Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-25926288-20160524132143/@comment-25926288-20160607164440

Downtime versus drama....interesting debate, but it's easy to see why at the end we will choose both.

Drama facilitates the plot and some twists and turns for the characters, but downtime is where we can get some nice character insight. As I tend to disagree with shippers and some of their views on downtime, I do disagree with having our characters sit around all the time doing trivial things, but those moments bring reality to certain aspects. For example, I'm not a big fan of Hook and Emma's relationship (clearly) but I think it's decent at best. The thing they lack is any downtime because they are almost always in some dilemma that I don't really imagine them together outside of that. Similarly with Robin and Regina, those two have no real thing in common besides being single parents and I can't see them doing much outside the drama. We've seen Rumple and Belle and Snow and David outside some of the drama (seasons 1-2, etc) so I can see them doing what they do and having a solid relationship, but the others....not so much.

With the return of Storybrooke, we'll hopefully get some downtime, so characters like Regina and Zelena can talk and I don't want everything to be totally fine between those two. You can't spend years of your life hating someone, take a breather, go back to hating them, then have a moment of reconciliation and then be the bestest buds.

SB allows us to see how their normal life will probably function and hopefully it will not be treated like some 3 week vacation to another realm. Like, Henry, go to school!

Seriously, it seems like it's supposedly Fall (or maybe they just had pumpkins sitting around for some reason.