Board Thread:Character Discussion/@comment-4839682-20131003142941/@comment-22525977-20131005221508

It's entirely possible for us humans to feel contradictory feelings at once (because we're all insane), and I think that that's what happened in the earlier years of Regina and Snow's relationship. Regina wanted Snow to go away because she was a constant reminder of everything that was awful in Regina's life, but she also felt some affection for Snow (evidenced by the fact that Regina continued to lie about Daniel to protect Snow and, yes, chose not to take action that would have immediately turned their subjects against Snow). As for how Regina could feel affection for Snow but still murder her beloved father, there's two things: First, Regina felt no such affection for Leopold, and second, Regina's entire context for affection or love of any kind is Cora (who was abusive and cruel), Henry Sr (who stood by and let it happen without a word), and, much later, Daniel (who died because of the kind of love that Regina believed in). People learn how to love from others, and especially from parents, and for eighteen years, the only kind of love Regina saw was twisted and unhealthy, or in the one case where it was healthy, led immediately to violent murder.

It's kind of like the Hansel and Gretel thing: I don't think Regina fully thought through or was able to think through the implications of what she did and how it would affect Snow. A person who'd had a normal upbringing and had the ability that you or I do for ethical thinking, sure, but Regina hasn't had that because she's been viciously abused for her entire life. (I won't go into it in-depth here for the sake of time, but it's worth taking a look at how severely child abuse can effect the brain even into adulthood—the short version is mainly that the brain rewires itself to focus almost exclusively on survival and threat response which, among other things, includes pulling resources away from the areas of the brain involved in complex thought and abstract cognition and being in a constant state of hyper-arousal so that what would, to you or I, be normal setbacks that are easily overcome are instead triggers for the flight-or-fight response.)

So, while Regina absolutely did evil things and should be held accountable for them, considering the context which the writers have given us makes me more inclined to view the Evil Queen as a symptom of a problem in the environment rather than a problem in Regina herself.

An obvious political stunt would be using Snow to kill Leopold, at which point her demise wouldn't need to be handled with care because Snow would have appeared a traitor; that Regina had no real plan in place for dealing with Snow and merely sought the huntsman's help on the advice of her mirror says, to me, that she saw an opportunity and took it much like she did with the genie and Leopold—it was not a plan that was in place from the start.

(I was mistaken about there being a gap—it's been a while since I watched that episode and I'd been under the impression that the scene with comforting Snow was implied to take place some time before Regina contacted the huntsman. That doesn't change my reading of either scene, though. Regina is, at that point, a confused mix of the Regina who wanted to run away with Daniel and have her True Love Happily Ever After and the Regina her mother forced her to become.)

The reason Mary Margaret agreed to meet David at the T(r)oll Bridge in the first place was because he was leaving his wife; the whole point was not to have an affair, it was that he'd left his previous wife behind and they were going to start a new life together. That very strongly suggests that MM never wanted an affair, she wanted a legitimate, public relationship, and once the affair actually started, she jumped back and forth from pushing David to go back to Kathryn and end the affair, or tell Kathryn and end the affair to go public with MM. She, as you say, repeatedly told David she felt uncomfortable with the situation—the implication is that she wants it to change, and since she refused to do anything to change it on her own it's reasonable to assume that she wanted David to make that change happen.

Then the Mary Margaret/David/Kathryn love triangle resolved when David gave MM a card meant for Kathryn and she dumped him because she couldn't or wouldn't handle being the "other woman," so to speak.

I don't think anyone needed to outright say that the marriage was unfixable for it to be clear the characters knew it. It was obviously unfixable from the moment that David decided to try to make it work with Kathryn and then, what, four episodes later—and the first episode after "The Shepherd" which focuses on their arc—they begin their affair (and it's heavily implied they've been mutually stalking each other for the entirety of the interim). So much for "trying to make it work." And I think David knew that and Mary Margaret knew that and Kathryn, on some level, sensed that things were getting worse and not better (which is why, in the end, she was more hurt at being lied to than about the affair itself).

Of course it's understandable that MM wanted Kathryn out of the relationship. She is, as you pointed out, 100% monogamous (though let's not make assumptions that everyone is—there are plenty of people who are cool with or actively seek out open or poly relationships or those, like me, who don't want any kind of romantic relationship at all). I don't see how pointing this out negates my point that because MM wants a monogamous relationship with David, she also wants him to not be married with Kathryn? Particularly not when she textually wanted Kathryn to be out of the relationship so much that she got emotional and shouted as much while she was being interrogated about Kathryn's disappearance-and-presumably-murder.

