Board Thread:Character Discussion/@comment-4839682-20131003142941/@comment-22525977-20131013004012

Real life happens, no worries.

Heart is a Lonely Hunter:

3. The kind of distress that happens when someone you feel some affection for is in severe pain?

5. The genie is obviously unstable and irrational when it comes to Regina—possibly he thinks killing Snow will earn him her affection, which he desperately craves, or he's looking at only the Evil Queen and not Regina and therefore not picking up on the visible moments of conflict.

6. Yes, exactly. And I think that's lazy writing. There should be a valid reason that Regina didn't just make her own heartless—for that matter, why not make extra certain and rip out the huntsman's heart before sending him after Snow? It doesn't even necessitate Snow getting killed—she's already clever enough to notice that he's not a knight, come to the conclusion that he's an assassin, and get the hell out of there. Make it so the huntsman has a time limit ("bring me back her heart by midnight," or similar), and then the writers have a great opportunity to demonstrate the limits of heart-ripping, because the "return by midnight" part conflicts with the "bring me her heart"

7. It makes me uncomfortable for the same reason that my conservative Christian family's casual homophobia and slut-shaming makes me uncomfortable. It's like—MM doesn't have to have one night stands if she's not into that, but her personal preferences and/or hypothetical beliefs do not give her the right to get judge-y at Emma for having them. And there's a huge difference between just not enjoying them and actively shaming herself and Emma for them, which is what MM does about sleeping with Whale and Emma having multiple ones.

Also, there are plenty of sex-positive Christians.

8. Look at the situation, though. Emma has known Graham for maybe a couple of weeks. She knows Graham and Regina have something going on. Graham drunk-kissed her without her consent and then didn't get it when she got very understandably pissed at him. The feelings Emma have for Graham are, from what I saw in the episode, a level of sexual attraction + friendly coworker + a pinch of jealousy + being upset about what a jerk he was last night and now he's sending me flowers? I'd have been surprised if she wasn't more irritated than not.

11. The manner in which she said it still oozed entitlement. It was "you haven't given me condolences, therefore you are not a knight, therefore you are an assassin."

14. Again, that's lazy writing. They demonstrate earlier that the huntsman finds it easier to kill people than animals, and there is no reason they couldn't have written it so that the vault was programmed to only open for Snow's heart specifically—change "this isn't a human heart" to "this isn't Snow's heart" and there's no change in story, but the plot hole is gone.

Planning:

We do see Regina experiencing conflict, though. I mentioned before how the Evil Queen mask starts to fracture when she's listening to the letter, and she covers that by twisting it into rage at herself and the huntsman ("don't tell me you're becoming a sheep!"). The murderous side won out, but that doesn't mean the affection was gone, just buried.

I think part of the problem here is a different definition of the word "planning." I don't consider having an undefined, conscious desire to kill someone constitutes a plan—it's a desire. In order to have what I would consider a plan, Regina would need some concrete idea of how it was going to happen or who would do it or something more than just going along with her mirror's suggestions.

And that the writers chose to do something because that's how the original story is without putting any actual thought into why it goes that way, especially in a show where the whole point is to tell the "real" story, is lazy writing.

The point of bringing up Scar's approval rating was to illustrate that killing off royals without witnesses in an extremely contrived way and then bemoaning loudly how broken up you are over it is really not a good way to convince people that you weren't at fault, and the whole point in Regina's case is to get rid of Snow without having a breath of suspicion about Regina herself (something which she does not succeed in doing at all, obviously).

I'm arguing here that the honesty of Snow's emotion was a tool which she used to further her own ends, not something that was completely exclusive from the manipulation. They're not happening in parallel; one is feeding the other.

It is possible to be emotionally honest and use that honesty in a very calculated way. Again: that's what most actors in the U.S. nowadays are trained to do.

But saying "the woman should not tell the truth" is the same as trying to deny her that option. It's saying "Women have the option to follow their principles but they really shouldn't, actually, because..."

I had assumed that the "and one of them is engaged to another woman" part was implicit in that definition of affair. Obviously people with no pre-existing and monogamous commitments to other people can do whatever they want to with each other as long as consent's involved.

And what are you talking about, they hadn't decided to act on it? The content of the letter was along the lines of "so I love you, if you love me, come to the castle and we'll elope." The only reason they didn't try to run away with each other is that George intercepted Snow on her way to rendezvous with Charming and imprisoned her and then threatened to kill Charming if she didn't "break his heart" and leave him.

Rumpel starts choking her because he thinks she's a trick of Pan's—but then he finds out she isn't, and he keeps his hand there for a while and never apologizes for accidentally attacking someone he loves. There's no reaction on Belle's part, either—what would you do if your lover attacked you, for any reason, and then didn't apologize for it after the misunderstanding came to light?

The problem is that OUaT (and, for that matter, the writers) routinely treats Rumbelle as romantic and positive rather than what it is, which is a severely dysfunctional and abusive relationship. It's like how Fifty Shades tries to sell Christian as a romantic hero instead of a sadistic abuser.

By the same token, portraying (primarily romantic) love as a magical thing that breaks people when it's removed is incredibly problematic, because it says terrible things about the people who either don't want those kinds of relationship or the ones who have lost significant others and went through a normal grieving process and got over it.

I'm familiar with Sun, Moon, and Talia, and it is indeed screwed up and disturbing. The happy ending is also screwed up and disturbing, because it's a happy ending built on rape and murder. A show like OUaT, which attempts to pull fairytales into a modern context (wherein the ending of Sun, Moon, and Talia is every bit as disturbing as the rest of the story because, again, rape and murder), can deal with this either by (a) updating the plots and characters to remove the rape and murder or at least regulate it to the evil characters, or (b) keeping the rape and murder but actually addressing it rather than just saying "oh they lived happily ever after."

