Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26159109-20161114201452/@comment-5106672-20161115035338

That's not entirely correct, either. Once has been pretty consistent with defining what makes a villain: wrong choices (power and/or revenge over love) and wrong methods to get them (lying, murdering, torturing etc). They've also been consistent with shortcuts to villainousness: two examples may be excessive alcohol consumption (Hook, Lacey, the Queens of Darkness, Zelena, now Queenie) and crave for wealth, social status and material comfort (Cora is the poster child, but the Evil Queen with her dresses and blings is no less, and look at Queenie's speech to Henry in the last episode). That's a quick way to establish that a character is vicious. That I can get past and also agree on, but using sex as a shortcut for evil is a bit dated nowadays. Generally speaking, not only do the villainesses show more cleavage than the heroines, but they're also heavy on make up and, in cinematic language, make up = femme fatale. Yes, they are heavy on fake eyelashes on Belle and she was practically naked in, say, Strange Case, but that's pretty much nothing compared to the eyeshadow and lipstick game of Maleficent, the Evil Queen, or even S1 Regina.

Back to GQ, I could have gladly done without. But I think that after all it makes sense: the Evil Queen is basically Regina's id without any restraints. Whatever little moral compass she possessed even at her lowest points, Queenie does not have. She might have found Rumple attractive back in her student days, but, say, grieving over Daniel may have kept her from acting on it. By the time she was over that enough to get herself a lover (which she did, poor Huntsman), the frenemy dynamics were already established and she wouldn't screw that up for whatever reason (i.e.: sex is a power play, she wouldn't want Rumple to have power over her, she'd rather take someone powerless completely at her mercy, enter the Huntsman). Queenie has no such qualms and, while being efficient in her evil deeds because she has no judgement, she ends up making a hot mess of anything outside of that.

So yeah, I think thematically and storytelling-wise it makes sense. It just has unfortunate implications, especially how they're playing it up to eleven and turning it into a crucial difference between Regina and Queenie.