Board Thread:Character Discussion/@comment-4839682-20131003142941/@comment-22525977-20131004014120

There is a difference, though, between rage and hatred. Rage prolonged over a period of years and fueled further and further by being constrained to the role of stepmother can certainly develop into hatred, but that was not the case with "I should've let her die on that horse." Regina had, mere days before, witnessed her lover brutally murdered before her eyes because her mother had found out from a little girl whom Regina had trusted; minutes before, Regina saw what she perceived as Snow acting like a spoiled, self-centered brat and her mother further revealed that the only reason Regina drew Leopold's attention and met Snow is because her mother made it happen. Is it a terrible thing to say? Yes, absolutely. But I believe it was born out of agonizing grief that transposed into rage rather than the kind of loathing Regina later develops. I'm not arguing that it wasn't the first step toward that loathing—it was—what I'm arguing is that that moment was not  evidence that Regina immediately jumped from liking Snow and wanting the best for her to despising her—the development of hatred is, like everything, a very long process.

I don't think it was jealousy on Regina's part that we saw in "Fruit of the Poisonous Tree;" I think it was the severe pain of being systematically ignored even by the servants. She was sitting in the back of the room with no one but the foreign guest paying any attention to her whatsoever—even though she, as the Queen, was the second most powerful figure in that room.

People get violent fantasies for reasons other than hatred. People get them for reasons less significant than the emotional agony Regina was going through as a result of losing Daniel. (Full disclosure: I get murderous fantasies about complete strangers. It's not because I hate them or because they caused me harm, it's usually because they're doing something that I find annoying—this does not mean that I am a danger to people and I would never, ever, ever act on these fantasies that last a few seconds at most, but they happen. I found them disturbing when I was younger, but less so now that I have accepted that they are a thing that happens to me, that they are not correlated to an actual desire to hurt or kill, and I know exactly how to regulate and deflate them the second they appear. The first time I had one, though? I freaked out and hid in my room for a few hours crying about it. It's a really, really horrible thing to imagine doing. So! violent fantasies ≠ hatred.)

I think Regina feels a genuine affection for Snow for a very long time after the Daniel incident, up to and including following Leopold's death. Yes, there is an element of manipulation in Regina's comfort of Snow, but the fact that there is also at least a bit of a gap between Leopold's death and Snow being driven into the forest suggests to me that Regina did not, at that point, want Snow gone as well as Leopold (if she DID want Snow gone, there was, as I said, nothing stopping her for falsifying evidence or outright forcing Snow to murder Leopold herself, which would be the easiest way to make her a criminal and getting rid of her without Regina having to publicly dirty her own hands. In comparison, hiring an assassin to murder Snow and bring her heart back to Regina  was ridiculously convoluted and risky  [heart=evidence!], especially since Snow did not, at the time, appear to be an outlaw. Far easier to kill someone who is reviled for killing their own father than to kill a beloved princess, yes? It's all about public relations.)

Of course the solution I suggested is twisted and nasty. That was the point; if Regina were as dark when Leopold died as she was when she cast the curse, the solution I suggested would be the obvious course of action to her (the only reason she cast the curse is she had no other options and was no longer the powerful queen; had she had another way to get her revenge on Snow with less collateral damage, she would have taken it. We know this because she repeatedly shows a willingness to minimize collateral damage, i.e. keeping her word after Snow ate the cursed apple.) What I suggested wasn't what I thought should happen on the show—quite the opposite—I was using it to point out, as you have, that Regina doing that would have been extremely out of character ''because her loathing for Snow is not immediate and is not the only emotion Regina feels for her. ''Or, I would've objected to it being canon for exactly the same reason you did.

There are a lot of IFs involved in the morality of the Mary Margaret/David/Kathryn love triangle, is the thing. Under normal circumstances, no, I would not be an advocate of Mary Margaret cutting out the middleman and going straight to Kathryn. But consider what the situation actually is:

1. David woke up from a coma with no memory of Kathryn and very intense feelings for Mary Margaret, which MM returned.

2. They considered beginning an affair, David planned to leave Kathryn for Mary Margaret but ultimately didn't because he regained his memories and felt obligated to rekindle the love he remembers having for Kathryn.

3. Mutual stalking occurred, and pretty quickly after that MM and David began an affair that included a pretty public kiss (right out in the street in broad daylight).

4. Mary Margaret tries her very hardest to make David leave Kathryn for her, arguing for honesty on the logic that his marriage is unfixable and the best they can do is break it and then move on. She is objectively right about this; when the truth does come to light, Kathryn is explicitly more hurt about being lied to than cheated on.

5. David repeatedly refuses to do this because he's afraid of hurting Kathryn and ignores the fact that the longer the lie continues, the more it will hurt when it inevitably surfaces.

