Andraste

1. Although my birthday is in February, I am willing to sacrifice it in order to skip to March because OMG WHAT HOW DO THEY EXPECT US TO WAIT?! (We'll have to wait until after Boxing Day for the timeskip, though, because I'm not jumping over The Hobbit and The Time of the Doctor.)

2. Do you think Mr. Gold enjoyed The Godfather II while cursed? ( Because spoiler. )

This show has its flaws, but I never cease to admire its willingness to gleefully toss its status quo out of the window and do something else.

I started doing that 2012 TV meme that's been going around, only to realise that my ramble about Once Upon A Time was taking up far too much space. So here, have a separate post!

Recently, I finished catching up on the first season of OUaT, and I liked it a lot. It's got some flaws, but shows every sign that it could mature into something great. (While I've been avoiding spoilers, people seem to like Season Two a lot, so yay for that.) When I first heard the premise, it sounded like a rip-off of Fables, but it's actually more like what would happen if you combined American Gothic and Merlin.

From American Gothic you get the American small town setting, only this time it's the Mayor who's evil. (And both shows do a great job of reminding me why I fled rural life literally the day I turned eighteen.) Like Merlin, the show plays with traditional stories and isn't afraid to mess around with them. It also feels quite tonally similar to Merlin in some ways, in that it can be cheesy but also has loads of heart and genuinely interesting characters. (Yes, selenak, I do think you should watch this show.)

For anyone who doesn't know the premise: twenty-eight years ago, Emma Swan was found wrapped in a baby blanket by the side of the road. Ten years ago, she gave birth to a boy that she put up for adoption. Now the son she's never known has turned up to tell her that she's the daughter of Snow White and Prince Charming and she's destined to save a town full of fairytale characters from an curse placed on them by his adoptive mother, the Evil Queen. And he's completely right.

One of the neatest things about the show is that it's full of female characters. They have varied personalities! They drive the plot! They have important relationships with each other that also drive the plot! There are several male characters who exist for no other reason than to be generically attractive and die horribly so a woman can angst about it! These are still not something you see on TV every day.

Also, despite all the True Love (which is objectively a real thing where the characters originally come from) the family relationships and friendships and the relationships between enemies and rivals are given plenty of attention. On the down side, the amount of True Love floating around makes it pretty conspicuous that everyone from fairyland seems to be heterosexual. Which isn't an issue unique to OUaT by any means, but I find this particular lack of realism in television increasingly annoying.

The show's big flaw so far is that the first season drags horribly in the middle. (I didn't care nearly as much about whether David and Mary Margaret got together as the show seemed to think I should, so all those scenes were pretty boring for me.) Given the, uh, situation at the end finale, however, I'm not worried that the writers are going to spend more time stretching out Act One when they could be getting on with ... whatever it is that's going to happen next.