Hi! I’m currently on a OUAT rewatch after a long time, and I’m wondering something:

The curse prevented the trapped characters from aging, right?

So the kids (like Hansel and Gretel) were still kids after 29 years of being on storybrook.

Henry arrives as a baby 11 years before the first season, during these 11 years, and before he finds the book, we can understand that he already saw strange things in the behavior of the residents, for example: anyone who tried to leave the city would get hurt, no one visited the city, the residents have no sense of time and don’t know things about their past.

The lack of aging of classmates was certainly another indication. All of this culminated in Henry easily believing that the book was real.

However, what if Emma hadn’t stayed in Storybrook (or if Henry never found her in the first place)?

Time would pass, Henry would grow up, become a teenager and then an adult and everyone, including the children he studied with, would remain exactly the same.

What would Regina have done about it?

She was barely able to convince a 11yo that she was not lying, imagine a 16yo or 20yo. Didn’t she imagine this when she adopted Henry?

Would Henry eventually be affected by the Dark Curse and would he somehow stop aging and enter the " mental fog" that the other characters live in?

I know that everything happened as it was supposed to, and we can imagine that in all realities and universes Henry always finds Emma and she always breaks the Curse but that’s just something I was wondering.

Sorry if it’s hard to read, English is not my first language.