6. This culminates in David leaving Kathryn but lying about why, Kathryn finding out the truth, and MM promptly dumping David because he lied to both of them.

And on top of this, Mary Margaret later makes it very, very clear that she wanted Kathryn gone (the scene where they interrogated her following Kathryn's appearance; obviously, MM means "out of the relationship" and not "dead," but the fact remains she very much did not want David to be married to Kathryn).

For points 1-4, I absolutely would not expect anyone to come forward to person whose spouse they have been having an affair with. It is at point five, when it becomes clear is that David's stance is "I would leave my wife for you if I weren't to scared to be proactive about it" that I would expect MM to do something besides repeat number 4 ad nauseum. She wants to be with David, but her actions in 6 make it clear that she only wants this if the truth comes out and she and David can have an actual relationship instead of a secret affair. Her options for proactivity, then, are (1) break things off with David because their moral schemas are different and things couldn't work in the long term, (2) come clean to Kathryn herself.

Obviously, 1 is the more admirable of the options; however, it is not one that I think Mary Margaret would choose to take because she's too deeply invested in the relationship with David. (Part of the problem, here, is that Mary Margaret and David operate on extremely different moral codes and those codes are in direct conflict on this issue: David thinks it's better to continue hiding until they're found out, Mary Margaret thinks it's better to come out and deal with the consequences on their terms. They're not, when you get down to it, very compatible people. Which is not to say I don't think they can make it work, it's just that they need to learn to communicate effectively, which they haven't yet.)

I am, in no way, trying to say that every person who has an affair with someone married should tell the spouse. I'm saying that in Mary Margaret's specific situation, I would expect her supposed extreme moral conviction that telling the truth is important enough to be worth breaking up forto translate into taking direct action rather than sitting around waiting for David to do what she tells him, and I don't think taking action by stopping the affair is something that she, personally, would choose because she desperately wants Kathryn out of the way so she can be with David.

(But, as an aside: "shred of dignity?" Really? Having an affair with someone who is in a committed and legally binding albeit not necessarily permanent relationship with another person is a hurtful thing to do, but how is it undignified? If anyone is acting in an undignified way in this scenario, it's David, who is the one who made the choice to cheat on his wife, made the choice to tell Mary Margaret he wanted to be with her and not Kathryn but still refuse to tell Kathryn or even just leave her without fully disclosing his reasons until Mary Margaret told him they should stop seeing each other because she couldn't handle having an affair; all Mary Margaret did is say yes and then pressure him to tell the truth and make it a clean break. Which is why the entire town demonizing MM for it and ignoring David's part was ridiculous.)

I read Red as a highly adventurous person (in general, not just sex) with a very active libido and also a strong preference for monogamy. In the cultural context of the FTR, this translated to her meeting a boy she liked a lot and related to easily and who she could dream about having adventures with (because promiscuity doesn't seem like it gels well or at all with the huge emphasis the FTR puts on finding True Love). I do believe she and Peter were as sexually active as they could be under Granny's watchful-to-the-point-of-paranoia eye. On the other hand, having many sexual partners with low emotional attachment is considered quite normal for a young woman in our world; Ruby seems like she's meant to come off as early-to-mid-twenties, which is exactly the age where hook up culture is very much the norm. Thus, her personality translates to a willingness and desire to explore her sexuality with the kind of people she would consider for partners; recall that she emphatically turns down Whale in "Red-Handed," but in the same episode shows interest in August, who appeals to her sense of adventure and desire to see new places—an excellent illustration of the fact that Ruby would not sleep around indiscriminately, but choose people that she likes. It's not about just sex, for her—she's clearly also looking for an emotional connection, even if that connection is just "I want to travel and you've been to foreign places that you're willing to tell me about."

It's the same character traits, but being applied to a very different culture—one values One True Love very strongly and discourages casual sex, the other normalizes twentysomething hookup culture.

As for Ruby's manner of dressing, it's worth pointing out that she uses the sexualized get-up of her earlier appearances as a defense mechanism because she's insecure—a trait which manifested in the FTR as fearing the wolf, hence her reliance on the cloak until she learnt to control it—and once Emma shows her that she is competent and she can succeed at what she sets out to do, Ruby switches to more comfortable clothes and what is in general a much less time-consuming style. It's not because Emma showed her that it was "wrong" to dress "inappropriately," it was because she had found something to be proud of about herself and she no longer felt the need to rely on how sexy she could make herself look (in the same way that Red was terrified when she ripped the cloak, but after she learnt to control the wolf, she had zero problems shrugging it off when in situations where the wolf could be useful—it's exactly the same arc of "security blanket to cover terminal self-esteem" -> "learning she doesn't need it" -> "being confident in herself").

