chapter three

I was wondering if there was a reason behind the names you chose for the cursed names of characters in your OUaT reboot? I was looking at some that weren't already in the show and was wondering you chose those ones specifically?

OH YEAH. One of my biggest complaints about the real show is that Kitsis and Horowitz know nothing about fairy tales (or how to use Wikipedia tbh) and so they kind of just name their characters however they feel like, without giving the careful consideration they should. An example I’ve cited before was how it was Ginnifer Goodwin who pointed out to them that Snow White is sometimes believed to be based on the real-life Bavarian baroness Maria Sophia Margarethe Catharina, which actually makes the name Mary Margaret quite fitting. This was just a happy accident rather than being the intentional touch it should have. I actually wanted to change more of the names - David Nolan was Will Ferdinand for a long time in our rewrite - but in the interest of keeping the characters as recognizable as possible, we kept a lot of them the same. Here are some of the new ones (that we’ve met so far) and what their names mean:

Evelyn Oxford - “eve” for evening and oxford is a shade of blue, tying Storybrooke’s current mayor to her identity as the Blue Fairy

Sydney Glass - Uh, this is a boring one, but I just like this spelling better. I shuffled through several name options for Sydney, including using names like Lohr (the name of Maria Sophia’s town and her father’s mirror manufacturer) and Moroni Olsen (the voice of the mirror from Disney’s Snow White) as well as some other things that would be rather spoilery at this point… but as with David Nolan, things got too confusing when such a central character went through too much rebranding. 

Ruby Connor - means “wolf lover”

Widow Agatha Lucas - Angela Lansbury played the grandmother in the film The Company of Wolves, she is also quite famous for playing Miss Marple in The Mirror Crack’d, based on the novel by Agatha Christie. It’s a bit of a stretch, mostly I just like Agatha as an old lady name.

Helen Connor - Granny’s Storybrooke alter ego, Helen is related to “selene” meaning “moon,” suggesting her werewolf connection

Marco Collodi - The Adventures of Pinocchio was originally written by Carlo Collodi

Graham Buchanan - The huntsman in Disney’s version of Snow White was voiced by Stuart Buchanan

Dominic Leroux - I bet you forgot this character even existed… he’s there though, and his name does have meaning! I just can’t tell you yet!

Luciana - The name “Abigail” was particularly worthless. We gave her a Greek name, since her father is Greek, and Luciana means “light,” loosely connected to the gold nature of her myth.

Zoe Nolan - According to some accounts, Midas’s daughter is named Zoe! That name felt weird in the Land of Ever, so we used that name in Storybrooke instead.

Matthew Llewelyn - Matthew comes from Sir James Matthew Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, and Llewelyn comes from the Llewelyn-Davies family, on whom Barrie based the adventures of Peter Pan and the Darlings.

Ivy Langland - Ivy just comes from Robin Hood’s connection to the forest. One of the earliest mentions of the Robin Hood character comes from the poem Piers Plowman by William Langland.

Matilda Fitzwalter - Matilda Fitzwalter was an actual historical woman, on whom many legends of Maid Marian are based.

Judge Lyman - Oh wait… you don’t know who he is yet, do you? Not yet, at least…

Annie Orleans - Flora Annie Steel is sometimes credited for being the first user of the name “Goldilocks,” a character who has seen several different incarnations over the years. Orleans is related to the French word “or,” meaning gold, and I also was inspired by the person of Joan of Arc, aka the Maid of Orleans, for the character of Goldilocks.

Coquelica - Most of the names from the Land of Wonder were lifted from the Tim Burton reboot, but the princess that becomes the Red Queen is named for coquelicot, a shade of red and a French term for wild corn poppies.

King Hubert - The grandfather of Cinderella’s prince shares a name with a king from Disney’s Sleeping Beauty. I wonder why…

Prince William - Like I said, David Nolan was going to be Will for a long time until I decided it was just too confusing to rename such a major character. It’s just as well, because Prince Charming from Disney’s Cinderella was voiced by William Phipps.

Timothy Rupert - We let Timothy keep his name from the show, only because calling him “Christopher Rupert” felt too on-the-nose - because yes, the Rodgers and Hammerstein middle name for the prince is exactly where this surname comes from!

Ashleigh Glaser - I actually thought naming Cinderella “Ashley” was cute, I just liked this spelling better (same as the Sydney thing honestly). “Glaser” means “glass blower.”

Nancy Kennedy - Since Lady Tremaine inspired Nancy’s last name in Disney’s Enchanted, I used Nancy’s first name for Lady Tremaine’s Storybrooke persona. Kennedy is derived from an Irish surname that means “misshapen head” - inspired by the term “ugly stepsisters.”

Rhoda Kennedy - Rhoda Williams voiced Drizella in Disney’s Cinderella

Lucy Kennedy - Lucille Bliss voiced Anastasia in Disney’s Cinderella

Vladimir Mangiafuoco - Vladimir means “great, famous,” which makes sense for an entertainer like Stromboli, and in the original The Adventures of Pinocchio, the puppet master character is name Mangiafuoco.

