Board Thread:Character Discussion/@comment-4839682-20131003142941/@comment-22525977-20131006182612

But Regina doesn't hate Cora, is the thing. She tries to have her killed before casting the Dark Curse because she's doing what Cora taught her to do, i.e. get rid of the things she loves because love is weakness (she says this outright over what she thinks is Cora's corpse!). Then, later, the second Cora shows up and starts talking about being sorry and can she have a second chance so she can do better this time, Regina falls for it even though it's, to the viewer, an obvious lie.

She clearly still loves her mother and is desperate for her love in return—that's how Snow convinced her to return Cora's heart, after all.

She's gotten to the point where she can, intellectually, accept it when Emma tells her that her mother was a real piece of work (I believe her actual response is "indeed," but don't quote me on that). That does not in any way mean that Regina isn't still a complete mess and genuinely needing professional help, because she is and does and her behavior demonstrates that quite clearly—consider her progress early in season two, when she was seeing Archie and making leaps and bounds, versus late in season two, post-Cora, when there's no indication that she went back to Archie and she flounders.

Saying that Regina isn't equipped to overcome her abuse-related psychological problems by herself also does not mean that she isn't trying, because she obviously is and she's doing remarkably well for not having any support network to speak of. What I'm saying is is the reason she keeps making wrong turns and backsliding is that she's working on an understanding of people that is based on the foundation her parents gave her—a fundamentally flawed one, because everything about Cora and Henry Sr and their relationships with each other and Regina was twisted and unhealthy—and there's no one around who can help her unlearn that and replace it with a more normal knowledge based.

I'm not trying to "make" Regina a victim; she is a victim, and she's trying incredibly hard to not be one anymore and failing because she doesn't know how. Her behavior in-show makes that painfully obvious.

And yes, I'm going to continue to hammer the abuse point because the repercussions it had on Regina's character throughout her life are glaringly obvious. No, nothing about her childhood excuses or justifies the abominable things that Regina has done, but it does explain them. It's the same as how I take into account Emma's crappy time in the foster system and later criminal activity when I talk about her present-day trust issues and cynicism, or Charming being a terrible leader because he grew up as a shepherd and has no political training whatsoever, or Frankenstein is messed up because his father was abusive, et cetera. One of the things OUaT does extremely well is showing that stories change in meaning depending on how far back you go, while never trying to justify the horrible things their villains do (although Rumpel does seem to get a bizarre free pass on a lot of things). Explaining why something happened is different from justifying it; justification involves the additional step of "this happened because X and therefore xe is blameless," which I'm not, by any means, trying to say.

Regina has done horrible things, and she can and should be held accountable for them. But her backstory explains why those things happened, and that's valuable to take into account when making judgements on a character like we're doing here. It's why I talk about Regina differently than I do Tom Riddle: Regina is acting in response to a lifetime of abuse and misery, whereas the only reason Tom's orphanage was notably unpleasant was because Tom actively terrorized everybody for giggles ("I can make them hurt if I want to"). Both of them commit evil acts; Regina does it because she's fighting back against what she perceives as the reason for her misery and Tom/Voldemort does it because he's a sociopath who feels entitled to do so. Both of them should be held accountable for their actions, but Regina is a far more sympathetic character than Tom. Does that make sense?