As for David: I submit that Charming is every bit as cowardly as David is, about exactly the same things—the difference in their behavior is, again, cultural context. Charming grew up being taught by both his society and his mother that True Love is more important than anything and something that must be fought for. David's memories are of growing up in our world, where the opposite is true: the divorce rate in the U.S. is something in the neighborhood of 50%, there's the aforementioned hookup culture, there's the cultural expectation that men will have lots of sexual partners and don't have to settle down until their late thirties/early forties if at all, and we're socialized to blame women for affairs with married men more than we blame the married men who pursue those affairs. Of course David struggles more than Charming does with dealing with the Kathryn-MM problem. His past experiences haven't equipped him to face it the way Charming's did. (Also, the slay-a-dragon kind of bravery and the tell-your-wife-the-truth-about-your-lover kind of bravery are really, really different things—and remember that Charming didn't bother talking about his feelings with Abigail before he made his bid for escape—she told him about Fredrick and enlisted his help, not the other way around)

Nonono, I didn't mean "acting" in the sense of "putting on a show", I meant it in the sense that the actions she took were heroic (because she was fighting to protect a person she loved). It's like if I said "Tom Riddle's pursuit of knowledge about Horcruxes was evil, but Harry following in his foot steps was acting heroically because he wanted to use the knowledge to stop Voldemort, not make Horcruxes of his own."

Specific examples of Regina helping people besides Henry for unselfish reasons are difficult to pick out, since what she does not do is help people who hurt her, but off the top of my head:

1. fireballing the mermaids instead of teleporting away and striking out on her own like she could have

2. offering to adopt Hansel and Gretel (leave aside the fact that she almost got them killed; it doesn't occur to her that their refusal was connected to that fact or that they might prefer the father who raised them over the queen who almost killed them by proxy—and after all, she did warn them not to eat anything, so in her mind it's a lot less severe than what it actually was—the point here is willingness, not success)

3. saving storybrooke: Regina was going to die by slowing the failsafe, and this is how her decision went:

''Regina: You were right, you know. Everything that's happening, it's my fault. I created this device. It's only fitting that it takes my life.''

Emma: What am I supposed to tell Henry?

Regina: Tell him that, in the end, it wasn't too late for me to do the right thing.

Emma: Regina, please.

''Regina: Everyone looks at me as the Evil Queen, including my son. Let me die as Regina.''

That isn't "I'll save this town because that's the only way Henry will love me." That's, "I'll save this town because after all of this, I want to stop being evil." Yes, there is an element of "In doing this, I will prove to Henry that I am not irredeemable," but she's going to die. It isn't a redemption she can live to reap the benefits of—it is death. It is permanent. And yes, it was selfish—she wanted this redemption for herself and for Henry, not because she cared so much about the whole town. But the willingness to save hundreds if not thousands of lives at the cost of her own is not something that can or should be erased because her motivation was selfish. Also worth noting is that Regina doesn't volunteer to do this because Henry told her to (Emma did); nor does she use the fact that it will kill her to win points with Henry; she lets him believe that she can do this and live (and he's horrified when Emma tells him that that isn't the case).

That said, every time Regina hurts someone or even just lets them be hurt, it's a direct result of that person doing something to hurt her—Snow is the biggest example, of course, but there's also Jefferson, Whale, Rumpel, Emma, etc. By the same token, Regina has no interest in hurting people just because—she's polite to Emma until Emma does something that Regina perceives as an outright threat, to which she responds in kind; she opens up to Archie until he betrays her trust; she doesn't seem to bear Neal any ill will (you could interpret Lacey as being an attempt to drive a wedge between Rumpel and his son, except she knows nothing about their relationship or why it's strained—she's not omniscient, just clever); she ignores but is wary of August and later Greg (until she remembers who Greg is and realizes that he's probably a threat); etc.

About Snow saving—what was the disguise!name? Wilma, I think: The entire point of Snow saving her was "look how horrible the Queen is for executing violent dissenters who are rallying people to attack her in effigy!" (remember: Wilma was going to be executed for treason, and Snow doesn't know how that happened). It's a political stunt—an obvious political stunt—and the clear follow-up is not to let Wilma die, which would defeat the point. (Or do you really think Snow would have saved "Wilma" if she had seen Wilma decrying Snow's name in favor of the Queen?)

Emma's first reaction to having parents again in the beginning of season two is feelings of abandonment and betrayal—irrational ones, considering the circumstances, but still valid. She doesn't get over them until she and Snow are in the FTR nursery, and then I got more "we can be a family even if you couldn't raise me like it should have been" vibes than "finally! a mother!" then.

