Board Thread:Spoilers!/@comment-23906605-20131017110136/@comment-22525977-20131029070058

Still, creature≠human + magic. Emma has magic but she isn't a magical creature, she's a human with magic.

It could be pretty awesome, if they swung it right.

See you have the badass normal woman who grew up in our world and her scared-but-determined boyfriend who knows a thing or two about magic but is scared witless by it plus their son (not Henry, that's what Regina named him. Let's call him Alec instead) who just wants to have magical adventures and doesn't quite understand how dangerous it'll be, and they've been working for years to prepare for breaking this curse and the twenty-eight years are up so finally they can get in to Storybrooke (canonically she might've been able to get in early, but for the sake of this plot it's a very strict 28 years).

They meet Regina, who's either nowhere near as stable as she is canonically because she has no kid to love or just adopted a different kid. For the sake of maximum drama we'll say that the stricter curse boundaries mean that she couldn't adopt a kid so she's the way she was in "Welcome to Storybrooke" only intensified by twenty-eight years of isolation, so when savior Emma swings into town with nervous boyfriend and gung-ho son in tow, she freaks the hell out and starts throwing everything she has at them all at once instead of being passive-aggressive like in canon.

I mean she has deadly two-headed vipers and stuff in her vault. Watching savior family defend themselves against broken Regina could easily fill up the early episodes until the unfrozen time starts giving people back their memories, and then time goes on and the curse keeps not breaking and Neal and Emma are like "well crap how do we completely break the curse instead of half break it"

Don't need the book in this scenario, it was just a plot device really, so instead they go to the pawn shop to get things to trigger non-curse memories but oh shit the pawnbroker is Neal's dad, and he remembers everything, but now that he has his son back he doesn't care about breaking the curse so much and if he doesn't tell them how he still has the power to keep Neal in Storybrooke (because you know Neal would be all for the "break the curse and get the hell out of dodge" plan), so finding Gold gets Regina off their backs a bit and the focus of the plot shifts to an internal struggle on Gold's part where they try to convince him to do the right thing and he doesn't want to because it'd mean losing his son again.

August can just go die, I don't like him and he was also a plot device, but he could also show up to be suspicious for consistency I guess? Maybe for more plot he goes to Regina for help with his skin condition (heh) and she sees the light at the end of the tunnel and tells him the curse'll break and she'll have magic to help him if he just kills the savior

And if that's still not enough for a whole season, Greg and Tamara show up early and there's tension between them and the Swans because the Swans want to save Storybrooke and Greg and Tamara want to destroy it.

For this to work of course the True Love Kiss can't be the key because Emma and Neal in these circumstances would qualify as True Loves, probably, so either the curse breaks because Regina was telling the truth and August shoots Emma or whatever OR the key is something more complicated than just kissing. The failsafe could be repurposed somehow, like smashing it breaks the curse but the only one who can smash it is the savior a la King Arthur pulling Excalibur from the stone, so the finale would be the Swans working together to figure out how to kill a dragon instead of Regina and Emma working together to save Henry's life. And to prevent Alec from being useless, he could be the one to figure out about the failsafe (maybe he charms Regina? she does seem to like kids even as the Evil Queen), which also leaves Rumpel with a long ways to go characterwise after the curse breaks because he's still too much of a coward to tell the Swans the truth.

And I'm just one person coming up with stuff off the top of my head; the OUaT team would have a whole group to kick ideas around and stomp on plot holes.

...I mean, the canon plot works just as well, it's just that it happened that way because Neal took the easy route and not because it had to happen that way or the curse would never break.