Board Thread:Rant and Rave/@comment-25733960-20170508011247/@comment-5106672-20170512021954

Eskaver wrote: Killian Jones wrote: But the song was introduced in the Pilot... No, it wasn't. The orchestral track was. XD

A cool use of theme, but some would have liked to know that Emma wanted to secretly sing. (Personally, I have no problem with it, so I'm sort of being Hades' advocate. All I want is it not to be a one-off (which it appears to be.)) Exactly. Up to last Sunday, the song was non-diegetic – meaning it was there for the benefit of the audience but not in-universe. The score is generally non-diegetic, which is, it's there to convey the narration in addition to the visuals and the dialogue, but is not part of the world. Characters don't hear it in the background while they do their things, it's simply there for us. Diegetic music on OUAT was, for instance, the song Neal was listened to on his iPod, the tune the Dwarfs whistle, the song that played on Emma and Henry's radio in NYC, the opera Ursula was listening to on the radio, the song Henry played on the iPod to Violet, the song Emma was humming in the Wish Realm, music in taverns when there's someone playing it, possibly the music at Granny's which has the juke box and so on. The actual score is not.

So yeah, they were clever in using Emma's theme because it was familiar and meaningful to the audience, but they never showed it before as an in-universe thing or as meaningful to Emma.