The thing about parents is that their main function is to guide the kid to adulthood. If they're successful, the end result is a self-sufficient adult who can take care of themselves without the need for parental authority. Emma is a self-sufficient adult capable of taking care of her own needs without the authority of parental figures. Therefore, she does not need Snow to be her mother in the sense of Snow filling the function of a parent->kid relationship. What she does need is a close, familial relationship with Snow and David for the purpose of support and emotional health. Now, If Snow and David had raised Emma to the point she is now and filled that parent->kid role in her life, then NOW what I would expect to see based on how adulthood works is Emma being autonomous and turning to her parents for support when she chooses to—in which case, if she wanted Snow's "wisdom", she would ask for it.

I have no doubt that Emma idealized having parents because she grew up without them, and was interested by the possibility of suddenly having them, and that she loves David and Snow and considers them her family (they are her family), but family is not the same as having parents who treat you like a child. What I have gotten from the show thus far is that Emma went from feeling betrayed by Snow and David -> seeing she was wrong and accepting them as family -> letting them treat her like a child because PARENTS!!:D -> realizing how awful it is to have someone her age treating her like a child -> the events of the premiere, which correlate to Emma realizing that, while Snow and David are her family, she doesn't want them to be parents in the sense that they have been, which is trying to reconstruct a parent>child relationship without taking into account that Emma is an adult.

I think "not as parents, just family" is a problematic way of putting it, since "just" is inherently dismissive and familial relationships outside of the parent/child ones are every bit as valid.

I wasn't explaining very well before—part of the problem is that there aren't separate words for "parent to a young child" and "parent to a grown adult," even though they're different types of relationships, because the former has an element of authority and the parent having the final say and the latter does not and should not. And yes, I think that Emma does regret letting Snow and David act like the former rather than the latter; she still wants them as family and parents, but not parents in the sense of having an authoritative position over her and having the level of control of her life which she allowed them to have.

The thing is, Regina is "being saved" by her desire to do right by Henry and be worthy of his love again (with the obvious implication that being worthy of his love means that he will also actually love her). What she is getting in response is still being constantly rebuffed in favor of Emma—she has been reduced to the role of the visiting parent rather than the primary one, and Henry is still being used like a carrot to dangle in front of her to get her to do what Henry wants her to.

Henry is a ten-year-old boy with a very, very rigid and black-and-white morality system that includes impossibly high standards for redemption. He expects an immediate turnaround and no struggle—and that is what he's demanding from Regina in return for his love. No, he doesn't think of it this way and he's not being malicious—he genuinely thinks he's helping!—but that doesn't alter the fact that this is what he is doing. When Regina fails, as she inevitably must because no one could live up to the standards that Henry has set for her, Henry concludes that it's because she's evil rather than because she's human and treats her accordingly, which is why his "love" seems so conditional.

I believe that Regina does genuinely want to be good. Her redemption arc started not because she wanted to earn Henry's love—it started because Henry, however accidentally, made her realize that she has become exactly the kind of person she wanted to avoid—i.e. her mother. That realization is what prompted her to start trying, not that Henry hated her. She didn't start trying to redeem herself until she realized exactly how far she had fallen, and she is relying on Henry's standards and, to an extent, Archie's help because she knows she can't figure it out on her own.

Snow isn't ignoring that what she did was horrible. She seems to be ignoring that it happened at all. As soon as she deemed herself sufficiently "recovered" from her darkened heart? She snapped right back to her usual self-righteous "we're not killers" self, and the most we get is a few token reminders to keep up appearances. It rings false to me—and there is a certain amount of subjectivity here, because I'm partly operating off my gut feelings from watching the show.

In terms of horrible lives, Cora had it leagues, leagues above Regina; Cora was not actively abused (neglected, sure, but not abused in the way that she abused Regina), incredibly prideful, and—unlike even Rumpel—noticeably power-hungry and vicious before she learned how to do magic ("I want their necks to break from bending," indeed). Cora was not driven and pushed and molded into a monster like Regina was. Parallels between Cora's and Regina's backstories break down when you look at the actual moment at which they crossed the line into darkness: Regina broke, Cora had three major options (kill Xavier and elope with Rumpel [happiness, power because magic], keep her heart but marry Henry [loveless marriage, presumably ongoing affair with Rumpel, power because magic and aristocracy], or rip out her own heart [no real happiness, but buckets of power because magic, aristocracy, and ability to be emotionlessly ruthless]) and deliberately chose to rip out her own heart. She did, in fact, embrace it, where Regina did not and never did.

Similarly, Eva is superficially similar to Snow in that she started off spoiled and later became good, except that from what little we see of Eva, she walked the talk after becoming good, so to speak, where Snow still seems every bit as entitled and nasty as she did before Eva told her not to be, only better at hiding it now.

(...For that matter, wanting to murder people for tripping you is a whole 'nother scale of darkness than tripping people weaker than you and laughing at them...)