Board Thread:Character Discussion/@comment-5895297-20131019194655/@comment-1916997-20131031204350

TNOandXadric wrote: She's not very good at it, though, is the thing. While she's managed to get her footing, mostly, in "Forget Me Knot," the first two episodes were mainly her clinging to her position by her fingernails and then immediately gloating when she gets a tiny bit of leverage over Jafar (and honestly, based on what we've seen of him, she's lucky he didn't strangle it out of her). She's trying to be a chessmaster without the prerequisite "ten steps ahead of everyone else" part.

I mean, when I think of successful chessmasters, I think James Moriarty or Havelock Vetinari or Iago or OUaT!Rumpelstiltskin, or even Regina when she's on her game ("Fruit of the Poisonous Tree," for example) who would never put themselves in the situation where someone would have the reason or means to choke them unless it led to significant benefit for whatever they were doing, and then they wouldn't be surprised that it happened.

OUaTiW's Red Queen is also shockingly unlike her literary counterpart, since book!Red Queen was bossy and standoffish and generally plowed through any disagreements by sheer force of personality. (and was also not a villain)

She's growing on me, though. She seems like she's just recently taken power and is still figuring out how it works, which is interesting, and from what we've seen of her she's got a fast learning curve, so maybe by the end of the season she'll be a fully realized chessmaster. But maybe she wants to be underestimated as part of her master plan. We won't know how much she's manipulating people, until after her end game is revealed. One doesn't win a game of chess in one move after all.