Is Once Upon A Time Repeating Disney Stories or Adding To Them?

I have watched every episode of Once Upon A Time since its premiere in 2011. My view of the show started well, but has been declining since the second season. From bland plot twists to poor character development, my faith in the show is practically non-existent now. Despite that, I watch it in good faith, hoping the show will be as unique and memorable as it was when it started. Then I saw this image circling the internet.

At the end of Season 3, we do see someone who looks like Elsa walking toward Storybrooke, but the show has made it perfectly clear that she is indeed Elsa from Disney’s Frozen. Not only that, but they are using even more characters from Disney films and stories (like Fantasia for instance). I was outraged after the first episode of Season 3, but decided to give the show the benefit of the doubt. Surely they wouldn’t bank on the fact that Frozen is so popular that it’d help ratings (regardless of how much work was done with the plot). Now, nine episodes in, I can honestly say the writers didn’t expect to cheat their way into better ratings. They did a nice job tying these two worlds together, along with answering any questions you might have had about Anna’s and Elsa’s past and future. Not only that, but they continue to develop the characters from their original cast.

Spoilers after the jump!

Magical Mondays: Acts of True Love and Saving Yourself

Acts of true love are everywhere in our fiction. In many of these narratives, performing an act of true love—such as a kiss—has the magical ability to save someone from certain death brought about by a curse. In many older Disney films and fairy tale stories, true love is almost always portrayed as romantic. Recently, though, we’ve gotten a few new interpretations on the mythos. In the new Sleeping Beauty movie, Maleficent, a platonic kiss Maleficent gives Aurora saves her life. And in Once Upon A Time, Emma saves her son Henry with a motherly kiss on his forehead. Then there’s Frozen, which, between the sisters Anna and Elsa, gives us yet another interpretation of true love, one that I like far more.

Top 5 Female Villains from Geek TV Shows

For your Halloween pleasure, I am providing my Top 5 most terrifying female villains in geek TV shows. These are the women who you would not want to meet in a dark alley or in a brightly lit park, because no matter what, they’ll probably fucking kill you and laugh while they do it. Why only five? Well, sadly there aren’t as many female villains as there are male ones, especially in TV shows, and more often than not, they are shown to be just vain and petty rather than pure terrifying evil. For this list I chose ladies who seem to legitimately enjoy being evil and show little to no remorse for their actions. This does not necessarily mean that they have less depth or are less interesting; they are just the female characters you love to hate. I am also only sticking to one villainess per TV show. So with that in mind, let’s begin!

Trigger warnings for mentions of rape, torture, and abuse after the jump.

Magical Mondays: Beauty, Morality, and Magic

(via quickmeme)

Western standards of beauty are ubiquitous, and just one of the many things they’ve infiltrated is our retellings of fairy tales. All too often, you can tell who’s good and who’s evil just by looking at the characters’ faces. If they’re classically beautiful? They’re probably good. But if they have anything that’s considered ugly by societal standards, be it a big nose, a fat figure, or a wrinkled visage, chances are they’re working for the dark side.

Sexualized Saturdays: Queer Stories are Tragic Stories

Popular media is making teensy tiny strides in queer representation, but it’s still light years behind where it should be. One of the many issues in today’s portrayal of LGBTQ+ people in media is that their stories are often tragic. Queer characters may exist in a universe, but in all likelihood their relationships, if they’re lucky enough to initiate them, will fail, and they themselves may very well die or disappear.

The ubiquity of this trope occurred to me recently when I was listening to Part 2 of Welcome to Night Vale’s 2^nd Anniversary episode. As part of the conclusion of the episode, which wrapped up the recent Strexcorp invasion storyline, everyone and everything that wasn’t from Night Vale was ejected from the town. Unfortunately, this included Carlos, Cecil’s boyfriend, who’s now trapped in an alternate dimension. Their relationship has mostly been smooth sailing up to this point, and I can’t fault the WtNV writers for introducing some new conflict into the storyline now that Strex is gone and a mayor has been elected. But still, I was kind of sad because Cecil and Carlos’s problem-free relationship, while somewhat unrealistic for any humans, queer or not, was a safe space of angst-free queer love. I certainly haven’t found anything like that in other media; in other media being queer is apparently the equivalent of using a black cat to break a mirror underneath a ladder on Friday the 13^th.

