Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-1962215-20140317132636/@comment-24780348-20140504002913

The thing with Peter Pan was that he never mentally became an adult. He did some of the most heinous actions in the series, was willing to go as far sacrificing his most loyal henchman, and that, based on utter lack of remorse, puts him possibly ahead of even Jafar and just below Midas. I just have a hard time faulting him for those actions. (I've known way too many people with kids just like that.) He was a child in an adult's body who traded his child for a child's body.

It's a little unfair, but the most socially forward perspective on evil admits that children just can't be expected if they don't reach a certain developmental stage, and some people actually never go formal operational. If the body matters, then he became a child and that's that. If the body doesn't matter, he was never an adult at any time.

I think real villains always know better. They do it anyway. They make those horrible choices, knowing they're horrible. That's the black heart of true villainy. It is also its white shadow: The possibility of redemption. This light and dark are both totally necessary to complete villainy. Making them both as intense as possible without destroying believability as the fine art of crafting a beautifully evil villain.

Now as for who Regina tortured, that would be anyone she put under a sleeping curse. That would be gloating over Mary Margaret as she cries in her cell. Really revelling in the pain of others puts the icing on the evil cake, and makes it so, so much sweeter. Because Cora ripped out her heart, I could argue that she's evil the way a robot is evil. Plenty of bad robots out there. Terminator, Lore, Multivac (was more evil in the VIKI incarnation), replicants and duplicants aplenty, and I have my eye on that one on The Jetsons. But they're just acting on their programming. It's kind of the same with Cora. Except she programmed herself. Imperative: Attain power. Since she chose that, it's still evil, but her actions after the fact just weigh less because she didn't truly choose any of them. There was no chance for her to be redeemed. A good but angry person who decided to shut off their own free will, because that free will would choose love and happiness. (Still had the free will to choose to push the off switch, though.)

Cora is just a lovely jumping off point about how much free will people actually have (mainly because of our desires). If you really find the off switch, free will could be infinite by its very negation, or at least, ability to be negated.

I find it funny how few people are mentioning King George. Not that I think he deserves any high spot on the list. Whiney, sour, barren old bastard is more goth than villain. "Instead, [Charming] made my suffering worse." Every time he's on the screen I expect another sob-fest about how he can't have kids. At one point I seriously expected an episode or two where he grabs Henry, tries to remake him in his own image, and everyone else blames Regina. That would be a little dark for Once Upon a Time though.