Once Upon A Time in Wonderland
I haven't watched Once Upon A Time since about 2/3 through season 2. I do intend to eventually get back to it, I just haven't yet. Mostly because everything was starting to resolve around Rumpelstiltskin and his male progeny, and not only was that antithetical to everything that drew me to the show, but my eyes still glaze over with boredom when I see "Rumpelstiltskin." Unless they glaze over with annoyance. (I know most people didn't care for her but I found Cora a MUCH more interesting villain with better ties to the aspects of the show that I liked, as well as a MUCH more effective master manipulator. I mean, she was still a horrible person who needed to be stopped, I'm just saying that if they'd put her in Rumpelstiltskin's role, that season 2 plotline would have had the opposite impact on me.)
But I'm digressing. OUaTiW is a spinoff that was conceived as a miniseries with the potential to become an ongoing series. It's set in the version of Wonderland established in OUaT, but operates mostly independent of OUaT. Pretty much, as long as you know how things work when sorcerers take your heart in-universe and about the basic setup of the parent show in regards to Storybrooke and the curse.
OUaTiW is about Alice of Alice in Wonderland roughly 12-15 years after her initial adventures in Wonderland. When her father didn't believe her stories about Wonderland, Alice kept running away to return to Wonderland over and over again, eventually disappearing for a number of years before returning, claiming to have fallen in love with a genie who was then murdered by the Red Queen. A year or so later, Alice has been institutionalized, and is trying to convince her doctors that she doesn't believe in Wonderland and was making it up when the White Rabbit and Knave of Hearts find her and tell her that Cyrus is actually alive, but being held prisoner.
The first 3/4 of the show are fueled by this plot, with Cyrus as the Damsel in Distress who keeps trying to save himself, but fails miserably at it, and Alice as the action hero off to save her Damsel, and Will (the Knave of Hearts) as her roguish sidekick. Now, I'm as prone to partnershipping as anyone else, but lets all pause and sidetrack for a moment to appreciate the fact that Alice and Will are conventionally attractive, sexuality compatible friends who are close and who spend a lot of time travelling and adventuring alone, both during and before the series, with never a hint of romantic or sexual attraction or "will they, won't they" between them. The last chunk of the series is all the various parties coming together to deal with the main villain, Jafar.
Jafar is...urm...well, if you're expecting race!fail, you'll get it, though admittedly not as much as I was expecting. (This isn't actually saying much.) Naveen Andrews does his best with what he's given, and unlike Rumpelstiltskin, I actually do find parts of his backstory to be sympathetic, though they don't do anything to make him any less awful in the present. This, I think, is where so much modern fiction gets lost in its portrayal of sympathetic villains. Sure, give them tragic backstories and layers, even like them more than the protagonists if you want, but don't act like their pain is more important than the pain they cause others, and both canons and fandoms typically leap over that line as quickly as they can. The downside is that they can apparently only keep from crossing that line if the character is a sinister Middle Eastern man. There is another character whose actions I feel get somewhat swept away because of a change of heart, but given what there was of that redemption plot, I'm willing to assume that a longer redemption arc that addressed the character's greater wrongs, but that it got truncated. A downside to Jafar is that, between he and Alice, there's a major narrative trend of paternal acceptance being a chief motivator, and narrative character drive that I've been over for years. Mothers are also present, but are treated as far less important than fathers.
A lot of the problems I had with OUaT stem, I think, from the fact that it's a miniseries concept executed as an ongoing series. OUaTiW, I think, fares better because it's a miniseries concept that is executed as a miniseries with the possibility of becoming an ongoing series. As I referenced before, I think some character arcs and relationships reveals and developments got shorted because they were hoping for the series to be longer, but the good outweighs the bad for me. There are some serious oddities. The series takes place in both the present and the Victorian age, which can be explained by Wonderland existing in another dimension, but some human characters in Wonderland who aren't from Wonderland are the same age in the present as they were when they were they came to Wonderland some time before Alice first did. The show also maintains more of the sheer nonsense of Wonderland (including Alice sometimes slipping from more conventional, adult forms of speech to the more nonsensical speech she sometimes had as a child in the books.
