Emma's Apartment (Boston)

(This was the first one I wrote in this series when originally posted to Tumblr.)

To celebrate my return from the Land of the Virally-Stricken, and to dip a toe into the kind of thing I'm going to be doing long-form during the hiatus, here's the first of many potential posts on the spaces that make up Once Upon a Time.

We'll start with Emma Swan's apartment in Boston, or what we see of it.

It's a starting point, briefly viewed and never seen again, but it does have things to tell us.
We know there's a bathroom and presumably a bedroom, but otherwise -- this is it. Judging from the view, this is not a cheap place even for its limited square footage, but the contents? Even if those were all bought new, the visible furnishings are both spare and inexpensive (yes, that's her baby blanket thrown over the chair). There's nothing at all on the walls. Like Snow's bandit hideout or Tink's treehouse, it's a place to sleep, and not much more. It is pretty close to spotless, but there's nothing in it to create a mess with other than some junk mail.

What we know of Emma before we see the apartment is that she is a bail bonds-person, "the sexiest friendless orphan" Ryan has ever met, and she has a bit of a short fuse on the topic of family. Emma is in many ways a classic audience stand-in character. She's a bit of a blank slate herself, and she goes into the world of adventure with no idea what the rules are. We learn the story along with her.

What gives this particular story some heft is that it's also her own history that she's learning, even if she doesn't know that for most of S1. If Emma was a random person plucked off the street and whisked off to a life of adventure, the stories wouldn't be nearly so compelling. Knowing that all of these characters and their individual pasts come together in the curse and in the present world of Storybrooke provides reason to keep track of it all.