I didn't say that she "should" tell Kathryn the truth—I said that she could have, and that I think a person with MM's personality would choose telling the truth over simply dumping him (and then sticking to her guns, so to speak).

In the event that she did, I imagine MM's part of the conversation going something along the lines of "David and I screwed up because we're in love, we went about it in the wrong way and I feel terrible, but David won't tell you the truth and I think the only way for this situation to resolve well is for to be honest with you because you're his wife and you deserve to know, therefore I'm telling you," not "I'm a home-wrecker" so much. It would be really uncomfortable for both MM and Kathryn, and I have no doubt Kathryn would have been upset just like she was when she had to find out from Regina, but Kathryn also canonically would have preferred honesty over being cheated on behind her back, and, character-wise, it would have demonstrated very clearly that MM is serious about wanting the truth to come out and is willing to make hard decisions to stick to her moral code.

I disagree it would be tantamount to Mary Margaret taking full responsibility for what happened; on the contrary, it would put the majority of the blame on David, because MM made a mistake and feels horrible about it and is doing what she thinks she needs to to make it right, whereas David made a much bigger mistake and has shown every intention of continuing to have this affair. It's not as if MM is totally blameless—she did say yes even though she had the choice to say no—but here she is less to blame than David is but still the one trying to fix it. And, yes, MM might well perceive her actions as undignified, but accepting the amount of blame she deserves and making an honest attempt to make up for her mistake is a means of regaining that dignity, not destroying the last remnants of it. Especially for someone with a moral schema based so strongly on forgiveness.

I think it has everything to do with culture; it's nurture over nature. Red was raised in a world where werewolves exist and are feared and reviled and she is one; Ruby grew up in our world, where there are no werewolves but women are culturally expected to not be both sexually desirable and sexually passive (i.e. the men are supposed to be in charge), and Ruby takes charge of her own sexuality anyway. Red begins by hating and fearing the wolf inside her and covering it over with a cloak, and grows to embrace it and own it so she no longer needs the cloak; Ruby begins by flaunting her sexuality to mask her insecurities (thus using sexuality as a metaphorical cloak) and grew to accept herself—all of herself—so that she no longer needs to hide behind a caricatured version of her sexuality. Does that make sense? In both cases, Red/Ruby has something in her that is undesirable in the society in which she grew up, uses masks to hide it, and eventually throws those masks away in favor of saying, "No, this is who I am and this is who I will be" with no apologies. I don't think it's a spiritual freedom/sexual freedom difference; it's a discovery of personal freedom from cultural norms that don't suit her as both Red and Ruby.

Similarly, on David/Charming: Putting oneself in physical danger for the protection of others is something that is highly valued in both our culture and that of the FTR (the FTR venerates people who slay dragons for the common good; we venerate soldiers who put their lives on the line to defend our country). David could, for example, very easily be the kind of firefighter who pulls a child out of a burning building at great personal risk just like Charming was the kind of farm-boy who could fight a dragon. On the other hand, Charming grew up in a world where putting oneself at emotional risk for the sake of someone you love is venerated just as if not more than fighting for mere common good. True Love is a real thing with real power and real in the FTR, but it's a laughable concept in our world. In our world, Charming's lofty "I will always find you" brand of love would get him jeered out of the room—it's naive and the real world sucks, right? So when Charming sets out to move mountains to get his happily ever after with his True Love, he has the support of the cultural expectation that True Love will out on his side. David, on the other hand, grew up in the kind of world where love is expected not to last and certainly isn't worth really fighting for—oh, certainly it's a nice thought, but real life doesn't work like that. David, unlike Charming, has been told his entire life that sometimes it just doesn't work out between people. That's his norm, not True Love. (That, and telling the truth is a lot scarier than doing something physically dangerous. Humans are weird that way; it's a lot easier to stand up to our enemies than to our friends and emotional pain is almost universally considered worse than physical pain. See also: Rumpel and his terror of emotional commitment)

And finally, there's Mary Margaret versus Snow. Snow grew up as a spoiled princess beloved by all and with a bevy of servants at her beck and call. Even when she was a fugitive, she had a huge number of people taking her side over the queen's. She, like Charming, was taught to fight for what she wanted and that, if she fought, she'd be rewarded for it by getting what she was fighting for. Mary Margaret, on the other hand, grew up like a perfectly ordinary middle-class woman, in a culture where women are not treated well and she had no additional status to overcome that. On top of that, I would bet everything I own that Regina went out of her way to bring out Snow's weaknesses—Mary Margaret more than likely has memories of being unrelentingly bullied in school, has no close friends (the MM we see in Storybrooke in the pilot is a very, very lonely woman), more than likely was not spoiled as a child—in other words, MM does not have the trained entitlement that Snow does, and Snow's tendency to not deal well with serious setbacks (talk about that in a minute) comes to the fore much more quickly in Mary Margaret.

