Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-6175354-20130930170041/@comment-22525977-20131002035530

Regina does not believe that Snow is good. She has not believed in Snow's goodness since the Daniel incident, and every subsequent action Snow took served to further convince Regina that Snow was no different  from her, except that Snow got everything she wanted and Regina got kicked to the proverbial curb. Given that, I think it's understandable to hearing Snow tell her triumphantly that good will always win is to scoff and say, "We'll see about that."

Think about if their positions as protagonist/antagonist were reversed: A triumphant Snow has just cast the curse and gloats that "good will always win"—would you expect our hypothetical hero-Regina to accept that? No. A character like Snow, who sees things as very firmly defined, would say something along the lines of "Please, you're not good." Regina, on the other hand, is something of a deadpan snarker when she's not miserable, so of course her response is more scoff than contradiction. Yes?

(I'm a big fan of the "the villain is the hero of their own tale" school of thought, which is where this is coming from.)

The dialogue I provided works on two levels: first, there's the text, which is that Sidney wants to break into Regina's office to collect evidence and Emma wants to acquire a warrant first because she has an actual moral spine. Mary Margaret throws her support behind Sydney on the logic that Regina is clearly evil, and therefore it's okay to break the law to get evidence that wouldn't even be useable in the event of an actual legal process.

Then there's the more subtextual level that you mentioned. Mary Margaret is having an affair with David and is in crisis over it. She rationalizes it away with the same line, and it becomes "I am meant to be with David, obviously, therefore it is okay to lie to Kathryn and see her husband behind her back instead of being upfront with her and explaining things." Yes, this is something that real people do all the time, but that does not make it okay.

The reason people use rationalizations and justifications of that nature is because they want to continue doing something which they know to be wrong. It's not okay. It's exactly the same kind of mental contortions Regina must have gone through to kill her first victim (I imagine it was something like "I need Rumpelstiltskin's tutelage because I have no other options; this girl is probably just learning magic as a lark, therefore my needs take precedent over hers and that makes it okay if I kill her to convince Rumpel to train me again.")

Snow thought Emma was upset because Emma was brooding and blaming herself. The idea that she could be part of the problem never occurred to her. Then, instead of responding with the incredible compassion that she's purported to have, she gets defensive and tells Emma to essentially stop feeling bad and listen to Snow because Snow knows best.

Contrast this, again, with David (who incidentally is the biggest proponent of Snow-is-a-wonderful-person-and-can-do-no-wrong), whose response is "Yes, things are awful right now and we're going to do whatever we can to help you fix that." It's simple and still irritating in its optimism, but it tells Emma that he disagrees with her worldview but he respects where hers comes from and how it influences her decisions.

(Basically David is, while a bit dim, an infinitely better person than the majority of the primary cast.)

It's not understandable that Snow treats Emma as a child. Consider the contexts in which she knows Emma:

1. A few minutes at best following Emma's birth, when Snow got to hold her and formed the mother-child chemical bond.

2. A few months of knowing Emma as just Mary Margaret; they are friends and roommates who trust and confide in one another.

3. However long after the curse breaks—not more than a year—of having both one and two in her head.

What is understandable is Snow having trouble reconciling those differences. What is not understandable is the mere knowledge that twenty-eight years ago she gave birth to the woman who is her age and who she has known predominately as a friend translates to treating that woman like a rebellious child. What is not understandable is trying to parent a friend who is her age or possibly a bit older, depending on how old Snow was when the curse was cast, just because Snow gave birth to her once and parenting is what mothers do.

It doesn't matter if she's doing it on purpose. What matters is that it's creepy, rude, and condescending, and Snow gives no indication that she understands any of these things or why Emma might react badly to them.

(And, personal digression time: I have a mother who is extremely patronizing towards both my sister and I—I am twenty and my sister is eighteen, and she routinely speaks to us the exact same way she did when we were eleven and thirteen or thereabouts. It's annoying, but understandable because, you know, she raised us. My mother is also a stubborn, opinionated, occasionally bitchy person who is very often certain that she's in the right. She also realizes that the patronizing thing is wrong and she tries really hard to back off and let my sister and I grow into our own people! That Snow, who does not have the excuse of having helped Emma grow up or even known that Emma was her daughter for the majority of their relationship, doesn't see this is really creepy.)

I completely agree that Emma didn't mean to imply that Regina isn't Henry's mother, but she did inadvertently do so. I'm very certain that she later apologizes for her mistake (and I wrote fic to that effect). Like I said before, intention is not everything.

All of Snow's moralizing speeches happen when she has an audience; when she's alone, we get things like Gepetto and "that's not me" and trying to incite Regina to kill her. I think that is a not insignificant juxtaposition.

Dark!Snow "fell in love" with Charming because he took an arrow to save her from a fate which he explicitly told her he believed would destroy her. Whether she agreed with him on the destruction part is irrelevant; what he did was prove to her that he's 100% willing to risk his life in order to keep her safe from destruction that he thought was certain. It wasn't his love that she was responding to, it was the actions he took because of that love, and those actions were to prioritize her needs over his life.

I didn't mean that Dark!Snow could have fallen back in love with Charming based on their past, I meant that she could have fallen back in love with Charming the same way she fell in love with him the first time, which was by having crazy adventures with him and learning who he was rather than what he was willing to do to protect her.

It is completely possible for abused people to be devoted to their abuser. Again: Belle to Rumpel. Regina to Cora.

I don't think Snow is outright abusive in the way that Rumpel or Cora are, although Dark!Snow certainly had the potential to be. But I do think that her relationship with David is creepily codependent and that her behavior in general is a big, big part of the reason for that.

"We all saw that happen to Regina" —actually, no, we didn't. The entire time she was the Evil Queen, she was completely convinced that she was doing the best she could under the circumstances and it isn't until she begins her redemption arc in Storybrooke that she begins to admit that what she did was evil and now she needs to get better. There is a reason that the cliche is "admitting you have a problem is the first step to healing." You cannot change if you do not first admit to yourself that there is a reason you need to change.

For instance, replace "evil" with an addictive substance—let's say alcohol. Regina and Snow both struggle with alcoholism; Regina is low-functioning and Snow is high-functioning. Regina-as-the-Evil-Queen is deep in denial—she can stop any time, she just chooses not to! See, she's in control of herself!—but Regina-during-and-post-curse eventually realizes that she isn't in control and does what she can to overcome this problem, by attending AA meetings and trying to gather a support network, et cetera. Snow, on the other hand, insists that she doesn't have a problem—she doesn't get slobbering drunk and pass out in her bedroom like Regina does, right?—and refuses to get help because she doesn't believe she needs it.

And on top of this, everyone Regina knows is telling her "you have a problem with alcohol and you need to fix it," whereas Snow is so high functioning that none of her social circle can believe that she would ever have need help.

In-show, Regina and Snow both have wells of nastiness in them that run very, very deep. The difference is that everyone in Regina's life is pushing her to redeem herself, to become a better person, to stop being evil—and everyone keeps telling Snow that she has the purest heart of anyone they've ever known (I believe David literally says that to her in "The Miller's Daughter"—I remember being angry about it).

Therefore, where Regina keeps struggling to find a way to overcome her past evil, Snow buries hers under a mountain of rationalizations and excuses and pretends it doesn't exist. One of these strategies will lead to success, the other will not. (Hint: repression is never the healthy choice.)