rewatching Once Upon a Time with analysis headband on.
The pre-air pilot, specifically.
It’s interesting how Rumples says the queen has created a powerful curse, even though he’s the one who gave it to her. I wonder if this was a decision made between shooting the pilot and the show being picked up.
“The infant is our only hope.” Because he’s also trapped in Storybrooke, this snowglobe of a town that’s more of a way-station between “Our World,” where Emma lives, and where Henry was born, and the Enchanted Forest. Storybrooke isn’t really “Our World.” I think Rumples is the one that remembers life in the Enchanted Forest rather than Regina, mainly because he was the architect of the curse. So, Storybrooke as a liminal place. A gateway.
Emma - derivation from Germanic names based around “ermen,” which means whole/universal. She is the whole world to the Enchanted Forestians because she’s the one who’s supposed to break the curse.
Henry - Heimirich/Henricus = heim (home) and ric (power, ruler). Of course, we’ve got all the Henrys in the English royal family. Suitable name for the grandson of Prince James Charming and Snow White, and the adopted son of the Evil Queen, even without the connection of him being named after Regina’s father.
Baby-brokerage. It works in the pseudo-medieval hierarchy of families that exists in the Enchanted Forest because of the whole firstborn heir thing. You take that kid away, you muddy the lines of succession and can cause some pretty messed up fighting (hi, War of the Roses).
The whole ‘giving up for her/his best chance’ - it’s paralleled with Emma and Henry, both of them being given away. The same with finding - Emma is supposed to find her parents, Henry finds Emma. Emma finds people for a living. She quests for people.
Is it a werewolf or a regular wolf that stops Emma from leaving Storybrooke? We don’t see the moon, so there’s no telling whether or not it’s full.
ABC is really lucky with OUAT. They get the entire Disney back catalogue to play with, plus the stories that Disney never did. Which makes me interested in what they’re going to do with Ruby/Little Red Riding Hood and various other tales that aren’t part of the Disney canon. I know we’re supposed to be getting Belle and Gaston at some point, too. I really want to see them take on Bluebeard or something.
It really is a cultural zeitgeist because you have almost everyone raised on Disney films, so you get the nostalgia of people my age, with the whole mid-eighties to the end of the nineties of a sort of “golden age” of Disney animated films, so there’s the nostalgia, and then you also get people interested in seeing how the stories are different (such as the meeting of Charming & Snow).
Everything is driven by happy endings. Snow and Charming had theirs, the Queen’s was ruined and she just wants to be happy, too. (Do antidepressants not exist in the Enchanted Forest?) Which begs the question of what counts as a happy ending. If, indeed, Regina/Evil Queenie is the miller’s daughter from the original Rumpelstilzchen story, then she never had a happy ending in the first place. The king who married the miller’s daughter only did so because of the spinning into gold and it made him rich (he was going to kill her if it didn’t work because it wouldn’t have been any loss to him) and he wouldn’t have wanted anyone else to have that power.
The destruction of the Enchanted Forest reminds me of Jareth’s entrance in Labyrinth with all of the glitter and smoke and such. If we don’t get the Goblin King, I can settle for Rumpelstilzchen, who seems almost to serve a similar function. Well, in terms of awesome clothes, hair, and mannerisms.
Regina wears a wedding ring on her left hand. Interesting. Mary Margaret Blanchard calls her Ms. Mills, implying that there is no husband in the picture. Huh.
HI MR. GOLD I LOVE YOU. Ahem. Sorry. Had to be said. You creepy bastard, you.
Time starts again - Henry was the only one changing, the only one growing up, while everyone else felt it was the same day over and over again. A mystical holding pattern. Again, liminal space (and time, in this instance).
I need to dig out my Zipes and Bettelheim books when I get home.
Um, yes, my analysis hat is firmly on. Okay, analysis gold laurel headband.
The whole ‘giving up for her/his best chance’ - it’s paralleled with Emma and Henry, both of them being given away. The same with finding - Emma is supposed to find her parents, Henry finds Emma. Emma finds people for a living. She quests for people.