#'but also its impossible to avoid this humiliation because you are a powerless child and everyone says this is normal'

[carnivorepussy]

being accosted by adult authority figures you barely know for doing something "sexually provocative" that will "tempt someone" (like showing your shoulders) as a Small Child that knows literally nothing about sex or sexual innuendo (but still being treated like you know and you're doing it intentionally) is 20x more damaging to your psyche than seeing two men hold hands.

[septembriseur]

All right. I have finished the ludicrous, shoddy, over-earnest, convoluted saga of Once Upon a Time, and I am going to inflict my observations upon all of you. 

The reason it’s worthwhile to write down anything about a show that insisted on green-screening entire sets in almost every episode, abandoned all the rules of its own world as-needed, retconned every character history to death, and insisted that Captain Nemo, Cruella De Vil, Captain Ahab, Dr. Jekyll, and Pongo the Dalmatian lived in Fairy-Tale Land(s) is because there were things that it did outstandingly well, better than most TV dramas.

The most obvious of these things has to do with the fact that OUaT was full of women. It was replete with women. Its main narrative was centered around Emma Swan (bail bondsman who needed to learn how to love and be loved), Regina Mills (former Evil Queen now torn between learning the same lesson and, well, being the Evil Queen), and Snow White (impossibly idealistic warrior princess); every season introduced more major female characters, including Cora (power-hungry abusive mother), Zelena (needy abandoned child and resentful sidelined sister), the Snow Queen (don’t ask), Rapunzel (who also turned out to be the not-actually-stepmother of Cinderella), Drizella (the not-actually-ugly stepsister), Cinderella (the second of her name), Tiana (a rebel leader and beignet-maker), and my precious daughters Alice (sort-of-In-Wonderland) and New Robin “Nobin” Hood.

And that’s just the major female characters, leaving out Mulan (who never gets the girl she wants), werewolf Red Riding Hood, werewolf Red Riding Hood’s girlfriend Dorothy Gale, Belle (more-or-less a saint), Tinker Bell, Ariel, Jasmine, oh my God, I could go on

When you have that many women, it’s hard for your stories not to be about women. And OUaT’s stories were almost all about women. They were about what it means to be a mother, a sister, a daughter; they were about the limited ways that women can seize and exercise power, about the limited paths women can take towards happiness. They were about the reasons women betray one another, the traumas women suffer (which don’t, on this show— heave a sigh of relief— include rape), and the ways women can recover from that trauma and those betrayals. And by the end of its run, the show had recognized this. 

I say “by the end of its run,” because the second thing that OUaT did extremely well was “learn from its mistakes.” It started out as an insanely white show that suggested the only possible fulfillment for a woman was having a child, and for several seasons it rambled along in this vein— racking up, along the way, three instances of female-on-male rape that were never really acknowledged as such. (Okay, one of those was in the last season. Some lessons were never learned.) By the end, the show was laboring to be diverse so effortfully that you felt sorry for it, while also feeling a little bit confused as to why it had a magical Día de los Muertos realm full of cempasuchiles where people could go and talk to the dead. It also, in a legitimately baller move, realized that its core narrative of learning to be loved had never been about motherhood— and had the crowning moment of this narrative be a literally crowning one, in which a woman’s ultimate love and triumph came through assuming a position of leadership, and had nothing to do with either a lover or a child. 

So why do I think the show as a whole is so terrible? I mean, obviously it’s technically terrible. I long for someone to send me back in time with a red pen and let me at those scripts. And anyone who knows me could predict my critique of the notion of True Love, which is predicated upon the existence of a fixed, discrete self, and also implies the existence of some kind of metric according to which emotional experiences are judged, which in turn endorses the notion of objectivity, which arises in the Enlightenment, and— etc. But my bigger problem with this show is that so many of its narratives suggest that Dark Magic is the magic that the powerless use to seize power. There, like, a whole scene that’s explicitly about this— a scene in which Rumplestiltskin and Cora, while the former is teaching the latter to do magic, discuss their desire to make the people who have humiliated and hurt them on account of their class status pay. Rumplestiltskin began life as an abandoned child turned spinner/serf/single father, who disabled himself to avoid fighting in a Duke’s war; he turns to magic in an effort to save his son from conscription. Cora is a miller’s daughter who’s mocked by the aristocracy (and seduced and abandoned). Two other dark sorcerers, Regina and Zelena, turn to magic after being, in Regina’s case, abused and sold into a loveless marriage, and in Zelena’s, being abandoned as a child and tormented by the knowledge of what’s been denied her.

It’s notable that of these four characters Regina is the most privileged, and also the one who most readily achieves redemption. Rumplestiltskin and Zelena can be redeemed only by ridding themselves of magic, and Cora at the point of death. Regina, who was born to be a queen, gets to be a queen with magic. This fits into a narrative in which the people with power are the people who are supposed to have power. Our good-hearted heroes are almost all nobility: Snow White, her daughter Emma, Emma’s son Henry, Cinderella, Tiana... when they’re not, they’re people who know their place. Magic, here, is figured as a force of social transgression: something that destabilizes hierarchies, empowering the poor, the traumatized, the disabled, the victims. 

This (magic as transgressive) is not a new idea, but what’s remarkable is how uncritically the show endorses the idea that such magic is wrong. Within the OUaT moral framework, taking power can only be evil, and as such power inevitably belongs in the hands of those to whom it’s been given. This is a troubling ideology, and especially strange for a show that, as I said, focuses so much on the rich lives and relationships of women. Only in a very fantastical world indeed could these two elements coexist.