And yes, Snow is terrible at dealing with the kind of setbacks that lead to emotional pain, especially if it involves Charming. She has to lie to Charming to save his life and spend the rest of her life separated from him? She takes a potion to make her forget him instead of trying to move on like Grumpy did. The Dark Curse seems insurmountable or like she'll have to be apart from Charming for years? We get these exchanges:

''Prince Charming: I've sent my men into the forest. The animals are abuzz with the Queen's plan. This is going to happen unless we do something.''

''Snow White: There's no point. The future is written.''

''Prince Charming: No. I refuse to believe that. Good can't just lose!''

Snow White: Maybe it can.

and

Snow White: I don't wanna do this.

Prince Charming: It has to be you.

Snow White: I'm not leaving you.

''Prince Charming: It's the only way. You'll go in there, and you'll be safe from the curse.''

Snow White: He said it would be on her twenty-eighth birthday.

All the curse has to do to make Mary Margaret terminally passive? Remove the kind of supports Snow had that made her strong. Take away her lover, take away the friends who helped her through adversity and take away the people who showed her the way through, take away her royalty and the power that comes from it. Simple.

I don't have a very high opinion of Henry Sr. He let his daughter be horribly abused for her entire life and did nothing to stop it, and then when she was in trouble and set to be executed the best he could muster up was advising her to roll over and show her belly, so to speak, and maybe they'd spare her to a life of exile. The most he ever does for her is to tell her Rumpel exists. And Regina knows that, on some level—the scene between Henry Sr. and Regina when she was in jail waiting to be executed comes off very much like Regina finally realizing just how little her father did to protect her.

Therefore, I'm not surprised that Regina, when faced with the decision between killing her father and casting the Dark Curse versus letting him live and being miserable for the rest of her life, chose to kill him. Selfish, yes, but I do think there was a part of Regina that felt betrayed—understandably—by her father's passivity and that that sense of betrayal and resulting anger were what allowed her to take his heart.

Hook is totally trying to help Henry to make up for his failures with Baelfire. In his eyes, remember, Bae is his step-son and Henry is his step-grandson, and since he screwed Bae over he's now trying to make it right by saving Henry. Admirable, certainly, since he's able to prioritize his love for Milah and the obligation he feels towards her offspring over his hatred for Rumpelstiltskin, but not purely out of the goodness of his heart.

It comes down to motivation, I think. Emma and Regina want to save Henry because they love him. Snow and Charming want to save Henry because he's Emma's son (never mind that Emma didn't raise him, it's obvious that neither Snow nor David consider adoptive parents to be legitimate ones), and they care about him. Hook wants to save Henry because he loved Henry's paternal grandmother and failed Henry's father. Rumpel wants to save Henry presumably for reasons similar to Hook's, as a means of making up for screwing Bae over (and I think there's also an element of "Henry is my grandson and they took him from me, and I have to get back what's mine" there, because Rumpel is uberpossessive about people he considers his family).

They're all being selfish, to an extent. Regina and Emma come off as having the least selfish motivation here: both of them truly love Henry, of course they're going to do their damnedest to save him from his kidnappers. Snow and David are there because they believe that family always has to find each other. Hook wants to assuage his guilt at not being a good step-father by being a good step-grandfather. Rumpel seems more interested in revenge than Henry personally. Or: The more degrees of emotional separation they have from Henry, the more selfish their motivation appears to be for me.

Trying to quantify which character is objectively better/worse is a failed endeavor from the start; there's a bit of subjectivity and different interpretations (we can't even agree on how the curse effected personalities, for example—and that's okay) that will influence that, and different personal definitions of what it means to be selfless or brave or honest or morally pure or anything. That said, I think talking about our interpretations and how they differ and why we interpret things the way we do it is a valid exercise; it's not about aiming to convince, it's about exploring different opinions and examining opposing viewpoints and better understanding why we think the way you do. (Plus, if it weren't a worthwhile thing to do, the field of literary analysis would be obsolete)

On Snow, saving Wilma, and public relations as a monarch:

1. Yes, it would have been easy on Snow's part to watch Wilma die, swoop in after the guards were gone, and start decrying the Queen's men for summarily killing a dissenter. But think how that would look to the peasants: "You mean, you saw this person being executed and you did nothing to stop it? You're too cowardly to fight for us, but you expect us to rally around you? What kind of a leader claims to have our best interests at heart and doesn't lift a finger to save someone when you could have?"

