Once upon a Time: Anti-adoption

In my challenging but never-ending quest to find some piece of film that exists with females as main characters, and that is actually worth watching and not insufferable for me, I have recently come upon the show Once Upon a Time. 

This is a cable TV show that airs on ABC and apparently has been airing since the year 2011. It is a fantasy show with two women characters as the main, and both the women are "queens" of a sort. I was very excited when first i glimpsed it, for this reason, but then of course I read the synopsis and i came to see it might not be as good as I'd hoped. Why? It is for a very simple reason: Not only is the show not allowing literally  a single female character on it to not be a mother or interested in motherhood, but it is also completely shaming adoption and anyone who might ever want to do that.

I was not adopted, but one of my best friends from childhood was, and he basically lived and is still living a "better" life than me, assuming you are one of those people who rate how good a life is based on college degrees, education, and job prospects. Lol. If you are one of those, my old buddy has basically had a very good lifei n your eyes. His adoptive parents -- who adopted him from a 17 year old girl-- had enough money to send him to the college of his choosing, etc. He hasn't had any time for me, or any of his old cronies in this decimated hood, for years now. Because he moved up to better hoods. And he was adopted!

At any rate, in the show Once Upon a Time, I have essentially been being told now, for the past 3 episodes i've watched (and certainly many more) that adoption is the worse thing that can ever happen to any of us. I suppose i shouldn't be asking for much from a cable TV network like ABC, but i still can't help but feel -- especially after all my long and miserable story with depressed single mom Jennifer--- that finding this show, and its really stupid plot, is a bit depressing right now. Like, how could these people at a major network like this seriously think it's alright to write a script that shames adoption this fuckin badly? It's actually disgusting and I almsot didn't watch the show because of it. Then I decided to watch it because, as I say, I am starved of entertainment with women as leads, and this is especially the case with the fantasy genre. If I have to suffer through this truly asinine plot about shaming adoption, just to watch some sexy females strut around and pretend to be Evil Queens and so forth, I suppose i will do it. It is better than watching Lord of the Rings for the 90th time, where there are hardly any women at all, and where I have simply grown tired of seeing bearded Aragorn and stupid fat male hobbits. I can't stress how profondly i long for the day to see Mary-Anne Baggins take off on the journey to kill Saurona the Pink, instead of Frodo and Gandalf...blah blah blah...

All males. All annoying.

But, back to the show at hand: Think about how pathetic it is that a show that is, in fact, a FANTASY show, still can't think of a way to fantasize, that adoption could be a wildly positive experience, instead of a negative one. For example, it's very easy to imagine the plot of this show, which is that Henry's adoptive mother is a lunatic, and his real blood mama is his savior, being precisely the opposite. Why could it not have been that the adoptive mother was the greatest thing since sliced bread, and then the "real one" --who we could perhaps portray as a demented soul ravaged by fairy tale drugs -- tries to move in and steal him? Oddly enough, this idea is even hinted at in the very first episode, almost as a sort of shadow idea that no one at ABC wants to admit they had. 

The show begins when young Henry, only 10 years old, somehow manages to escape from a small coastal town all the way in Maine, and hitch himself a long series of bus rides and taxi rides to Boston. He has stolen a credit card from his elementary school teachers pocketbook and used it to do this traveling to find the real mama, who requested a "sealed adoption", but whose plans have somehow been foiled. He knocks on her door just moments after she blows out the candles of her 28th birthday cake, and of course she is lonely, living in a gloriously large apartment that it seems a child would perfectly compliment. Henry marches in and announces immediately that she's his real mother, and that he knows she abandoned him 10 years earlier. He quickly explains he needs help, because the woman who adopted him is a psychotic abuser, etc. The real momma is not at all prepared to play the game. She refers to Henry solely as "kid" (my blood Uncle Gino calls me only kid to this very day) and she tells him she wants him out of her hair..."You need to return". Henry then says the 'shadow plotline' i referred to above. "If you call the cops on me and try to bring me back to the woman who adopted me, I'll tell them you kidnapped me!"

"And they'l believe your every word," says Emma, the lead character, "since i'm your real momma. Damn you, kid."

Shortly thereafter, we see them leaving her glorious apartment to take the ride to the small coastal town in Maine, which is apparently unusually close to Boston. Not long after, Emma quickly comes to realize that Gina, the Evil Queen and adoptive mother, needs to be done away with, or at least seriously investigated, and she starts doing cute motherly things like walking Henry to school, discussing his therapy sessions w/ him, telling him why she had to give him up, etcetc. I am sure by seasons end that she will basically be his complete mother, and Gina will be...well, "The Evil Queen to rule all Evil Queens!"

Alas, why is all of this worth discussing? I think the reason is simple: All the plot details of this show, like the anti-adoption rhetoric and the fact that every major female on the show seems obsessed with playing mommy, is precisely why so many people don't like fantasy or have simply lost interest in it. This is because the fantasy genre, strangely enough, seems to actually be one of the most consrevative genres out there, at this current point in time. At first, this seems sort of antithetical, since many of us associat fantasy with swallowing mushrooms, taking LSD, and smokin' reefer, and yet ... it's still the case because fantasy is often written off as childish, and as a result of that, it seems to constantly find itself trapped in TV shows like this, that have an intended audience of, say, a mother, watching with her kids. In this specific case, a "real" momma, watching with her "real" kids.  Isn't it kind of bizarre how the word real should have such significance on a show that is making itself up in the costumes of fantasy land?

The solution to all of this, alas, is also just as simple as the problem: If you or someone you know is or wants to be a fantasy writer, encourage to write up fantasy plotlines that directly challenge our accepted social norms. Encourage them to include chracters who live fantasies that, in our own world, are so clearly outlawed. Fantasies like men turning into women, perhaps, or fantasies of young women who do not sit around convinced that the only way to be happy is to have children. The sad truth about fantasy is that, just like it can be used to push a conservative agenda as this show is doing,o n ABC, it can also be used to push new ways of living. It's just that it hardly ever is, because most people in this society still aren't really fantasizing too deeply about much of anything at all. Another popular show -- Game of Thrones -- is basically little more than a macho man fantasy , which displays our societal lack of imagination perfectly, in my opinion. Charles DIckens once said you can learn everything about a society by visiting its prisons. I would add to this statement that you can also learn a great deal by studying its fantasies. In America, ours are few and far between.

---- Notes on TV.