YMMV / The Mechanisms

• Complete Monster: King Cole, from Once Upon A Time (In Space), is the brutal, millennia-old ruler of a space empire spanning thousands of solar systems. Seeking a better way to conquer, Cole had his greatest general Rose Red kidnapped from her wedding to serve as the genetic basis for a Clone Army, killing almost all the attendees in the process. When Rose's sister Snow White starts a rebellion against him, Cole has all resistance suppressed brutally, having dissidents executed and sent to prison camps. When the prototype for the clone army revolts, Cole has her turned into a Living Battery for his throne world's defense grid, keeping her in a tortured, half-conscious state. Side materials establish that Cole's bodyguards are made of children painfully converted into cyborgs. As the final battle of the rebellion approaches, Cole commands all his soldiers to die to protect him. When cornered in his throne room, Cole has Snow killed and shoots a recently-freed Rose in her wife Cinder's arms, rendering his death and the rebellion's victory largely Pyrrhic.
• Dead Horse Genre: Folk. But that's okay, because it's SPACE FOLK.
• Growing the Beard: While Once Upon A Time (In Space) is already musically polished and a good entry point into the band's discography, the concept behind its Rock Opera (fairy tale characters as combatants in a galactic civil war) is less developed and the plot more disjointed than in later albums. The next three rock operas would be based on pre-existing narratives that already had clear overarching stories (the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Grail Quest, and the myth of Ragnarok), making them feel more cohesive even as they mixed in elements from other parts of the underlying story cycle or from other genres.