Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-4467206-20161205063902/@comment-24674051-20161205183252

A couple of points on the "Sympathetic Story".

For all of the Women, we are given a glimpse into thier lives at an early age. Cora and Regina are both either late teens or early 20's when we see them being mistreated. Ingrid was an early teen when she found her magic. We see Zelena abandoned by Cora, and we see the mistreatment by her Father. In other words, we are allowed to see their lives completely, including the events that lead up to their choices to go evil.

In Malcolm's case, we see him as the downtrodden adult strapped with a child and no mother, but we don't see all of the events that lead up to that, so it's harder to have a sympathetic story (though with coming events of the Black Fairy we may get a little more insight into Malcolm after the fact).

Isaac we only saw one scene of him before he was selected as the next Author. And we saw nothing of what happened with Hades, only what he told (which may or may not be fabricated)

However, whether or not they had sympathetic stories is irrelavent, imo. because what we are given is that all of these characters (rumple and killian included) had pivotal points in their lives where they could choose to go a different path, and they chose the path that led towards evil. Ursula falls into this category as well.

We know nothing of Mal, so we can't really speak to her life. So the only 'villian' we've seen so far that really did not have a choice would be Cruella. She was a sociopath from the beginning, and did not have the capacity to choose differently.