They did a little of (a) with Snow and Charming and Phillip and Aurora, since in both cases they modified the tale to be less "and then he was so overcome by the sight of her corpse and her great corpse-y beauty that he kissed her/had sex with her corpse/carried her off to have sex with her corpse later, depending on the version" and more "he was so overcome by the loss of his lover that he gave her a final kiss goodbye," and they did (b) rather well in dealing with the fallout from Red/Peter and how that ended. They have not done so well on either count elsewhere; certainly no one in-show has addressed how horribly the dwarves are treated or the awfulness of how the Blue Fairy treated Grumpy and Nova; there's been minimal discussion of Regina being an abuse victim and certainly the show does not want to talk about just how disturbing her entire marriage to Leopold was; Rumpel's abusive tendencies towards Belle are never portrayed as abusive.

In "Lost Girl," Regina calls David a shepherd; in "Tiny," Grumpy (who is present for that scene in "Lost Girl") is confused at the revelation that David is not, in fact, James. (This is probably a similar problem to Regina figuring out twice that Cora was responsible for young!Snow's horse going out of control at the time that it did. Continuity!)

MM struck me as an extremely unhappy woman in the pilot; once Emma showed up and MM had a friend to confide in, she became much, much happier (or content, if you prefer).

In what world does "being treated as inferior" translate to "feeling inferior"? The fact that I, as a woman, have to work twice as hard to earn the same respect that is given to men does not make me feel inferior, it makes me really pissed off. Being privileged is not a matter of the privileged person "looking past the judgements of society," it's a matter of society giving that person privilege, i.e. judging them less and/or putting them on a pedestal.

I read MM and Snow both as very insecure people (just look at what happened in "Lost Girl," wherein Snow caved immediately to Regina's offer and only changed her mind because David lied to her and gave her a "magic sword"). The reason Snow is superficially stronger than MM is that Snow was royalty, and therefore put on a pedestal and pampered her whole life, and MM was not; therefore, in situations where Snow would have her royal upbringing and training to rely on, MM does not, and therefore MM's insecurities surface much faster.

Compare this to Regina, who was strong enough to make it through eighteen years of her mother abusing her and all but beating it into her that love was weakness and still believe in the power of true love right up until Cora crushed Daniel's heart before her eyes. She had it a lot worse than MM and a lot worse than Snow, but both Snow and MM crumple into despair far more often and for longer than Regina ever does (and usually when Regina succumbs to despair, she fights back rather than rolling over and submitting until someone else pushes her to fight as Snow/MM is prone to do). And she's Latina or the FTR equivalent thereof, for that matter, so even ignoring the abuse she's less privileged than Snow/MM.

Or Ruby, who has not one but two separate arcs that focus on her growing from someone suffering as a result of internalized prejudices to someone who finds her own strength and realizes that those prejudices are wrong. Or Emma, who grew up a foster child and ended up a criminal during her late teens/early adulthood, but who, like Ruby, lives life on her own terms rather than by what society tries to define her as and is very successful in that.

I came to the conclusion that you don't like extrapolating very far from the text because every time I extrapolate from the text (or even talk about subtext!) you argue that it's wrong because it's not in the text.

Cora turned herself into a sociopath by ripping out her heart. Rumpel turned himself into a sociopath by accepting the Dark One curse. It doesn't matter that neither of them were sociopaths prior (though Cora certainly had the tendencies in place already); the magic made them that way.

The director has final say over what the finished product looks like. That's no different than the writer having final say over what their finished product looks like (even with published works, writers are under no obligation to make the changes suggested by their editors). Or are you trying to argue that a book written by two people (say, Good Omens) is less subjective than a book written by one because it had more collaborators?

If anything, collaborative works should be more subjective than not, because there's an entire team of people putting them together and they're more than likely not a hive mind and everyone's going to have slightly different ideas about what things mean no matter how clearly the director communicates what they want.

This homophobic friend of yours would have ignored the lesbian subtext if Fried Green Tomatoes were a book just as much as they did watching it. The type of media has nothing to do with it—people who are going to erase things outside of the heteronormative spectrum are going to do so regardless of how it's presented.

I didn't see any change in Regina's facial expression during the second hug.

Snow

2. I believe I said before that I don't actually trust the show on family matters and, specifically, biological parents anymore.

3. It was sexist. It was the man going behind the back of the woman he loves and lying to her and potentially putting her life at risk to "make her see" that he was right and she was wrong.

Regina

Why on earth would anyone assume that the creepy, psychopathic demon-child's game was anything but rigged? Especially since the general trope in fiction is that the villain is always assumed to be lying when they offer the protagonists a deal of the kind Pan is offering Emma and Neverland explicitly runs on belief?

This isn't a real-world kidnapper, and Pan isn't asking for a ransom. This is a disturbed immortal child who routinely kidnaps other children and traps them on this island and never, ever lets them go home. They have zero reason to think that they won't get to the end of his game and have him screw them over—all they have is Pan's word that he never breaks his promises, really, and all he's promised is that the map will lead them to Henry and that Henry's still alive. Not that he'll let them take Henry away from him. Just that it will bring them to Henry.

(My personal theory is that Pan needs, not only the heart of the truest believer, but said heart at a moment when its owner is most hopeful/believing that he will be rescued—so Henry sees his family coming to save him and bam, Pan takes his heart.)