It's taken me a while to work my way back to
this show, probably because I burned myself out on tv shows earlier
this year. And I have to admit that if I'd watched it back in
September I probably wouldn't like it nearly as much. Well, it's
February now, and Once Upon A Time
is kind of ringing my bell.
Here's the thing.
It's kind of crap.
Well, maybe crap is
overstating.
But it's not great
television, let's get that clear. It's not terrible, but the writing
is pretty consistently on the nose and a little awful, the plots are
easily predicted and very lowest common denominator, and it suffers
heavily from "cute child syndrome". So really, I should
hate this show. But I don't.
It's campy and the
effects are terrible, the writing's horrible, the characters are
cartoony and their motivations are overly simplistic. But it's fun.
More relevant to
our purposes here, however, it's also full of female characters.
That's
not a super-interesting statement on its own. I mean, most shows are
full of female characters. We are half the population, after all,
and people gotta breed. Romances must be had. No, what's
interesting about Once Upon A Time
is that of the main characters, almost all of them are women, and
only one of those women is a traditional romantic heroine.
Let's break it
down.
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Strong jaws. Respect. |
Emma Swan, our
protagonist, played with frowning mediocrity by Jennifer Morrison, is
a bailbondsman turned small town sheriff. She's tough, a touch grim,
and committed to doing the right thing, a concept that might have
evaded her for the first 27 years of her life, but is sticking pretty
hard right now. The best thing about Emma, though? Her main love
interest is her son, Henry. Put up for adoption immediately after
birth (Emma wasn't in the best place to have a child--prison, and
all), he finds her on her 28th birthday and recruits her to save his
town from the Evil Queen, also known as his adoptive mother.
Henry also insists
that Emma is the daughter of Snow White and Prince Charming (which
makes him their grandson), and that she was sent by them from the
fairy tale world into ours to keep her safe before the Evil Queen's
curse hit. Emma doesn't believe him, because she's still got a
brain. But she loves this kid, who she barely knows, enough to want
to stick around in town and protect him from his overbearing,
unloving adoptive mother. And that makes her rock.
![]() |
There are worse relationships to have. |
Mary Margaret, or
Snow White in the fairy tale world, is a lot more a regular romantic
heroine. She's a schoolteacher who can cajole birds to perch on her
finger. Well, she is a Disney princess come to life. She happily
offers her spare room to Emma and they bond, though both are a little
weirded out by Henry's theory that they're mother and daughter. She
dates, she flirts, and she pines. Oh does she pine. Because in this
world, Prince Charming is an amnesiac trapped in a loveless marriage,
and she's the woman he actually loves. So she pines.
But as Snow White,
she's actually pretty cool. She defies the Huntsman, and eventually
he lets her go. She lives in the woods as a bandit until she robs
Prince Charming's carriage and he chases her. Their relationship is
built on mutual respect and a little bit of distrust. She's a bandit
and he's an unhappy noble. I can dig a fully self-sufficient woman.
You go girl! But not your real world version. She's a little emo
for my tastes.
![]() |
She has the best wardrobe. Ever. |
And finally, on our
main characters list, there's the Evil Queen, aka Regina King. Yes,
she's sociopathic, crazy, and pretty much full on evil. Sure, she
cast an entire world of people into a living hell so that she could
feel better about herself. And, fine, she's a really awful mother.
But isn't it refreshing to watch the good guy and the bad guy trade
barbs without any testosterone involved? Just nice, healthy doses of
crazy-making estrogen.
Regina's evil, a
particularly prancing, mincing kind of evil, but it's nice to see a
female character take this on for a change. In fact, I think that's
my overall point. No, the characters on this show aren't nuanced.
At all. And the show itself is really only so-so, addictive though
it may be (and it is).
But the lure of
watching strong women go up against each other every week? Not for
the love of a man (though a little bit for the love of a small boy),
but in a good old fashioned fight between good and evil.
I can dig it.
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