*waves from beneath the piles of papers*

[pellucid]

I have survived the teaching part of my first semester of full-time professoring. There's still the grading part and various odds and ends that people generally file under the category of "service" (or "the stuff that's part of the job that no one really remembers to tell you about, like going to meetings and doing paperwork and writing letters of

Comments

[pellucid]

I don't know whether that's an accidental message or not. Maybe it is one of those things they just didn't think about, but it does seem so thorough that I've been hoping it's intentional. Obviously there's very little agency for anyone (other than Regina and Rumplestiltskin, I guess) within the Storybrooke world: they can't even leave the town, they don't know who they are, they're being subjected to things like marriages that were not of their own design (presumably--my reading of David and Kathleen's marriage is more that it may have been entirely invented/manipulated by Regina, since I'm guessing that Prince Charming doesn't get around to marrying Jamie Bamber's sister in Fairy Tale Land), etc. But the question of how much their fairy tale lives are determined--and by whom--is also intriguing. How much can the characters diverge from type? And if they can't, what does that mean for the way a show like this deals with agency?

I agree with you that this is a potential pitfall, especially if it's all unconsidered, but I'm sort of willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, at least for the moment.