I liked it enough to look into OUaT fandom a bit more than I have in a long time, and it sounds like it may have turned back to the things I cared about, and have less of the ones I didn't, so maybe I'll get back to it soon. (The flipside is that it looks like certain character stans are worse than ever.)
But I'm digressing. OUaTiW is a spinoff that was conceived as a miniseries with the potential to become an ongoing series. It's set in the version of Wonderland established in OUaT, but operates mostly independent of OUaT. Pretty much, as long as you know how things work when sorcerers take your heart in-universe and about the basic setup of the parent show in regards to Storybrooke and the curse.
OUaTiW is about Alice of Alice in Wonderland roughly 12-15 years after her initial adventures in Wonderland. When her father didn't believe her stories about Wonderland, Alice kept running away to return to Wonderland over and over again, eventually disappearing for a number of years before returning, claiming to have fallen in love with a genie who was then murdered by the Red Queen. A year or so later, Alice has been institutionalized, and is trying to convince her doctors that she doesn't believe in Wonderland and was making it up when the White Rabbit and Knave of Hearts find her and tell her that Cyrus is actually alive, but being held prisoner.
The first 3/4 of the show are fueled by this plot, with Cyrus as the Damsel in Distress who keeps trying to save himself, but fails miserably at it, and Alice as the action hero off to save her Damsel, and Will (the Knave of Hearts) as her roguish sidekick. Now, I'm as prone to partnershipping as anyone else, but lets all pause and sidetrack for a moment to appreciate the fact that Alice and Will are conventionally attractive, sexuality compatible friends who are close and who spend a lot of time travelling and adventuring alone, both during and before the series, with never a hint of romantic or sexual attraction or "will they, won't they" between them. The last chunk of the series is all the various parties coming together to deal with the main villain, Jafar.
Jafar is...urm...well, if you're expecting race!fail, you'll get it, though admittedly not as much as I was expecting. (This isn't actually saying much.) Naveen Andrews does his best with what he's given, and unlike Rumpelstiltskin, I actually do find parts of his backstory to be sympathetic, though they don't do anything to make him any less awful in the present. This, I think, is where so much modern fiction gets lost in its portrayal of sympathetic villains. Sure, give them tragic backstories and layers, even like them more than the protagonists if you want, but don't act like their pain is more important than the pain they cause others, and both canons and fandoms typically leap over that line as quickly as they can. The downside is that they can apparently only keep from crossing that line if the character is a sinister Middle Eastern man. There is another character whose actions I feel get somewhat swept away because of a change of heart, but given what there was of that redemption plot, I'm willing to assume that a longer redemption arc that addressed the character's greater wrongs, but that it got truncated. A downside to Jafar is that, between he and Alice, there's a major narrative trend of paternal acceptance being a chief motivator, and narrative character drive that I've been over for years. Mothers are also present, but are treated as far less important than fathers.
A lot of the problems I had with OUaT stem, I think, from the fact that it's a miniseries concept executed as an ongoing series. OUaTiW, I think, fares better because it's a miniseries concept that is executed as a miniseries with the possibility of becoming an ongoing series. As I referenced before, I think some character arcs and relationships reveals and developments got shorted because they were hoping for the series to be longer, but the good outweighs the bad for me. There are some serious oddities. The series takes place in both the present and the Victorian age, which can be explained by Wonderland existing in another dimension, but some human characters in Wonderland who aren't from Wonderland are the same age in the present as they were when they were they came to Wonderland some time before Alice first did. The show also maintains more of the sheer nonsense of Wonderland (including Alice sometimes slipping from more conventional, adult forms of speech to the more nonsensical speech she sometimes had as a child in the books.
I liked it enough to look into OUaT fandom a bit more than I have in a long time, and it sounds like it may have turned back to the things I cared about, and have less of the ones I didn't, so maybe I'll get back to it soon. (The flipside is that it looks like certain character stans are worse than ever.)