Once Upon A Time Season 3 Was Less than Magical

Oh man, oh man, oh man. I have been putting this review off for as long as possible because I just have so few positive opinions about this season and I don’t want to have to recap the weird and awkward mess that was the plot. But I guess that’s what they pay me the boonbucks to do, so here we go.

Sarcasm (n): the implication that I am paid in more than Lady Geek Girl’s unending devotion.

Spoilers for the whole season below the jump.

Was Once Upon A Time In Wonderland Worth Our Time?

Once Upon A Time In Wonderland has its origins in a cool and eminently sustainable idea: take the Once Upon A Time mythos and tell other stories that have happened in its universe that just don’t fit into the main OUAT story. To reference a similar project, it could have been to Once Upon A Time what Paradox Space plans to be for Homestuck. As Once Upon A Time seems to include, at this point, the entirety of classic speculative fiction within its parameters (as the inclusion of characters like Peter Pan, Dr. Frankenstein, and Robin Hood suggests), if the Wonderland spinoff had been successful, this could have been a launching point for a whole network of derivative series.

Unfortunately, we instead got the most boring, bland, and tropey mess I’ve seen since that one Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. episode. (You know the one.)

Shots fired.

Once Upon A Time Midseason Review

It’s been a week and a half since the midseason finale of Once Upon a Time’s Season 3, which means I’ve had plenty of time to sit around and figure out what I thought of it. In general, I think it’s moving in a good direction, but I still have some complaints. Specificity (and therefore spoilers) after the jump.

Sexualized Saturdays: “It’s totally canon now!”

Queer representation is not a sneaky thing. It doesn’t creep up like a ninja, and it doesn’t hide behind equivocation. If something has queer representation, it’s because it includes a queer character who at some point has audibly and unambiguously expressed romantic or sexual interest in the same gender. Anything else is speculation. Hell, even Word of God is tricky—JKR may have said that Dumbledore is gay, but anyone who just reads the books and doesn’t bother to dig up an interview from ten years ago will have no idea.

I bring this up because of a recent trend I’ve seen in fandom, where all sorts of interactions and statements that don’t fit the above criteria are being held up as proof of a queer pairing’s now-canon status.

Oh, My Pop Culture Wicca: Magic/Witchcraft is Evil (It’s Not Really)

I have already discussed magic a little bit in my post on magic and Christian objects. To give a little bit of a refresher, the Bible condemns witchcraft and any other sort of magic, from talking to the dead to seeing the future. But like many things in the Bible, this rule is contradictory to other things in the Bible and other practices in both Jewish and Christian traditions.

For example, most churches will say, even today, that seeing the future or talking to the dead could make you a prophet. If it’s a gift that you have no control over, it would make sense that your creator blessed you with it. On top of this, there are certain practices that seem to rely on magic. Ancient Jews used to put magical amulets near the beds of their babies to ward off the demon Lilith, who was said to kill children. In the Acts of the Apostles, there is a passage that introduces Simon the Magician, who wowed the people with his magical abilities. However, when the Apostles showed up, everyone converted to Christianity, even Simon. In this passage, Simon is never condemned for using magic; what he is condemned for is offering the Apostles money in order to gain the same gifts granted to the Apostles by God. Peter condemns Simon for thinking he can buy God’s gifts and urges him to repent, but he is never condemned for using magic specifically.

Despite these contradictions and varied ideas about magic, the Bible still condemns all magic and witchcraft, which causes tension between Christianity and Wicca to this day. That’s reflected in our pop culture.