arduinna | Once Upon a Time - season 1 takes place in a forest

I was hoping to get this done before season 2 started up, but I'll have to settle for getting it done before season 2 gets too far in.

This past spring,

therienne found a song that would be perfect for OUaT, and we started vidding it. (You can find the vid You can find the vid here on Dreamwidth or here on AO3.)

When you vid something, you're looking at it completely differently. Usually the sound is off so you're not distracted by dialogue, and you're looking specifically for visual information and cues.

So I started getting hit with these cues, and being boggled at how much I'd missed. And figured I'd share!

This is really image-heavy, fair warning.

The first thing I realized was that everyone in Storybrooke still lives in the forest.

Starting with Granny's diner:

Every wall is covered in that wallpaper - behind the counter, the cut-through into the kitchen, everything. And I'd never noticed it.

And Mary Margaret's school:

There are trees down the hallways, too, but I don't seem to have screencapped them.

And the vet, inside and out:

That last one manages to not just have trees in the glass, on the counter, and behind the counter, but above the fish tank is a framed picture of a winter woods scene, with birch trees. Just in case people missed the whole forest motif.

Jefferson, too; he has birch tree trunks in his living room for a more subtle forest reference (... as subtle as tree trunks can be, anyway), but the room where he held Mary Margaret captive is more blatant, from the tree trunks on the walls to the floral curtains.

And there's Regina's office -- not her home, which is just where she raises Henry and grows her apples, but her office, where she rules from:

In that last one, you can see the actual birch logs she keeps there, as well as all the birch trees she has all over her walls.

Even Rumpelstiltskin is in the forest, although his is a little different. Like Regina's office, his pawn shop is his castle, which you can tell from the crenelated windows he's created on the wall behind his counter, which are full of scenes of trees and woods, so he can look out into the forest. He also has actual birch trunks scattered around as dividers, and in one case is using one as a post to hold a pair of stirrups:

Not every place is in a forest; some are in gardens.

Like, say, Granny's bed & breakfast.

You have to fight through the woods to get to it (which actually only happened once, when it was introduced, but it was cool). Sorry it's so dark, but this is Emma, whapping her way through overgrown trees and brush at night to get to the B&B:

But once you arrive, it's a haven of safe, nonthreatening flowers. As long as you don't mind pink:

And Kathryn, who lives in a bower because she's a sheltered princess:

Mary Margaret is also a princess, but spent a good chunk of her story living rough in the woods. So her personal space is largely unadorned, but her bedroom mixes flowers and trees:

Sorry, it's really hard to get a good shot of that tree on the far side of her bed - the only times it's really visible it's from a long distance away. But trust me, it's a tree.

The only prominent secondary character who didn't seem to follow this mode was Archie. He has stripes on his office walls, much like the stripes on Henry's bedroom walls -- but Henry isn't part of the story, and Archie is, so this was confusing.

Until I figured it out, and literally facepalmed. Archie is a cricket. Crickets don't live among the trees. Crickets live among the grass.

Not that trees don't exist. But they exist well above eye-level, above the tops of the grasses.

About the only thing other than grass that would exist at a cricket's more-or-less eye level would be mushrooms.

I never noticed any of that when I was watching live. I'm really impressed with the set people on this show. Like, did you notice any trends there?

Look at the birch branches and trunks. The only people who have actual, physical representations of trees are Jefferson, Regina, and Gold -- the three people who remember the truth.

I have no idea why that would translate specifically into "keeps birch trees around", but I really appreciate that it's consistent.

I've got a series of posts like this, which I'll spread out a bit. Next up, Regina and Rumple and their castles.

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OUaT s1 picspam series

Part 1: You are here!

Part 2: Regina and Rumple: colors and castles

Part 3: Clothes make the match

Part 4: Clothes make the point

Part 5: Disney references

Part 6: Bits and pieces