Let's, for the sake of argument, say that "Wilma" was not Regina at all but a real peasant who really dissented and was really executed. Snow lets it happen and then strolls in to make a pretty speech after the guards have dispersed. The peasants who here her think to themselves: she talks a good line, but can we trust her to put her sword where her mouth is? She could have saved poor Wilma and she didn't.

Regina gets wind of this, because she's sure to save spies. What can she do to mitigate the damage to herself and make Snow look even worse? First, find the guards who executed this poor peasant without so much of a trial and have them publicly hanged or beheaded or whatever the penalty for defying a monarch's orders are; spread the word that these guards were NOT acting under Regina's authority and that Regina is punishing them for it. This says to the peasants: The queen was not behind Wilma's death, it was a couple of guards who went rogue and she punished them for their crimes. She, unlike Snow, follows through on her words.

Yeah, this doesn't win them over to Regina's side, but it does put down that seed of doubt: Is Snow really the kind of leader who can or will protect them? Is the queen really as horrible as they say?

Keep in mind, this isn't a world with internet and the villages look pretty isolated. Snow didn't even know about the destroyed village until she stumbled over it. What the peasants are getting is unsubstantiated rumors, and if, for example, the rumors of Snow's amazing heroism don't match up with what they see before their eyes, they're going to question that.

2. However, Snow chose to put herself at risk to save Wilma's life. The peasants saw her do this. They saw her fighting with all she had to save them from the queen's men. Regina could still, in theory, have those guards executed and claim it wasn't on her orders, but Snow could then say: She would say that, but I've saved hundreds of people just like Wilma, and I know it wasn't a matter of just a couple of guards who were overzealous. This is happening everywhere. And the peasants would believe her absolutely, because what she's saying matches up with her actions.

Furthermore, in our hypothetical Wilma-was-really-Wilma scenario, consider what would have happened when Wilma returned to her family after having been cured and tended to by Snow. Wilma tells everyone she knows about how Snow was kind, and saved her life twice over, and so merciful that she feels sympathy for the Evil Queen while also being so just that she has in her the willingness to put the queen down if that's what's necessary to protect Snow's subjects. That story spreads like wildfire—there's so much to hope for in it: a merciful-but-just ruler, a kind ruler who cares so much about her subjects that she'll devote herself to healing just one whom she's never met before, etc.

Of course Snow couldn't be blatant about the fact that it was a very political move on her part. (Plus monarchies are not elected governments; that would defeat the point of a monarchy). But she knew—there's no way she didn't know—that doing what she did would win everyone there absolutely on to her side. They see that Snow's willing to fight for them; maybe now they're willing to fight for her instead of just talking about it—armchair revolutionaries and effigy-burning revolutionaries are not helpful to Snow. Revolutionaries who are willing to take up arms on her side are, so that's what she wants.

It comes off as very, very calculated to me. It's the kind of thing that I'd admire in a character who didn't keep trying to tell me it wasn't calculated at all (if Havelock Vetinari had been the one to save Wilma, for example, I'd be cheering him on for being a magnificent chessmaster and knowing exactly how to work a crowd. If Snow were acknowledged as having the ability and the willingness to manipulate people for her own ends, I'd also be cheering her on, albeit not as much as I am Regina [who is legitimately my favorite character, quite apart from being more honest and more genuine in her attempts for redemption than Snow]. Note also that our hypothetical Vetinari-saving-Wilma would not necessarily be strictly a political move; there's plenty of evidence to suggest that Vetinari really does care about his subjects even if his primary goal is to keep them, if not loyal to him, at least content enough in his rule to not try to overthrow him. I could easily buy the same for Snow—the problem is that we're being expected to believe that she's only motivated by her bleeding heart, which is both (a) unrealistic and (b) not a quality I'd want in a leader who has to be able to make decisions based on the common good and not how much she cares about individual subjects).

Regina's belief in Snow's genuineness is not proof that Snow's actually 100% genuine. She also buy's Cora's very obviously false "redemption" hook, line, and sinker—Regina's biggest weakness is the willingness to bend over backwards and accept whatever from the people who she thinks are willing to offer her love in return.

