Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-24218843-20150223161532/@comment-24674051-20150226221905

The only time I remember comments regarding our world's interpretations of the Fairy Tales actually came from Neal when he was back in the EF in the beginning of season 3. And Emma's Lion King reference at the end of Season 3 (although in the latter case, Mary Margaret and David were not phased by the reference).

I think maybe that technology is all over the place because of the first curse. For 18 of the 28 years, time was essentially completely frozen in an endless loop. The only one that noticed was Regina. I think after Regina got Henry, or at least after he was old enough to actually start remembering each day, Regina had to let go of a part of the 'time freezing' spell, and it is at this point that we maybe see some discontinuity in the town's techonological infrastructure.

When Emma arrived, the curse was further weakened, so that time actually started flowing normally again, but the curse was still mostly in effect, including the 'false' memories.

So to get back to my original point, it is quite possible that exposure to Fairy Tales (from our perspective) was limited to the period of time when the residents could remember one day to the next. Henry know what Fairy Tales were (since he recognized the book as a fairy tale book) and even Cursed Mary Margaret understood Fairy Tales. But even with that, there would probably only be a minimal exposure to the fairy tales, except for those FTL residents that were actually outside of Storybrooke (but still in the LWM) during the early parts of the Curse (Emma, Neal, August, Ingrid), who got to experience Fairy Tales from a larger perspecitve.