Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-4467206-20161205063902/@comment-5106672-20170329013300

To be honest, I've never felt the writers have ever intended for Cora's back story to be sympathetic, as much as explanatory of how she ended up being the way she was. In all the flashbacks, even the ones where she was the main character, she's always been presented as callous, manipulative, social-climbing and downright ruthless (with or without her heart). Her being humiliated as a peasant was framed as her ego being bruised rather than a life-altering experience (like Rumple's in Desperate Souls, for instance); her abandonment of Rumple was 100% a selfish action in which she chose to remove her feelings altogether, so we never saw her torn over it; her abandonment of baby Zelena was clearly stated to be made out of self-interest; even the brief moments of warmth towards young Regina were either preceded or immediately followed by some form of abuse. How is any of this sympathetic? The only two moments when Cora was truly sympathetic were her death and her last episode, in the present and definitely not in the flashbacks. So, one of the greatest female villains doesn't really fit this rule.

Neither does Zelena, to be honest: the first flashbacks in which she truly became sympathetic didn't occour until S5B. In S3 her back story consisted of some sympathetic moments but, again, they were framed in a way that made them more for explanation than for an emotional connection. The main focus was not on her life of poverty and the abuse at her stepfather's hand, but rather on how she kept focussing on wanting other people's lives, never being content with what she had and actively, deliberately choosing to screw herself over (the latter is also true for Our Decay, but there they really played the emotional part up to eleven, which they never did before). So, in S3B Zelena comes off as exactly what she accuses Regina of being: someone who doesn't appreciate what she has (and, on top of that, keeps blaming others for what they have). Hardly a sympathetic villain.

Also, we've got Team Rocket err, Greg and Tamara, whose situation is completely reversed: we have a full, very sympathetic back story for Greg / Owen and none at all for Tamara.

TL;DR, I think it boils down to: it's not about the gender of the villains as much as about the screen time devoted to their back story and how they are framed. It was easy to sympathise with Ingrid because her back story got a whole half-season worth of screen time alone. Rumple and Regina have been there since day one and have had a huge character arc, too. Cora and Zelena got a lot of screen time, but their back stories were framed in an unsympathetic way despite being full of potentially sympathetic moments. Pan, Isaac, Arthur and Hades got very little screen time, so it was difficult to empathise with them.

Also, Hades gets bonus points because his story was entirely told from Zelena's perspective, but that's because she's a main character and he's not. Again, it's not about gender, as much as just character importance to the show.