I think part of the parent problem stems from Snow and David trying to be parents and basing their decision off of that; since that isn't the context in which they know Emma best, they're running into problems as a result of trying to impose a parent->child type relationship over what is really very close, nigh-familial friendship. I have a personal theory that this is happening because of a cultural tendency in the FTR to treat the nuclear family concept as the end-all, be-all of existence; the ideal is that you meet your True Love, get married, have children, and live happily ever after as a cohesive family unit. This is why Snow and David, unlike Emma, never acknowledge Regina as Henry's real mother and value Rumpel's blood relationship to Henry over Regina's adoption/the fact that she raised him for ten years. To them, adoption means that the True Love-based family union was broken and now they're trying to get it back, which doesn't work because Emma is an adult who grew up in our world and Henry is realizing more and more that he does still love Regina.

Granted, that's a theory and much more tenuously based on the text than my belief that Snow is self-centered and manipulative if not an outright sociopath (mostly I'm guessing based on the huge emphasis the FTR puts on True Love and MM/David's attitude as Emma's parents); take it or leave it.

Henry seems to have very poor critical thinking skills (which I'll put down to him being, you know, eleven), and as a result of that he's inclined to believe what the book tells him: Snow and Charming and by extension Emma, good; Regina, bad (it's very much implied that Regina's side of the story is absent from the book). He approaches them from this standpoint; like Snow and David, he's much more inclined to be suspicious of Regina than of Emma, which is why he's more resigned to Regina behaving in the black side of his personal moral code while still being crushed when he found out Emma lied to him about his father. There were hints in season two that he was going to become more grey in his thinking as a result of his heroes not living up to his expectations (again: humans, not gods); hopefully that will be further explored in three.

On Regina running away when Snow declared she was beyond redemption and figured out the disguise: Snow had an arrow pointed at her face at point-blank range (that's even the picture for this wiki's recap page). If you had a very angry person say that you were beyond saving and then drew a bow and aimed at your face from a mere foot away, would you try to reason with them or get the hell out of there before they could make good on the threat implicit in aiming an arrow at your head?

Any way we spin it, "We're not killers!" was a ridiculous thing to say because, as we've both said, everyone on that ship except Emma  is, in fact, a killer. At best, it comes off as Snow, once again, being foolishly naïve or grabbing a moral high ground that she has no right to claim (because she's a killer and so is Regina). At worst, it's Snow erasing the parts of the past that don't work for her.

Laying aside the fact that Cora's father was a deadbeat: The mill was successful enough that they were doing business with the royal family, and Cora did it all on her own. She was providing a good life for herself; she wasn't starving, even though her father must've spent a large percentage of the income on alcohol, and she was a very competent miller (and she's clearly disgusted by the fact that her father isn't doing this). Simply not being royalty does not automatically mean that one's life is crappy and Cora, as a peasant, was doing pretty well for herself.

On top of that, she has this perpetually drunk father who lolls around doing nothing all day, and if he was like that in her childhood, she's going to be very self-reliant and feel like she can't afford to trust anyone but herself—goes back to the effect neglect and abuse have on brain development—and probably feel anger towards her father, which eventually turns to the disgust we see in "The Miller's Daughter," which in turn reinforces her view that she's better than other people because she didn't succumb to alcohol like her father and she's good enough to run a successful mill all by herself, etc.

That she wanted more than that speaks for her ambition; that she wanted to kill the people who humiliated her and used this as motivation to create her first use of magic speaks to the fact that she was a real piece of work even before she started using magic—that arrogance and anger has, by this time, twisted into something violent and cruel. Rumpel is not the person who made her want to see people's necks break from bowing to her; that was all Cora. For comparison, Emma used her love for her friends and family to do her first magic, and Regina used her desire to be free from her mother's abuse. Rumpel didn't create those desires, either; he capitalized on them.

As for Regina following her mother's footsteps: Regina spent most of season two trying to get out from her mother's pall and learn how to unlearn all the horrible things that Cora taught her. Then Cora showed up and love-bombed her, showing her far more affection than Regina had gotten from anyone else (as far as she knew at that point, everyone still blamed her for Archie's murder). I would have been shocked if that hadn't tripped her up.

About number seven:

That the writer of the article is talking about Emma as if she needs the kind of mother Snow is trying to be (i.e. a parent->child one instead of a parent->adult one) makes me really uncomfortable for reasons previously discussed. Hopefully that isn't how the writers are going to treat it that way—that there's "bittersweet conversation" about it sounds promising, because talking is always the way to a better understanding and effective character development.