triggered by something as commonplace and potentially transient as a crush, which we see in "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter" when Graham drunk!kissing Emma because he has this mild crush on her (bear in mind that, at this point, Emma's been in Storybrooke for at best a couple of weeks, probably much less) is enough to start breaking his memories. This, combined with instances of the TLK being prescribed as a magical cure-all ("Have you tried True Love's Kiss?" in "What Happened to Fredrick," with no more emotion than "have you tried ibuprofen?", for example), really gives the impression that it isn't the characters who give the kiss power (which is what happens in ACW), but that the TLK itself is magical (which is what we see in OUaT). Does that make sense?

Rumpel grabbed Belle by reaching up beneath her jaw and getting a grip on the place where her neck and jaw met—if you want to choke someone from the front, that's where you want to put the most pressure. You can try it yourself (carefully); squeeze just under your jaw and then squeeze lower down on the neck and see which one's harder to breathe through. He's choking her or, at the least, very seriously threatening to choke her.

It doesn't matter that he believed she was a fake!Belle; he held on long after he decided she wasn't hostile and, more importantly, there was no hesitation when he lunged at her. Compare how much Charming struggled when the siren took on the appearance of Snow—people are programmed to trust the familiar and even if you know in your head that an enemy is using the appearance of a loved one to screw with you, it's going to or should be much harder to attack them (because what if you're wrong and it really is the person you love?).

MM's being sex-negative shows up in the "flower abuse" scene. She's clearly ashamed of having had a consensual one night stand, and then she shames Emma for enjoying them by saying that Emma only has one night stands because she's emotionally closed off and shut down (which, as I've already discussed, is simply not true—cynicism is not the same thing as emotional unavailability) rather then well maybe Emma just enjoys casual sex or hasn't run across someone that she'd want to pursue a long term relationship with.

It's this idea that having one-time sex with someone you're not in a committed relationship with is either a point of shame or a sign that you're shut down emotionally and need to learn to open up.

OUaT has all these great opportunities to explore really fascinating things about the modern world and how it relates to these fractured fairytales that they've created, and they skip over a lot of them in favor of doing it the easy way by not addressing anything at all. The result is entertaining, certainly (I mean, I've watched the show in its entirety and I'll continue to do so because I like the show), but disappointing for me personally because it could be so much more.

Also, Once  isn't a sitcom...?