Ryan Booth - Honestly, Ryan is taken from the guy Emma meets in the opening sequence of the pilot and Booth we just took from August Booth since that character wasn’t going to appear in our version. But Ryan does mean “little king,” so I wonder what that could mean for his future…

Sylvia Wren - One of my favorite names in the whole lot, Sylvia comes from Sylvia Llewelyn-Davies, the mother of the family that inspired the Peter Pan stories. As for the surname, in the original stage production of Peter Pan, the program credited “Jane Wren” as Tinker Bell, despite the fact that the character was just lights and sound effects, as a wink and a nod and a way to add mystique to the character. The best part is that H.M. Inspector of Taxes wasn’t in on the joke, and sent “Jane Wren” a tax demand.

Monique Hamilton - We’ll get there… her name definitely means something though!

Moira Henley - She takes her name from her great-grandmother’s middle name. Margaret Henley was a young girl who was an acquaintance of Sir J. M. Barrie. The legend goes that she called him “friendy” but could not pronounce her Rs, so she actually said “fwendy.” Allegedly, Barrie dropped the letter F and found his heroine’s name - Wendy.

Nathaniel Thorn - Who is he? I’ll tell you one thing: this name is the only one that means absolutely nothing.

And I think that’s everyone so far! Forgive me for indulging, but I really like questions like these. Also, I didn’t keep good track of where they all came from, so I had to do a little digging myself, which was pretty fun! I hope you like the new names, we put a lot of thought into them, and there’s certainly more characters coming still!

When did OUAT really go off the rails for you, and what gave you the idea for the reboot?

Season 1 had its problems but Season 2 is where they really lost me. I didn’t like that the Enchanted Forest was still there, I thought that really mucked up everything they had done so far. It was a nice shock at the end of that episode, but it’s just been messy ever since. I also kind of hate how their permission to use Peter Pan kind of derailed everything. The Hook stuff is all well and good, he’s one of my favorite characters on the show, but Kitsis and Horowitz have talked about how they kind of ditched all of their plans to write toward Neverland instead and I think that sloppiness shows. Especially their treatment of my favorite character, Ruby, has been awful. They had wonderful opportunities to change characters’ genders and sexual orientations and could have developed a lovely story around Ruby or plenty of other characters, but instead they shoehorned it into one episode just so they could check “LGBT” off their list. It’s just so clear that these two showrunners know absolutely nothing about their source material or even how to form a story and it’s just… it’s not cute anymore, it’s stale. It’s time to wrap it up, boys.

is writing the OUAT series hard? :O How are you able to properly write it and not get confused!!

Here’s our secret: it’s all written already. (Mostly, at least!) We’re not writing as we go, we wrote the whole thing first so we could craft the stories the way we wanted to. (There’s a heck of a finale at the end of all this, if I do say so myself.) I did have to go through it a couple times and track certain characters and objects to make sure they logically move through the story the way I needed them to (like I kept losing track of Peter’s pocket watch totem, which is obviously an important piece, and Alice was a character that I kept forgetting where she was and when). I also have a whole document that is just the flashbacks in chronological order so that the timeline flows and makes sense and is plausible!

I just want to say, I adore your OUAT reboot. It's beautifully made, the plot snippets are compelling but leave room to build your own scenes, and I will never not be salty that this has to be the AU while the real thing trudges through season 27 of wasted potential. Just a quick question, any hints of major shifts we can expect? Different narrative layouts, or Storybrooke identities? A certain Richard Madden-esque huntsman making it past the first season ...? Thanks so much for your hard work!

Ohh Conor, you’re too kind to me.

This is a fair question, the first episode especially seemed to get a response of “what’s different, besides the casting?” We’re starting off in a similar place to where the real show started but you’re going to see changes sooner rather than later!

Each season is going to be ten episodes, and each season has one or two primary fairy tales told through the flashbacks. Much like the real show, Season One is all about Snow White. So we’re going to see the story of Snow White unfold first, with dashes of other stories as well (the Red-Handed episode, for instance, remains largely in tact). Season Two will tell another fairy tale through the flashbacks. This is what I thought the show was going to do - I thought we were getting Snow White for Season One, Sleeping Beauty for Season Two… and then when they started actually doing this in the form of half-seasons, it was a total disaster. So this is our attempt to rectify that from the start.

In Season One you’re going to see at least three characters gender-swapped and at least two Storybrooke characters with completely new identities - one of which will be immediately revealed, one of which will take some more time. One thing I thought the show did poorly was its reveal of identities. They did it well with Dr. Whale, where they were dropping hints, but I wanted to see more of that. We’re doing more. I also felt like many characters have been underused… Archie, Ruby, Whale, and the Mother Superior are all going to play bigger roles, although some of them are going to be completely different - we won’t see the Blue Fairy in Storybrooke until Season 2 but she’s going to be a completely new character.

There are definitely some new storylines coming, in both Storybrooke and the world of fairy tales, which we have renamed the Land of Ever. Some stuff will remain the same and some stuff will be different. Not every idea the show has ever had has been a total dud, but we want to relook at some of the ideas and see if there’s a better way to tell those stories. There’s not a whole lot I can say without giving things away - but stay tuned. We haven’t even begun to dive into the background of our Sydney Glass and Cinderella plays a much bigger role in the overall story of the show.

Someone else to keep an eye out for is Baelfire. He’s going to start off in the same place, as Rumpelstiltskin’s son, but he’s going somewhere completely different.

As for Sheriff Graham… like I said, Season One is going to look pretty similar to the real season one… but you’ll have to wait and see his fate!

I’m so glad to hear that you’re invested and I’m hoping this series will grow over time. There’s a lot coming your way!!