Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-25939674-20150717221924/@comment-7526254-20160524152009

Nobody is fully good or fully evil.

After rewatching 3X18, I realize Eva might not be the bad guy. She and Leopold were engaged and he dumped her for Cora without getting a chance to know Eva. Even before Cora was a villain she was a power-hungry gold digger. She said yes to Jonathan's proposal after hearing that he was royalty, not that she even knew him that well. She probably never loved him, nor did she really love Leopold. She lied to him about her pregnancy, when all he wanted was to know he could trust her. She could have told him and they could have happilly raised the baby together (and none of the main characters would have been born). Eva was trying to do the right thing and let Leopold know that his fiance was a liar and a theif, in an attempt to win him back. Eva must have truly loved Leopold. She did not need to marry him for money. She was already a princess.

Leopold is also not a perfect man. He may be good when he meets Cora, but later on he is in an abusive (not physically) marriage with Regina. He won't let her leave the castle and she can only have one tree. He is possesive of her even though he doesn't love her. He only marries her so Snow will have a mother, but Regina hardly interacts with Leopold or Snow during her marriage. Not to mention, he threatened to kill a man for giving Regina a mirror.

Snow says that she is just like her mother for telling Regina's secret and that she is a spoiled brat. This is certainly not true. The only time Snow is a spoiled brat is at the beginning of 2X15 and she quickly grows up when her mother dies. By the time she meets Regina she is a kind and caring girl. All she does is try to improve Regina's relationship with her mother and Regina blames her for Daniel's death. She did nothing wrong. Snow is also accused of turning to darkness for killing Cora. Cora was planning on becoming the DO and destroying all of Storybrooke. That makes Snow a hero, not a villain. The only evil thing Snow has done was kidnapping Maleficent's baby. She had no good intentions there. She was trying to help her daughter, but at the expense of another woman's child. Even if she did not know the child would be sent to another realm, she did intend to fill it with darkness. She claimed that the child would already be dark because she would not be any different than Maleficent. That kind of goes against everything the show stands for. Snow of all people should not excuse her actions by saying that a child cannot be different than its parents.

The only pure evil character is Cora. She pretends to love Leopold and secretly steals from him. After breaking his heart, she abandons her child, rather than raising it herself. She blames Cora, but it was really her choice. Poor people raise children all the time, even by themselves. She could have found her daughter a home, but instead she lets her get sucked in by a tornado. After becoming a princess she could have gone to Oz to take back her daughter, like she does in 5X20. After seeing how cruely Zelena's father treats her and how much Regina wants a sister, Cora sends Zelena back to Oz and erases her daughters' memmories. Apparently, bringing back those memmories was enough to redeem her for everything she has done and allow her to move on from the Underworld. Cora spent her whole life preparing for Regina to become queen, which Regina clearly didn't want. Cora claimed everything she did was for her daughter, but she really only cared about herself. After being sent to Wonderland she took the life she always wanted and didn't even try to get back to her daughter.